How great literature can change your life

Wednesday

An interesting article in the latest New Yorker addressed the age-old battle of the sexes at a time when toxic masculinity is on the rise, even though feminism appears firmly entrenched. Zoe Heller reviews two books arguing that too often the debate between feminists and patriarchs is a zero-sum game–which is to say, it’s bad for both the women and the men.

An even-handed fictional account of the tension appears in an unfinished novel by a dear friend, the now deceased Rachel Kranz, that has stuck with me for years. I share an excerpt with you because, in addition to acknowledging the problem, Rachel points to a possible solution.

Zoe Heller reviews French historian Ivan Jablonka’s A History of Masculinity From Patriarchy to Gender Justice and British columnist Nina Power’s What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents. I focus here on Power’s book.

Power worries that exaggerated complaining about male toxicity (say, about mansplaining or manspreading) has become “a kind of tribal habit among women.” What is lost in the demonization of men, she believes, is that which is “valuable and generative in male and female difference”:

In our haste to declare masculinity a redundant artifact, she says, we have lost sight of some of its “positive dimensions”—“the protective father, the responsible man.” Although we’re often told that modern societies have outgrown the need for male muscle and aggression, we still rely on men to do the lion’s share of physically arduous and dangerous jobs, including the fighting of wars….If we still expect men to do the dirty work, Power asks, shouldn’t some value be attached to male strength? Women in heterosexual relationships, she claims, respect a degree of responsibly channelled aggression in their partners. “However tough you feel, however independent you might be, when it comes down to it, you would like a man to be able to stand up for you, physically at least,” she writes. “Violence is not as far away from care as we might like to imagine.”

Along these lines, Heller’s New Yorker article quotes from Manliness, a 2006 book by

 conservative Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield, who regards protection as “a defining task of masculinity.” As he observes in his book,  “A man protects those whom he has taken in his care against dangers they cannot face or handle without him.”

Power appears to want men to be both strong and considerate, assertive when necessary but otherwise committed to living “on terms of scrupulous equality the rest of the time.” To which Heller asks,

Is this plausible? Can women enjoy the warm embrace of he-men without having to endure bossiness and swagger? Harvey Mansfield didn’t think so. “Honor is an asserted claim to protect someone, and the claim to protect is a claim to rule,” he wrote. “How can I protect you properly if I can’t tell you what to do?”

Now to Rachel’s unfinished novel, which I find to be brilliant and which was to be a sequel to her first novel, Leaps of Faith. (The Long Wave in my opinion was 90% complete when she died.) In the novel, psychic Warren is working with a Wall Street bonds salesman who is encountering relationship problems. Warren, a sensitive gay man, doesn’t like Gary, who is everything he is not, but finds himself unexpectedly sympathizing his dilemma.

Gary’s girlfriend wants him to be both the man of the house and a little boy who leans on her for support, mixed messaging that leaves him thoroughly confused and angry. He says that, when he is aggressively assertive, she complains that he isn’t taking her needs into consideration, but that when he tries to be vulnerable and lean on her, she accuses him of being weak and whining. Here he is:

 “She wanted to cut my balls off,” he says bitterly.  “Well, maybe you’ll take her side.  But I’m telling you—”  His voice is harsh and trembling, and I can hear the way he must sound on the phone consummating a deal, angry, offended—when does he ever feel safe?  “She said I wasn’t available enough, and what does that even mean?  She was like, ‘Be home more, pay more attention to me, you never tell me anything,’ but you know if I had done it, she would have been all, ‘Oh, what are you complaining about, Gar, get the fuck over it.’  She said she wanted me to—to—lean on her more—but you know she didn’t mean it, it was like a game for her.  She had no fucking idea what she was asking me to do, and if she had known, she wouldn’t’ve cared.  She just wanted it both ways.”

And:

[W]hatever I do, she’ll never be satisfied.  ‘Lean on me, lean on me’—that’s not the way you make money!  Who the fuck is going to respect a man like that?”  He swallows and I swallow, too.  “She thinks I could just turn it on and off, like some fucking machine, like some fucking machine, when she wants me to be the man of the house and when she wants her little boy—”

“So,” he repeats softly, triumphant and resentful, “she’ll never be satisfied.  Will she?” 

All I can see is what he sees, and no, that woman won’t be, ever. 

To break the impasse, Warren asks Gary to tell him what he wants, to which Gary replies, “I want her. But—not like this.  Not where I have to go crawling back to her.  I can’t live like that.”

Warren’s feels stymied but is aided by his psychic intuition. His suggestion is that the two work on the problem together as companions:

“Tell her,” I say slowly, “that you want to be her friend.  Tell her—if it’s true—that you’re going to think about what she said.”

            “And then what?”

            “And then—think about it.  See if—see if there’s a way—” I take a breath.  “Not the man of the house and not the little boy,” I say finally.  “Something—else.”  I don’t know how else to help him, though it astonishes me how much I want to—Gary, of all people.  Both his weakness and his strength seem so deadly to me.

            But he’s nodding as he stands up, gathering his raincoat and briefcase, handing me a check.  “What the hell,” he’s saying in a shaky voice.  “It might work.”

I myself am not what you would call a manly man, but the urge to be my family’s protector and chief breadwinner runs deep in my psyche. Now, I’m a 71-year-old boomer so maybe things are different for the generations that grew up after the feminist revolution. Then again, the two books reviewed by New Yorker seem to indicate that the forces that shaped me are still alive and well.

But I also know that, as a result of the feminist revolution, Julia and I have practiced listening to each other throughout our married life. There have been breakdowns, of course, but our breakthroughs have occurred when we in fact heard what the other said.

Maybe Gary’s problem is that he feels as though he needs to solve everything himself, and maybe his girlfriend’s problem is that she both wants him to fix everything and is frustrated when he tries (and inevitably fails). Maybe, as I used to tell my writing students, they need to make the problem the subject.

Male-female tensions will probably continue to the end of time. But addressing those tensions together? “What the hell, it might work.”