Conversation # 1

"At the heart of it, all men long to be irresponsible."

"Really? Really??!!

"Sure."

"Why would you not want to be the best mature person you could be?"

"Maturity has little to do with it, though immaturity is what keeps me young. Irresponsibility is the hallmark of youth, and it is all about hanging on to youth."

"So you're having a midlife crisis."

(smiles) "I have had a perpetual midlife crisis then. It's chronic." (laughs).

"That's funny to you?"

"If I don't laugh, I'll cry. I'd love to start over. Completely. Have an actual family instead of just parents, you know? An intact, loving family, but where then is the struggle for the artist in me? Let's get back to the point, though. Maybe I long to be irresponsible because I want to complete my childhood. It ended rather abruptly. My mom used to tell me that when I was ten years old I put away my toys and told her I needed to make something out of my life. Ten years old for Christ's sake."

"I'm sorry."

(Shakes head)"Don't be. I don't want pity."

"So let's talk about all men, then, like you started with. Are you basing your assessment that they all long to be irresponsible on just your own experience?"

"It isn't evident, glaringly obvious to you that men are like that?"

"I don't know, I've met plenty of men who are kind and responsible. Men with a steady job, who show up to dates, on time, even open the door for me...."

"Oh, you believe in chivalry?" (chuckles) "I've got news for you. We hold the door so we can watch your ass go through."

(Appalled, mouth open in shocked silence)

"Yeah, I know you like to think that you can give men at least a little credit, but just don't. Maybe your gay male friends. It isn't even about sex, it's about lust, because we're also timid and fearful of intimacy. The psychologists have that right. Why do you think porn is so popular? It keeps women at arm's length. We don't have to answer for our inadequacies, physical or emotional."

"Wow."

"We also don't want to be responsible for your happiness. Hell, we don't want to be responsible for our own happiness. We're always looking for other people, other situations, other locations, and material goods to make us happy. God forbid we should do any self-work so we can be happy independent of anything, or anyone, else."(smiles)

"How can you be so cynical? No, no, how can you be so okay with that, if you believe it?"

"Who says that I am? Laughing or crying again. When you think about men's motivations in biological terms, all the shit makes sense. Keeping up appearances. Showing off. We have raised the lek to a theatre stage. We hoard material goods like a male bower bird, all to get our genes into the next generation."

"You said it wasn't about sex."

"True. I guess maybe it is if you really are a stud. Maybe a lavish lifestyle, and climbing the corporate ladder are substitutes for guys who can't get it up. Maybe women have that right."

"Well, gee, thanks for giving us a little credit." (rolls eyes sideways)

"You're welcome."

"So, if my man leaves me for a younger woman, it isn't about sex?"

"Nope. It's back to youth again. She symbolizes youth, freedom, confidence, everything men aspire to."

(Skeptical tongue in cheek) "I see."

"No, really. At some point in a man's marriage, his spouse becomes a symbol of confinement rather than freedom. It could be that in the process of trying to make her happy he has sacrificed his own plans and goals for security, for his wife's cooking, her income, her mere presence in his otherwise lonely life. That's always the trade-off, isn't it: freedom or security."

(Shakes head slowly)"You've got this all figured out, haven't you?"

"Hell no. If I did, I wouldn't be sitting here with you. I value your honest appraisal. Truly, I do."

A Wedding, Wealth, and Masculinity

© YouTube.com

It is perhaps tragically ironic that we have prom season and the royal wedding setting up the perfect storm of inevitable disappointment for the average high school male bent on wooing his dream girl. When you aspire to fantasy, have unrealistic expectations, and are more concerned with how you stack up to other male students, it is not going to end well for you. Meanwhile, women are collateral damage.

Our collective obsession with the royal nuptials Across the Pond is troubling if not disturbing. We revel in pomp and circumstance, and I dare say long for the rigidity in standards for what constitutes "marriage material" in stodgy old England. We want rules to be explicit, if only so we know when we are breaking them, but often because we have failed to properly construct our own moral compasses. We rely on externalities instead. America has few formalities, and even those may vary from state to state.

Consequently, our young men are left to their own devices, their own warped perceptions of idealism in the female form. How boys and men handle their romantic defeats is what should make you a gentleman or a loser. Here in the U.S., we do not learn how to deal with those perceived setbacks in any positive, meaningful way. At best our male students simply become more determined to achieve victory in the socio-romance game, and maybe set their sights on college coeds once they graduate high school. That simply perpetuates the cycle of reducing women to prizes to be won, by any means necessary.

The tragic part is that for men like this, women are a means to an end, the end being enhanced status for the guy. There truly is a trophy wife mentality whereby men measure each other by the....what, "hottness" of their spouse or girlfriend. Women cease to be anything more than an accessory to this kind of sorry excuse for a man. This is how we ruthlessly objectify women, and it does not even have anything to do with women. It is all about the male hierarchy.

At some point in our evolution did this become a strategy for becoming the alpha male? The accumulation of food and other necessary resources certainly made some males more desirable to females, but eventually there was enough to go around thanks to agriculture, improved weaponry for hunting, and the ability to preserve collected foods. What separates us now, then? We created the unnatural resource of money, currency that is not perishable, wealth that demonstrates you have risen above mere survival. We announce the existence of our fortunes through expensive automobiles, luxurious homes, second homes, yachts, jewelry, and other rare and precious commodities....and attractive, younger women.

Mating strategies in the animal kingdom are often complex, and none more so than in Homo sapiens. We point derisively to other cultures that rely on arranged marriages, that eliminate a woman's dignity through genital mutilation, or reduce her worth to her dowry, or enslave her in any number of ways by prohibiting her education and disallowing her consent to anything, but are we any better? American men who cannot achieve wealth, or cannot achieve it fast enough, try and bypass the implied route of success and just go for the hot chick. If he can get her, other men will assume he has something they do not. Women are the facade in the male social-success game. Debt is the facade we all use to project that we are wealthier than we are. We must stop kidding ourselves.

Let me repeat that: We must stop kidding ourselves. We must stop believing that we should be aspiring to great individual material wealth and the flimsy social status that comes with it. When we do that we start dropping pretense. We stop pretending. We start being comfortable with who we are. We start recognizing the matrix that is our unsustainable style of living and relating to each other. We stop shaming others. We stop feeling guilty for our excesses because we have realized the futility of indulging in them. We start having meaningful relationships with the opposite sex.

The revolution will be a long one. Men will not go quietly, willingly giving up the power that they have accumulated through greed and womanizing. We will have to overcome our biology and our social expectations, without the help of media and advertising that will even more stubbornly stick to the status quo, the old school rules of engagement. We have an opportunity here to advance civilization to a level of respect it has perhaps never enjoyed. Failure will mean its total collapse.

Me, too

© DhakaLawReview.org

No, I am not a woman who has been sexually harassed in any way, shape or form. I am, instead, a man who is guilty of inappropriate behavior, in my past, if even unwittingly. The standard of what constitutes sexual harassment has changed considerably over the last few decades, and that is a good thing in the sense that no one should have to tolerate even the lowest, most passive forms of abuse.

For the record, I am making a sincere public apology to any and every woman I have offended, whether I realized it or not at the time. I am totally ok with assuming whatever degree of guilt I deserve for the unwanted touch, the "compliment" on a woman's external beauty, or any other gesture or language that was or is unacceptable to the recipient. I am better at taking shame and using it to better myself these days than I would have been at a younger age. I am eternally grateful to the women who have asserted themselves and told me in no uncertain terms that my conduct was intolerable, even if a single incident.

Each woman has her own personal threshold for what she is willing to accept or, more likely, overlook when it comes to misconduct by males. Men have to understand that and make the assumption that almost anything said or done in the arena of sexuality (even the outskirts of sexuality, to include beauty and attire to name two) could be interpreted negatively by any woman. Men should not express physical intimacy unless unequivocally invited to do so.

I vividly recall having expressed a desire for affection from a woman, being politely but firmly rejected, and learning from her the next day that she had a stalker. The fact she did not throw me out of her home the night before speaks volumes about her strength, tolerance, and trust. Naturally, I apologized profusely, but, to this day, not enough for my own conscience. We remain friends and I will always hold her in high esteem. The point is, I assumed incorrectly that she had not experienced the trauma of harassment. It amazes me that women still trust men at all in the face of our misogynistic society.

Last Sunday my Facebook newsfeed was full of "me, too" posts from nearly all of my female friends who have experienced the indignity and shame and guilt and horror of sexual harassment in one form or another. I remain appalled by that, but sadly not surprised. As one woman pointed out, this does not even include women who never told their parents, spouses, or authorities about the harassment they experienced, so are not about to disclose it on social media. Understood.

I would hope the tide is turning, but we cannot rely on men in power to address this epidemic in any meaningful way. Even leaders of this country have either confessed to sexual harassment or been implicated for it. Many powerful men feel entitled to conduct themselves in any manner they see fit, whether they create victims or not as a result. If your code of conduct is ruled only by whether or not you have done something you could be prosecuted for, then you are missing the point. This is an insidious plague that casts a constant chill over women.

The solution is going to be the average man taking an above-average stand, every day, when they witness sexual harassment. It means conducting oneself with a degree of self-censorship in word and deed that we have not paid enough mind to until now. I have pretty much vowed not to hug anyone I do not know, unless obviously invited to do so. I will be more careful with what I once considered "compliments," that were in reality thinly-disguised attempts to initiate sexual intimacy.

Today, I am married, and am a better man for that institution. Having a spouse makes you more keenly aware of what is (or should be) acceptable behavior and what is not. We, as men, need to unlearn behaviors we learned from our fathers, uncles, and other male role models in our youthful lives. We then need to take the new standards of positive behavior to our sons and other boys in our community. We must earn respect, and teach boys they must also earn it. Right now, every woman on the planet has the right to assume the worst about us. I don't want to be the one implied in "me, too." Do you?