The Unmade Bed

by Stephen Marche

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  CONTENTS

  How Much Should a Man Speak?

  Sex and Money and Dreams and Children and Power

  ONE The Hollow Patriarchy

  TWO The New Fatherhood

  THREE Straight Camp

  FOUR The Pornography Paradox

  FIVE Against Outrage

  SIX The Boys’ Crisis, the Girls’ Crisis

  SEVEN The Case for Living in Filth

  EIGHT Messy Hope

  Acknowledgments

  About Stephen Marche

  Where the Numbers Come From

  To Sunny and Janet and Bob and Geraldine

  How Much Should a Man Speak?

  * * *

  IT is a well-established fact at this moment in history that men talk too much. They speak when they should listen, and once they start talking they go on and on and on and on and on.

  Fifty years after the birth of feminism, when its promise of gender liberation seems closer and more distant than ever before, the word mansplaining has arisen to describe the sheer bulk of verbiage men foist onto the world. The word has followed the typical life trajectory newborn words take in the twenty-first century. Inspired by an essay by journalist and activist Rebecca Solnit, mansplaining started as an insider joke among journalists and activists, then spread to the New York Times “word of the year” list and the online Oxford Dictionaries. Its meaning expanded through the inflation of meme. So there were several variations. Some were serious (whitesplaining, blacksplaining, ablesplaining); some were not (geeksplaining, momsplaining, Foxsplaining). Then, as the word drifted into common usage, its meaning loosened. TV commentators pounced on White House spokesman Jay Carney for mansplaining the White House gender pay gap, but the slur failed to stick. Can you use mansplaining to describe any instance of a man explaining anything, even when he’s answering a question you’ve asked him? The community of journalists who pioneered the word’s adoption slowly began to pioneer its abandonment. There are plenty of overexplaining women, they pointed out, and occasionally men who speak are not doing so strictly to drown out the voices of women.

  The word survives nonetheless because it describes a common social scenario so aptly. Solnit’s inspiration was a man at a party who, on learning that she had written a book about film pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, lectured her on a recent book about film pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, which happened to be Solnit’s book about film pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. It was yet another case of a man, confronted with a knowledgeable woman, displaying his own knowledge to the maximum—a dick-measuring contest where only one party has a dick. I first heard about mansplainers from a woman who started dating again after a divorce in her mid-fifties. On every date she was forced to endure mini-lectures on subjects about which she was an expert. I saw mansplaining in action just yesterday in the park. A young couple, in a cloud of marijuana smoke, lounging on beach towels they had spread in a patchwork equivalent of a picnic blanket, were playing chess, the man offering his opinion of each of her moves, right up to the point when she mated him. Immediately following his loss, he kept right on explaining the woman’s moves to her.

  For Solnit, these tiny but ubiquitous social interactions amount, in aggregate, to a politics of silence. In ways big and small, men have too much to say. “Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty,” she wrote in Men Explain Things to Me. “I’m grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.” But Solnit’s larger political point is vague and nowhere near as urgent as the question of etiquette, of proper manners between men and women. In daily life, in the world in which men and women talk, the result of adding mansplaining to our vocabulary is that it might cause men who hear it or read it to think twice before explaining anything to a woman.

  To take the example at hand, I am a man writing a book about men and women. I am thinking twice right now.

  * * *

  An empirical question first: Do men in fact explain things more than women? In her 2006 book The Female Brain, the American neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine claimed that the average woman uses nearly three times as many words as the average man. Other researchers disagreed immediately and vociferously. At the University of Arizona a group of sociologists attached voice recorders to 396 participants and found no statistical difference in how much men and women spoke. “The widespread and highly publicized stereotype about female talkativeness is unfounded,” they wrote. (The stereotype in this case being that women, rather than men, have too much to say.)

  In 2014, Harvard researchers used electronic monitoring and found that men and women spoke more or less depending on the size of the group and the setting. While collaborating on a work project, in groups of seven or fewer, women talked more and men talked more often. During a lunch break, women spoke more in larger groups, and men talked more in smaller groups. The problem in determining who talks more, men or women, when, where, and in what size groups, under what conditions, is a sub-problem of the attempt to measure social interactions reliably. The dynamic realities of human speech, setting and tone and situation, means that gauging which gender actually speaks more is nearly impossible. The human weather is too implacable.

  A recent California State University study of email exchanges, which are easy to measure, found that women wrote more than men across a range of situations, in both work and personal messages. The researchers concluded that “electronic communications may level the playing field, or even give females an advantage, in certain communication situations.” (The stereotype up for rejection in this case being that men won’t shut up.) Likewise, almost every form of social media is dominated by women; 76 percent of U.S. women use Facebook, compared to 66 percent of men, and that divide more or less applies to the others: Twitter (18/17), Instagram (20/17), and Pinterest (33/8). The only exception is LinkedIn (28/27).

  Who talks more has been one of the traditional battlegrounds in the gender wars. At the beginning of the feminist revolution, male reserve rather than male speech was the symptom of disease. In 1971 the sociologists Jack Balswick and Charles Peek published “The Inexpressive Male,” an essay that became the basis of many thoughtful male responses to feminism. “As sex role distinctions have developed in America, the male sex role, as compared to the female sex role, carries with it prescriptions which encourage inexpressiveness,” they wrote. For the men courageous and sensitive enough to recognize the import of the feminist revolution, the first requirement was expression: expression as release from frozen Stoic ideals and expression as the beginning of a considerate masculinity.

  Men were encouraged to talk more, not less, particularly around women. In 1985 Michael McGill, author of The McGill Report on Male Intimacy, concluded, “Most wives live with and love men who are in some very fundamental ways strangers to them—men who withhold themselves and, in doing so, withhold their loving. These wives may be loved, but they do not feel loved because they do not know their husbands.” The crisis was male silence and the solution was a cultural revolution, one that expected intimacy of men and sought to redefine the male nature of expression. Among the techniques for applying this new expressiveness were men’s rights groups, consciousness-raising, cognitive-behavioral therapies, and just generally sharing your feelings and going on and on and on and on and on.

>   The men who tried to build a new model of male expressiveness were a vanguard. Jack Sattel, a sociologist right at the center of gender reinvention in the mid-1970s, understood the paradox of the premise right away. For men speech has traditionally been weakness. “Silence and inexpression are the ways men learn to consolidate power, to make the effort appear as effortless, to guard against showing the real limits of one’s potential and power by making it all appear easy,” he wrote. “Even among males alone, one maintains control over a situation by revealing only strategic proportions of oneself.” The irony probably wouldn’t comfort Solnit, but the man blathering on at that party is, in certain key respects, the end result of a conscious program to overcome gender restrictions, to make men give more of themselves.

  The irony runs deeper than awkward scenes at parties. The entire discussion of mansplaining operates on the poor assumption that people explaining things are demonstrating more power. They aren’t. Reserved speech has been the marker of masculine power for millennia. The strong silent type has an ancient pedigree. “Speak softly and carry a big stick” was Theodore Roosevelt’s definition of U.S. foreign policy and, like so many descriptions of U.S. foreign policy, also a stand-in for fantasies of masculinity. During Robert Scott’s doomed voyage to the South Pole, Captain Lawrence Oates knew that his frostbitten feet were slowing down the party as they struggled back to civilization. Before he walked out into a blizzard to die, he paused at the door and announced to his colleagues, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Scott wrote in his diary, “It was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit.” That spirit is manly brevity.

  The Edwardian term for a mansplainer was club bore. In the novels of the period the men who talk too much are cold and cowardly. The club bore talks more because he knows less. Baldessare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier, the guide to gentlemanly etiquette popular across Europe during the Renaissance, identified the phenomenon as early as 1528: “I will have our Courtier to keep in mind one lesson, and that is this, to be always wary both in this and in every other point, and rather fearful than bold, and beware that he persuade not himself falsely, to know things he knows not indeed.” A gentleman keeps everything but his most certain opinions to himself: “Let him be circumspect in keeping them close, lest he make other men laugh at him.” In the early sixteenth century men and women both were laughing at men who talked too much about things they didn’t understand.

  Reserved speech has been a defining feature of warrior culture since ancient Greece. Sparta permitted only the names of men killed in battle and women who died in childbirth to be remembered on gravestones. In 346 BCE Philip of Macedon sent messengers to Sparta with elaborate threats: “If you do not submit at once, I will invade your country. And if I invade, I will pillage and burn everything you hold dear. If I march into Sparta, I will level your great city to the ground.” The Spartans sent back a single-word response: “If.” Philip and his son, Alexander the Great, both chose to leave Sparta alone. Don’t mess with men who are careful with their words.

  * * *

  Not explaining is always more powerful than explaining. The most powerful men and women I have known speak quietly and rarely, even those in publishing and journalism. Others have to lean in to hear them. Men don’t make women voiceless and thus powerless; men make themselves voiceless and thus powerful.

  The problem with mansplaining as a term is that men also have to deal with mansplainers. Mention you have a doctorate in Shakespeare, and they’ll tell you everything they learned about Romeo and Juliet in junior high. Mention that you write for magazines, and they’ll ruin your evening droning on about what makes a great magazine story, even though they’ve never written an effective email. The correct response to the guy who told Solnit about her own book is to laugh in his face. Laugh at him because he’s weak.

  I recognize that I am now mansplaining mansplaining. Behind that absurdity lies a despair that has haunted the feminist revolution from the beginning: the despair that men and women cannot understand each other. Despair over language is the deepest despair. If equality eludes us even in our words, how can we dream of justice in our bodies? The classic books of intergender linguistics have always betrayed a shared hopelessness, even in their titles: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus; That’s Not What I Meant!; You Just Don’t Understand. “Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication,” Deborah Tannen wrote, depressingly, in You Just Don’t Understand. Men and women need translators, like at high-power summit meetings.

  If men and women are from different tribes or different planets, then we are doomed to a permanent stand-off. The battle of the sexes will be never-ending and the gender wars ongoing and irresolvable. But our language is failing us most of all when it comes to describing the state of gender itself. “The gender wars,” “the battle of the sexes”—these are disastrous metaphors. We have used the word war to describe the historical process of men and women beginning to live together as equals. We have used battle to describe the advent of deeper intimacies and more just laws. The fate of men and women in the twenty-first century is toward equality: that much is certain. Women are gaining financial clout and political power consistently. In advanced economies misogyny and violence against women are declining consistently. In those successes lies the possibility of real recognition, a chance, after centuries of wandering the labyrinths of fabrication and disguise, for men and women to find one another. The hope of that discovery is turbulent, uncertain, fraught with unpredictable meanings. It is a messy, unmade hope. But it is real. It is happening. That hope needs promotion to the center of the debate. That hope is the fulcrum on which the world is turning.

  We are entering the intimate wave of feminism, a wave that will have to include men, both as subjects and as participants. The language of conflict is no longer useful. The future can belong only to men and women together. The most vital, the most profound changes in the lives of men and women have occurred in their lives together: in bed, in families, in workplaces. Gloria Steinem’s famous declaration is true: “Women’s Liberation is Men’s Liberation too.” The opposite is also true. Men will have to do some of the explaining.

  * * *

  This book is the fruit of many confusions, both personal and intellectual—an attempt to reckon with the contemporary framework of gender relations in all their stunning flux, but also with the personal crises of my thirties: the sacrifice of my career for my wife’s, the birth of my children, the death of my father. This book is half-argument, half-confession—a peculiar form for a peculiar moment.

  My experience coincided maybe too conveniently with the general trends: the rise of women, the new fatherhood, the decline of patriarchy. But I am not alone. The statistically rendered trends, in all their cool clarity, bubble up into daily life as a welter of hot mysteries. The problems of men and women are the problems of flesh and blood, of giving birth and living and dying. They are the problems of sex and money and dreams and children and power. They require a philosophy of the nurturing womb and a philosophy of the stiff prick. The experiences came at me as the response of my body to the bodies that I love and the responses of my mind, always hopelessly late, to the responses of my body.

  I have also included the responses of my wife, Sarah. The footnotes scattered through the book are hers. Sarah is an editor by profession and she edits almost everything I write; as she worked through this book, she started writing notes that I couldn’t integrate into my own writing but felt I had to preserve. Without her perspective a part of the story of my own intimate life was missing. Read her notes as the positive inclusion of a female voice or as deliberate marginalization, as you wish. To me it was just another big favor I asked from my wife.

  Whenever I read books in which a wife or a husband describes a marriage, I feel I’m being lied to. Maybe not intentionally, but inevitably. Marriages are mysteries even to the people within them. One side of the sto
ry will no longer do. The other side is always the revealing side anyway, the side that messes up whatever we may have thought we knew. Somewhere in that mess may be the real thing. That is my own messy hope.

  Sex and Money and Dreams and Children and Power

  * * *

  ONE

  * * *

  The Hollow Patriarchy

  AFTER nine hours of labor, nine hours of a new person ripping her way into the world, my wife asked for an epidural and then the iPad so she could send a note to work. In my state of protective exhaustion I suggested that the time should probably be just for us and for the little body whose head was working its way through the birth canal. But it’s hard to argue with a woman who’s eight centimeters dilated. Besides, why not send the note? Soon enough the baby would be with us. The pause between the epidural and full dilation was the most calm we would know for months. Everybody is in the thick of it, in the mash-up of work and family, the confounding blur of everything, instantly, at once, the way life happens now. Why waste a moment?

  While my wife and I waited for the baby to arrive—she on the iPad while I tried not to stare at the puddle of blood beneath her on the bed—we were waiting in a totally new reality than had greeted any generation before us. We barely noticed; the moment seemed utterly natural, despite its novelty and the slight tang of absurdity. The hospital was full of the gentle pings of the latest, most reassuring technology and the low murmur of sympathetic nurses, but no veil of hygienic modernity can disguise the brutality of what goes on there. My wife’s vagina was on a raised platform for all to investigate, and she was still running Toronto Life. What was the note? A cover negotiation? A better lead to the second paragraph of some story or other?I