Travels (46 page)

The incident was exciting, but it was also a little unnerving, so I didn’t call this woman for a while. Eventually curiosity overcame me, and I called and made a date.

We met for dinner in a sushi bar. Andrea was twenty-eight; she had a degree in business administration and she worked for a commercial real-estate company. She was ambitious and levelheaded about her work; she had it all figured out, how long she would stay in this company, when she would leave, what she would do next.

She didn’t ask me much about myself, and in fact didn’t seem very interested in me, except to ask where I lived, and whether my house was close to the restaurant. She was impatient during dinner, restless. I couldn’t figure out why.

Finally the meal was over and I asked if she wanted tea or coffee. She shook her head. “Can’t we have it at your house?”

And then I understood her impatience, her hurried indifference toward me. I was being rushed to the bedroom. Amazing! Andrea was doing to me what men supposedly did to women. I was being treated as a sex object.

At my house she announced she didn’t want coffee but wanted a tour instead; she saw the bedroom and the Jacuzzi.

“Nice Jacuzzi,” she said, starting to take off her clothes. “Want to join me?”

Things were going very fast. I had the strangest sense of trying to catch up, to accommodate this new pace of the eighties. It seemed we had hardly gotten into the Jacuzzi before we were in the bedroom, and it seemed that we had hardly gotten to the bedroom when she was up and getting dressed, and I was still lying there on the bed, and to my astonishment I heard myself say: “When will I see you again?”

“I’ll give you a call,” she said, buckling her belt.

It seemed to me she was dressing with undue haste. Did she have another date after leaving me?

“You have to go now?” I said.

“Yeah. I hate to fuck and run, but … big day tomorrow, I have to get my rest.”

So I lay there in the bed, feeling worse and worse, while she got dressed, and pretty soon she waved goodbye, and then I heard the door slam and her car back down the driveway, and I thought,
I feel used
.

Well, I had been out of the action for a decade. My friend David had been single all during that time. The next time we played racquetball, I told him about my experience, which still troubled me.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve had that, too. Where you find yourself asking her, ‘When will I see you again?’ You feel used after she’s gone.…”

“Yes,” I said. “I really did. I felt used. Seduced and abandoned. All of that.”

“I know,” David said, shaking his head. “It’s a new world, Michael. It’s all changed.”

It was David’s theory that feminism and the sexual revolution had actually had the effect of reversing traditional sex roles.

“Look,” he said, “all of my male friends want to get married and settle down. But the women don’t. The men want babies. The women don’t.
The men want meaningful relationships. The women want quick sex and then they want to get right back to their careers.”

In keeping with this idea of reversal, David had a term for the behavior of women like Andrea: “feminine macho.” David’s idea was that women had seen the past years as an opportunity to behave like men—but that, in taking up certain traditional forms of male behavior, they had sometimes modified the form without understanding its underlying purpose.

“See,” David said, “women think that, when men behave romantically on a one-night stand, that’s hypocritical. So women won’t do that. When a woman intends to have a one-night stand, she lets you know it. Bam! No illusions from her. But that doesn’t feel like honesty to a man, it feels like brutality. Because, let’s face it, men are the romantics. We’re the ones who need the romance.”

Here I am in the locker room with my friend David, who has been a Hollywood bachelor for two decades, who has gone out with so many models and actresses that he’s good friends with the people who run the model agencies—here’s David, suave man of the world, telling me that men are the romantics, and not women.

“No, no, no, David,” I protested. “Women are romantic. Women want flowers and candy and all that stuff.”

“No, they don’t,” David said. “Women want the respect and admiration of a man, and they know flowers are a sign of respect from a man. But they don’t care about the flowers; they don’t moon and ooh and aah and sigh, except for our benefit. They don’t have any of those romantic feelings men think they do.
Men
have the romantic feelings. Women’re much colder and more practical.”

I disagreed.

“Okay,” David said. “We’re sitting in the locker room, right?”

“Right.”

“Have you ever had a locker-room conversation about women—you know, the way women think we do, talking in explicit detail about what we did with our dates the night before?”

“No,” I said. “I never have.”

“Neither have I,” David said. “But you’ve been accused of having such conversations by a woman?”

“Yes, sure.” I couldn’t count the number of times a woman had said she didn’t want me talking about her to my male friends.

“You know why women think we have these explicit conversations? Because they do, that’s why. Women talk about
everything
.”

I knew this was true. I had long ago learned of the frankness of women among themselves, and of their tendency to assume that men were equally frank, when, as far as I could tell, men were actually quite discreet.

“You see,” David said, “each sex assumes the opposite sex is just the way they are. So women think men are explicit, and men think women are romantic. Eventually that becomes a stereotype that nobody questions. But it’s not accurate at all.”

David insisted on his view: women were stronger, tougher, more pragmatic, more interested in money and security, more focused on the underlying realities of any situation. Men were weaker, more romantic, more interested in the symbols than the reality—in short, living out a fantasy.

“I’m telling you,” David said.

“What about the idea of the nurturing female?” I said.

“Only for children,” he said. “Not for men.” He shook his head sadly. “Did you ever wish a woman would send you flowers?”

The question caught me off guard. A woman send
me
flowers?

“Sure. Send you flowers, a nice note, thanks for a lovely evening, the whole bit.”

It seemed such a strange idea. But as I considered it, it seemed as if it would be terrific.

“I’m telling you,” David said, “we’re the romantics. Work it out.”

Working it out seemed to be the story of my life in the mid-1980s. In my private life, all the women I saw worked; often they were preoccupied with their work. During this period I went out with a reporter, a computer salesperson, a choreographer, and a composers’ agent. Dinner with these women tended to be a litany of their problems at work. They assumed that the details of their jobs were as interesting to me as to them.

I was reminded of the times in the past when I had gone to dinner and monopolized the conversation with my own work problems. And, as David had said, the sex roles were now reversed. But whatever the explanation, there wasn’t much romance in those dinners. On the contrary, this new equality had some decidedly dreary aspects. I used to listen to these women and think,
The only time you give your full attention is when you are talking
. When I was talking, they would glance at their watches. They were all vaguely preoccupied; they were all pressed for time; they were all playing An Important Person of Affairs. Which was fine, but it wasn’t
sexy: “Hey, it’s nine o’clock now, I have to hit the road at ten. Do we have time to do it, or what?”

Practical, but not what I would have called a hot date.

One night I was sitting in the corner of a woman’s kitchen when her roommate stormed in from a date, banging doors, shouting: “Jesus, what does a girl have to do to get
laid
these days?”

This roommate was embarrassed when she saw me sitting in the kitchen, but it led to an interesting discussion. And the most interesting thing about the discussion was that the attitudes, the frustrations, the disappointments expressed, were exactly the same as for men. In exactly the same terms. There was no difference at all.

By now I had adopted David’s view of the inherent differences between the sexes, that men were the romantics and women were the pragmatists. His view that each sex saw the other as a projection of itself. I talked about this idea all the time, particularly with women.

I noticed that it always made women angry. They didn’t like to hear it.

At first I thought it was because women were experiencing so much discrimination in the workplace. Women felt they were always being told they couldn’t do this, or they weren’t suited for that. Or else they were just subtly bypassed in corporate hierarchies. So women were a little raw about any notion of inherent differences between the sexes, because it sounded like the setup for justifying discrimination.

But then, as I continued to listen to their complaints, I heard something else. I began to hear about “the way men are,” about “the way men stick together,” about “the way men are threatened by a competent woman,” about “the way men are threatened by sex.” About the way
they
are. About the problems
they
make for women because of the problems
they
have with intimacy or feelings or power. I heard a lot about how
they
act this way, and how
they
act that way.

I wasn’t hearing about a particular man, or a particular job. Nothing was individualized. It was all abstract, all explained by a general theory of the way
they
were.

One night I was at a dinner party. The conversation was lively and far-ranging, and not at all concerned with the sexes. It was broadly social
and political. But as I listened I noticed a tendency to talk about how
they
don’t protect the environment, how
they
don’t run the government responsibly, how
they
don’t build quality products, how
they
never report the news accurately.

The basic message was that
they
were ruining the world, and there was nothing
we
could do about it.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who is this
they
that you keep talking about?”

I got a lot of confused looks. Everyone else at the table knew who
they
were.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t think anything is served by imagining a world of faceless villains. There isn’t any
they
. There’re only people like us. If a corporation is polluting and the CEO sounds uninformed on TV, the chances are he’s some guy who’s in the middle of a divorce and whose kids are on drugs and he’s got a lot on his mind, a big corporation to run, stockholders and board meetings and everybody pushing at him, and he’s tired and pressured, this pollution issue is just one of many problems, and the government changes the regulations so often nobody can be sure whether he’s breaking the law or not, and his aides aren’t as smart as he’d like them to be, and they don’t keep him as informed as he’d like to be, and maybe they even lie to him. This CEO doesn’t want to appear like a jerk on TV. He’s not happy he came off that way. But it happens, because he’s just a guy trying to do his best and his best isn’t always so hot. Who’s any different?”

The table got silent.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I think I’m pretty smart, and I don’t always run my own life so well. I make mistakes and screw up. I do things I regret. I say things I wish I hadn’t said. A lot of the people you see interviewed on TV have impossible jobs. It’s only a question of how badly they’ll do them. But I don’t see any grand conspiracy out there. I think people are doing the best they can.”

The table stayed silent.

“And what’s really wrong with making
them
the problem,” I said, “is that you abdicate your own responsibility. Once you say some mysterious
they
are in charge, then you’re able to sit back comfortably and complain about how
they
are doing it. But maybe
they
need help. Maybe
they
need your ideas and your support and your letters and your active participation. Because you’re not powerless, you are a participant in this world. It’s your world, too.”

So there I was, preaching at the dinner table. I got embarrassed and
shut up. But in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, There’s something else here. Some other way this is true. Something you haven’t considered.

Back in the early 1970s, a girlfriend became exasperated with me and said, “Listen: just assume men and women are the same.”

“How do you mean?” I said.

“Anything you think as a man, I think as a woman. Anything you feel, I feel.”

“No, no,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” she said.

“Well, for example,” I said, “men can just look at a woman and get turned on. The visual stimulus is enough for a man. But women aren’t like that.”

“Oh, really?”

“No. Women need more than the visual stimulus.”

“I’ve certainly looked at a nice pair of buns in tight jeans and thought, ‘I wouldn’t mind trying
that
.’ ”

I thought, This is a very masculine woman. “Maybe for you,” I said, “but for women in general, it doesn’t work that way.”

“All my girlfriends are the same,” she said. “We’re all bun-watchers.”

She must have a lot of perverted friends, I thought. I gave another argument. “Women aren’t turned on by pornography and men are.”

“Oh, really?”

We went on like this for a while. She insisted that men and women were the same in their underlying behavior, and that I had a lot of wrong ideas about differences. Back in the 1970s this was pretty extreme stuff.

In subsequent years I forgot that conversation, but now, more than ten years later, it came back to me. It seemed useful to reconsider the whole business.

I still thought there were differences between men and women. It was true I didn’t conceive those differences in the simplistic way I had so many years earlier. But I still thought there were differences. I wanted to know what those differences were.