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Lady of Quality, Georgette Heyer (reread)
Why Men Are The Way They Are, Warren Farrell
You'd think with a title like this, it'd be good only for shits and grins, but you'd be wrong. Farrell, deeply involved in the women's movement and apparently also involved in the men's movement, is attempting to explain, largely to women, why men behave in a way that women perceive as "fear of commitment". Farrell's discussion is largely focused on white, middle and upper class men and women; as such, it is inherently somewhat limited. His explanation focuses on self-interest as displayed by both women and men -- a largely economic approach. Much of his evidence is derived from work in women's groups and men's groups, and bolstered with illustrative examples from a variety of popular magazines. And his analysis strikes me a startlingly insightful.
To oversimplify, Farrell is describing how both women and men have power and use it over each other, causing each other to feel power-less -- exploited and used. They have different kinds of power, and Farrell discusses in some detail the socialization process that creates/exaggerates this situation. Farrell is not interested in attaching blame to people, despite the fact that the related problems he addresses include rape, spouse abuse, and a high divorce rate. The solution he proposes to these myriad ills is equality: not just equality of rights, but of responsibility. He's interested in women participating fully in the financial and economic life of the family -- women and men should equally enjoy the "choice" of whether to work or not. That is, if it's okay for one partner to quit work and stay at home, it is equally okay for the other to do the same.
It's hard to do. Like Pepper Schwartz in Love Between Equals, Farrell is aware that saying is different from doing, nor does two workaholics a relationship make. The transition period is particularly difficult, and Farrell recommends that as men mentor women in the workplace, so women should mentor men in the emotional arena. Like all good self-help books, he has some little questions to ask oneself (no right answers supplied) and some experiments to try (and directions for rolling your own if the ones offered do not appeal).
As a woman, I'm not really in a position to say whether this is one of those descriptions of men that women nod and say that's right to, but men look askance at, or if it is actually correct. I'm awaiting Scott's opinion, if he gets around to reading it. I will say, however, that as the ex-wife of a non-working husband (he kept promising to get a job. . . and stop spending all my money on action figures and Elvis dolls. . .and finish school. . .), I strongly identify with some of the sentiments expressed by men supporting non-working wives. Especially the bit where the spouse is swearing true love up and down in an effort to get one to stay, but once one is gone it's she is was and always will be evil all the way and how much can I get out of her -- and in a matter of a day or two, no less! So that much rings true.
The other section that really strongly rang true I'll introduce by reference to the trailers for The Mirror Has Two Faces, in which the female lead pokes her head into the room and says to Her Man (this is in the morning) "Is now too late to tell you I'm interested in sex tonight?". Most women still do not initiate sex anywhere near half the time, but those who do with any notable frequency at all can be shocked to find out how hard it is. I'm sorry to say we engage in behavior that we would find repulsive in a man, as neatly illustrated by the above quote. Our only excuse is that we've never had to before and are being clumsy and stupid at an age when even somewhat insensitive men have been working on figuring it out for over a decade. Craziest of all, the (wonderful) men we're figuring it out for (on?) really don't have any idea how to explain how to do it because for most of them, no woman has done it for them before and for that matter they learned it by hit or miss and may not be able to articulate what they know works with women!
I've been saying for a few years now that it is tremendously important for women to have jobs -- to have the economic independence necessary to say no, mean it and be taken seriously. Partly out of a sense of fair play, partly from having been mooched off of myself, I tend to think it important that shared economic responsibilities (including entertainment) be shared equally -- fifty-fifty, down the middle. When house/condo hunting, I've consistently looked for two types of places: ones I could afford (and like) by myself and ones I could afford (and like) with my partner. I've had more luck with the former than the latter, altho I have not yet broken down and signed a mortgage. And while I don't want either of us to quit work until we're wealthy enough to retire comfortably, I'd be marginally happier with him shooting himself in the career foot than me doing the same -- I have no desire for children if they mean I have to sacrifice my independence (which, at least for now, means my career. I can always dream of living off investment income after a startup pans out, now, can't I?). While I know I am not alone, the vast majority of women of my acquaintance have rather different opinions and expectations about all of the above. It is very clear to me that we have different kinds of problems in our relationships with men, and Farrell's book -- like Pepper Schwartz Love Between Equals -- supports some of my pet theories about why. So I'm biassed. So what. Read it.
Bath Tangle, Georgette Heyer (reread)
Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society, Nickie Roberts
I started this late last month and decided to finish it after reading the Warren Farrell book. It makes for a fascinating companion. Where Farrell is advocating equality, and the elimination of disguised prostitution, Nickie Roberts is all in favor of legalizing the real thing. And, to my mind, not surprisingly, the two ideas are completely compatible. While Roberts' is an unabashed advocate, and at times her sources are not used as carefully as they might be, her analysis of why women become prostitutes, and how prostitution fits into their life-cycle, is excellent. Like Farrell, her approach is based on self-interest, basically economic. Unlike all too many others who note that women become prostitutes because it pays so well, Farrell bothers to see what happens to these well-paid women after they've made their pile. The answer differs by time and place and individual, but remarkably few have stuck with the trade to the bitter end -- most "retire" to a legitimate career with more prestige but less pay. Others retire entirely. Some get an education. Some become political activists. Many find themselves with enough money to enter a marriage with a good deal more equality than they would otherwise have done.
As a good little anarchist, I tend to think that laws against activities engaged in by consenting adults to no other person's or property's harm are silly beyond imagining, not to mention Incredibly Evil. Ms. Roberts supplies ample evidence that legislating against prostitution in particular is futile and oppressive.
But I do have a question. The author does such a good job of demonstrating that good wife/bad whore is a dichotomy that cuts across most if not all of Western history (if such a beast can really be imagined). Let's imagine for a moment a world in which marriages and genuinely equal -- that is, the partners enjoy equal economic and emotional power in the relationship. Parity, in other words. Further imagine there are no laws against selling sexual services. Under such circumstances, who buys and who sells? And what kind of services are bought and sold? It's a fascinating question -- one that makes me consider rereading (once again) some of the late Heinlein novels.
The Making of Victorian Sexuality, Michael Mason
This is the first of a two volume academic survey of sexuality in England during the nineteenth century. It addresses mores and manners of various classes in urban and rural areas, regarding courtship, marriage, reproduction, and sex. It spends some time looking at possible relationships between political attitudes and sexuality, as well.
The tone is dry and at times edges on to tedious, but the book as a whole is nevertheless readable. Mason does an acceptable job pointing out the problems of taking some of the contemporary commentators seriously, particularly when it comes to such hot issues as numbers of prostitutes, and more generally when the commentators were foreign or from different classes than the women (or men) they were observing and commenting on. I suspect he discounts the influence of what we might call vigilante groups on the numbers of street prostitues (then again, do we consider Guardian Angels and Take Back the Night'ers to be Vigilantes?). The fact that Mason feels compelled to ponder the extent and nature of innuendo in music hall performances makes me wonder if he ever watched Hollywood musicals. He finds it amazing that outright raunchy songs (Lamentations of a Penis) could be followed up by sentimental love songs, or a downright artistic ringing of the changes on the parallels between fruit and whatever. He seems to think that this combination is somehow not completely compatible, which leads me to suspect he's been overly socialized.
Mason does a good job demolishing several ludicrous propositions: that the Victorians didn't do anything (or much of anything) to control their reproduction; that one tenth of the female population of London was engaged in prostitution; the premarital sex was universally frowned upon during the nineteenth century; that women never had orgasms and that perhaps the Victorians didn't even know women could have orgasms; that women had little or no sex drive or need for sex. In the process of doing so, he points out some of the things which were obvious in the nineteenth century that some of us boggle at in the twentieth: the idea of spontaneous ovulation (if more people now knew about that theory, they could never imagine the Victorians didn't know about the female orgasm); the belief that women needed sex even more than men to maintain their health; the major differences during the century -- and across classes -- in acceptable behavior of women, married and unmarried.
One of the most striking insights this book offers is the incredibly close connection between sex and reproduction that prevails amongst many of the commentators on sexuality. Let us not forget, as so many do, that most of these commentators knew perfectly well that devices and techniques existed for circumventing this connection, and used them themselves. Despite this, they persisted in attempting to measure male libido via sperm count -- and in believing the female orgasm contributed to the likelihood of conceiving, even when they knew the falsity of spontaneous ovulation. Little of the demographic controversy aroused by Malthus addressed the possibilities suggested by new methods of birth control -- the debates centered around whether libido might decrease in response to education and increased intellectual stimulation of men and especially women, leading to a gradual decrease in sexual activity and therefore children.
The New Victorians, Rene Denfeld
I avoided buying the Denfeld in hardback, because it seemed clear to me that her historical analogy was problematic. Yes, a bunch of Victorian writers said things that a bunch of our weirder feminists are basically repeating -- things like Men Are Dirty, Violent Creatures who Cannot Be Trusted, while Ladies are Pure, Peaceful and Uninterested in Violence, er, Sex, er, whatever, who, If Only They Were In Charge, the World Would be a Different Place. Probably so -- I'm betting there'd be more stalls in public restrooms for women, for one thing.
Those Victorian writers were far from representative, however, and furthermore, Denfeld is guilty of quoting Acton out of context, altho she is in good company doing so. She used exclusively secondary or worse sources, which explains, if it does not excuse, this problem. Nor does she explicitly claim those Victorian writers were representative of their era -- any more than she believes the wackier feminists are representative of ours. And I think her analogy is, as far as it goes, not inaccurate.
Denfeld is pissed at the Dworkins and MacKinnons of the women's movement. She wishes they'd ditch all this fucking is inherently violent nonsense in favor of doing things like getting better mechanisms in place -- legally or via corporate culture -- to support family leave and other policies flexible enough to enable dual-earner couples (the norm today) to cope with children.
A worthy goal -- and even one typically identified with women in the news. But is it really a women's issue? I can't imagine, not having watched male co-workers go home in the middle of the day to watch a sick kid, or regularly call home in the afternoon to make sure they'd gotten home from school all right, or bring the kid into the office one day when there was no one, and I do mean no one, who could watch him. Denfeld self-describes as a feminist interested in equality between the sexes -- and there is some way yet to go (in terms of pay, and which jobs are occupied by which sex, and in terms of sexual harassment on the job, and a variety of other issues). These are clearly women's issues, but they are not the ones Denfeld wants addressed. She wants the women's movment to spend time on what are arguably more important issues -- but ones which are not as clearly women's issues. And as long as the things most important to women are also the things most important to men, it is no surprise to me that the women's movement languishes in irrelevance.
She Works, He Works, Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers
And lo, after many years, a statistically valid, random and representative sample of dual-earner married couples arrives on the scene, investigating how they divvy up the work of maintaining the relationship, the residence, the two jobs and the kiddies, if any. The two earlier studies with which I was familiar (Schwartz' snowball sample discussed in Peer Marriage and Hertz' modified snowball in More Equal Than Others) were not representative, were older, and were overly limited to white, upper-middle class careerists, rather than to dual-earners across the race and class board. The results are similar, if not identical. The housework is divvied up even more equitably than in other (earlier) studies (does this mean it's getting better or that earlier measures were problematic? Impossible to know, since the latter is definitely true).
These people are really incredibly busy -- and there does appear to be some impact on the frequency of sex, altho Barnett and Rivers don't appear to have looked real closely at this. The quality, however, appears to be excellent, which differs from Schwartz' findings. My money is still on the women not having figured out all the complicated problems associated with initiating sex, that men have had to learn the hard way over their early decades. In another five-ten years, this frequency gap should disappear. An alternative likely explanation would be simply that these people have No Time.
Unlike the wealthy, high-earning careerists of Hertz' and Schwartz' studies, which focused on corporates and professionals, many of Barnett and Rivers' are closer to median household income. They have to hire child-care, but they can't necessarily hire everything out, which helps explain why there's so little time -- and energy --left. More of these couples are doing this out of necessity, also. This is the first study to investigage the impact of dual-earners on health of themselves and their children -- and the answers are all good. The second income means neither has to worry quite so much about losing their job. It also means nobody's stuck at home bored, depressed and fearful of being abandoned. Best of all, it means father's get to be more involved in their children's lives, right from the beginning -- and that's really good for everyone.
Barnett and Rivers' found some of the same problems that Hertz' and Schwartz' did, altho their explanations and emphases differ. One, noted above, is the impact on frequency of sex. Another is the problem of child care during the first six months' -- it's very difficult for the woman to avoid taking over. In general, it's the leftover gender role expectations that Barnett and Rivers see as making for a lot of stress. Women feeling the house should be spotless; men feeling they should be able to pay for everything. Guilt and fear on the part of both -- not just the women -- about hiring child care. Where Schwartz' and Hertz' identified peer pressure as an issue, Barnett and Rivers identify internal expectations as being the biggest source of stress.
Similar low rates of divorce appeared -- the amount of time, energy and resources invested in one of these relationships is high for both parties, and the "switching cost" is really amazing after even a few years. A similar intensity of relationship is experienced, and the same stress on the importance of understanding, empathy and, above all, friendship. These really are co-operative endeavours.
One of the things which struck me most about this summary of study conclusions was the fairness of it. All too often discussions of who does more housework focuse on laundry-cleaning-cooking. What about mowing the lawn, maintaining the car, doing small repairs around the house? That's housework, too! Not all housework is traditionally female, and not all housework is tedious. Barnett and Rivers conclusions suggest that splitting up the housework should mix-and-match the tedious, time-constrained, repetitive jobs with the more interesting, less time-constrained, less repetitive tasks.
Vitamania, Rima D. Apple
If you've ever wondered about what the FDA was thinking when it raided that health-food place in Kent, this is the book for you. Apple isn't here to tell you whether or not you should take supplements, much less how many of what kind. She's here to explain how science has been used to argue for and against vitamin supplementation of the American diet, and how that science was used by the FDA in attempts to protect consumers -- from others and, less successfully, from themselves.
It's always nice to find an author who's capable of looking at an area completely lacking in scientific consensus and doing it in a way that does not come to a conclusion on one side or the other, but rather helps explain how everyone really is behaving and speaking in a more or less rational way. Apple does a good job of showing us how different premises led to wildly different ideas of whether or not to take vitamins, an accomplishment not to be mocked. It's also an entertaining overview of American diet and health in the 20th century.
Betrayal of Science and Reason, Paul and Anne Ehrlich
Faludi's Backlash spawned an awful lot of books which took the same premise (progress leads to an organized resistance to the progress, potentially causing net regression -- almost, but not quite, Hegelian) and applied it to other movements. The Ehrlich's, of The Population Bomb fame, apply this idea to the anti-environmental movement, labelling it a brownlash. Perhaps the most distasteful aspect of this way of describing ideas and trends is that is tends to make the other side look like a bunch of evil jerks who cannot be engaged in mutually beneficial debate. The Ehrlichs do a little of this, but for the most part, their book actually falls into a slightly different genre: the Catalog of Fallacies.
The Catalog of Fallacies has recently seen a revival, largely in response to some of the more egregious nonsense spewed by Rush Limbaugh. An entire sub-genre of publishing these days consists of books which list statements made by Limbaugh, usually in one of his books, but sometimes from one of his radio programs, followed by well-researched prose describing in some detail exactly why that statement is utterly wrong. It's a really easy game to play (witness the number of books, and the small amount of overlap from one to the next), but probably worth doing anyway (apparently some of his audience, perhaps even most, believes what he says. I know, I was shocked, too. Some people have difficulty telling the difference between journalism and polemic.).
The Ehrlichs nail That Fatheaded Idiot (to mis-quote Al Franken) along the way, but their primary targets are people who really ought to know better: Dixy Lee Ray (Trashing the Planet), Gregg Easterbrook, Julian Simon and sundry others. They are specifically after people who publicize the opinions of contrarians without adequately labeling them as such; those who misunderstand and/or misrepresent the nature of scientific progress (i.e. we didn't used to have enough data to know whether the net effect of what we were dumping into the atmosphere was going to make things cooler or warmer on average, so there used to be warnings about cooling. Now we don't worry about that, because we have more data and much better models. This does not mean science can't make up its mind and can therefore safely be ignored); and those who overestimate the ability of the environment to cope with human-caused changes -- in a way that allows humans to continue to exist. Worthy targets, all.
Notable along the way is the Ehrlichs' discussion of public perception of risk, and public ideas about regulating risk -- as good or better than a recent treatment of same by Consumer Reports. The gist is that the public does in fact have a reasonable understanding of risks, and their ire is typically directed not at those items which kill the most people, but at those things which individuals have the least control over, and receive the least benefit from, to go along with the risk. A lot of the arguments from the wise-use crowd really fall on their faces if you can manage to realize that this is in fact how most people view risk, and it is even a reasonable approach to regulation.
Discovery of Dragons, Graeme Base
Transcendence, Charles Sheffield
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This file recreated from The Internet Wayback Machine in January 2002. Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2002.
Created November 10, 1996 Modified: January 10, 2002