Never Walked In High Heels

Last night I watched on a whim a film titled, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Which recreates the tale of a modern man who was forced to play it safe in the name of family. But still, given his preternatural instincts, wishes to go out and continue to steal chickens from the coup.

I see the entire movie as a badly needed commentary on masculinity in our current society. I remember once my father saying: “women marry men thinking that they’ll change, men marry women hoping that they never will.” And in truth, both expectations are unrealistic. People do change but maybe not in the areas that we desire to see that change. I remember being woken up by a newly engaged friend of mine one morning in college. She came to my room later than usual and when I enquired about this she explained that she was up all night cleaning her fiancé’s dorm room. I was a bit shocked. She was the most independent young woman that I had met up to that point. Her dream was to go live in huts in Africa, and yet here she was confessing she had lost sleep by doing something her able bodied fiancé could have accomplished entirely by himself.

“Don’t worry, when we get married things will change.” Why would she say that? Why would she insist this when there is evidence to the contrary, that all of a sudden with a wedding band on his finger and a double income in the bank account he would ever change? Right there, still lying in bed in my dorm at the age of twenty, I could see that my father was absolutely right. People will often marry others absolutely convinced that after the wedding, everything will change.

Mr. Fox was by nature a chicken hunter. Simple. People often have in their very nature habits that aren’t particularly pleasant. My friend’s fiancé was not particularly neat. That was a characteristic about him that as far as I see evidence right now, has yet to change. By saying “Oh, he’ll change”, wasn’t my friend ultimately saying, “I would like to change him”? And if you love someone, do you want to change them? Can those two philosophies ever come together? Can you love someone while still wanting to alter any aspect of their character?

Mrs. Fox said it best when later in the movie she admits: “I love you, but I never should have married you.” It is a plague on modern masculinity that we seek to change it in the name of safety and security. Taming the modern man to live under a mortgage and go to the same place of work day after day after day is ultimately conditioning men everywhere to be afraid of freedom. I look at the male friends I have in my area of London. A large percentage of them are single, substantially older, and of course they live on boats or carry out some other form of adventurous life.

I love my friends dearly, even though I have my scuffles with them. The point is I can’t imagine altering any of them a fraction. They are warm and friendly and they carry out there lives for the most part exactly as they intend to. That doesn’t mean not living in safety simply because that isn’t what they want. It means weeks on boats waking up in the wee morning hours because the boat next door is on fire. It means not having a plan and living comfortably with the idea that at any moment life can change. I think about them and all I wish is if their lives unexpectedly change, tragedy or great joy, they aren’t forced to change who they are for any reason. Unless of course, they become more like themselves.

There are few stories told today about women. An inspirational story has to have someone such as Sandra Bullock in it in order to sell, and even then there is something about these female characters which seem either glossy or angular; a rough mock up of what a woman might possibly look like. Recently, I’ve been looking for a fictional female character that I wanted to emulate. This meant finding a woman who was strong in the face of adventure and gentle in the eyes of loved ones. This is how I rediscovered Mrs. Kay Miniver.

Mrs. Miniver was a film produced in 1942 and follows one woman’s adventures during the opening of the Second World War. What would no doubt be looked down upon as being “a common housewife” by many today, provides the heroine ample opportunity for courage, grace, grief, and even humor within an ordinary backdrop which produces a most extraordinary life. Between the open communication she shared with her husband to her fierceness in finding the joys in life even in difficult times, we watch a rare sight in the unfolding of this movie. We see a woman in the fullest sense of the word.

We are bombarded by images of two types of women today. Surprisingly, I’m not talking about the vixens and the angels, which you’ll hear feminist academics drive on about at intellectual conferences. Rather, I see the two poles of femininity today as being victimized or being controlling. She must either have no strength left within her that she must depend on someone else to be happy, or, she must be steely and cold, demanding that someone else make her happy. Neither makes for a particularly stable or happy individual.

Today I think we see the controlling woman as the standard rather than the other. A woman must have her life put together and have a goal beyond her family which, she will, come hell or high water, succeed with. I’m a career woman myself and I’m not saying that a housewife is somehow superior. But the grace of a woman, I think, comes from fully facing the challenges which are in front of her… all of them. What makes Mrs. Miniver so special is that she can be facing a German gunman in one moment, and overjoyed at the return of her husband the next. For her, there is no point in fantasizing how life ought to be, when there is so much to discover within how life is.

In the movie, there are no sex scenes or cleavage shown, nor is there any room for a damsel in distress fainting at the most climatic moment. In this way, Kay Miniver’s story is remarkably modern. Oddly enough, I think hers is a life which most women have in front of them, were we not so preoccupied with fairytale endings and Hollywood love scenes. What we learn from Mrs. Miniver is that it is not in making things how they ought to appear which leads to a life of beauty, but in accepting things as they are. Or in the words of another admirer of Kay Miniver, “: What goes to make a rose, ma’am, is breeding… and budding… and horse-manure, if you’ll pardon the expression. And that’s where you come in…”

“He who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither.” ~Ben Franklin

One of my favorite things about living where I do is that I get to see men who have yet to give up their sense of adventure. Some of them have passed forty and still live on boats with no wives or children. Their homes sometimes seem like an adult version of a tree house as I pass them. They stick their heads out and greet me, asking if I need help with anything today. These are the friends I call when I am stuck in central London with a dead battery or suddenly find myself in a sticky situation. They are unshaven, unabashed, and all together untamed.

In the circles I was raised, men like this are pretty much nonexistent. The males we have are like old circus bears who perform a few ticks on command, but are old and have been declawed. The bars placed on the circus cages are to give a feeling that the beast is unsafe despite how aged he actually is. Although I have my theories, I’m not sure whose ‘fault’ it actually is. What I am sure of is that these men, somehow or another, have entered into a safe world of suits and status quos where they often married before they knew who they were, to avoid some unknown darkness. They have become tamed because the world around them requires it. All opportunity for adventure disappears when people demand that men play it ‘safe.’

My point is not that we should encourage men to be reckless or even brutish. Real men possess self control as much as they do power. But what I am emphasizing is that on insisting on safe lives, perfect homes, and taming passion, we trade away our freedoms. And in doing so, we (for lack of a better word) castrate our men. Then we wonder ‘where have all the men gone?’

The men around here are still often feral even on their best behavior. Most of them are far from having a stable life, but by my count I don’t expect them to. In keeping their company, they don’t expect me to stay in my ‘place’ either. They don’t comment about how I shouldn’t be out in inaccessible places or calling them when I need to get out during a snow storm. They are the first to offer help but the last to enforce limits. I know that each of us are fully functional individuals who treasure our freedom. Because we know we are each independent, there is a community where each of us is valued. Watching them be the fullest men they can be, raising sails and rebuilding their boats with calloused hands and amazing stamina, helps me to realize what it means to be a better woman than I thought I could be.

              When my roommate brought home a new fling, I didn’t pay much attention. In our house, boys come and go, and while most of them are friendly they all have their faults. So, we’ve learned not to get too attached, not to invest too much, and not to become too annoyed by the fault that one can see plain as day even when the other cannot. But this particular one got unexpectedly on my bad side so fast that he managed to permanently smear himself to my disfavor.

              It started when I was stupid enough to walk across the floor of our new flat barefoot and I received a splinter from an ill cared for floor. This unleashed a general barrage of comments about my landlord not taking care of the place and not being responsible for his investment. I was having various amounts of trouble with the property owner that week and the splinter just sealed the deal.

              “But Athena, you shouldn’t hold people responsible to their actions like that. People just do stuff, it doesn’t mean anything,” he said, reclining on the couch and lazily fondling my roommate’s hand. OK, I instantly went from having on opinion about the guy to utter disgust all in a matter of four seconds. This was an impressive record. My somewhat embarrassed roommate asked him to clarify what he meant, which he gladly did, by repeating himself. I looked to my roommate in utter disbelief, ready to punch the guy in the face, before I realized that he would dismiss the action as being “just stuff.” What was the point?

              I couldn’t imagine having a relationship with a guy who, when asked to take responsibility for his actions, refuses to due so. More to the point, I can’t imagine having sex with someone who behaved in this manner either.

              The link between sex and responsibility is an issue that makes modern audiences very nervous. In an age of birth control and condoms we’d like to think that we’ve removed any responsibility from having sex. And we’ve gotten rid of the big ones to be sure, but sex is something which profoundly affects every facet of life including economics and politics.

              For a woman to have a partner who refuses to take responsibility for himself and his actions is like a throw back to the days before feminism.  Its saying that she doesn’t deserve someone who is honest with her or respects her. If he can’t be held accountable for his actions, what will stop him from  becoming abusive or cheating on his partner? Why should his girlfriend have any value to him, if he doesn’t value his own actions. 

              Like so many of society’s problems, this commentary is meaningless without making it concrete. Most women will say “I would never go out with anyone who would say that!” Fair enough, but would you get involved with someone who subconsciously believed it? How many times do you tell yourself excuses for your significant other. Or are left trying to explain the unexplainable to friends when your partner does something stupid?

              But then let’s add sex to the mix. It goes without saying that this sort of attitude carries huge risks for my friend in terms of STDs. But the ramifications become much more distressing than that. If a man refuses to take responsibility for his actions, then sex is meaningless to him in every sense of the word. It is not an act of adoration, commitment, or even enjoyment. If “people just do stuff” then the intention cannot exist, even if the intention was/is hedonism. Sex is “just stuff” and as mundane as doing your laundry or emptying your pockets. When even the most exciting things become mundane  there is no longer passion or even a sense of life.

              Suffice it to say, the beau didn’t last too long after that. I think my roommate figured out they didn’t have that much in common. It was the first one in a while that I had learned anything from, so this boy had more sticking power than most in my mind. And for that I tip my hat to him…not that I expect that to mean much to him. After all, people “just do stuff.” 

              Sometimes academics have far too much time on their hands.

              A typographical error on my part allowed me to discover the word ‘womyn’ in Wikipedia yesterday. As with any of my experiences with Wikipedia this leads to what I call ‘justifiable and educational procrastination,’ aka spending hours clicking on links to learn about things that are utterly unrelated to my life. Its an addiction without a 12 step program.

              It seems that the term ‘womyn’ was a product of feminists in the 1970’s wanting to remove the ‘man’ from ‘woman.’ It comes from the branch of feminism that seeks to correct the inherent biases in language because the word ‘woman’ suggests that female humans are a subset of male humans.

              This emphasis shift to gender neutrality rears its ugly head for me as a writer all the time. Several of my friends have vocalized their disturbance that I use the word ‘he’ to refer to an editorial person. “Why not use ‘he or she,’ or better yet, just use ‘their.’” Has anyone ever tried to write in iambic verse or with an ear for cadence while using the term ‘he or she’? It’s cumbersome, clumsy, and sounds absurd. Take the line from The Merchant of Venice when Portia describes any monarch with “His sceptre shows the force of temporal power.” Say that out loud. Now just try to say “His or her sceptre shows the force of temporal power,” without sounding like a legal document. It just doesn’t work. You wouldn’t tell a painter that every time he (or she) used the color red he (or she) had to put the color blue next to it. Why would you exert that level of control over a writer?

              And using ‘their’ isn’t an option because its just wrong grammatically. If you doubt me, refer to your middle school grammar books.

              Which brings me back to the neologism of ‘womyn.’ The fact that there is a little red line on my screen telling me there’s a spelling error every time I write ‘womyn’ tells me there’s a problem. As a writer, I am a firm believer that words mean something. It is because of this opinion that I hope to be careful about the words I use. And while language is a wonderfully flexible thing (Shakespeare, it is said, introduced 1,700+ words into the English language), the fact is the entire basis for the argument of the existence of the term is unfounded.

              ‘Woman’ is not a diminution of ‘man’ as some might suggest. The word is germanic in origin where ‘man’ and ‘mann’ have two distinct meanings. In German ‘man’ is a gender neutral subject (as in mankind or human) whereas ‘mann’  means someone of male gender. Oddly enough my spell check seems to like the word mann much more than womyn.

              If you want to be egalitarian about it, here’s what I propose. Get rid of the word ‘woman.’ (This is the point where all my female friends look for the biggest rock that’s nearby to throw at my head.) Just stop using the word. You don’t need it. Then use ‘man’ to mean anyone regardless of gender. Then use the scientific words of male and female if you need to specify. As science can tell you, using these terms doesn’t denote any superiority of one over the other, it signifies biological difference. That’s all.

              I have now spent some hours contemplating the use of the word ‘woman’ and am surprised at how much time can go into a debate about a single letter. And the thing is, just as in any schism, those who want to be insulted by the spelling of a word will always choose to be.  In this way, 200 years after changing the spelling to womyn there would no doubt be a faction demanding that men and womyn are exactly the same and we should, therefore change it back.