Men Page 8
Nevertheless, he’s contemptuous about the well-meaning sensitivity workshops they shuttle us professors to, and the increasingly restrictive campus codes that instill “paranoid extremes of self-monitoring.” Of course, everyone who’s not a sexual idiot knows that the price of employment in academia these days is that these wayward libidos of ours have to be throttled into obedience. But I suspect that even extremes of self-monitoring won’t prevent professors from sparking the occasional imaginative chord in a student—and sometimes excessively imaginative ones.
What sets Lasdun’s account of his experience apart is that as much as Nasreen’s hate campaign derailed him, he’s too exquisitely attuned to the daily difficulties of libidinal self-management—his own as well as his students’—to entirely pardon himself for it either. He’s also uncomfortably aware of the extent to which the two of them came to mirror one another. “Her obsession with me achieved perfect symmetry: I became just as obsessed with her.”
If there’s a moral to this grim little story, it’s that acting out prohibited desires isn’t the only way to cause mayhem: regard the rancid turns that not acting on them can sometimes take. Lasdun’s misfortune was to encounter someone whose obsessions he fired, and who refused to let him off the hook for not following through on what he thinks he never implied.
The Lothario
Via the grapevine I hear some startling news. Humorist Patricia Marx’s oddly titled new novel, Him Her Him Again the End of Him, is apparently a roman à clef about an ex-boyfriend of hers, who happens to be someone I myself dated at one time too. Life is long and the world is small, so it stands to reason that you will occasionally encounter an ex turning up as a thinly disguised character in another of his previous girlfriends’ satiric novels, but I feel a momentary rush of annoyance anyway. Dammit, why didn’t I think of this first? He would have made such great material! I could have really skewered him! Then I remember that I’m not a novelist, nor a memoirist, and when I enter the ex’s name in my carefully cultivated internal database of animus toward men, the hostility meter barely flutters. Still, you can probably understand why I was most eager to get my hands on an advance copy of this book.
A swirl of pre-publication rumor also leads me to believe that the ex gets quite a working-over from Marx. He was indeed something of a Lothario. Although short, he got around quite a bit, at least among a certain type of woman—the type I’m likely to encounter socially, it appears, as I keep running into other women who were also involved with him at some point, though thankfully none of us overlapped, which could prove awkward. But I was well aware that he cast a wide net: I recall mentioning his name once to my then hairstylist and even he knew someone who’d previously gone out with the man.
With this material, I figured Marx—a former writer for Saturday Night Live—could do a lot. The first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, she now writes occasional comic pieces for the New Yorker, meaning that she’s been certified by various arbiters of American humor as “a funny woman.” This is an exceedingly rare genus, at least according to a notorious throw-down by the late Christopher Hitchens in a 2007 issue of Vanity Fair titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” When it comes to sexual politics, Hitchens liked to get the ladies hoppin’. His argument is that men are simply more motivated than women to be funny since men want sex from women, whereas we females can get it anytime, on demand. And if a guy can get a girl to laugh—real open-mouthed, teeth-exposed, “involuntary, full and deep-throated mirth … well then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression.” (You know what he means: deep-throated.) Women also aren’t funny because women are the ones who have to bear the children, these children might die, and you can’t really make jokes about that.
Now, this is a fascinating portrait of female nature and relations between the sexes, though it’s unclear which decade he had in mind: it has the slightly musty air of 1960-ish Kingsley Amis, wrapped in nostalgia for the merry days when sexual conquest required an arsenal of tactics deployed by bon-vivantish cads on girdled, girlish sexual holdouts. “Oh, Mr. Hitchens!” you imagine one of the potential conquests squealing at an errant hand on nylon-clad knee.1
As if to set Hitchens straight on what women really go for in a man, the unnamed heroine of Marx’s novel—unnamed because it’s written in the first person, meaning you have to keep pinching yourself to avoid falling into the biographical fallacy—is pathetically eager to have sex whenever possible with a man possessing absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever. The titular “him” is Eugene Lobello, a philosopher and academic Lothario who relieves the inexperienced protagonist of her unwanted virginity at the advanced age of twenty-one, while both are postgraduates at Cambridge. Not only is Eugene the furthest thing from funny there is, he’s also utterly charmless, except, inexplicably, to the insecure and constantly self-deprecating heroine. Her friends all think he’s a pretentious twit who’s jerking her around, but having bestowed the gift of her virginity on him, she’s apparently able to forgive him any form of churlish behavior. All she really wants is for the purportedly brilliant and infinitely narcissistic Eugene to think she’s smart, thus she specializes in the erudite quip, a source of some of the book’s funnier moments. On William Empson: “Don’t you think a better title would be Seven or Eight Types of Ambiguity?”
There’s nothing more alluring for many of us independent women than an unavailable boyfriend, and Eugene plays the role to the hilt, not least when he dumps the heroine to marry and impregnate the annoying and sniffly Margaret. (Quips our abandoned protagonist: “Hypochondriacs make me sick.”) Her creative solution to Eugene’s romantic flight is to rent the apartment directly above the newlyweds, where she can smell the curry odors wafting up from the dinner parties they don’t invite her to. Marx is adept at sending up the familiar terrain of Women Who Love Too Much—you’d definitely like to get this girl on Dr. Phil for one of his tough-talking butt-kickings. But the fact that the humor usually ends up being far more at the heroine’s expense than at Eugene’s creates a more curdled than comic feeling. Eugene may be the ostensible target—saddled with cringe-inducing lines like “Your kisses are so recondite, my peach, that they are almost notional”—but she’s the one who so relentlessly loves such a buffoon.
It’s also disconcerting that these characters live in such different comedic universes: he’s cartoonish, obtuse as an Oxbridge Homer Simpson, while her self-reflections have the ring of real human pondering and pain. Let me qualify that: real female human pondering and pain. It’s not that men don’t sometimes conduct themselves in a pathetic fashion when it comes to romance, but when they do they’re “acting like little girls,” in the current idiom—romantic dippiness is popularly coded as female. The heroine isn’t unaware that Eugene doesn’t love her, and that arguing and pleading and phoning a lot is a good way to “make someone who was hitherto lukewarm really detest you.” Unfortunately, the less he loves her, the more convinced she becomes that “he and I could have been just the thing.”
And remains convinced, against all odds. Seven years later, Eugene turns up in New York, where our still terminally insecure narrator now resides, having landed and been fired from a number of jobs (including one as a writer on a Saturday Night Live–like TV show called Taped But Proud), and she readily takes up with him once again. Eugene is in training to become a psychoanalyst (as a philosopher, he’d specialized in “ego studies,” ha ha), and, though still married to Margaret, he lures the heroine into an affair that drags on for years. As a shrink, he’s no more reliable than as a boyfriend: his pillow talk consists of divulging all his patients’ secrets, and in the end it turns out he’s been sleeping with one of his more attractive analysands, for whom he—yet again!—summarily dumps the heroine.
If there’s humor to be milked from the common but wretched plight of loving someone who doesn’t love you back, or from the variety of self-abnegating female behavior on display here, let’s call it the humor of painful recognition. To the extent t
hat it’s funny, the comedy hinges on our willingness to recognize the element of truth in the parody. It struck me, while reading Marx’s book, that the humor of painful recognition is an inherently conservative social form, especially when it comes to conventional gender behaviors, because it just further hardens such behaviors into “the way things are.” The laughter depends on our recognizing the world as it is, and leaving it the way we found it. Like all cathartic laughter, it questions nothing. (This was Brecht’s objection to catharsis in theater, which leaves audiences complacent and sheeplike; expelling our emotions instead of reflecting on what caused them.) By contrast, consider the comic sensibility of someone like Sarah Silverman. At her best, Silverman’s scalding humor, delivered in that faux-naïf girly voice, leaves exactly nothing the same. When she takes on female abjection—most famously, “I was raped by a doctor. Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl”—clichés are defamiliarized and demolished; the world as it was is turned on its ear. The laughter isn’t the laughter of painful recognition, it’s the shock of sledgehammering feminine shame and smearing menstrual blood all over its covenants, not deferring to them with a chuckle.
Whether or not Hitchens was right and women are inherently less funny than men (he allowed that fat women, Jewish women, and lesbians are the exceptions—THANKS for that), women are highly funny when it comes to finely honed observations about the romantic and horizontal conduct of men, and it’s on this terrain that Marx is a particularly keen observer. Though I was disappointed to recognize only a few superficial similarities between my own ex and Eugene, my antennae perked up when I came to a small moment between Eugene and the heroine, after he re-enters her life. All that happens is this: the two of them are on the couch; he looks at her intently, makes a beckoning gesture with his forefinger, and says, “Come here.”
That did have an awfully familiar ring. Back when I was on the receiving end of the move, I remember thinking that it seemed a bit Cary Grant–ish, but it never occurred to me that I was getting recycled material. I also didn’t realize how comical it was until I read it reprised by Marx, though I felt a little unkind for thinking so. Like I said, I don’t really have anything against this particular ex who, despite his own array of temperamental complications (including a monumentally crazy mother looming in the background), moved through the world with a certain courtliness and liked to whip up elaborate multi-course dinners for two. He would soon after embark on the tried-and-true second act of middle-aged male professors everywhere: marry a graduate student and have another child. It’s like Botox for men apparently—though he was always preternaturally youthful-looking, when I ran into him recently he looked ten years younger than he had when I’d last seen him a decade before. Is this humor-worthy? Maybe if I envied him the opportunity to marry a graduate student and acquire a late-in-life offspring I’d be more inclined to lampoon his new life, but having taken a thorough self-inventory of all my currently unmet and/or impossible desires, I find that happily this isn’t one of them.
On reflection, I’d append to Marx’s mockery of our ex the qualifier that if our most intimate moments turn out to be pre-scripted, well obviously these are anxious encounters: failure hovers, rejection looms. No doubt there’s a small buffer of added security in playing a role, or relying on what worked last time around. As Nick Carraway remarks of Gatsby, personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures; though maybe he should have added that the most successful gestures have been rehearsed in advance. But it’s also more complicated than that. If you believe Freud, emotional life itself is all recycled material: no new disappointments, only old ones revived; no new attractions, only those earliest loves and hates imprinting every subsequent desire forever after.
It’s easy enough to see why men might rankle and disappoint in the romantic sphere: bad copies of lost originals—even the best specimens would have to register as inept frauds, at least in the darker recesses of female emotional life. It’s from these same recesses that jokes too originate, says Freud. I wonder if mocking male seduction techniques is such a comedic gold mine for this reason, because jokes and disappointment share the same home base.
Now that men have become less economically necessary and there’s less reason than ever to pretend to admire them, scorn for men has become the postfeminist fallback position, widely regarded as a badge of feistiness and independence. Nevertheless, men remain conduits to things a lot of women still deeply want: sex, love, babies, commitments.… It’s a contradictory situation to find oneself in, to say the least. And not really that funny, but get a bunch of women in a room, add liquor, and jokes about men’s inadequacies fly like shrapnel. When it comes to dating, single men are dogs, infants, sex-obsessed, moral rodents, or emotional incompetents. And once you finally land one, nothing much improves, since husbands are morons, selfish, workaholics, emotionally unavailable, and domestically incompetent. Single men lie and mislead to get sex; husbands have lost interest in sex entirely. Men are emotionally autistic, except for all the ones who want you to be their mother. Men can’t talk about their feelings! Except for all the ones who won’t shut up about themselves. They’re macho assholes, except when they’re wimps—what man could endure childbirth? And so on.
In Women on Men, Liza Donnelly, a New Yorker cartoonist—thus, along with Marx, another officially certified funny woman—makes the case for ridiculing men as a form of female assertion. In a running commentary about her assembled cartoons she suggests, as potential comedic material, men’s misplaced egos, bravado, hot air, childish behavior, self-obsession—their other obsessions include sports, cars, and gadgets—and, of course, their preoccupation with sex, one of her frequent cartoon subjects. (A woman speaking about her husband: “His body is fifty, his mind is thirty, and his penis is thirteen.” Another woman ordering in a restaurant, speaking of her date: “I’d like a Chardonnay, and I’m fairly certain he’d like sex.”) The goal, says Donnelly, is to “Make them uncomfortable. Make them squirm. Because we love them.” One notices that this is love mixed with a healthy dose of aggression. (A man and a woman are ordering in a restaurant; the woman says to the waiter: “What wine do you recommend I throw in his face?” Another man and woman are in a car; the woman says to the gas station attendant: “Forget the windshield. Please just wipe the silly smirk off his face.”)
Donnelly offers a few telling glimpses into how her own life has fueled her humor; interestingly, her dating career seems to have echoed that of Marx’s heroine. Donnelly too kept being drawn to men who weren’t available—not willing to settle down, not wanting to leave their wives.… “You name it, I fell for them all.” For a long time she thought marriage wasn’t for her and married people were aliens, though at some point she realized that all men have their “side effects” (like medicine?), and the real question is which side effects you can tolerate. Her story ends relatively happily: she marries a fellow cartoonist who provides her with plenty of male foibles to humorize about. All in all a good match, except that he doesn’t dance. And is a little sex-obsessed. And some other stuff.
Are ambivalent women funnier? This is a category Hitchens neglected to include on his exceptions list, but I’d like to think so. I’m hardly in a position to suggest that women shouldn’t be ambivalent about commitment, because everyone should be, in my opinion—note that the same term covers stints in a mental asylum. And if women who are ambivalent about commitment are drawn with suspicious frequency to men who are unattainable, far be it from me to begrudge anyone the consolations of venting about men’s immaturity and egotism in response. After all, it’s not like getting stuck with the guy and waking up to the same mug day after day is without its ambivalences either, as Donnelly’s cartoons attest. A woman to her girlfriend: “I always saw marriage as a stepping-stone to divorce.” A woman to her date: “I love the idea of you, but not you.” Another woman to another date: “You are exactly the kind of guy I could learn to leave.” A woman about her inert husband: “Nobody told me marriage wo
uld be an endurance test.”
For funny women, each man is his own unique recipe for disappointment. From their laundry lists of male failings it can be tempting to deduce that women humorists specialize in wanting what men don’t have to give, or perhaps in wanting from each particular man the particular thing he’s most unable to provide, whether it’s an account of his feelings, a respite from ESPN, or lifelong fidelity. And when men do come through, look for an ulterior motive: Donnelly says that men who cook for women are only doing it to prove they’re good in bed, which caused me to re-evaluate my ex’s culinary flair. Hmm, so that’s what he was up to.
The term “misogyny” is often proffered to explain the historic male–female predicament, but it’s not like women are so fond of men at the moment either. Researchers who study these things generally find far higher levels of rage among women toward men than among men toward women. Still, hope springs eternal—maybe the right man will come along soon. Maybe one who will commit! And not interrupt! And a lot of other stipulations. There’s no reason that longing to merge with a man has to include either respecting or liking him, which is one of the more comedic aspects of heterosexual relations at present.
The question is whether this is an entirely good-faith enterprise. What I mean is: to the extent that jokes mask disappointed desires, aren’t they just an index of your disavowed dependency on the very thing you’re so busy scorning? The problem with scorning men isn’t that it’s unfair to them, it’s that it makes them all the more emotionally central. To compound the problem, in these post-conventional times, men have fewer incentives than ever to deliver the goods, which exacerbates their capacity to disappoint, which maximizes their emotional centrality.
Still, it’s a universally acknowledged truth that these errant and frustrating men could gratify female needs and desires if only they were somehow different than they are. Less like men, to begin with.