Travelling on Business

I have a sad tale from a reader who travelled on business to a traditionally macho nation. She was there for some weeks, long enough to get to know some of the men there, also employees of her multinational employer. I shall call the two principal men Hans and Franz although this was not a German-speaking country.

Hans was a cheerful chap with a steady girlfriend, but also apparently the sort of man who complains that other guys get all the girls.

Franz was charming, handsome and, according to Hans, was one of those guys who gets all the girls.

To make a long story short, Franz began to flirt with our heroine, whom I will call Sally, in a way that shocked her. To paraphrase, "Do you always talk to female colleagues that way?" she demanded. "Only when I like them," quoth he.

This carried on for a bit, Franz oozing charm and handsomeness, and Sally trying to figure out if he was at all serious when he said he wanted to kiss her. One day she and Hans spotted Franz with another girl. "Something's brewing there," said Hans, and Franz and the other girl disappeared. Who knows where?

But Franz continued to make his flirtatious remarks, including that he did not want to talk, he wanted to kiss, and when Sally was preparing to go home to her English-speaking country, even though they have never really had a serious conversation, he asked her if she would like to be his girlfriend.

Sally was shocked, doubtful, thrilled. No-one had ever asked her to be his girlfriend before. But being a practical woman, she asked how that would be possible, as they live so far away. He suggested sexting. I'm not sure what Sally said to that--I suspect she let it slide. At any rate, Franz gives sexting the old college try when Sally gets home, she tells him off, and that is that.

Except that Sally really misses him and wonders if she should contact him to apologize and explain, and if she made a terrible mistake in not agreeing to be his girlfriend.

And my head fell into my hands, for I had got Franz's number when I read the part of the story in which he said that he wasn't interested in talking. But to be frank, I had half Franz's number, thanks to Hans' subtle English-is-his-second-language warnings.

Talk about a culture clash. I wonder if innocent Sally confused player Franz as much as he confused her.

I think women from English-speaking nations should be taken aside and warned about men from non-English speaking nations before business trips.* It should be banged into our heads that not all countries have the same codes of office conduct, and not all men take them as seriously as the men in our offices.**  A Single woman travelling alone who is leaving in a few weeks is still a Single woman travelling alone who is leaving in a few weeks.  If that Single woman is travelling to a country where having sex with as many pretty women as possible is a national past-time, she is more likely to be hit on by male colleagues than she would be at home.

Manager: Franz, I hear from head office in London that you made sexual overtures to Sally.

Franz: Ah, Sally. So sexy, so foreign.

Manager: Did you score?

Franz: (long pause). Alas, no.

There are useful little books for business travellers, and I highly recommend that everyone who works with people from other countries read them. For example, the behaviour of one of my foreign colleagues in the theologate seemed to me so odd that I read a business travel guide to his country, and much was made clear.

The fact is that although all people belong to one great family called the human race, and we all share a lot in common, we also have significant cultural differences, and some of them--a lot of them--pertain to sexuality. One piece of evidence is the national indicator for virginity loss by age 15. In Canada, roughly the same number of boys (24.1%) and girls (23.9%) have had their first "sexual experience" by the age of 15.  In Israel, however, it's 31% of boys, and 8.2% of girls. Could there perhaps be a stronger sexual double standard in Israel than there is in Canada? Hmm....

Grandmothers fearlessly used to warn their granddaughters about men from other countries, and my own grandmother warned me against Italian men before I went to Italy, predicting that my bottom would be pinched black and blue. Well, maybe that was true in the 1950s, but nobody pinched my bottom in Italy in 1998, 1999, 2010 or anytime since. I suspect Grandma was seriously out of date.

But that said, the whole world is not London or New York or Toronto and so we shouldn't be caught off guard when men do not act like most men born in London, New York or Toronto. When the elevator boy at your resort in Egypt (France, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Turkey, Poland) tells you that he has fallen in love with you at first sight, he is lying 99% of the time.

The older I get, the more amused I am at the idea of foreign elevator boys, foreign seminarians, foreign owners of grocery stores telling me that they are in love with me, but then I'm happily married.

It's not so funny for women who are lonely and wish they did have a boyfriend, let alone a husband. The battle between good sense and wishful thinking must be very bloody when an American/English/Canadian woman is suddenly romanced by a handsome man from a macho country where constantly hitting on women is just what men do there.  And unless marriage is a ticket out of poverty, marriage to Foreign Woman is almost never on their minds. The goal here is not marriage. The goal here, if it is not just flirtation for flirtation's sake, is sexy fun bedtime with as few complications as possible. Thus your ticket home makes you even more attractive.

Update: There are two heroes in this story. The first is Sally, who strove to remain professional. The second, of course, is Hans, who tried to balance loyalty to his pal Franz with warnings to Sally.


*That said, the most devastating film about bad workplace behaviour I ever saw, The Company of Men, was set in the USA. That though was about men who were vicious woman-haters, not men who think women are like fine wine and other valued comestibles.

**That said, not all the men in our workplaces are so good about that, either. I've heard some eyebrow raising stories about British workplaces.

Spoiled Fruit of the Revolution

I'm on a earn-more-spend-less kick, so I have stopped going to swing-dancing. It's a pity, as that was my guaranteed weekly exercise, and there are two guys there who are afraid of most of the other women, so they always danced with me. I like them: they were refreshingly humble, modest and clumsy. They knew they were clumsy, and they knew I didn't care. To say with with no irony whatsoever, who am I to judge?

Yesterday, after sitting around all day writing my brains out and growing fat, I got a phone call--I think from a mobile, as the reception was so bad. I muted the TV, and the caller became audible. He had phoned about the weekend "Balboa" workshop I had signed up for, as I hadn't paid yet. I apologized for not having contacted the society earlier to ask them to take my name off the list, saying something like, "I'm sorry I should have mentioned this earlier." "Yes,  you should have," snarled the stranger. "But I usually get an email," I stammered. "I sent you an email," he snapped. "What's your name again?" I asked, so ladies, Balboa-dancing M. is not the guy you want to take home to your mother.

M. had sent me the email the day before, and I had not seen it, as I had been busy writing, shopping, cleaning, cooking, entertaining, and then sitting in bed most of the next day writing some more. So I thought M. was right out of line snarling and snapping at me over the phone, and when I found the email from the "team" I told them a member of their "team" had made an angry phone call and please take me off their mailing list.

This is where I start judging, just so you know.

As I've mentioned (and as my mother will confirm), I know not how to suffer in silence, so I mentioned the event on Facebook and soon got a mention from a  local swing-dancer--one of the best, perhaps the best, followers in the club. She is kind, beautiful, hip, graceful, talented and in her mid-twenties. I would introduce her to Polish Pretend Son if she were not also an atheist. She wanted to know what had happened, and I ranted about swing being a "young woman's game" and how to be asked to dance one has to be either an advanced dancer already, or young and attractive.

And this truly charming, objectively pretty, unusually graceful girl wrote that she isn't asked to dance all that often herself. She usually asks men to dance, and they often turn her down. Some always turn her down--she doesn't know why.

"What!?" I inwardly screeched.  "What the h--- is wrong with those guys?!"

My hypotheses are two-fold:

1. Local men who swing-dance are spoiled rotten by the female attention.
2. Some men resent women asking them to dance and so won't dance with women who do, even if they are young and pretty and guaranteed not to miss a cue.

My kindly advanced-dancer Facebook friend is not from Edinburgh and noted that "girls-asking-guys" is the culture here. (Presumably this isn't the culture where she's from, and guess where that is? One guess.) And because she is so kind, I don't have the heart to tell her I think she is helping to perpetuate the problem.

M. might have just been having a bad day, but even then  I am not sure why M. thought that a good reason enough to snap and snarl at a woman on the phone, one who could identify him over Facebook in two clicks. Martyn must have thought it didn't matter a damn, and in a way he's right. Women at swing-dance want to dance with men, and M. is a man, and women probably ask him to dance all the time. I could denounce M. from the housetops, and still the eager young ladies of the Edinburgh swing scene will want to dance the Balboa with him.

Back when convention dictated that women didn't ask men to dance, dance organizers made sure there were indeed men who would ask wallflowers to dance. Hotels hired male as well as female professional dancers to dance with guests. Mothers poked their sons (and sisters poked their brothers) and hissed, "Dance with Samantha. She's been sitting there for fifteen minutes." Men asked women for dances in advance and women wrote their names down in a charming little notebook. Everyone knew that women couldn't ask men, and so there was a lot of social pressure on men to ask women. Now "of course women can ask men" is treated like a massive advance, but in practice it turns men into Scarlett O'Hara.

I am always annoyed when I read men saying they started a rock band to meet girls or had fantasies of girls throwing themselves at them. That's nice, but why don't they just march up to girls at parties and say "Hi! I'm [the host]'s friend from school/work/club/church. How do you know him?" If they like the girl, they can bring her a drink or something afterwards and have another conversation. How hard is that?

Believe it or not, this is a serious question, for when I think of the attractive young Catholic twenty-something men that I know, not-spoiled, not-snarling, not-rude, I wonder why so many of them don't have girlfriends. As a twenty-something, I would have hit on any of them, and not because I was this incredibly deep twenty-something. I would have gone out with them for intensely shallow reasons, protected from my folly by their own sterling characters. (Rather like I was protected from any fallout from my infatuated marriage-in-haste by the fact that B.A. actually is the perfect man for me.) So why do they not have girlfriends? They're tall! They're smart! Two have proper jobs! One has a car! I don't understaaaaaaaaaand!

It's such a waste of twenty-something Catholic bachelor that it makes me cross. And meanwhile those spoiled wretches at swing-dancing have women chasing after them for dances. What a world. I cry.

Georgian Men

I have no time to write really but I have one thought about Single life today and it is that in the 18th century young Englishmen men longed to get married and set up household. There was just as much premarital sex then as now, only naturally less among women, which is to say, women who were not prostitutes of one class or another. However, aspiring middle-class men longed to quit (or avoid) all that and just earn enough money to buy a house and get married on. "Domestic felicity" was what they dreamed of, and such domestic felicity made them feel they had grown up and arrived.

So what happened? Feel free to answer in the combox even though moderation will be on until I get back from Polish class. There has been combox weirdness of late, and so the drawbridge is up for the time being.

On Dating News from Huff Po

I read this article knowing at once how it would end because the article was about a study showing that men don't like hanging out with women who beat them at IQ tests. Instead of advising women not to engage in IQ tests with men, which is relatively easy to do, it suggests men need to change.

Of course, these findings don't mean that all or even most men are threatened by smart women. This study just adds to decades of literature on gender dynamics which suggests that, as a whole, there are a lot of icky complications around confidence and power wrapped up in heterosexual attraction. 

More research needs to be done until there are any practical implications.In the meantime, it's probably not a bad idea for threatened men to do a little soul-searching and think about why they might be intimidated by smart women.

So much for "born this way", eh?

When I was 25, I would have taken all this extremely seriously, especially the passive aggressive nagging at men to change. As a matter of fact, I dated guys probably not as smart as I was for years, and it was only when I was over 30 that I returned to the "Am I Too Smart?" worries.

Since then, I have come to the conclusion that there is a big difference between being an intelligent conversationalist  and embarrassing men by beating them in competitions, however informal those competitions may be. Guys have to compete with guys all the time. (In Poland male Polish wedding guests march up to male foreign wedding guests and wordlessly invite them to drink vodka shots with them. I saw incidents of this myself this month: it was very funny although, of course, not so funny for the foreign men.)  In general, guys like girls because/when the girls don't compete with them. Having an intelligent conversation is not the same thing as competing. Trying to win an argument is, however, competing. Fine for work. Not so fine for social life.

At best, girls are a lot of fun to be around. They make you feel good about yourself. They don't try to cut you down to size or to get you to drink more than you can stand or to become obstacles in your career path. Except when they do --which to many men feels like the woman are cheating. Sometimes they are particularly annoyed when the  aggressive woman is attractive because they feel this gives her power over them. Men hate it when they feel women-not-on-their-side have power over them, and fair enough. I would feel scared if men-not-on-my-side had power over me. Come to think of it, I suffered unde women managers I really couldn't stand, and they were always way harder to deal with than any male employer I ever had.

If it is a FACT that men are turned off by women they KNOW--in some agreed upon, quantifiable way--are smarter than they are, then the really smart women will not stress to the men we meet that we might be smarter than they are. We don't have to "play dumb". We just don't get drawn into "who is the smartest?" competitions outside of work. (Work is a different story although even there I am sure one can be gracious. Not everyone you meet needs to know that you went to a "Top 15" college, gag, barf.) We don't exaggerate how smart we are, and we don't nuke men with our intelligence unless we are trying to turn them off.

I once nuked a drunken chap who was making ridiculous claims about Saint Thomas Aquinas. It felt very satisfying, but then he wasn't very attractive, and he was patronizing me, and I wanted him to go away. I try to keep this sort of thing to a minimum, however, as becoming addicted to crushing men's egos would be detrimental to my social life. I prefer to be fun to be around and make men feel good about themselves. I don't want to cut them down to size or get them to drink more than they can stand or to become an obstacle in their career paths. I have my jobs, and if I were competing for the ones they want, I sure wouldn't tell them.

Occasionally I feel sad that the men around don't seem to perceive how brilliant I am, or even that I had a really good education, but in saner moments I realize that this really doesn't matter as they are not newspaper editors and are not paying me. Besides, I learn a lot of interesting things by asking men questions. Men famously love to explain things to women, which I think is a weakness that can be used for good, especially if they know what they are talking about and I can learn from them. (If they don't know what they are talking about, I can at least practice being a kindly, restful woman.)

I showed my house guest the Polish Astrophysicist my essay about Wyspiański, and the first (and only) thing he said about it was "It's Szołayskich, not Sołayskich", which was very embarrassing and therefore GREAT because I will certainly never make that mistake again. Incidentally, even if you yourself are an astrophysicist, you can always improve yourself and make yourself sound dumb/funny/child-like at the same time by learning to speak another language. You could have a brain the size of a planet and still charm some manly man foreigner senseless by saying their equivalent of "Is not dwarf star, is comet. I show maths. Where is challllk? Look, look. I am writing on boardblack."

Good Men in a Fictional Crisis

I have returned from Polish class, where I delivered my 650 word paper on Stanisław Wyspiański. Typing the silly thing drove me around the bend, for when I change my normal British QWERTY for the Polish QWERTZ keyboard, I almost always get Z and Y mixed up. I just did it again. However, it is done and photocopied and delivered and handed out to my classmates, and now I can get on with life.

Yesterday I wrote warmly of the Suchet Poirot, and I was wondering today whom you would turn to in a crisis. We often look--foolishly, I think--for mates who remind us of our fictional romantic heroes, but what fictional men would we look to, like pretend daughters or pretend mothers, in a crisis?

For some strange reason, as I was walking up the Canongate this evening, I thought I would consult Mr Rochester on money matters. I certainly would never, ever, ever see Mr Rochester in the light of a romantic hero: what a twister! Big fat bigamous liar! Jane Eyre can have him, and I am not really sure why she wanted him in the first place.

But this is not the place to fight about the dreaminess of Mr Rochester. What I am wondering is, "Which men in fiction would you turn to in a crisis, not expecting or wanting to marry them afterwards, and why?"  If I were very sick, I think I would like to call Gilbert Blythe, MD. Gilbert rather than Dr Watson--Dr Watson is too easily distracted. Naturally I would not want to marry Gilbert (even if single), for he is a married man with seven children (including the dead).

Poppets, My Heart: Avoid Self-Declared Bad Guys

You will be the death of me. I just found an email from a reader--girls, ALWAYS use the subject heading or I will think you are spam---who went on a first date with a man who told her he was a "bad guy."

Now I am prostrate, worrying that this reader has decided to give him the time of day because I didn't email back in time. It's like being the mother of a six hundred invisible girls who are all wandering around the world, getting into trouble.

Always use the subject heading when you email me, and always remember that if a man says he is a "bad guy", he very probably is a bad guy. Good guys don't tell you they are bad guys. Quiet or bold, they just don't.  Of course, not all bad guys will be so dumb as to tell you, but I believe it cuts down on the bad guys' guilt later if they can think, "Well, I told her I was a bad guy."

When a guy tells you he is a bad guy, he's asking for permission to act like a bad guy. If you ever see him again, he may take that as the permission he was hoping for.

There are good boys, darn it. There are at least two in my parish. Let everyone arrive in Edinburgh en masse to have a look at them.

Nature's Little Double Standards

Met in January 17, 1971. Still together.

The crime of rape is mentioned in this post.

***
Men and women are different.

I'll just let you sit with that statement for a moment.

Men and women are different when it comes to sexuality, and the sooner girls accept this the better. B.A. was horrified when he discovered that a young female acquaintance was living in a hostel with co-ed dorms. When she beds down at night, it is in a room with a random, changing selection of men. When B.A. asked her if she wasn't worried about being attacked, she looked at him as if this was the most sexist, paternalist thing she had ever heard and said she was just as likely to be attacked by women.

Um. No.

I am sorry to begin a discussion of male sexuality with rape. I apologize to all my male readers. It's not you: it's me. As a child, the first novels I read with sexual content involved rape: Song for a Dark Queen by Rosemary Sutcliffe comes to mind, as of course does the explicit, true-crime, gang rape of a devout Catholic Irish immigrant in The Donnellys Must Die by Orlo Miller. Both of these novels were in my Catholic elementary school library.

Meanwhile, a number of my classmates were sexual bullies. The bullying ranged from mocking girls in general for having to have periods (which the boys learned about from the school library's copy of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret) to leaping on top of a  selected female classmate in the schoolyard while shouting "Gang bang!" Male hands shoved up female shirts and down female trousers, and I was sorry that the boy who finally got caught doing this was one of the least violent offenders. I hope nobody was actually raped.

The threat of rape scares many women silly, especially as the great bulk of world literature tells us it is the worst thing that can ever happen to us--"worse than death." I think it must be the absolute worst for little girls and other virgins because even in a loving marriage, bride fortified with strong drink, defloration can be (can be, not always) indescribably painful. Meanwhile, I believe an encounter with seething male hatred for women-in-the-abstract, or people-of-my-ethnic-group, or me-the-stuck-up-bitch would be so horrible, I take every legal step I can to prevent it happening to me. (Choosing my company carefully is key.)

Ordinary female sexuality is marked by the blood, pain and unfair shame of menstruation, and then (often) the blood, pain and unfair-and-confusing shame of defloration. Oh, and females get pregnant. When a girl or woman gets pregnant, people around assume she has had sex. Their reactions may range from joy that a grandchild is on the way to an honour killing.

Ordinary male sexuality is not marked by blood, pain and shame. If a man runs away with a married woman in rural India, tribal elders may rule that his sisters be gang-raped, though. Sucks to be him, eh?

Men and women are different.

A male reader once wrote that he was tired of trying to talk to girls at Catholic events because too often they would look at him as if he were a serial killer. I am guessing that he was not as good looking as Tiago Gomes de Rocha, who actually is a serial killer. Too many women seem to think that men who are handsome are probably good and those who are not are more likely to be bad. It takes an act of reason to get beyond this. It also takes an act of reason, if haunted by stories of rape, to judge that men almost never sexually assault women at Theology on Tap.

Now we get to my apparently controversial belief that men know a woman is pretty when they first clap eyes on her, and women often need time to develop an attraction to men. Beyond the fact that many women are terrified of stranger-rape, where do I start?

Men carry two sets of look books. The first, shared by women, recognizes the unusual beauty of starlets and models. The second is highly characteristic to each man. Women can have a hard time getting our minds around this because most of us are not sexually attracted to women. We get that men are attracted to the nineteen-year-old supermodel du jour. We don't get that some men are clearly attracted to forty-year-old Mrs Macintosh behind the bar at the Whistling Snail. We blame men for having impossibly narrow standards of female beauty, but a short walk around the mall will reveal all kinds and conditions of women hand in hand with men, or pushing strollers.

Therefore, when I say that men should date only those women they think are pretty,  I am talking about a very large number of women. Whatever they may say to their friends before they grow up, men are really not that fussy. They don't need to be; as young men, they are capable of mating with almost any woman up for it. But at the same time, the inclinations of their hearts have an awful lot to do with their eyeballs.

Women, on the other hand, are a lot more imaginative than men. We are the primary consumers of romantic fiction and erotic fiction, whereas the primary consumers of internet pr*n are men. In general, I would say that men's sexuality is more visual and women's is more symbolic. What first got me interested in B.A. was not his photo (au contraire) but his college pal telling me that women throw themselves at him.*

Symbolic-minded women have a bad habit up making up stories about men we barely know. The classically handsome man at the front of the class seems clever. Tom probably is clever, therefore, and good to boot. He has a Polish/Croatian/Italian/Czech/Slovak/Slovene surname, so he is probably a devout Catholic, too. He is, therefore, committed to chastity and just wants to find a nice girl to get married to and have five children. It can take a dreamy college girl a long time to allow the reality of Tom (superficial, selfish, agnostic, unchaste, immature) to supplant her fond imaginings. Of course, the rapid A-Z-Q-Z thought process that follows an ordinary, somewhat awkward guy saying, "Hi, I'm Scooter" at a social event can be even more life-blighting.  "Let's go for coffee" does not mean "You'll have to give your body to me if we do."

That is why I advise women to have coffee with any man in her social circle who asks, unless she believes that he is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Not only is it just a coffee, it's an opportunity to get to know the reality of that man, to find out who he really is. (A subsequent date is another story. See here.)

When women accept the chance to get to know a man, we can look beyond our first impressions, which 99.999% of the time include  the thought that he does not look like Ryan Gosling, or whoever is our current symbol of male caring and sharing. When I first clapped eyes on B.A. and his unspeakable checked tweed jacket (of which I am now rather fond), I resolved that we were just going to be friends. Previously I had sternly told myself I was not going to make any decision about that funny reader Benedict Ambrose based on the photo someone sent; photos are not a good guide to potential female happiness.

If I were Queen of the World, I would disallow men's photographs on internet dating sites. You would all have to decide whether or not to respond to them based on their religion/profession/philosophy/hobbies/enthusiasm for you. ("Hi, Sharona. I'm Pete. I hope you don't mind me stating bluntly that I'm a huge Grace Kelly fan, and you look a lot like her. Plus, you're a Catholic schoolteacher, just like me. I teach junior maths, and I'm quite fond of the little monsters. Well, some are not so little; there are a couple of six-footers and I'm 5'8. If you don't mind being seen in public with a chap an inch shorter than you, I'd be delighted to take you out for a cup of coffee.")

As Pete's inventor, I will tell you right now that he does not look like Ryan Gosling but has a heart of pure, romantic, gooey gold. He really digs Grace Kelly. Sharona is seriously disappointed when she claps eyes on him, but by the end of coffee is seriously impressed by his personality, primarily his intelligence and sense of humour. She says yes to dinner. Strangely, he seems cuter at dinner.

Thus, NAture has yet another sad little double standard. A man can court a woman he finds pretty and often convince her that she should keep seeing him because he is inwardly incredibly attractive. A woman can't court a man she finds handsome and convince him that he should court her in return because she is outwardly very beautiful. Women can certainly flirt with men, and even (incredibly subtly) pursue men, but we can't court like men without looking, well, more like men.

My mother said that women don't get to go out and choose a handsome man; we have to choose from the men who are interested in us. She said that when I was 14, and I was furious. I thought she was completely out of date.  However, almost thirty more years have elapsed and I admit that she was right. Saint Edith Stein wrote about "Call" and "Response." In her discussion, men call us for companionship and/or help, and we respond. We can try to work against this, of course. We can declare this sexist and court men like men court women. Best of British luck!

The one comfort I hold out is that although men know at once who is pretty to them and who is not, they do not all fall in love at first sight. They ask out (or bob around) a pretty girl and either become more attracted to her because of her personality or they cease to feel attracted because of her personality (or, if they are immature/stupid/base, it becomes clear she isn't going to have sex with them any time soon). But "pretty" begins the process. If a man asks you out, he thinks you're pretty. And that's a good thing.

*Now, of course, accidentally seeing B.A. somewhere I don't expect him carries a rush of emotion only comparable to that caused by catching sight of my beloved parents ambling along somewhere.


Update: I cannot resist. This is the funniest comment I have seen so far on the "Catholic Answers" thread about my dating manifesto: Honestly her idea seems so foreign to me. I don't know anyone who would be okay with what she is saying. Over here people are "dating" months before they have a "first" date with each other. The blog is called Edinburgh Housewife, is she not American or not familiar with American dating standards?

The shocked tone makes me howl. No, darling, I am not American. Sometimes people aren't, and I daresay that is very sad for us. But having lived (and dated) in the USA for two years, I am familiar with a variety of American dating standards. Sometimes American dating standards are quite unlike those that rule your homeroom/dorm. Sometimes Americans graduate from college without being engaged. Sometimes Americans don't go to college at all, or even to high school with the opposite sex. (Eeek!)

Update 2: Okay, I erased my remarks about the gazillions of people who are not Americans yet speak English and blog. One assumes from her/his remark that the poster is still a child, and it is not nice to poke fun at children. I think a good solid term abroad would be helpful to her/his horizons, however. Like in Forrest Gump, you know.

Why Men Aren't Lord Sheringham et al

The Ninth Laird of Auchinleck. Not safe in taxis.

I took Georgette Heyer's Friday's Child off the shelf the other evening. In case you don't remember,
it's the one where Lord Sheringham, aka Sherry, marries a 17 year old girl named Hero in a fit of pique because the lovely Isabella Milborne won't have him. Also, Sherry won't get his inheritance until he is 25 unless he marries. So Sherry, whose gambling debts are oppressive, picks up little Hero--otherwise doomed to become a minor teacher/drudge at a girls' school in Bath--and carries her off to London. Hero, who knows nothing of the facts of life, has always had a crush on Sherry, so is absolutely delighted.

I forget how many pages in Sherry first slaps Hero. I can't remember if it is before or after he buys her a mountain of new garments, or even if it is before or after he marries her. However, Sherry slapped Hero when they were children, and he slaps her now.

Oh yes--it was after they were married, for silly Hero, who understands that men like Sherry have girlfriends as well as wives, even though she still doesn't know what they do with either, saw a lady on stage flutter her eyelashes at Lord Sheringham, lost her head, and asked him if that was his "opera dancer." Because Georgette Heyer's world is one of preposterous hypocrisy, wives are never supposed to admit to knowing about their husbands' mistresses, so it's all a hilarious joke that the innocent bride has just done so. Sherry has thus lost face, and so when he gets Hero home, he wallops her.

I had forgotten that there was domestic abuse in Georgette Heyer although of course we all know there are other kinds of violence, especially attempted murder, aka duelling. Duelling is fun in books, but rather horrible in real life, as I found out in my early twenties when I asked an admirer to do something about the teasing I was getting from another. All that happened on that occasion was that Admirer 1 suddenly grabbed the arm of Admirer 2, and the tension was so awful, I instantly repented. I have an amateur's interest in boxing, but any woman who enjoys the sight of men fighting over her should go and talk about that with a priest. Ick.

Of course, women have very little to do with the duelling in Georgette Heyer's novels: it is all about men's relationships with each other. Quite a lot of things women think are about them are actually about men's relationships with each other. The man in Dubai who recently stopped life guards from rescuing his drowning daughter probably didn't hate his daughter. He was just worried about losing face in front of other men--possibly even the life guards. It seems absolutely insane to me that some men keep their "honour" on the skin of their female relations, but there you go. Again this may sound very romantic in books, but in real life it is horrible.

"Hero" incidentally, is the name of a girl in Shakespeare who feigned death because her admirer had believed an accusation that she had had sex. I forget if Viscountess Sheringham will also suffer such an outrageous libel--so far she is still as "innocent as a newborn lamb"--but no doubt we are supposed to suspect it. Sherry has no interest in bedding a nicely brought up seventeen year old just because his society, religion and the law says he has the right to do so. He might slap the girl like a naughty child (as one did when Georgette was writing all this stuff) but unless they "fall in love," forget about the fun stuff.  I suppose there may be men like this, but I am hard pressed to imagine that they are also the ones who bed high-class prostitutes, gamble away fortunes and drive extremely dangerously--as Sherry certainly does.

Hmm.

The principal thing about Georgette Heyer's men is that we don't know any men anything like them, unless we hang out with men who are also multi-millionaries, e.g. professional footballers, and footballers usually come from the working classes. Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining which rung of the Heyer class ladder I would land on, and the closest I can come up with is that I am the daughter of a university don who has married my Lord of Historical House's secretary, a clever man of humble origin who through sheer intelligence and determination, etc., etc. I spend my days writing letters and chastizing my few female servants, giggling with snobbish joy when the spinster daughter of my Lord of Historical House deigns to drop by for a cup of tea. However, such ordinary people never feature in Heyer's landscape, which is populated only by a staggeringly rich oligarchy, a few rich middle-class people, shopkeepers, servants, prostitutes of various rank, peasants and chavs who give gin to their babies who shut them up.

Heyer was brilliant at description, but she was not particularly interested in the full reality of Georgian England, in which a very small (but very rich) group of people rode roughshod over everyone else, their massive fortunes created by the work of real or virtual slaves. And of course it would not be as much fun to read about Hero's new wardrobe if we could see the conditions in which the frothy lace was made. We do not want to imagine ourselves as the lacemaker, be she in a factory or in a hovel, dying of TB while slowly going blind. No! We want to imagine ourselves as Hero, just seventeen, as innocent as a newborn lamb, and valued for this quality by our handsome husband who gives us tons of elegant stuff--silk dresses, jewellery, carriages--and by all his snazzy friends.

Well, that's okay. That's okay unless we start expecting men to actually act like Georgian aristocrats, or expecting them to act towards us as if we were Georgian aristocrats ourselves. If I were not to move from my seat but to go back in time to Georgian days, I might very well overhear James Boswell below me downstairs, and if so I would immediately change out of my pjs into some proper clothes and lock myself in my room, lest Boswell come upstairs looking for some middle-class, middle-aged lady action. Oor Jimmie wisnae fussy, aye.

The drawback of being  lifelong bookworms is that we compare men of real life to the men of books and find the men of real life wanting. Our books teach us a code of behaviour that no longer exists, if it ever did exist. Our books can also brainwash us into adopting the point of view of people who are not on our side. Sometimes I wonder why, despite having voted SNP, I am such a terrible Tory at heart, and I suspect it has something to do with Rosemary Sutcliffe, Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh and just about every author I admire who had enough leisure time to write amusing sex-free books. As a child I was naturally not permitted to read books with sex in them,  and as a devout Catholic, I generally don't want to, which meant the vast majority of books I read were published before 1960.

Goodness. What a long post. If you're still with me, sound off in the combox about your favourite heroes of literature and if you have ever met real men anything like them at all. I think at best we have met a number of hobbits, perhaps Frodo. When I first came to Edinburgh, I met a lot of people who I thought were just like people in books, but since then I have reflected this was just because they spoke like British people in British books. That said, characters from Trainspotting occasionally take the Rough Bus and I've overheard Begby in Easter Road Stadium.

Update: My mum says deconstructing Georgette Heyer is harsh. I found this message after I had gobbled the rest of Friday's Child and downed a stiff G&T, so I feel a tad guilty. However, too many women think Austen's and Heyer's fantasies are somehow Really True, so here am I to say they are not. If you want to live in Georgian England, with servants, luscious silk garments, etc., may I suggest Bangladesh? But  I'm afraid the class disparities are rather more obvious there than they are in the works of our glorious J & G.

We Could Care Less

Helen of Troy

This post is inspired by Australian Julia, who described her bout of anxiety over her looks after mentioning another girl's beauty to three guys. Going nuts with fear that we have lost the genetic lottery in the eyes of all the men around is something I am sure all we modern girls can understand. My solution is that we care less about what men think. After all, they don't care as much about what they think as we too often seem to do. In fact, sometimes they don't even think.

 Female thought process

I'm serious. One of the big differences between men and women is that men are capable of switching off thought. When you ask a man what he's thinking, and he says "Nothing," he's actually telling the truth. When you say "What do you think of Sharon?" and he says, "I don't," he 's not being bitchy. He just doesn't think of Sharon. And the fact that you think about your looks all the time doesn't mean that men think about your looks all the time. Male thought looks like this: A-->B-->C-->D-->E. Plod, plod. Female thought looks like this (see photo):

Besides all the other signs that Bruce Jenner is a man, his fond belief that womanhood can be achieved with a lipstick, knife and silicon (A-->B-->C) is pretty obvious. But it is not nice to make fun of the mentally ill, so I shall return to the only people over whom we have real control, and that is ourselves. 

Our inner selves, I mean. We could have whole new faces carved on into our own, risking scars and horrible misshapen silicon shifting under the skin, and even if they looked great (doubtful), our inner selves could still be wailing away: oh, but what do men think?  A better question is, DO men think? That is, DO men think about me? And the answer to that is, Why should they? I know a gazillion men, and I think of very few of them, and even then of most of them only occasionally. 

"I owe it to the public to look my best," said some celebrity or another. "They have to look at me." And I think this is the right point of view from which to see your grooming habits. It is a duty not to offend against community standards. Therefore, you must wash and tidy your hair before you run for your bus. You must put on clean clothes that proclaim you to be an inoffensive, if interesting, member of society. If you are twelve, you shouldn't grieve the middle-aged ladies on the bus by wearing "sexy" clothing. If you are fifty-two, you shouldn't embarrass the twelve year olds (and everyone else) by wearing the same thing. If you are going to a wedding, you wear a pretty dress--not white--and shoes. If you are going to a Sunday church service, you cover your shoulders and cleavage. If you are going to a Goth bar, you wear black. (Wearing blue jeans to any of these places is just rude. Daily Mass, okay. You pop in between this activity and that. But Sunday Mass? Come on. Even if you just milked the cows, you surely have time to wash your hands and put on a skirt.)

But as far as "beauty" goes--try to forget it. Either any given man is going to be attracted to your face and figure, or he is not. End of. Apparently men are attracted to faces brightened with makeup--duh, lipstick is red, and our eyes are drawn to red--but I have never heard a man who wasn't a homosexual make-up artist say to a woman "I really like your make-up."  (Usually women say it to each other, and then there is a conversation about make-up tutorials on youtube.)* And the British press is full of unkind remarks about features that have obviously gone under the knife or needle: "trout pout" is the one that first comes to mind. 

Actually, I take back the "End of". A man can be attracted to your face and figure without liking you. All unusually pretty (or "common denominator" pretty) girls know this, and by the age of 21 are experts at identifying it. A man can even hate a woman because he is attracted to her face and figure, for he sees his attraction to her as her power over him, which he must resist by punishing her. So on, so ISIS. A man who honks his horn and says, smiling with every tooth, "Hey, looking good, baby" is not lying about being attracted to you, he is lying about LIKING you. Obviously he doesn't like you; he doesn't even know you. 

So either any given man is attracted to your face and figure, or he is not. Start of. If only a few men appear to be attracted to you, then you are more vulnerable to anticipate foolishly and just hope that (rather than discover if) he likes you, too.  But whether a guy likes or dislikes or hates you, on top of being attracted to you, can be known only from social interaction. And by social interaction, I mean around other people in the community. The guy on the Boston street who forced his phone number into my hand saying, "You gotta call me! You just gotta!" probably would not have recognized my voice had I been silly enough to call him. ("Sandra, right? No--Charlene! Oh yeah, of course, baby, just havin you on. Of course I remember you! Heh heh heh!") Actually Facebook most definitely counts. You meet a guy, he befriends you on Facebook, and he has fewer than 200 Facebook friends, or he actually sends you a message... Well, I think that counts as social interaction in the community.

If, however, all the guys you know who seem to like you don't seem to be attracted to you, don't sweat it. Big fat deal. Are you attracted to all of them? No. But you still like them okay? Well, great. You're more than a sexual object, and they're a lot more than sexual subjects. You're a sexual subject, too, by the way, and you'll notice men don't browse the make-up counter, wondering how to make their eyes look bigger. You're just attracted to any given man, or you're not. 

As I have said I zillion times, I am not (nor have I even been) particularly beautiful according to conventional standards. (My hair is by unconventional ones, and I used to have the muscles of a Greek goddess, weep weep.) Nevertheless, I have attracted more than one guy who actually liked me in the last thirty years, not including Paweł the wonder child who fell for me when we were six. I am not sure I attracted one guy a year--and knew about it--but maybe I did. I don't know. I care only for illustrative purposes. As men on the prowl for women like to say, "It's a numbers game." 

The chap who first said that me, a neighbour, used to chase chickens when other work was scarce, so he slapped a "Not My League" label on civil servant me shortly after we met. I rather liked him; he was a good soul, although prone to giving out his phone number to waitresses at the same bar and wondering why they didn't call. As women, we are lucky that we aren't actually expected to hand out our unsolicited phone numbers to men. At most, we have been expected to trail ourselves through crowds of men like fishing lures. I suppose we can still do that, as long as we are trying to catch the fish that are most attracted to "Nice Catholic Girl With Too Much Self-Respect To Say Nothing of Respect for Nice Catholic Men To Dress Like a Hooker." However, I think it best that even then we just dress for success, and then forget all about it. 

Fisherman (and fisherwomen) must get cranky when they stand knee-deep in frozen streams without catching anything, but surely they don't resent the fish. Still less do they freak out that they will never, in their entire lives, catch a fish. Of course, they will catch a fish---unless, of course, they stop going to the stream and take up gardening instead.

*All the same, I think men prefer women wearing an average amount of makeup because most men are by definition conventional, and women conventionally wear some makeup. If men are turned off by female leg hair, it is because women conventionally shave, wax or melt off the hair on our legs. WHY, o WHY did we start doing that?!

Liking Men

It is sad how many women who want to get married and have children actually don't like men.

I wrote an entire post on this subject, and it depressed me so much, I erased the whole thing.

But it is an important subject, so I will try again. I may have to resort to a list.

1. Not all men are the same. Some men grow up in toxic, anti-female cultures, and some do not.

2. Of the men who grow up in toxic, anti-female cultures, not all of them sign up for it. My youngest brother, for example, was dead sick of hearing locker room talk at his (notoriously anti-female) all-male high school by the time he graduated. He once told me he bragged to male colleagues at work about his smart, ambitious sisters.

3. Some men who grow up in female-positive cultures nevertheless become virulently anti-woman. They say things like, "A woman's place is in the kitchen, and if you find her in some other room, the chain is too long." What psychic wounds create an attitude like that I cannot even begin to imagine.

4. If you don't like the men around you, go away. Meet entirely different kinds of men.

5. Try to be kind to the men who are sincerely kind to you, to avoid the men who are rotten to you, and to cultivate the intelligence to distinguish between them.

6. Men in  your favourite books are not like men in life for the following reasons:

a) those books were written before 1963
b) those books were written about a social class of men different from the you know best interacting with a social class of women different from the one you are in (and before 1963)
c) those books were very often written about men from a country different from the one you and the men you know were born in (and before 1963)
d) those books were written by professional liars for whom ordinary life (even before 1963) was so painful, they lost themselves in dreams.

Jane Austen never married. Louisa May Alcott never married. Lucy Maud Montgomery was miserable in her marriage and, we now know, committed suicide. About Georgette Heyer, we know precious little, as she was darned sure to keep it that way.

7. If you really do not like men as they are -- real live human beings beyond the control of your imagination -- as cranky, happy, silly, serious, imperfect, sinful and saintly as women are--then give up hoping to marry them and have their children.  If you live in a country where women are considered less than dogs and horses, you have my abject sympathy and all I can do is suggest you try to emigrate somewhere else. But if you live in a country where you are pretty sure, in your heart of hearts, most or many men value women as companions, colleagues and fellow citizens, then put away your romance novels and get to know some, not as potential husbands, but as themselves.

Obey

He said this was me. It wasn't.

Here's another post my conscience says I have to write. Drat. Why can't I just write a novel about it instead, eh? However, there it is.

Twenty years ago I was romantically involved with a young man who often told me what to do and how to be. I had not wanted to be romantically involved with the man in the first place--having told him that I wanted to date only Catholics, as the whole point of dating was to get married. Also, he was not "my type", except that he was scholarly and very intelligent. Very, very intelligent.

But the young man was also very young. He had very strong views on subjects about which as yet he knew very little. And although he was not a Catholic, or even a believing Christian at first, he was disgusted by premarital sexual activity, especially by women. He was also disgusted by divorce, and in depressed moments, inspired by Kierkegaard (I think), thought himself impure because he was the child of a second marriage. For some complex non-Christian reason, he did not believe in divorce, so he thought he was a kind of bastard.

Or so he said. It was some time before I realized that he had lied and bluffed a lot in that relationship to get what he wanted which was, not to put to fine a point on it, me. But not in the way you might fear. No, no, no.  He was, don't forget, disgusted by feminine sexual sin. His intentions, if not his methods, were entirely honourable.

Unfortunately, however, the young man hadn't the slightest idea who I was, which after twenty years I can forgive, as I didn't really know who I was either. I was bored by my Catholic friends, and shocked by my "artist friends", and the world was stubbornly refusing to fall in with my ideas of how the world was supposed to be. However, my ideas of how the world was supposed to be were shared to a certain extent by my agnostic male friend, and he decided that I was the Perfect Victorian Lady, or would be if I followed his advice. Somewhere I have his letters extolling me always to strive for virtue, taking "dear Jane" (Austen) as my model and guide.

It felt wonderful to be put on a pedestal and encouraged to be more of what I already apparently was. It felt great to be flattered and entertained and told that I was beautiful and good by a very clever and promising young man who had a high regard for female chastity. And so I was very sorry when I disappointed his high regard for me by mentioning that I had joined the university revolver club. As a Canadian, I am not that excited by guns (pro- or anti-), but I think knowing how to fire a gun is a good life skill, and I picked the revolver club because my brother was a military rifle instructor. Rifles were his thing.

The young man was horrified. He hated guns--or the idea of a woman mixed up with one. "Beauty cannot hold the repugnant," he said, paraphrasing--I think--Aristotle. He had a student petition against or for some gun bill that he was supposed to sign and pass on, but he said he wouldn't sign it until I quit the revolver club. As a matter of fact, I was terribly uncomfortable in the shooting range, which was in a cellar, and the noise was incredible, and I jumped every time I heard a shot, which was rather tragic for my aim. Thus I was tempted to quit the revolver club anyway, but I didn't for a long time because of that stupid petition. Twenty years later, I realize I should have simply told him to stuff  the petition in his ear, instead of gaily laughing it off every time he shoved it under my nose and looked sad because he had still not passed it on, as he was bound in honour to do.

He meant me to feel guilty for his not signing the petition, and I did feel guilty. And that, my dear friends, provided him with a very useful tool. He was good at looking sad, and expressing shocked, high-minded disappointment, and convincing me that if I did not do something, this would be a blow against all honour and decency and a correctly run universe. Thanks, I think, to his studies, he became a believing Christian, and thanks to my adamant belief I could marry only a Catholic, he entered an RCIA course with a priest I recommended. However, the young man told me he would be chucked out of RCIA if he couldn't find a sponsor to come with him, and so I had to do it. This was probably a lie, but I believed him. After all, his immortal soul was on the line.

He was the most manipulative young man I ever met in my whole life, and that is saying something. He did sales one summer and chatted smugly about the psychological tricks salespeople pull to sell their unwanted wares. I admired him for his cleverness, God help me, and his ability to make people do what he wanted. It never occurred to me that he might be using the same tricks on me, "the woman of his dreams."

He didn't tell me not to wear make-up, but he did tell me what to wear. And when we were engaged, I actually obeyed his clothing strictures, which were almost entirely about preserving my lily-white skin. This meant wearing opera length gloves outdoors in summer and carrying a parasol. In the city. In the 1990s. I felt ridiculous. But when I did not wear my gloves and when I did not carry the parasol, I felt incredibly guilty. It is really amazing what men can make women do if they make us feel guilty enough. At one point--among other things, he dropped out of RCIA-- I called off the engagement, and he stopped eating. He showed up weeping at my door. He told me horrible things his parents had allegedly said about me, but he knew they were wrong, wrong! They couldn't understand! And he needed a friend to talk to me about, but as all his other friends now hated me, only I could understand! Please would I talk to him? Please? Please! He cried and shivered.

Reader, I married him. And I kept wearing the stupid gloves--somehow I lost the stupid parasol--and, because he didn't "want a fat wife", I lost twenty pounds and with them  his hold over me. Somehow all that healthy eating and athletic activity gave me a backbone, and I started pushing back. (Testosterone?) He didn't want me to visit my family, but I visited them anyway. He didn't want me to visit my friends, but I visited them anyway. He most definitely did not want me to continue being a Roman Catholic--"Roman Catholicism is the religion of immigrants and peasants" he memorably said--but I continued going to my parish church anyway. We began to fight--quite viciously, really--and it was terrible. Beyond terrible. Naturally I will not tell you the whole story: telling the annulment tribunal was bad enough.

That incarnation of the young man is dead. I do not mean my ex is dead (although maybe he is--I haven't seen him in 15 years). If he is alive, he is over 40 and the man the past almost-twenty years have made him. By dead, I mean the incarnation of that young man, a twenty-something.  That young woman is dead, too, poor thing. I am the spine she forged in the weight room and the boxing ring, and I'm almost all she had left of herself when she walked out of the apartment with the clothes on her back and her passport in her purse. (I am the spine plus the past almost-twenty years, of course.)

However, I have seen that young man in other men. I've heard about him, too. I sat with a friend's mother--my friend was abroad and desperate, his father had just been arrested for domestic asssault--and discovered she too had married that young man. I've met that young man in other countries. Somehow he persists, generation after generation. I'm sure he's a lefty sometimes, but I don't frequent lefty circles much.

The easiest way to recognize him is through his stubborn fantasy about what women are supposed to be, which he protects by ensuring women live, or at least one woman lives, up to it. I am not sure WHY this fantasy woman is so important, except that she is the love of his life, and he will do almost anything to protect her. If he projects her onto you, God help you, for if you threaten her, he is capable of anything. If he just breaks up with you, consider yourself lucky.

And I am writing this today because of E. E, my dear, I have no idea who you are. My computer doesn't trace commentators easily, and I haven't tried. I think you might be French, but I don't know for sure. For all I know, your name isn't E. I know nothing about you except that you are a reader and you have a boyfriend who lets you know that he is disappointed when you--like most women of your age in the western world--wear a little make-up. He makes you feel a little guilty about it--yes?

E, to me this is a red flag. I am not sure how much pushing-around you want to take from the man in your life. Maybe you don't mind a man who tells his woman what-is-what, and maybe your boyfriend is just a bit grumpy. Maybe you belong to a culture in which women let men be the head, knowing that they are "the neck who directs the head," and in which women nod and smile and then just do whatever they like. However, maybe your boyfriend is, how should I put this, a control freak who will never be content with the woman that you are and wants you to be another woman entirely, perhaps a fantasy image he carries in his head and heart and projects upon you, as if you were just a film screen.

As I have never met him, I have no way of knowing. But I hope you will consider discussing him with your mother, or if not your mother, a favourite aunt, and ask if she thinks he is a controlling type. I hope this because I do not want what happened to me to happen to any other young woman ever again. This is, in fact, [what I think is] the ruling passion of my life.

The Don't Need Make-Up Video

The "Do men really know what they are talking about when they say they don't like make-up?" debate continues! Incidentally, I found a version of it in  Daddy Long Legs  which was first published in 1912. Judy writes to "Daddy" of a man who got his wife to wear "rational dress" and then ran off with a chorus girl.

Thanks to the reader who drew my attention to this amusing video.  

Sexual Victimization of Men by Women

Well, there goes that double standard.

Not that I go around kissing strange men out of the blue, but it has never occurred to me that that would count as sexual victimization.  But now I am thinking, "Well, of course it would be! Why didn't I realize that before?!" 

Obviously the solution is for everyone to keep their hands to themselves.  But, really, I had no idea teenage boys and college men felt so strongly against girls and women touching them and begging them for sexual favours. I understood that they were more likely to be annoyed by this when the women were much older than them, or did not fit the their cultural template of what attractive women look and smell like, but...

According to the study, trying to seduce someone with sexual behaviours counts as sexual coercion. Holy crickets! What does that mean? (The example has the woman asking if she could use the man's phone. What?) And I don't understand how "internal obligation" counts as sexual coercion. 

If it is true that men hate all this kind of stuff just as much as women do, then I think we should be told from the age of 10 or so. For forty years or more, women have been told that it is okay to be the sexual aggressor and that it is incredibly hateful to call women names (e.g. slut) for aggressively trying to seduce men. But if it turns out that such behaviours, which as far as I know, have been socially acceptable (or even desirable) outside conservative and religious circles, should be classified as sexual assault, then obviously women ought to know that!

Male readers have told me about women asking them for sex and ditching them flat when the men have explained that premarital sex is against their Roman Catholic faith. I have thought that very sad, just as sad as when women have The Talk with men they like and the men ditch them. But to be honest I had no idea so many men have been (or think they have been) sexually coerced by women.

On the other hand, I have seen women sexually assaulting men--here most definitely a crime "not of sex but of hatred." There was a video of young men protecting a church in Latin America from feminist demonstrators and various women rubbed up against them, flashed them, etc., as they prayed. It was most disgusting.

Enticing Men to a Nice Conversation

PART ONE: Enticing Men

Things got a bit preachy in the combox last night, as you can see, and an anonymous commentator cast aspersions on the Catholicism of the writer of my most recent "Dear Auntie Seraphic" email. She or he cited Thomas to prove that modesty is objective, not subjective, invoking dear old IIa IIae Q 169.2.

Naturally I have the Summa Theologica in both English and Latin, so I bounced up at once to review dear old Q 169.2. Naturally I skipped straight to the Respondeo, which can be summed up as follows: 

1. A woman's apparel sometimes has the power to incite men to lust.

2. Nevertheless a married woman may dress in such a way as to "please" (cough, cough, ahem) her husband. A married woman can do this without sin.

3. But unmarried women, and women who do not wish to marry, or  nuns, "cannot without sin desire to give lustful pleasure to those men who see them, because this is to incite them to sin." 

4. Women who do dress with the intention of  inciting men to sin, sin mortally. 

5. Women are inspired by frivolity or ostentation in their clothing choices--e.g. blowing the rent money on an Armani dress just to show off--do not necessarily sin mortally but sometimes venially. (Really, it's about your intentions.) 

6. The same applies to men in this respect. Blowing the rent money to impress the chicks with your expensive suit is a sin.

You'll never guess who it was who was okay with women dressing up with gold and costly attire. You'll never, ever guess. Saint Augustine. It's right there in dear old 169.2

7. CULTURAL EXCEPTION!!! In the case of frivolity and ostentation, some might be excused from sin when they wear frivolous or ostantatious clothes not out of vanity but out of some contrary custom. 

8. Thomas doesn't think much of such a contrary custom. 

Meanwhile, I'll tell you what Thomas did not rule on: spaghetti straps, hemlines and necklines. Because "modest dress" is a cultural construct and changes from culture to culture, era to era. Naturally Thomas, not being used to the sight of women's legs, would have been very disturbed by the forest of female legs now on the streets of Paris. However, being of his own century, he would not have noticed scooped necklines much. He probably would have found it odd that we allow our hair to float about unbraided and uncovered, and most definitely odd that we cut it short. In fact, he would have been severely annoyed that, by twelfth century standards, we dress like men. This would have bothered him a lot more than public breast-feeding, which almost every mother everywhere used to do.  Prominent breasts---no big deal. Shoulders--bigger deal. Ankles--Eeek! Eeek! Eeek! 

But to get right back to Thomas's point, it's about intention. If you put on a strapless sundress because it is hot out and you want to look feminine and pretty as you putter around downtown with your shopping bag, then all power to you. If you put on a strapless sundress because you're in Morocco and want to anger/incite to lust all the Arab men around, then you're an idiot. If you put on a black dress with slits up both sides to go to a college Hallowe'en party as a sexy vampire, then bad. If you put on a black dress with slits up both sides to go to a tango milonga, then okay. 

Sundress and tango dress mean different things in different places. And naturally nobody should ever harass you because of your clothes although of course they will if you offend community standards in a place that believes in both community standards and yelling at strangers. I saw a woman in the mall yesterday who was outrageously offensive to community standards, for she had a black mask tied over her face to go with her hijab and robe. However, Edinburghers do not yell at strangers, unless either party is drunk, so I merely rolled my eyes.   

PART TWO: ...to a Nice Conversation.

It would be a lie to say that men have never stopped me in the street for a conversation, so I won't pretend this never happens. Strangers have approached me in the street since I was a child to talk about my hair. It is never about my clothes; it is always about my hair. This is because I have unusual hair. I have spent my life feeling very self-conscious about my hair. However, I can now see the benefits of having hair that interests people. It makes for an easy topic of conversation, even cross-cultural ones, as people from more outgoing cultures try to reconcile their beliefs about "white people hair" with my hair.  Believe me, I don't have big hair to incite anyone to lust; I have big hair because of genetics. 

However, even these hair-chats have been unusual occurrences because I have not lived in countries where (white) men just walk up to (white) women and start talking. Even in super-chatty Scotland, you have to be standing beside them at a bus stop or something. And then the man is usually not as interested in meeting you as he is in talking. Really, I have never been around such a chatty people in all my life. It solves the mystery of why my Scottish-Canadian granny used to talk to bus-drivers all the time. 

Thus, if your  first language is English, and your expectation of social life is that young men are going to stare at you appreciatively or wolf whistle or say "Looking good" or humbly introduce themselves to you on the bus or subway, you watch way too many movies. Meanwhile, it used to be utterly unheard of for gentlemen to talk to unknown ladies in public. And women who spoke to unknown gentlemen in public were assumed to be hookers. You just didn't do it. Once upon a time, when men were more interested in women, in part because women looked up to men as demi-gods and saviours, nice young men would scramble to find someone to introduce them to a certain young lady at a PARTY or after MASS. If desperate, he would go gulping up to her mother, excusing himself and saying that he believed Mrs X was a friend of his mother Mrs Y, and he hoped Mrs X wouldn't mind if he said good morning and perhaps (gulp, gulp) came to call. We have not made the transition from British/American formality to foreign bonhommerie with grace.  

Therefore if you want to meet young men, and naturally you do--even I don't mind it, as to widen my social circle--you must forget all about meeting them on busses and trains and the street and possibly even the beach--and go to social events, preferably local ones. And I suggest that, while preparing for them, you dress with a certain amount of originality and flair. At recent dances, I remember a girl standing out from the crowd (literally) because she was wearing a crinoline, another because she had very defined curls, and another because she was wearing an unusual grey bell-skirted wool dress with a ghost pin. It was a cute little wee ghost; a real conversation starter. 

If you are interested in meeting certain young men from sub-cultures, for example, if you are a committed Goth, then naturally wearing full Goth rig-out will get you noticed by the brotherhood, especially if (at a Goth gig) you have some bit of Goth kit nobody else has, or show up in a ruined wedding dress. Actually, taking any effort to dress creatively for any social event can get you noticed. I went to a Balkan music event--one quite notorious for wild dancing and drinking--in full pretend Gypsy rig-out and was approached for conversation by men and women alike.

Then there are the homesick. Nine years ago in Boston a sad, sad Gael asked me in a bar in heartrending tones if I were Irish. If you are partial to Czechs (et alia), you can wander around your town with a Czech (etc.) dictionary and homesick Czechs may just suddenly ask you if you are learning Czech and why. (At swing dance, the coolest of the Cool Girls did a double take in the ladies' when while unpacking my handbag to get out of my lipstick, I set my Polish dictionary by the sink, and now we are on greeting terms.)  When abroad, you can go to places where the men of your nation hang out. (In Rome, Canadians and Americans go to the Scholar's Pub, which is nominally Irish.) 

To return to Saint Thomas, he would have been confused by the concept of women going out by themselves hoping to meet men. In Thomas's day, and in every day until the 20th century, young women whose fathers could read (or could employ someone to read for them) never went out by themselves hoping to meet men. Young women who went out among men unchaperoned were almost always prostitutes. In Thomas's day, your parents sorted out your marriages themselves, or at least supervised the process with due diligence. 

Thus, although Thomas was assuredly right about not dressing or acting in such a way because you intend to incite men to lust, he doesn't have much to say as to how to encourage them to talk to you in the first place, as nice men making friends with nice women for nice reasons. 

I will say, however, that conventional, mass-produced boring old clothes from H&M, et alia, no matter how short, long, clingy or tight, are unlikely to spark anyone's interest in you whatsoever. You will be just another girl in a spaghetti strap top and a denim skirt or khaki trousers. (Zzzzzz.)

Meanwhile, looking interesting is not enough. You must BE interesting, too. Fortunately, women can very often be interesting just by being good listeners and reading up a bit on their friends' interests, so as to ask intelligent questions. However, let's face it, at social events it is very unlikely that men will discover you are interesting unless you LOOK interesting, too. And naturally that does not mean looking like a stripper, except to the sort of men you don't want to meet anyway.

More Ponderings of Male Psychology for Self-Serving Purposes

Last night I had a particularly good time at swing dance. First, there was a surprise guest: B.A.! Sadly, he didn't stay to dance, but it was nice to see the dear chap in the ballroom. There is no-one I'd rather dance with than B.A., but strangely now that we're married he doesn't care so much for dancing. Let that be a warning to you all.

Second, I was asked to dance by the best dancer on the  floor, which  was undoubtedly way more exciting for me than for him, but it is no doubt in his interest to dance with promising newbies to help us become better and better and one day actually desirable dance partners. Meanwhile, his generosity may have been inspired by my shameless flattery of last week. In my view, it is okay to tell a guy he is clearly the best dancer in the society around when he actually is. 

N.B. When I was young, I thought insulting men a little bit was super-charming, and now that I am no longer young, I realize that this was perfectly ridiculous and instead women must tell men we like what is good about them. Try not to do this when the other ones are listening in, however.  

This may sound very funny, but this is the first weekly occasion I have frequented a male-and-female environment where men and women (as men and women) are equally important to the smooth functioning of the planned activity.  Yes, sometimes women are "leads" and sometimes men are "followers", but most of the time men are leads, and women are followers, and very few men seem to be comfortable dancing with other men, that's just the way it is. 

As I mentioned before, the problem with having fallen in love with swing-dancing--after having hated dance classes all my life--is I'm back to caring about what men (as men) think of me. Naturally, I want them to ask me to dance. Of course, at swing-dancing women ask men to dance all the time--even my friend and inspiration Alisha Ruiss asks men to dance--but I was long ago indirectly cautioned not to do this imprudently by a chap who had thought a lot about the issue. 

To paraphrase, or blatantly make it up from memories, the authority said something like, "The job of the man is to lead, and the job of the woman is to follow and make it all look nice. The job of the man is also to ASK, and the job of the woman to say yes or no. If a woman says No to a man, he does not like it, but he just asks some other woman. But if a women asks a man, and he says No, she is devastated. So naturally a gentleman does not like to say No and dances with the woman even if he does not want to, and then he is resentful, especially if she tries to lead or is a really bad dancer in some other way. And then of course he will never ask her to dance, and so she will just ask him or some other man, and the situation gets worse and worse."

YIKES! And yet even Alisha, who won second place at the Lindy Hop International Championships in 2010, feels she has to ask men to dance, so who am I to sit prissily on my chair all night when I want to dance? And, of course, the best way to become a better dancer--especially a better follower--is to dance with people, as many different people as possible, as often as possible. 

So I consulted my expert again, and once again to paraphrase/blatantly make it up, he advised:

1. Be as good a dancer as you possibly can be.

2. Be young.

3. Be good-looking.

4. Be well-dressed.

5. Be young.

6. Be good-looking. 

7. Be interesting to talk to. 

This is where I repeat my mantra that we can ask men what they think, but we will not always like the answer. Fortunately being young and being good-looking are secondary to being a good dancer in this schema, which is also my experience. One of the most popular regulars at swing-dancing is a 45+ Frenchwoman who is not only a great dancer, she could charm the birds from the trees. As she leads as well as follows, I have learned a lot from her about the zany spirit which animates swing,which apparently can be expressed by chanting "A-whoop-a,-a-whoop-a, a-shooby-dooby-dooby-doo" while dancing.

My attitude is that the shy, the beginning, the quirky, the older-than-me and the female leads are fair game for my invitations, whereas I should wait for the really great male leads, and the confident young whippersnappers, to ask me--or not. There is no point sulking about not being asked; it's a free country, and men can ask whomever they want, or they can go outside and smoke, or they can stand on the sidelines like Mr Darcy and glower.*

As for being interesting to talk to, I suppose that all depends on your environment. One of the great advantages to Edinburgh social life is that there are so many Poles in it, and if you, a non-Pole, say, for example, "Litwo! Ojczynzno moja! Ty jestes jak zdrowie", you will instantly get the Pole's attention, good or bad. Of course, the Edinburgh swing scene is so international, reciting a bit of super-famous Spanish, French, German, Estonian, or Italian poetry could also have the same result I achieved last night, e.g. "That's so cuuuuuuuuute!" In short, tailor your conversation to what other people, not just you, find interesting, e.g. very rarely your job or children. 

 I know I have long recommended dance classes for meeting people, but  people who go to swing-dancing (and tango, etc.) week after week, year after year, go because they love the dancing so much. Making friends is obviously secondary and takes time. To "break into" the social dancing social club, aka the Cool Kids (who might be total nerds off the dance floor, but on the dance floor they are obviously the Cool Kids), you have to be patient and persistent, good-natured, show up week after week, and figure out the unspoken rules. 

Therefore, when you go a class or an activity to "meet people", you should pick something you are really going to be interested in, be willing to work at  (which includes coping with feeling stupid for the first few months) and will stick to even if all the men have girlfriends.

Update: Another guy's eye view. Don't forget my mantra. Meanwhile, that's tango. Don't wear dresses with slits in them to swing. Swing is for the good kids in saddle-shoes. Tango is for those scary sexy people.

Update 2:  Man on salsa. Sweaty backs--who knew? I guessed about the shoes. As soon as I go to London, I am getting proper swing shoes.

Update 3: An interesting and useful quiz for followers.

Update 4: Interesting advice for swing.  Sadly, it is really very hard for me to achieve vintage hair, unless "vintage" means 1970s, in which case I rule. And one of the Coolest of the Cool Girls in Edinburgh is always in perfect vintage make-up, hair and clothes.

Well, Now I'm Depressed/Now I'm Cured

I came across a hideous article trashing women writers on the manosphere. I would never have discovered it, but a woman writer I know (not Hilary White) actually linked to it approvingly on her Facebook page. Since I am going to scream about it, here it is. Caveat clicker. And please don't spend too much time in the combox. The manosphere is angrier than a Jansenist on crack at the idea of any woman on earth ever having had sex with more than one man in her life, and needs to talk about it ad nauseum. The language will depress you.

Anyway I hit the ceiling when I read this post because a famous British journalist into whose hands-- after some begging and pleading with the sales team --I got a copy of my novel remarked to a mutual friend that he doesn't usually read "women writers."

The mutual friend thought this very funny. I felt as if I'd been slapped. I had recently read in myslexia, that although women write most of the novels that are published, most of the novels reviewed are by men. And you'll have noticed J.K. Rowling is J.K., not Joanna. Why would that be? Hmm.... Meanwhile, no review, and I still languish in British virtual obscurity.

The irony? I just found out he actually really liked it. But perhaps I had been told that earlier, and all I could hear was "woman writer, woman writer, woman writer." I couldn't say for sure, but that might be like being told you can't play football because you're black.

Meanwhile: Alcott. Austen. Bronte. Bronte. Brookner. Byatt. Christie. Drabble.  Du Maurier. Ellis. Fitzgerald. Godden.  Gowdy. Heyer. James. Lee. Mantel. Montgomery. Murdoch. Sayers. Shriver. Smith. Spark. Woolf.

But let us get down to the stupid arguments of Manosphere Matt.

1.Their (i.e. our) sex lets them (us) get a pass for bad writing.

Ah ha ha ha ha. Don't bother clicking on the links, for all but the first one direct you right back to Mister I Haven't Been Published in the New Statesman Myself, Boo Hoo. The one article by a woman he does link to is actually about breastfeeding in public. The gross bodily functions part is just by the way.

The whole question of why men feel free to urinate on a tree or spit on the ground whereas women usually don't is actually rather interesting. It's the sort of thing women occasionally think about--especially in an emergency--but rarely question. Writing about it, when female, is actually very brave. Graham Greene had his hero Fowler cry his guts out in a toilet, but where did I send Catriona? Oh, yes. She throws up in the kitchen sink. I had to have a kitchen sink in my novel. You know how it is.

Meanwhile, my sex lets me get a pass for ... let me see. There is no military service required of men in Canada. I competed with only other girls for grades and therefore university places. My editor spikes my columns whenever he wants to.  He doesn't say, "Aww. Let's give Woman Writer a pass." He says, "Not up to your usual standard." So, I don't know--- Oh! My sex lets me get a pass--among decent men-- for saying what I want to or about them without getting punched in the nose. So there's that.

2. They (we) won't shut up about themselves (ourselves).

Ah ha ha ha! Hemingway, your honour. No more questions.

What a great time to mention that Ceremony of Innocence is NOT autobiographical. I did not live in sin with a Cardinal's nephew in Frankfurt. Male readers ask if I am Catriona. I am NOT Catriona. Catriona is a voice in my head who occasionally calls me "Mother" in a really condescending way.

The reason women so often write about our own experiences is because our own experiences are so often passed over. The first time I ever, EVER, read a very good, accurate and frank description of teenage female sexual attraction to boys was in 1989 or 1990 when I read Naomi Wolff's The Beauty Myth. Up until then I was vaguely aware that the male literary giants, including and especially the homosexual ones, were kind of getting that wrong. And women writers didn't seem to want to talk about it.  (Nota Bene: I had read neither Colette nor Duras.)

Meanwhile, back to Hemingway. I mean, I love him, but after a steady diet of male novelists, I do want to read something by and about a woman. I get so tired of men talking about themselves all the time and assuming, if they are homosexual, that this gives them magical insight into the female mind. No.

Amusingly, all Matt's links here go straight back to Matt.

3. They  (we) don't take risks.

Women don't take risks, he says, yet just publishing a piece about breastfeeding in light of  other bodily functions in the New Statesman while female gets guys like Matt buzzing around to say women don't write, they type. As far as I can make out, the "not writing but typing" insult has been around for as long as the typewriter, so so much for risks.  (The link here, incidentally, is also right back to Matt.)

The rest is barely disguised whining that he is writing for the manosphere instead of for the New Statesman. Where is the female version of "Return of Kings" he wonders. I don't know. Where do women who really hate women hang out and write drivel?

I am not sure what risk-taking means, anymore, especially to an audience that (see its combox, but only very briefly) is obsessed with women sleeping with too many men. If I told them that occasionally (not always, but  occasionally) some women sleep with dozens of men without ill effect, grow up, get married to younger, richer men who adore them and buy them little presents, they would collectively burst a blood vessel. (How is Victoria anyway, I wonder. Haven't seen her in yonks.)

Speaking as a woman (see 2), I know I damn well take a risk every time I write exactly what I think and sent it off to Toronto to be published in the CR. I also take a risk every time I write a piece of fiction and offer it up to readers to be judged. I took several risks with Ceremony of Innocence. let me tell you. And every time I mention Polish Pretend Son on my blog I fear a rumpus in my in-box beginning, "If you were a man..." (See 1.)

And now I don't feel depressed anymore. But please don't announce in the RoK combox that I wrote this post because I do not want a flock of readers from the manosphere. Seriously.

Manosphere readers are obsessed with how many men women allow access to ourselves, as if our ontological net worth--which, incidentally, comes directly from our having been made in the image and likeness of God--could ever be subtracted by, er, visitors. (I see they loathe the Eat, Pray, Love lady who, if I remember correctly, slept with only one guy in the course of the book.) Well, let me tell you, I do not want to consort with habitual fans of the manosphere. Insofar as a writer can be a lady, I try to be one, and I don't want those guys around.

Update: Check this out. At least in the USA, more women then men read books. And most women buy more of every type of fiction than men do. So Americans go from Johnny Can't Read to Johnny Doesn't Read Books. I wonder why that is.

Update 2: To come clean, I have a really bad cold now and hence the attention of a sparrow anyway, so I am having a great old time on the internet. I have been scrapping it up with men on the woman writer's Facebook page, and they have departed wailing, in short, "You're a meanie." A senior woman journo has made the error of telling me she covers "female effluvia" for a living, and I asked her if she was sure she wanted to phrase it that way. This has no doubt cemented my meanie reputation among the writer's fans and won me enemies for life. Ha ha ha! Risk-taking, people.

Update 3: I'll tell you what is really scary though. Last night I dreamed I had a hen night and somehow wracked up a bill for $1000. I was drunkenly trying to find my credit card, having already chucked $700 on the table, and I had just seen it so where was it...? And then BENEDICT AMBROSE arrived and REACHED FOR THE BILL. I was so horrified, I woke up.  As Count Floyd would say, "Oooh, SCARY!"

Moderation on, just in case.