I’ve been saving this post for some time when I need to get into trouble. Well, that time will never come: I seem to get into trouble without trying and stay there. Anyway, here goes.
Men have ambivalent feelings about women’s attempts to civilize them. Think about a couple comic strips, Calvin and Hobbes and Dennis the Menace (not the lame TV show based on the latter). In both, the male protagonist faces a female antagonist, Suzy Derkins or Margaret Wade. In both, the girl at least sometimes wants to play with the boy, but strictly on her turf and on her terms. In both strips the key symbol for this female-directed play is the tea party, with kids and dolls sitting in chairs around a table on a lawn. The horror felt by the boy in (or at the thought of) that cootie-filled circumstance is one side of the ambivalence.
In both strips there is another male. Hobbes joins Calvin in the anti-female tree house club, but he also thinks girls are good for smooching. He gets lost once and then is found and given care and refreshment by Suzy at a tea party. Dennis’s friend Joey sometimes submits to bossy Margaret and sits down at the tea table, but Dennis takes him under his wing as an apprentice in how to be a boy.
Maturity comes when a man is able to make decisions about how he will balance the two sides, the desire not to be tamed by woman and the desire to be with a woman or to accomplish things that can only be done in cooperation with women.
I can’t say much about the woman’s side of all this, but I will say how the woman’s role in this looks to the man. It seems that there is always a gravitational pull toward wanting to civilize men. For the word “civilize” I would sometimes substitute “restrain” or “feminize.” It’s the tea party. Different women are all over the map in terms of how far they take this, but the gravity is always there. A man who is largely controlled by women in this regard is what we call “whipped.”
It’s important to say that none of this is a matter of good on one side and evil on the other. Women need far more reminders of that than men do. That gravity is often taken by women as meaning that their attempts to tame men are good and that the results they seek will be good for the men. Christianity has been identified with the civilizing / feminizing efforts directed toward naked pagans and men. But such efforts are no closer to discipleship to Jesus than other human intentions, inventions, foibles, and fables are.
So the Christian man, just like other men, has to assess and make decisions about the particular civilizing efforts on the part of women. And one of the most dangerous of those kinds of situations is when a woman blocks or allows access to something a man wants according to whether the man does or says the right things. (I’m not talking about sex.) He needs to assess whether he wants that something enough to jump through the hoops. Or in some situations, he might be able to figure out how to get what he wants in some other fashion. If so, then he can bypass to some extent the female-defined processes and move forward without the need for female assessment of himself and his plans.
What is at stake in such circumstances might be called the man’s “dignity,” but that term doesn’t quite catch the importance of what’s involved. And my experience is that women don’t get this and regard it as an annoyance or even belittle it. At best, they regard it just as something they have to deal with, something they place no value on in itself but only as what must be tolerated in order to be with men.
The One Story 