Fear of Fifty (35 page)

Of all these fathomless Dark Ages, the eighties were the worst. The problem was that men all thought they had to be Masters of the Universe and women believed they were losers unless they captured men who could buy them emeralds as big as the Ritz. Somewhere during that mad epoch I must have decided to attempt a guidebook that would be a summation of all I'd learned about men in my much-too-long love life.

My working title was
Beauty and the Beast: A Good Girl's Guide to Bad Boys.
I knew that women wanted rules. How did I know this? I wanted them myself. So I gave them to myself:

 

A DOZEN PHALLACIES WOMEN BUY

If he loves me, he'll be faithful forever.

His loving you has nothing to do with his being faithful. Some men are monogamous. Most aren't. The sexy ones usually aren't. Monogamy lasts three days, three weeks, three months, or at best three years with most men. Often it lasts just about long enough to get you pregnant. Nature has a reason for this. Men are programmed to spread their seed as widely as possible and women to raise live, healthy babies. Human babies take a long time to grow to self-sufficiency—as you may have noticed. Some men lie better than others, but lying is endemic in the species. Some few paragons of maleness are faithful. Most others cheat. The question is: Can you stand it? If the cheating is not blatant and disrespectful and you get a lot out of the relationship in other ways (a friend, a lover, a father to your kids, an economic partner), then consider these alternatives: You can accept his cheating gracefully, and at the same time extract emotional and financial benefits from his guilt. You can cheat discreetly yourself—if (and only if) you enjoy it (not for spite). You can realize it has nothing to do with you. He does it for his manhood, not against your womanhood.

 

I need a man to feel whole.

You don't need a man as much as a man needs you. Women are the self-sufficient sex. Men are the dependent sex. Women reproduce the species; they create life within themselves (or the Mother Goddess does, through them). Men know this and in their inadequacy have created a world which cripples and demeans every female accomplishment—from the glory of childbirth itself to women's work in every creative and professional field. You may not be able to change the world—
yet
—but you don't have to buy this lie. You are powerful, strong, self-sufficient. The more you know this, the happier you'll be with or without a man.

 

If you use your power to support a man, he'll always support you.

Alas, not true. It's wonderful to stand by your man, to give to the one you love, but you must never forget yourself, and your children, since he may. Being a man, he takes for granted that his needs come first. Being a woman, you take that for granted too. Don't. Protect yourself—not with feminist rhetoric or argument, but with actions. A bank account and real estate in your own name, money put aside for your kids' education that he can't touch (or give to the next—younger—wife and her spawn), a profession of your own to rely on. Above all, empower yourself, and then help empower him if it pleases you to do so.

 

Men love it when you tell the truth about your relationship.

They hate it. Their truth and your truth are, anyway, different. Their truth is about their priorities (conquest, winning, fucking). Our truth is about
our
priorities (nurturing, creativity, love). Our priorities make
life
possible. Their priorities make their winning possible. They see our priorities as trivial, but they couldn't live without them. They are in denial about their human dependencies, and our priorities enable them to keep up their denial. How can you talk about this? It's like one person talking Greek and the other Swahili. Cross-babble.

Don't talk about the relationship—
do
something. Love it or leave it. Make your needs clear. Seize legitimate power. Always speak of how you feel, or what you need, and
never
accuse. Be gentle but firm. Know what you want and ask for it. If he says no once too often, then consider what your options are. If you are masochistic, get straight with yourself. This world is too cruel for you to compound the felony by being cruel to yourself. Speak gently to him and even more gently to yourself. Love yourself. Men are mimics. If you love yourself, they love you too.

 

Men love women who never oppose them and cater to their every whim.

Marabel Morgan and Anita Bryant spread this big lie a decade and a half ago and look where it got them. The truth is men feel
insecure
with women who humor them constantly, succumb to all their whims, and never tell them what to do. They don't want to be torn down, but they do want to be
guided.
They know they are bad boys, and a woman who caters to every whim only makes them feel
more
guilty. If you want a man to love you, make him feel big, but also give him firm but gentle guidance. He counts on you to save his life. He knows he's not the knight on the white charger or Prince Charming—why don't you?

 

Men want to be knights on white chargers and rescue you.

This is true. Which is not a contradiction of number 5. They want to
seem
to rescue you, though they know in the dead of (k)night that
you
are, in reality, rescuing them. Let your knight have his fantasy. Indulge it. Water it. Use it in the bedroom to make the sex hotter. But know it in your heart for the fantasy it is. Chances are, if you're cruising down the Amazon and you are shipwrecked in alligator-infested waters, you'll save him and he'll take the credit.

 

Men hate feminists.

The truth is: They hate women who
babble
about feminism without doing anything but blame them, but they
love
women who know how strong they are, while paying lip-service to how necessary men are. Is this dishonest? Yes and no. It's dishonest if you feel you always have to tell the truth to men—which is the biggest mistake you can ever make if you want them to fuck you. If you don't need this—you are happily celibate or happily gay—then read no further. You have it figured out.

Men love babies and all ache to be devoted daddies.

Some do, some don't. Most—like you—are ambivalent about parenthood, which is only human, after all. You, however, have hormones rushing through your body that make you—or most of you—gooey about babies in a way most men are not. During your menstruating years, your body reminds you every month of your mortality and your generativity—his body does not. His body reminds him that his penis is ever present, vulnerable, insistent, and lonely. It will get him to say almost anything to you in order to seem invincible, hard, and not-lonely. And afterward it will make him say anything at all to get away. As you long to merge with another, he dreads it. Your primary attachment was to a human being of the same sex, his was to a human being of the opposite. Thus he dreads union even as he seeks it. Your longing for union is unambivalent. You are not afraid to be engulfed by your mother; you expect, in fact, to
become
her. Add that to the hormonal differences between the sexes and you have one sex longing to merge and the other sex both wanting it and dreading it. Men are passionate and claustrophobic at the same time; they advance and retreat simultaneously. This is God's little joke on the human race. Some psychologists theorize that if men took care of babies, this would change. We're willing to try this, but a lot of men aren't. Babies seem to make them nervous. Of course there are those paragons who write articles for the men's column of the
New York Times.
They don't count. Who knows what they do after having dispatched the column? Besides, they are no more Everyman than Katharine Hepburn is Everywoman. If you have a man like that, chances are you aren't reading this. Perhaps your daughter will have a man like that—but it's too late for you. In the whiplash generation babies exacerbate male claustrophobia—which is why at just the moment you are at your nestingest, he is at his antsiest. If you understand this and don't take it personally, you'll be a lot happier.

 

Men like lusty women.

For most men, the ideal woman would be lusty on cue. His cue. And she would switch off as fast as a peep show switches off or you can snap the centerfold shut. Have you ever noticed the way the lustiest man will drool over the centerfold in
Playboy
while ignoring the real live woman in his bed? Is this a paradox? Not exactly. The centerfold (like the peep show) is safer. It's on
his
timetable. A real live woman is not. Better still—two women. One lusty and intermittently available. One nonsexual and mommyish and eternally available (for nurturing). To the male mind, that is heaven (i.e., utter safety)—which brings us back to phallacy number 1.

 

Men are rational, women irrational.

If consistency is rationality, women are more rational. They long for integration, honesty, union. They may suffer from PMS, postpartum depression, and premenopausal dread, but they are more usually unambivalent about jumping into life. Men know this and long for strong women to lead them. Strong women who strategically pretend to be weak.

 

Men hate women who have more money than they do.

Men really hate women who control them. They are perfectly happy to have women with money as long as they (the men) control the money—or seem to. Remember the Napoleonic Code? Remember all those heiresses married for their money in the days when a woman's money automatically became her husband's? What men hate is women having the power to control them. And money, in our society, is the ultimate representation of power. If you make more or have more money than your man, you will have to find real—or imaginary—ways of giving him control—enough control to right the balance—and he still may never forgive you.

 

Men like beautiful women with perfect features and perfect bodies.

Actually, men like them better at a distance than up close, where they make them a bit nervous—except for display.

Reading this now, it seems like a cry of pain disguised as advice to the lovelorn. The lovelorn was me—whether I admitted it or not.

I was dating, trying for the first time in my life to understand the opposite sex. I had to. I felt my survival was at stake. Always, there had been dozens of men to choose from. Now I was in my forties and the men were mostly married or dead. Others only dated women under thirty. The rest were gay—great for friendship, but generally not available for sex. I'd either have to give up men—not a bad idea perhaps, but I figured I could always do that
later
—or learn, at long last, how they
worked.
This unfinished advice book must have been my attempt to codify my knowledge. And I still believe in every one of these “rules of love.” After several years of midlife marriage, I believe them
more.

We could raise the question of why I thought—at fortysomething—that I needed a man. I like my own company; I can earn my own living; I have never had trouble finding lovers. Why, then, did I want a partner at all?

I have puzzled over this question and have never come up with a rational answer. Perhaps the answer isn't rational. Perhaps it is only the same reason why geese mate and rhesus monkeys prefer real mothers to heated cloth-and-wire armatures. Perhaps it is only a matter of warmth. Or perhaps it is the sad fact that women are still so discriminated against in a man's world that it is better to have one particular ally rather than face the whole discriminatory world alone.

What a wealth of warmth and protection there seems to be in that phrase “my husband”! What certainty, security, solidarity! Perhaps that's why we marry even though we know that marriage can mean having one's money stolen, having one's children used as hostages, or facing physical abuse. At the very least, marriage means

Perhaps that was why Colette's character Renée concluded in
The Vagabond:
“I'm no longer young enough, or enthusiastic enough, or generous enough to go in for marriage again, or married life, if you prefer. Let me stay alone in my closed bedroom, bedecked and idle, waiting for the man who has chosen me to be his harem.... I want nothing from love, in short, but love.”

After three marriages, I certainly agreed with her. What perversity still made me seek the Perfect Man—whom I knew did not exist?

After my blue-collar phase, I began to mingle with the masculine side of what was considered the upper crust of Manhattan. If this was the upper crust, where was the
under
crust? These men were as Byzantine as courtiers in old Constantinople.

I remember first dates that seemed like co-op board interviews or questionnaires about credit rating from Dun & Bradstreet. I remember men who were “almost divorced.” I remember men with toupees who drove Bentleys to make up for their lack of hair. I even went out with a still-practicing rabbi and a lapsed priest. I probably would have tried an ayatollah had one found me kosher enough to date.