Trust Fall 3: Boys Vs. Girls

No, It Isn't Directly About THAT.

Pictured here: toxic masculinity invading female spaces.

I haven’t written on the schedule I’d have preferred because of a) the ongoing septic system problem I mentioned recently causing a massive life disruption (think about the logistics of being unable to use ANY of the running water or sanitary facilities in your home for more than a day or two) and, amidst that, a very demanding work schedule on a recent account involving writing branding guidelines for something I absolutely despise, politically and ideologically, but was subcontracted to me by a valued client and which pays bills I have to pay. There are very few things that depress me more than doing work I hate (as opposed to work that is merely meaningless or dull). It’s been a rough week or so.

Today’s article occurred to me while Husbandmouth and I were dealing with our jury-rigged solution to our dying septic system- at the far end of the buried tank there is a slight downward slope, so we’ve rigged a sump pump onto a cinderblock, lowered it into the tank, and ran a drain hose out towards our crop fields (which are idle for the next 3 months or so depending on when soybeans start this year). At that end of the tank, there are no solids and what is accumulating is 99% rainwater, so this has allowed us to shower, use our toilets, and run sinks. It is not a permanent solution, but allegedly, the township will have an engineer out to bring the Power of Bureaucracy to the excavators that will replace the system in about a month.

Today while Husbandmouth went to fetch a few tools, I began raising the sump pump so we could figure out why it wasn’t running. As I mentioned, the pump is wired onto a cinderblock and then secured to a long cord that is lowered into the tank and secured at the other end to a post sunk in concrete out in our yard, an old clothesline. I got about 3/4s of the way up and felt my arms starting to give out. The cord began sliding through my work gloves and an uncontrolled drop back down to the bottom of the tank would have been bad. I yelled for Husbandmouth but he was too far away to hear. I was able to secure the line long enough to catch my breath and pull the pump up to where I could grab the handle on it and recruit my legs to lift it the rest of the way out.

This is not a dramatic life-or-death story, or even a very important one, but it started my mind working along the path that brings you today’s article.

A few years ago Hulu found a blockbuster hit in its adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, about the United States becoming an oppressive theocracy following a pseudo-evangelical Christian revolution in which, among other things, married women are reduced to their husband’s property and unmarried women are reduced to breeding stock to solve an infertility-driven population collapse. It was received by virtually everyone whose brain was on Power Saver mode as a commentary on the rise of the “dangerous far right” who was THIS CLOSE YOU GUYS to actually instituting a medieval theocracy whose highest priority was putting those damn women in our place. Holy shit you guys, Trump (one of the most pious and morally rigid people ever) wants to bring us back to Bible Times (tm) and there are no democratic processes that will stop him.

Somewhere in the series, one of Atwood’s lines from the book is quoted:

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

This article isn’t, just to clarify, intended to throw my hat into the ring about the current controversy around women’s athletics. I have strong, nuanced opinions about that, and I don’t think they would terribly upset anyone, it’s just not what I feel like talking about here. I’m talking about “normal” male-female relations and not any of the strange situations we currently find ourselves in- though what I say here may definitely be applied to thinking about that situation, and I urge you to do so.

So, back to me struggling to lift a sump pump and cinder block. I’m 5’9”, a few inches taller than my mother before she began shrinking with age, many inches shorter than my father even in his 80s, but of similar height (I am told) to many of the ancestral women on my father’s side, who were largely of dominantly Danish or Irish stock. There is a very old, low-tech picture in my father’s house of my grandmother before she immigrated from Ireland at the turn of the century carrying a sheep under each arm.

I’ve earned the equivalent of a black belt in two martial arts, one involving weapon styles, competed a little in my youth, trained in boxing for fun but never competed, and until recent years was a fairly avid gym-goer. I’ve done some firearm training courses, some quite rigorous, and taught some basic classes. Husbandmouth has done none of these things, and doesn’t have a lot of interests in most physical hobbies besides the incidental physicality of building things and farming.

It has occasionally been the subject of jokes that, if I needed to, there was no question that I could, if I saw him coming, utterly kick his ass and probably kill him, especially if I had any kind of weapon to hand, and thankfully this doesn’t bother him. I would realistically say this was probably true for 1/3 to 1/2 of my male friends. The other half or so of our male friends is entirely another story: physically fit, better trained, physically larger, usually with at least 50 pounds on me. One good full-strength hit to my head would probably put me all the way down- though I take it as the highest compliment that the most badass among them said in a chat with some military friends that “I’d beat her, but I’d be seriously hurt at the end.”

So, if Husbandmouth ever lost his mind and tried to hurt or kill me, I don’t lose a ton of sleep that I wouldn’t be able to defend myself. If confronted alone by a competent, fit male combatant and didn’t have a firearm or superior weapon to hand, I’d be in a lot of trouble. I don’t need my husband to be a super soldier to be manly. I’m interested in violence and he isn’t. There are worse problems.

I’m also aware that I’m a relative outlier among women in that respect (though I have spent a lot of time around other women as tough or tougher than me, too), but I can also confidently tell you that at least among the women I’ve hung out with, we don’t generally sit around musing about whether we can beat up our husbands or boyfriends if the need arises.

But this is a very frequent topic when We, Society talk about “men vs. women” especially in the current incarnation of ‘feminist theory’- a narrative that there is an intrinsic, permanent power imbalance between men and women as a population because, on average, men easily physically overpower women and could, if not prevented by externalities, easily hurt, kill, or overpower and rape any woman they wanted to, and because this is broadly always possible, men must, on average, be viewed as dangerous threats to women at all times. Furthermore, women can do nothing about this imbalance and should lean into their preordained condition as helpless punching bags and demand protection from half the human population.

There are a couple of interesting rabbit holes that this takes us down. I’ve gone down one of them myself over the years: more women should learn to use and carry guns. Samuel Colt’s revolver was famously marketed as “the Great Equalizer,” the implication being that such weapons didn’t require great wealth or inordinate physical strength and that any competent wielder could apply the same deadly force to any other person, and this is broadly true when it comes to small arms. Some of my best instructors (and most competent marksmen) have been women. We can get into the weeds about whether women, on average, have the temperament to effectively deploy deadly force when needed, but certainly many have and do, and I regard this as more of a question of socialization than arguments about testosterone-driven aggression.

So, we’ve got a bunch of women running around with guns ready to shoot guys down if they put them in danger. Presumably, many of these guys will have guns too. So now we’ve got a society where the only thing keeping everyone in line is the threat of instant death from each other- the reductio ad absurdum of “an armed society is a polite society.” Sounds like an incredibly tense, fearful, not-at-all-fun basis for a civilization- everyone watching each other for the slightest threat to begin blasting.

For the record, I do actually believe that more women should learn to use and carry guns and that this would save women’s lives, but this is in response to very specific situations of violent criminal threat in our real-life, actual society. It is not a practical solution to a worldview that all males present deadly threat to all women at all times.

So, Summary Execution won’t solve this apparent conundrum. It also seems unlikely that we can or should, Harrison Bergeron-style, somehow physically weaken men or feed women anabolic steroids to flatten the curve of muscularity on a population scale. (Yes, I know there are theories that such things are happening within the context of the current transgender insanity, but I don’t believe this sci-fi scenario is directly the point of gender-deconstructionist extremism.) We could attempt to deter male aggression by disproportionately punishing gendered violence- hate crime legislation is in this general category, with the notion that if a man is punished 10x more severely for assaulting a woman than another man, this will scare men into never laying a hand on a woman again. (I would then ask what penalties would look like if a woman were to now assault these legally-cowed men, or if a man were to severely beat or kill another male who was physically much smaller or untrained but still male. Are we going to go around like Dragon Ball assigning everyone a Power Rating and make it ‘more legal’ to engage in violence with one’s physical equal? Will it be televised, and can I be a commentator, and can I reserve Guttermouth now as my nom de vidéo?)

Let’s wander back to reality. While it’s true that violent crime is overwhelmingly (but by no means exclusively, and interestingly, this metric is shifting) committed by men, and so-called “gendered violence” like rape and domestic violence are overwhelmingly assumed by western culture to be ‘male’ crimes (whether or not this is so), the vast majority of men are not violent criminals, and the vast majority of male-female interactions in modern society do not involve questions of whether he’s going to punch her in the face instead of, say, ringing up her groceries or doing her income taxes.

A mentally healthy person of either gender has no reason to physically or sexually assault another person of either gender, so the vast majority of them don’t, without getting into questions of who could “take” the other in an MMA bout.

The progressive agenda of deconstructing every and all social constructs seems to have settled, where men and women are concerned, on the narrative that men are inherently oppressors and women are inherently oppressed because of what men COULD or MIGHT do, and that this is reducible to the greater physical strength and mass of males, and is seen through the lens of the most catastrophic of acting out this disparity in the form of physical or sexual assault. It’s led to bizarre sub-narratives like variations on “men being interested in physical fitness/strength training is toxic masculinity” with the notion that men are going to the gym and getting swole so they can beat on some bitches or physically intimidate women in daily life, like you do.

For the record, I like looking at men’s muscles, appreciate a well-toned male body, and find it attractive if a man could, if the situation required it, kick some ass. These are not bottom-line, nonnegotiable aspects of attraction, but they help a lot- and need to be accompanied by a personality with which those strengths are being used to work hard, take care of one’s body, and protect the people he cares about.

All this pondering is to say that, like all postmodern deconstructionist narratives, this one has served to sow greater distrust between men and women (which I believe is exactly its purpose) by magnifying focus on the worst possible edges of disparity between the two populations, and this plays out in every single oppressor vs. oppressed narrative: whites are the enemy because the worst behavior of whites is to enslave or kill nonwhites (never mind when nonwhite populations do those things to other ethnic groups themselves); wealthy people are the enemy because their wealth makes it possible for them to become gigantic criminal masterminds and hurt/exploit poor people; and so on.

The reality is virtually anyone could be a violent threat. Criminal violence doesn’t happen in an “all else being equal” MMA ring; almost anyone can, under the right circumstances, kill or harm anyone else. It is a fair discussion as to whether men are naturally “more aggressive” because of greater testosterone and other biological differences and whether this translates to any behavioral predisposition, but this is not directly relevant to a legal or moral discussion of social trust.

Because that’s what this is ultimately an issue of: structures of social trust and whether or not they are warranted. Our public health and political institutions have thoroughly proven themselves unworthy of our trust, but a secondary, related problem is that without those institutions being trustworthy, a modern civilization cannot function. This makes the two extreme solutions a) eliminate those institutions under the assumption that they are systemically untrustworthy, or b) tolerate the evil behavior of those institutions under the assumption that they are systemically untrustworthy but we need them anyway (“too big to fail”). This kind of thinking is fucking lazy, in either direction, and the same goes for creating an absolutist notion of gendered injustice because most of one group is physically bigger than most of another group.

The relationship between men and women as populations has been gradually renegotiated over millennia, in various cultures, and in the majority of modern societies finds balances that work well without relying on a myopic focus on fundamental differences and the greatest extremes of bad behavior they might represent. The truth is that the vast majority of humans are heterosexual, most want to reproduce, and no one wants to be hurt or killed. Most men want to like women, and most women want to like men. And that requires a baseline of trust on both sides that, when societies aren’t actively being fragmented, seems to emerge for the majority of people- one might even imagine it’s normal human nature.

We should therefore be highly suspicious, and maybe even preemptively antagonistic, towards outlooks that suggest that the most just and societally healthy relationship between two populations of any kind is a permanent state of defensive war, with only coercive legal frameworks preventing hostilities from erupting into ultimate violence.

I still yelled for Husbandmouth to lend me some muscle to lift the pump and cinderblock, and if I hadn’t been able to manage it on my own, I’d have been grateful for the help and probably not spent a lot of time worrying that he would later use that strength to choke me out or force himself on me.

I figure he’s my husband, we’ve been together more than 15 years, I’ve got a good idea of the kind of person he is, and have considered him worth loving for a long time.

I’ll probably be fine.