Bitches and Bastards

From Menletter September 2004

By Tim Baehr

I finally finished two books of essays by men and women. I started with The Bastard on the Couch, edited by Daniel Jones, and discovered that it was actually a follow-on to his wife's collection, The Bitch in the House, by Cathi Hanauer.

In both books, the essays are mostly by professional writers. Thus, they may lack the grittiness of a Studs Terkel collection of interviews, but they are still compelling.

Bitches

The cover of Hanauer's book (to take them in the order in which they were published) features a lipsticked, sneering mouth (of the paperback edition anyway) and enough blurbs ("Amusing, ferocious") to indicate that this is a book about female anger and rage, mostly against men. This, along with the title, could be very off-putting to a lot of men, but apparently the publisher thought such provocation would increase sales among women.

A few of the essays are angry and openly hostile to men. Most, however, have a different tone and theme. There are women deeply in love with their husbands, sometimes after failed first marriages. Others love their children with a love that borders on ferocity, yet they still scream at them frequently because the balance between home and work goes regularly out of control. One woman has never married, with a mixture of regret and contentment over her life of independence. Another both bemoaned and celebrated the fact that she was becoming her mother.

Relationships with men - husbands, boyfriend, lovers - are presented in detail; sometimes with increasing rancor over their shortcomings and sometimes with compassion for what their men face in the world. Many of the essays are filled with humor, sometimes light and sometimes dark.

Bastards

The book jacket of the hardcover edition of The Bastard on the Couch features the soles of a sock-footed man loafing on a couch. Not much else is visible, as if this feet-up position is all that is expected or bemoaned about men at home. Again, the title, graphics, and blurb ("27 men try really hard to explain…") seem intended to provoke rather than inform. Fine, if it sells books.

The sense I got from many of the essays in this book was one of sadness. There are men who despair about having enough family time while working at demanding jobs. There are homemakers whose wives don’t appreciate their efforts. Some men are lonely. Some are unabashed womanizers. Some have trouble dealing with female anger. Some just feel used. These men don't do rage as well as some of the women in Bitch, but they are angry and confused at times. And at other times they display a level of understanding and compassion about women's challenges that I think might surprise some women.

As with the women's essays, the essays here are often humorous, sometimes in a biting way and sometimes in revealing, self-deprecatory ways.

Speaking for Themselves

There are plenty of books about men and women, with sociological and pop-psych pronouncements about what men and women are like. The 53 essays in these two books are refreshing because men and women are speaking for themselves in ways that can be far more revealing. I can imagine someone reading one or both books and saying "That's not me" or "What a bunch of complainers." I hope, however, that men and women will read both books and say "Now I understand."

Understanding or not, simply reading the stories of other people can lead to a sense that nobody's perfect, we're all in the same leaky boat. The best quality of both books is their honesty. The men and women pull no punches, but they seem to have no wider or hidden agendas. Their goal is to tell their stories, not to advance some cause.

Why We Should Read These Books

We may think we're committed to assessing people on their individual merits, and the people we love or at least know well benefit from this commitment. But I think we're all subject to making generalizations: Men are. . . . Women are. . . . (even if we're careful not to put "all" at the beginning of the sentence).

The essays in the two collections create a kind of intimacy with men and women who are navigating the shoals of gender relationships with out-of-date charts, or none at all. And each one navigates differently, with safe arrivals, shipwrecks, and mixtures of humor, anger, joy, sadness. We may agree with some of the writers' views, disagree with others. But there's so much variety. The books are a demonstration that each person's story is unique, both in the books and in the world. And this realization could lead us - men and women - to the beginnings of compassion and perhaps some early glimmers of gender reconciliation.

I have no illusions that lots of men and women will read both books and start a spontaneous gender reconciliation movement. But what about the few of us who do read the books and take them to heart? Would compassion and gender reconciliation on a personal level enrich our lives?

Could be.