Making Peace in the Gender Wars

From Menletter February 2006

By Tim Baehr

A few thoughts about the War Between the Sexes:

Refrigerator Blindness

It's an old stereotype and favorite bit of wry humor among women: Men suffer from refrigerator blindness - call it RB for short. They can't find stuff in the fridge because they don't look hard enough, are too lazy to move stuff around, or just suffer from some sort of congenital blindness specific to refrigerators. The supposed phenomenon has even led to a tongue-in-cheek scientific treatise, "Refrigerator blindness: selective loss of visual acuity in association with a common foraging behaviour" in a Canadian medical journal (http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/173/12/1494).

OK, we can admit to a certain amount of frustration in finding stuff in the fridge, and sometimes the desired object is right in front of us (as wife/girlfriend/partner reaches around our crouched-over body and snags the item a couple inches from our sightless, peering eyes).

But what if there's a simpler explanation than refrigerator blindness (or learned helplessness, or laziness, or any of several uncomplimentary diagnoses? Here's what I think:

Who stocks and arranges and rearranges stuff in the fridge? Who most regularly retrieves stuff from the fridge to cook and feed the family? This may vary from family to family, and I'd be willing to bet that the person who performs these tasks has a superior - vastly superior - grasp of the contents than anyone else in the family. If you're male and you do not "suffer" from RB, chances are you're more involved in shopping and cooking than other men.

We could even try this experiment: Let's say you have a particular area in which you are the principal keeper of the stuff. It could be the tools in your shop, storage in the garage, your home office or anything will a more or less rich variety of stuff stored away in less-than-obvious places and categories but in which you can put your hand on any particular item almost without looking. Have your wife/girlfriend/partner try to find the hex wrenches or the TSP or the wire nuts. Give her a fighting chance; if she doesn't know what one of these things is, show her a sample.

I think the chances are you'll discover a new symptom. Call it shop blindness, garage blindness, office blindness, or whatever fits. Keep it to yourself, however. If you say it out loud, you may be sleeping alone tonight.

Of course this doesn't solve your problem with finding stuff in the fridge. One successful tactic I've found is to systematically empty the fridge onto the floor, one item at a time, until the desired object is found. You may even have to look into closed containers (don't worry; mold doesn't jump out at you). Remember to put all the stuff back. The more you do this, the less you'll have to, because you'll get more and more familiar with the contents.

The Longevity Gap

I can think of very few wives who would actually choose widowhood. In most cases, outliving your spouse can be a difficult time filled with happy memories mixed with loneliness and grief. But the fact is there: In the US at least, women on the average outlive men by half a decade or more.

Statistics, however, can seem abstract and remote, so recently I did a little experiment of my own. In the Boston Globe's obituary section, I counted four conditions among obituaries where the information was available:

● Women who died before their husbands.

● Women who died after their husbands.

● Men who died before their wives.

● Men who died after their wives.

The first, overall count surprised me a little. On this particular day, 12 wives and 24 husbands were reported in the obituaries that identified a living or "late" spouse.

The next count was not unexpected but made the longevity gap very real for me: Of the 24 deceased husbands, 18 were survived by their wife. Of the 12 deceased wives, 4 were survived by their husband.

Most of these obituaries involved men and women in their 70s to 90s. In that generation, the longevity gap between men and women was larger than it is today. So if we did the same obituary study 50 years from now, we would very likely see men's and women's numbers more similar based on today's narrower gap.

Obviously, the women were doing nothing to hasten their husbands' deaths - quite the opposite if you've experienced a wife (maybe yours) trying to get her husband (maybe you) to the doctor for checkups. But the tendency in our culture is the losing combination of making men out as tough and heroic while putting them under immense stress as breadwinners. One possible reason for the narrowing gap in longevity lately is the increased stress on women as they rise in the workplace and adopt men's habits (smoking and drinking) to deal with the stress. Our consumerist society puts tremendous pressure on all of us, often not consciously felt, to work harder so we can buy more stuff.

There's no magic pill to cure all this. But there are some things we men can do to close the gap.

The most obvious cure is better self-care. Get off tobacco and alcohol, or don't start. Very hard to do, but with immense payoffs in quality of life. Get annual checkups. Eat right and exercise. Forget the latest diet or supplement fad - just eat a variety of good stuff and take a 20-minute walk every day. Make at least one male friend with whom we can share joys and griefs, and de-stress. Keep it simple. We have to stick with the doable stuff or we won't do it.

A less obvious cure is to reassess our life goals and living style. Almost no job is worth dying for. Jobs we truly love that are also dangerous (cop, soldier, firefighter, miner, construction worker) might be worth it for the love of it. For most of the rest of us, we might ask ourselves and our families some hard questions about whether our quest for material goods makes us happier than the extra time we could be spending together.

Maybe there's an indirect answer, at least for those of us not living in poverty or on its thin edge. We could try spending extra family time, perhaps something as simple as making sure we always have dinner as a family. That might cascade into other things, until there's a conflict between family time and work time. The resolution to the conflict could turn out to be a new or different job; a less expensive place to live; a quieter, slower life.

Would we men choose to be widowers, just to have the satisfaction of reversing the longevity gap? That would be the height of irony, wouldn't it? It's not a very worthy goal. What about, instead, trying to live a healthier, happier, more fulfilling life? Isn't that what the current gap is challenging us to do? And isn't a healthier, happier, and more fulfilling life not only good for us but for everyone around us?

Testosterone Poisoning

Men and women both produce testosterone, men in greater quantities. The phrase "testosterone poisoning" is often used humorously, even by men. It usually accompanies observations about men acting badly: Giving the finger to another driver, engaging in road rage and other risky behaviors, being violent with women or other men. Some people, mostly women, I suspect, think that testosterone poisoning is real - either as an acute episode or the chronic condition of men.

Let's get one thing straight: Testosterone is a natural occurrence in the human body, and "testosterone poisoning" make about as much sense as thyroxin poisoning, adrenaline poisoning, melatonin poisoning, or even estrogen poisoning. In healthy bodies, our hormones do not poison us. The only thing I can think of as a poisoning hypothesis is that all men are poisoned simply because we are men. That is a truly chilling thought that runs against nature and reason.

Even otherwise respected magazines and journals get into the act. In an article in Psychology Today, Peter Doskoch reported on a group of nine men who began working for a company that services oil fields ("The Trouble with Testosterone," http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19961201-000021.html). Four of the five men with the highest testosterone levels had quit or been fired after "only" nine months. One conclusion of the article is that companies may someday screen for "ideal" hormone profiles. What we don't read in the short article is what the gap was between the highest of the "low" group and the lowest of the "high" group. What we don't read is the average tenure of all men in this high-stress job. What we don't read is whether, in a random group of nine men, four or five would have quit anyway. What we don't read is why the men in the study left their jobs. Maybe three of the four who left were ambitious and went on to better-paying jobs. Maybe someone at home got sick. Maybe, by chance, the five who left were assigned to impossible bosses or given more stressful locations. Further: Should anybody make policy on a study that involved only nine subjects?

The on-line Wikipedia article on testosterone poisoning has a more balanced view and explores the use and misuse of the term in the media and in academia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone_poisoning.

Behavior of all kinds, good and bad, may have many causes, some of them physiological, some of them sociological, some of them psychological, some of them a mix of two or more, and none of them easy to separate out and validate.

Yes, we men are occasionally and more easily observed to be more aggressive than women. There are a lot of other gender differences, too. But men and women both act both well and badly at times, and there is a disparity in how they are seen by society and how they are punished.

What is our best response when we hear someone spouting off about testosterone poisoning? I think we could point out that there is no physical basis for a poisoning hypothesis and that the speaker has taken a shortcut to avoid a better explanation.

What is our best response to our own behavior? I think it's twofold: We become aware of our actions and their consequences, and we take responsibility. Oh, and another thing: We can celebrate the best things that we men are capable of as men - as physical, social, and psychological creatures: loyalty, assertiveness short of irresponsible aggression, faithfulness, calmness in emotional situations, strength of character, zany humor, ability to communicate with few words, perseverance, devotion to our families, and much more.