Pseudomutuality in relationships

How will we ever achieve an equal society if we can’t even live in equality with those whom we love?

--Maria Sveland

Heterosexual women and men in our society often describe their relationships as egalitarian and fair while also reporting relationship patterns that are objectively unfair.

For instance, they may report that they both do housework--but measurements of how much time each spouse puts in almost always reveal that the woman does more (on average, 80% of the work). One man said that his wife did all the cooking, but he did the dishes. By “doing the dishes” he meant putting the dishes in the dishwasher, leaving his wife to notice when they were done and put them away.

Or spouses may say that they are both responsible for childcare--but often, the man’s contribution to childcare is playing sports, going on outings, and watching TV with the kids, while the woman remains in charge of cleaning up after the kids, nagging them to take a bath, going to doctor’s appointments, and other boring stuff. Even when spouses sincerely attempt to share the burden, often the woman remains the manager, in charge of the family schedule, remembering what needs to be done, and reminding her husband to do it.

Couples may talk as though they are peers, but behave in ways that unintentionally promote invisible male power. Research in  the ‘90s that examined couples’ shared work and family decisions found that even though both partners reported that their decisions were mutual, outcomes tended to favor the husband’s needs and goals more than the wife’s.

One reason this “pseudomutuality” exists is that, when you ask women whether their relationship is equal, they don’t compare the relationship to an ideal of equality; they compare to an imagined “evil man” scenario. I know my husband is not a wife-beater or crude cartoon misogynist. He helps out more than my friends’ husbands. So I have nothing to worry about, right?

This cultural narrative of evil men trying to control women appears very important to women as something to avoid and to men  as unacceptable behavior. Although this discourse appears useful as a negative model of what to stay away from, it also seems to be applied to individual men in a sort of all-or-nothing way. Some men dominate and control; others don’t. The more subtle ways that male power is embedded within normative gender discourse and social structures did not seem to be part of the story. When men do not fit the dominating male pattern, couples can have a false sense of security about the existence of male power in their relationship and are less likely to look for or recognize the more subtle forms of male power built into the gender-differences discourse.

Within heterosexual relationships, and, the research suggests but does not prove, especially within marriage, even women who believe in equality are often pulled towards traditional gender roles. They may find themselves feeling that the condition of the house reflects on them--a feeling that husbands are unlikely to share. Or, with the modesty our society teaches women to feel or pretend to feel, they may say that their husband’s careers are more important than theirs (this tends to occur even when he makes less money). This leads to lives structured to accommodate the husband’s career.

Francine Deutsch describes two couples she encountered. In one couple, he was a college professor and she was a physician, and in the other couple she was the college professor and he the physician. But in both cases, both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.

There is no happy ending to this post, but I will leave you with a hilarious anecdote from Linda Hirshman . A female professor of her acquaintance decided to drop out of the workforce. When Hirshman asked her why, she said she had no choice: commuting 300 miles every weekday was driving her crazy. Hirshman asked the obvious question: why in the world had she chosen to live 150 miles from her university? The answer, equally obvious, was that she lived right next to her husband’s office.

The serious point here is that one traditional choice tends to lead to another traditional choice. In most marriages, the husband makes more money, so it might seem reasonable to value his career more. But for this woman, that seemingly innocuous choice led to locating near his workplace, spending most of her free time commuting, and, ultimately, housewifery.

I’m not going to bother precisely attributing these quotes, but here is my essential bibliography:

Couples, Gender and Power, Carmen Knudson-Martin

Gender Vertigo, Barbara Risman

Wifework, Susan Maushart

Get to Work, Linda Hirshman

Fiction and memoir:

An Unconventional Family, Sandra Lipsitz Bem

Bitter Bitch, Maria Sveland

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver

Update: more quotes along the same lines.

Some research suggests that men cope with such uncomfortable inequities by denying that housework matters--or that it even exists! Male respondents to a time use study frequently tried to draw the interviewer into a collusive dismissal of the significance of housework and child care. Male partners were sometimes unaware that cleaners were doing some of the work. All they knew--and all they needed to know--was that it was getting done, and by someone else. One man admitted that he did no cooking, but claimed it was because he wasn’t interested in cooked food. When a wife suggested they might alternate responsibility for bed-making, the husband said he didn’t believe in bed-making. Or male respondents implied that their attitude toward housekeeping was tolerant and their wives’ obsessive. To most men, the suggestion that there might be a right and a wrong way to vacuum or fold a nappy or hang out the laundry inspires eye-rolling, or even disbelief. This is another way in which we betray the very deeply held assumptions that what men accomplish matters, and what women accomplish doesn’t...a women who persists in framing housework as skilled work, and who cares about the results obtained, is routinely stigmatized as too fussy or a control freak.

The persistence of marrying up or hypergamy is one of the most serious obstacles to achieving genuine equality within marriage today.

 

"Glamour" magazine

We all know Glamour as the magazine which led Americans to start misspelling “glamor.” But did you know it also teaches many terrible life lessons?

To the best of my recollection, all of these wonderful quotes were in the same magazine:

“Engagement eyeliner” worked for me!

(“Carrie’s” boyfriend complimented her electric blue eyeliner. Less than 24 hours later, he proposed. Glamour helpfully provides the brand name, but I will not. It sounds dangerous.)

Reading comprehension hint: when you see the word “hardwired”, know that whatever you are reading is probably bullshit.

Like most women, I’m hardwired to try to keep everybody who counts on me at the office and at home happy. There are weeks, not just days, when I feel like I’m cheating on him—with my work.

(Real women never displease others. Also, men need constant supervision. Whatever will he do if you go out and he doesn’t get sex for a whole eight hours? Probably stick forks into the electric outlets and pee on the floor.)

A dumb celebrity hopes her daughter will never develop sexual desire:

Jamie Lynn Spears says: “It’d be dumb to sit here and say that [my daughter] isn’t going to like a boy one day and she isn’t going to have a boyfriend. I’ll just have to handle that the best way that I can. Both her daddy and me will caution her about having sex, and I would hope that she would not want to do that at all, but I have to make sure that I’m realistic too.”

A woman who is boring in bed feels insecure about it:

Maybe everybody is kinkier than you are. So what? Having standard-issue sex in private is my fantasy, and that’s the last I’m going to say about it.

(Kinky sex is something other people do. Not Glamour readers, who are too busy with magic eyeliner and keeping everybody happy.)

Another dumb celebrity (Amanda Seyfried) says she doesn’t want to have sex when she doesn’t want to have sex, and also women never want to have sex:

I’m terrified of being promiscuous. I don’t like the feeling you get when it’s not something that you truly want to do, and I hate the emotional abuse you give yourself afterward.

I will spare you Glamour’s advice on yeast infections, but it is also bad.

Translation and class

“Translators tend to write in a normalized language and are more attentive to what is broadly understood to be the correct or standard form. Translation tends toward the center, to whatever linguistic regularities are conceptualized as belonging to the standard language, irrespective of what native speakers typically say.

No consecutive interpreter would think of adopting lower-class diction to reproduce for the benefit of a visiting foreign dignitary the kind of language spoken to him by a factory hand or collective farm worker. In written prose, too, translators shy away from giving the uncouth truly uncouth forms of language in the target text...Translation always takes the register of naturally written prose up a notch or two.
There is a seemingly inevitable bias against representing forms of language recognized in the source culture as regional, uncouth, ill-educated or taboo by socially matching forms in the target tongue---presumably because doing so risks identifying the translator as a member of just such a marginal or subordinated class. The social dimension of style doesn’t flow easily from tongue to tongue.”

One reason why translations are often less exciting and interesting than original texts. Let's all just learn all the languages instead.

You probably won’t get AIDS

"If you look at the data we have right now, it is very clear what is driving the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It's not sustained heterosexual transmission, it is not IV drug use, it's basically in African American men who have sex with men. HIV in heterosexuals persists only because you have inflow either from other countries, from high prevalence areas for example, or from other risk groups such as intravenous drug users or men who have sex with men."

Trust no one (especially criminals)

Depressing but sounds like good advice from Sam Harris on how to survive an encounter with a criminal.

You should also learn to trust your feelings of apprehension about other people—revising them only slowly and with good reason. This may seem like a very depressing piece of advice. It is. Most of us don’t want to see the world this way, and we take great pains to avoid being rude or appearing racist, suspicious, etc. But violent predators invariably play upon this commitment to civility. The truth is that most of us are very good at detecting ulterior motives and malevolence in others. We must learn to trust these intuitions. To read the reports of rapes, murders, kidnappings and other violent crimes is to continually discover how easily good people can be manipulated by bad ones.

You are under no obligation, for instance, to give a stranger who has rung your doorbell, or decided to stand unusually close to you on the street, the benefit of the doubt. If a man who makes you uncomfortable steps onto an elevator with you, step off. If a man approaches you while you are sitting in your car and something about him doesn’t seem right, you don’t need to roll down your window and have a conversation. Victims of crime often sense that something is wrong in the first moments of encountering their attackers but feel too socially inhibited to create the necessary distance and escape.

However bad your options may appear in the moment, complying with the demands of a person who is seeking to control your movements is a terrible idea. Yes, there are criminals whose only goal is to steal your property. But anyone who attempts to control you—by moving you to another room, putting you in a car, tying you up—probably intends to kill you (or worse). And you must understand in advance that your natural reaction to this situation—to freeze, to comply with instructions—will be the wrong one.

If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your purse or wallet, hand it over immediately and run. Don’t worry about being shot in the back: If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range. By running, you make yourself harder to kill. Any attempt to move you, even by a few feet—backing you off a sidewalk and into an alley, forcing you behind a row of bushes—is unacceptable and should mobilize all your physical and emotional resources.

Captain, captive

Captain, captive
Of your fate
Fast asleep
On the bed you made
Dream away
Wake up late

–Samuel Menashe

Scientology

Scientology is not as popular as the celebrity blogs would lead you to believe.

This NYT Motherlode article is all about class (though it doesn't admit it).

Finding good food while traveling

If you travel for business, or if you travel at all, often the first problem confronting you in a new place is that of how to find something decent to eat. We have all spent uncounted hours in our hometowns experimenting with restaurants, reading reviews, chatting about food, comparing grocery stores. All of that experience is torn away from you in a new place. Yet, if done right, the food can be one of the best parts of your trip–even in places which might seem like culinary wastelands (Anchorage). And I will tell you how.

First of all, you will probably want to pick up a map of the area. If you’re serious about food, you can’t afford to stay in the area in immediate sight of your hotel. Yes, you may have to do a bit of walking. Hotel maps can be useful – but ignore the restaurant ads on them. You don’t want to subsidize those places’ advertising budgets.

Instead, you’re going to Yelp. Look for the highest-rated places within a two-mile or so radius. But be careful how you interpret those results.

1) Consider the prevailing cuisine of the region. You want a dinner that will be congruent with the rest of your experience of the location. The best sushi place in Columbus, Ohio, is not likely to give you either the Columbus experience or good sushi.

2) Consider the ancillary cuisines of the region. Is there a concentration of immigrants from a particular area? Does the area have a cultural connection with another?

For instance, when you go to Alaska, you think of fish and reindeer sausage. But consider the fact that many Alaskans vacation in Hawaii. Perhaps there might be good Polynesian food. Or maybe the Russian influence has left behind restaurants as well as Orthodox churches. It’s worth doing a bit of Wikipediaing to find out your prospects.

3) Don’t bother reading bad Yelp reviews. Bad reviews are almost never about food. Bad reviews are written by people with personal grudges – they had to wait too long, pay too much, or the staff didn’t show them sufficient deference. Bad reviews can be hilarious, but they are irrelevant to your quest for good food. Especially when written by people who didn’t get in at all.

If you want deferential service, go to the most expensive place you can afford. If you want food, the service, and hence the negative reviews, are largely beside the point. Also, if a review complains about not being given enough food, remember it was, statistically speaking, most likely written by a fat person.   

4) Do not be too intimidated by reviews claiming it is hard to get into a restaurant or bar. Many places are crowded in the first few weeks after opening, or if you show up, as so many Yelp reviewers seem to do, with five other people and no reservation on a Saturday night. This does not apply to you, the savvy business traveler. You are most likely alone or with only one other person, and you will prefer to dine early on weekday nights.

5) Read the good reviews. The sheer number of good reviews is irrelevant; what you’re really looking for are good reviews written by people who are interested in food. Which are not as common as you might think.

One Yelp review reads in full:
“The salmon soup was good. It was cold and refreshing.”

And this review is averaged in, along with all the others, to give a star rating.

So read the good reviews with discrimination. Does she love the place because it reminds her of the Cheesecake Factory back home? Does he give you details of the food, or details of the decor? Does he even bother to tell you what he ate, or is he focused on how often his water glass was refilled?
   
Once you find several good reviews by people who are like you, who will ideally give specific recommendations about what to eat and what to avoid, you’re set. If you do find a really good place, consider ordering a large dinner and eating the leftovers for lunch the next day. Otherwise, eating well during a business lunch is going to be hard, since you most likely won’t have time to research or range far afield.

If we are lucky, maybe my friend will contribute a post on how to find good food in small towns.


UPDATE:

I forgot to say that, if you are traveling with a group, avoid at all costs the restaurant your meeting planner has picked. Remember that her job is not to find great or even good food, but to find a restaurant which will be acceptable to the least common denominator, preferably within a few blocks from the hotel (because many of us are so used to driving that walking more than six blocks feels like a death march to the gulag.) Plus your meeting planner is probably a middle-aged woman with unadventurous tastes and not familiar with the area. I ignored this advice and had the only bad meal of my time in Honolulu.