The Ongoing Battle Between Men and Women

“The Hangover” wasn’t may favorite movie of 2009. That award would probably go to “The Road”, with “Adventureland” and a couple of movies that I caught on video, “Into the Wild” and a film about the East German secret police called “The Lives of Others”, as close runners-up. However, “The Hangover” was the funniest move that I saw last year, and possibly the most culturally significant in the hard line it takes concerning America’s ongoing cultural trench war between the sexes.

The plot involves three guys who go to Vegas for a bachelor weekend and proceed to lose not only their friend, the groom, but also any memory of the night when they lost him. They then decide to retrace their steps in an effort to find their buddy, and amidst all the wacky high jinks which ensue, the filmmakers posit a couple of ideas on the joys of Vegas and the context of a contemporary marriage: First, that it is our right as men to be allowed these kinds of no-holds-barred vacations; and second, that any woman who would try to deny them from us is an incorrigible bitch who you are better not being with in the first place.

This is a pretty bold shot across the bow, at least from my experience with the modern woman, most of whom would not understand, much less condone, a weekend of drugs, strippers, and general debauchery, not to mention a flirtation with real danger and economic ruin. But, despite all the craziness, the movie still tries to keep a certain moral respectability. There is no outright sex, at least as far as we know (OK, there is a photo collage of some fellatio in the closing credits, played purely for laughs), and the only reason that the guys in the bachelor party all take “roofies” and lose their collective memories is because one of the characters, the crazy brother-in-law-to-be, is tricked by a local drug dealer and then secretly doses their drinks. In short, despite all their misbehavior, we are supposed to buy into the basic moral center of these guys. Amidst all of their naughty behavior, we are expected to root for them.

For such a popular movie, “The Hangover” goes pretty far out on a limb, implying that sex, drugs, thievery, breaking the law, it’s all good clean fun, provided you “don’t bring anything home with you,” as the saying goes. More or less, this is the attitude of the prospective bride in the movie who, despite being given around 45 seconds of total screen time, sets the moral tone for the film. She seems to understand that boys will be boys, stays off her high horse, and, by accepting both her husband and his best men back into the fold, allows for a happy ending. The boys have their fun, the wedding ceremony goes off with nary a hitch, and she has a sheepishly compliant husband to boot (at least for the time being).

The bride in the movie contrasts with the girlfriend of a hen-pecked dentist named Stu, who not only tries to control every move of his life but is naive enough to actually believe that the guys are out touring the wine country on their bachelor bacchanalia. A major subplot of the movie is based around the contention that this kind of woman has a wicked heart, and that the dentist is much better off dating a prostitute with an illegitimate child and the proverbial heart of gold.

The residents of Planet Vagina have also been talking about the state of modern marriage, but the nature of the discussion has been going a little differently. Last month, the Life and Arts section of the Financial Times ran a column titled “I do… don’t I?”, which reviewed a series of books recently written by women about marriage. These women are all very serious about the subject, giving way more thought and moral gravity to the institution than even the most fire-and-brimstone of preachers, and for most of them, it boils down to “shared intimacy” with the person who, by choosing to marry him, you are making “the most vivid representation of your own personality” in your life. Whew. That’s a lot to ponder. No wonder the fair sex also tends to be the grouchy one.

A cornerstone of the column was a review of “Committed”, the latest book by Elizabeth Gilbert, whose “Eat Pray Love” described her roaming the planet to find herself and was probably the most popular book of the year among the Oprah set in 2008. Gilbert also happened to be speaking at the Borders in Oak Brook to promote her new book. As a one-time journalist, punk rocker, and diligent seeker of knowledge, I felt compelled to venture right into the belly of the beast, to hear this spokesperson for her generation for myself.

I was expecting some kind of spooky estrogen fest, and I was not disappointed. I got there about fifteen minutes before Gilbert was scheduled to speak, and all 120 or so folding chairs in front of the podium had already been taken. All but six of these seats were occupied by women, and the conversation waxed at a tittering cackle, as the relatively hushed tone of each individual voice was magnified by its trebled constancy, the babbling soon becoming background noise like some kind of well mannered but wicked brook. It made my hair stand on end, at least for a few seconds, until my reptilian brain had a chance to reorient itself.

Having suppressed my immediate instinct of fight or flight, I leaned against a bookshelf at the edge of the speaking area and made myself comfortable. The crowd continued to swell, eventually topping 200, including a few more men, most of whom seemed either to have stumbled by out of curiosity or to be attached to a book-bearing, autograph-seeking female. The crowd ranged from their early 20’s through late-50’s, with the bulging bell curve of these ladies somewhere in their 30-somethings. In other words, they were just the folks you would expect to attend a reading from possibly the foremost advocate of a woman’s perspective on love and self-fulfillment in America today. Most were white, although there were a smattering of black and Asian ladies, and there were even a couple of scarf-wearing Muslims in the crowd. From my limited observation, very few of these women were wearing wedding rings.

Gilbert entered to healthy applause, but the biggest cheer of the night came when she made some snarky comment about Sarah Palin. This seemed to be a regular line for her, a predictable applause getter used to break the ice. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I guess a personal memoir about the spiritual value of leaving your husband to travel the world is not really much of a red state idea. Gilbert then read from the first chapter of her new book, a tale about her boyfriend’s extensive interview with the Department of Homeland Security at the Dallas airport, and while the writing was competent, the bathos of Gilbert’s prose left me unmoved.

When Gilbert announced, “Thank you, men,” to the dozen or so of us in the audience, and everyone applauded, I felt sort of like I imagine a black guy would feel if the P.A announcer at the United Center thanked him for attending a hockey game. Then she added, “Don’t think you aren’t noticed,” and I even felt weirder.

But Gilbert’s response to questions were a lot more interesting than her prose, in that she wasn’t reiterating some hackneyed narrative but discussing ideas. “You can’t have intimacy without privacy, you can’t have privacy without rights, and you can’t have rights without marriage,” she declared, which is an interesting tautology, although probably an incorrect one, as the lack of government recognition hasn’t stopped many an unmarried couple from being intimate. Gilbert talked about the shift in Western society from an arranged to an “expressive” marriage, and that most societies throughout history would regard our linking of chimera such as love and romance to the bedrock foundation of marriage as “a fool’s errand.” She discussed Aristophanes and Platonic myth. She discussed her own “gaping loneliness.” All in all, it wasn’t bad stuff, far more thoughtful than I had expected. I could see why all these women were at least casual followers of Elizabeth Gilbert, as she seemed to be a smarter, prettier, more driven version of themselves.

After the reading, while Gilbert was busy signing books, I ran into a buddy of mine who was taking photos for a local newspaper. I explained that, much like him, I was on assignment, just one of my own devising. My buddy complained about how ridiculous both the author and the store manager had been, treating him with a dismissive tone and not letting him get in position to do his job. Then the spell was broken, and I remembered that these folks are the enemy. Elizabeth Gilbert speaks for a privileged subset of women. Of course, she was going to yell at the guy trying to do his job. That’s not what she respects. She respects exotic bullshit, because it helps define who she is. It got me thinking about Javier, or whatever the hell his name is, her boyfriend-turned-husband who somehow has the luxury to leapfrog around the planet yet is still supposed to be living the simple life.

Gilbert went out of her way to note that she and her husband now have a home in central New Jersey, with the implication that they are obviously not concerned with the perceptions of others. But you don’t need to prove your hipness once you’ve been a bartender at the Coyote Ugly and then popularized the place by writing an essay about your experiences for GQ. Spend enough time in Manhattan, and you’ve internalized your hipness. You only prove it all the more, to yourself and to your peers, by moving somewhere seemingly unhip and pretending not to care about such things.

Out of curiosity, along with a journalistic due diligence, I tracked down Gilbert’s 1997’s GQ article, “The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon”, and found just it just as painfully smug and cloying as I had imagined it would be. It’s offensive and just plain wrong on so many levels. First, Coyote Ugly is less a bar than a concept, a place where you can be served the overpriced beverage of your choice, as long as it’s beer or whiskey, by a beautiful woman, who will “entertain” you with her scathing repartee. As money making ventures go, it’s pretty much a “can’t lose” proposition, assuming that you are in Manhattan, Las Vegas, Orlando, or one of the other cultural gathering points of the young, the self-absorbed, and the beautiful. But most of the country isn’t graced with such talent, and the faux craziness that Gilbert details is not just annoying, but delusional. I’ve frequented more than one too many crazy, drunken bars in my life, and none of the Manhattan wanna be bitches who worked at Coyote Ugly would tolerate being anywhere near them. To imagine that the Coyote Ugly is some kind of real experience, and to write about it as such, is just bullshit. Personally, I’m all for a pretty woman serving me drinks, but she better know how to correctly mix a good Beefeater and tonic. And bonus points if she knows when to shut up.

Towards the end of the question and answer session, Gilbert briefly noted, without elaboration, that she and Javier wanted to have children together. I’m not sure if this rocked many of the single, childless women in the audience, but it brought things home for me.

“Holy, my biological clock is fucking ticking, Batman!” I thought, the scales falling off my eyes. Because that, of course, is what this is all about. A woman may say she just wants to discover herself, or to save the poor children of Haiti. But what she really wants is to be loved, to be “chosen”, and (for most women anyway) to have her own baby to love and to hold. They’ve got all this estrogen coursing through their veins, and they just have to put all that loving energy somewhere.

“Every couple in the world has the potential over time to become a small and isolated nation of two,” Gilbert coos, “Creating their own culture, their own language, and their own moral code, to which no one else can be privy.”

It is a sweet thought, and one of the reasons that I decided to hear Gilbert speak. I’ve ruminated along similar lines about my own marriage, about its wide circumference, its ability to shade us from most of the B.S. of modern culture.

But if a marriage contains the ability to create your own “small nation”, then your children connect that nation to posterity, to the future of the planet. For all their gallivanting about and their wringing of hands, contemporary women are back in the same place they were a generation ago, one where they secretly hope to ensnare a man into the joys of domesticity. But this time, her man better be able to live up to her high expectations, to be devoted yet enthralling, that “most vivid representation” of a woman’s personality.

The contemporary American male has been taking flak from all sides, as witnessed by Katie Roiphe’s essay “The Naked and the Conflicted” and the chorus of hallelujahs (along with a fair share of criticism) that came in the wake of its Dec 31 publication in the New York Times. In it, Roiphe condemns the contemporary American male writer, guys like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Safran Foer, for their flaccid narcissism, using her belated praise for the sexual virility of the Roths and Updikes of the previous literary generation as a cudgel to attack and condemn the legitimacy of today’s men. To argue the merits of each literary generation is an exercise for another day. Suffice to say that Roiphe’s basic premise, if not her conclusion, holds merit. I personally find both David Foster Wallace and Philip Roth very talented but also incredibly annoying, Wallace precisely for making a fetish out of our individual and collective impotence and Roth for his over-the-top sexual braggadocio and bravado. I’ll also note that my favorite writers from each group, namely Saul Bellow from the old school and Dave Eggers in the contemporary crowd, can also descend into the stylized machismo and impotence of their respective generations.

What is important to note here is that for Roiphe, much like for Gilbert, the American male is simply inadequate. A generation ago, we were inadequate because we were macho, grasping, selfish. Now we are inadequate because we are soft and pliable, but with a cool-eyed contemplation that Roiphe interprets as simply the flip side of the old narcissism. My point is that, for this generation of pampered princesses who roam our universities or hold court on Oprah, no reasonable, mortal man would be good enough for them. So, like Roiphe, they flail at literary windmills, or like Gilbert, they hang out on a distant beach and wait to be saved by some exotic stranger. Meanwhile, “Hangover” portrays a world where everything would be just fine, as long as women would lighten up and allow their husbands the occasional trip off the marital reservation to fulfill our seemingly irrepressible need to act like boys.

But do not fret, as reality is a lot less depressing than the fantasies concocted in the imaginary worlds of Hollywood or Manhattan. A CBS News poll finds that 90% of Americans are happy with the spouses they married. Perhaps even more interesting is the economic breakdown, as 95% of the couples making over $50,000/year are happy with who they married, while this percentage drops to 83% for those making under $50,000/year. In other words, those with lower incomes are 3.4 times more likely to be unhappy with their choice of mate than those who are making decent money, and most of those who are disappointed are women (15%, versus 5% for men). Meanwhile, statistically, 0% of those polled said that money was the most important feature in a happy marriage. Rather, it was respect (at 49%) and trust (37%) that were viewed as most important. In other words, most folks say they are looking for trust and respect, but this means little if they don’t have the economic freedom to live their lives. As my Dad used to say, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. And let me tell you, rich is a whole lot better.”

So, Happy Valentine’s Day, all my loved and loving friends. I have good news for you. Most of us who have ventured into a state of matrimony will have basically happy marriages, the exceptions generally being those who either married too young or who for whatever reason are just incorrigibly selfish. Assuming that both of you have a normal sympathy for the people around you, about the biggest thing you have to worry about is making enough money to satisfy your basic desires and to buy the mental space that goes along with a sense of personal freedom. Everything else pretty much sorts itself out in the wash.