In Minimizing Is Not a Bra I remarked, “But that’s a subject for another blog post.” Well, here it is.
A man I once worked with, a strong, proud Vietnam vet, had married an Asian woman he’d met during his tour of duty. They’d had a long and (at least according to his side of the story) happy marriage, successfully raising well-adjusted, responsible children and living normal, middle-class American lives.
Mr. Veteran attributed the success of their marriage to the fact that his wife never made excessive emotional demands upon him. His marriage was free, he once commented, of “emotional instability”. “I’ll tell you this,” he would say, chin raised high and lips thinned in a proud smirk, “In 40 years of marriage, I have never seen her cry.”
The looks he received at this remark from female coworkers were usually either disbelieving or simply aghast. I was certainly unimpressed. But after the third or fourth time he made this statement, a woman far more forceful than I am spoke up and said what we were all thinking.
“The operative word in your sentence is ‘seen’,” she said firmly. “Tell yourself anything you want; that woman has cried, and cried plenty—all alone. She knows she doesn’t dare display her feelings in front of you. She wouldn’t get any compassion or comfort. You’d never put your arms around her and hold her while she cried. You’d just walk away or get angry.”
Mr. Veteran scoffed, but we women nodded and agreed with our gutsy coworker. And I don’t believe any of us ever heard him dare make that reprehensible remark again.
The memory of this incident, though, came sharply to mind recently when a male member of a group I’m involved with intentionally belittled an emotional remark I made. I recognized his bullying and responded to it; I snapped right back at him. But experiencing his attempted intimidation in response to the feelings I displayed, and recollecting Mr. Veteran’s remarks, made me wonder why and how it is that women are still considered by many in Western society to be excessively emotional; why, in fact, the expression of feelings, especially sadness, continues to be considered, by society in general and males in particular, to be a “bad” thing.
I recalled an article written by a man describing his viewpoint of the male reaction to women’s tears: men were, he explained, very disturbed by any evidence of sadness, any weeping, because it might keep happening. And, he expounded, men just didn’t want to feel called upon to provide comfort by even acknowledging a woman’s sadness. They simply didn’t want to deal with it. Men, the author claimed, preferred a stiff upper lip to distress, no matter what was happening and in spite of every provocation.
This writer’s explanation sounded shockingly similar to the 1950s marital advice provided in women’s magazines, in which a wife was encouraged to make her home an oasis of perfection and quiet, ensuring that her spouse was undisturbed by any domestic problems. It flabbergasted me to realize that, 70-odd years after that era, a good many men are still expecting the same thing.
That led me to consider just how many books (many of them bestsellers) had been written, by men, for women, explaining to females just how they needed to treat their men to keep them happy. At least three-quarters of the “relationship books” of the past 50 or 60 years, I realized, were written in this vein. Why wasn’t the converse true, I wondered belatedly? Why weren’t the bestseller lists studded with books written by women, for men, advising them on how to make their female partners happy? Why was it assumed that the success of a relationship was predicated upon a woman doing all she could to make her male partner’s life a paradise: bending to his every whim; understanding his every requirement; meeting his every need?
With sudden and startling illumination, I belatedly realized why my misogynistic coworker had always made it a point to state that his wife was Asian. The shameful myth that Asian women are docile, subservient and submissive was part of his worldview. Sadly, his wife, transported following a brutal war from a country in tatters to life in what was nearly another world; dependent on him; feeling it incumbent to keep her marriage intact for her own and her children’s’ survival, fell in line with his demands, even to the point of suppressing her every emotional need–not because she was Asian, but because she, like so many women of all nationalities, everywhere, had been taught to caretake the needs of men to the detriment of her own.
That this has been the way of the world for centuries is appalling. That a marriage of such inequality could have been contracted in the 20th century is unspeakable.
But that such attitudes continue to exist is enough to make one weep.
If you’d like to read the prequel to this essay, you’ll find “Minimizing Is Not a Bra” by scrolling down to the Archives link below, and checking the post of June 9, 2021.
Speaking to the Heart of Many Matters 