Tradition and the Sexes
By Mary Elizabeth Podles, Leon Podles
Courtship and the Rules
(Or, Why Young Women Need Flowers & Candy)
By Mary Elizabeth Podles
There is a tradition in my house of not reading bestsellers, but I’ve made an exception for The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right. Politically incorrect from the title on, this guide to old-fashioned coquetry has raised the hackles of every feminist writer worth her salt. The book’s crime: implicitly casting doubt on the sexual revolution, which was supposed to bring the sexes into equilibrium. Making childbirth optional through contraception—and providing abortion on demand for those pesky infants who still insisted upon appearing on the scene—was supposed to abolish the old stereotype of man as hunter and woman as prey. Then with the field of sexual pleasure-without-consequence open to everyone equally, the rules become the same for women as for men. All we have to do is speak our preferences plainly and a whole new world of mutual felicity should arise.
Unfortunately, with the playing field leveled, we find ourselves playing a form of no-holds-barred rugby, when some of us would rather be playing croquet. Now, many women play rugby and enjoy it—but all who play it end up shaken and bruised. Somehow not everyone is happy in the new feminist framework. Marriage, which should have become a 50-50 partnership with every child a wanted child, is not alive and well in America. Dare we say it? The new concept of sexual parity does not work.
Enter the Rules Girls, authors Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider. Right out loud they announce that something is awry. Things are not better than what we had before. It may be that men and women are constitutionally different. Recent neurological studies reveal that men and women use entirely different areas of their brains to solve problems, endure pain, and store the gender of the definite article in German. The relatively new science of evolutionary psychology dares to suggest that the different neurologies have distinct advantages, and anyway are too deeply ingrained by eons of human experience to be altered by the relatively new processes of human reason.
Courtship behavior, for instance, seems to be very deep-seated. Psychologists interviewing subjects about what attracted them to their mates were startled at how quickly food entered into the conversation. Gradually it dawned on those who had studied animal psychology that courtship feeding was often crucial to mating, that there were lizards, for example, who were never permitted to copulate without first presenting their intended with a nice juicy bug.
Or consider the bowerbird of New Guinea. The male spends hours constructing an elaborate edifice of no apparent practical purpose. Some build "dancing platforms," thick mats of leaves arranged silvery side up and studded with flowers and fruits; some create "maypoles," towers of berry-studded twigs twined around saplings with garlands of fruits and flowers swung between them. Some plant surrounding lawns of tree moss. Some build long "avenues" of decorated interlacing sticks between trees. Others build huts the size of children’s playhouses and paint the insides with a mixture of fruit juices, charcoal, and saliva, daubed on with a "paintbrush" made of leaves (a rare instance of an animal using a tool). These puzzling structures are not nests; the female builds a small brown nest elsewhere. The bowers are far too conspicuous for the assured safety of young. Instead, they seem solely meant to please the female bowerbird, to persuade her that the builder is a suitable mate. No one asks these charming and energetic birds whether all this is really necessary, and from an evolutionary standpoint, the strategy seems eminently successful: there are 17 species of bowerbird, each with its own distinct architectural style.
So, too, men and women seem to be different, at least when it comes to courtship behavior. Our grandmothers may have known what they were doing after all. And so, having empirically discovered the bowerbird lurking in every male heart, the Rules Girls decided to reinvent the art of playing hard to get:
Men love a challenge—that’s why they play sports, fight wars, and raid corporations. The worst thing you can do is make it easy for them…. Men really feel good when they work hard to see you. Don’t take that away from them.
So far so good. The Rules Girls, the evolutionary psychologists, and I are in accord in opposing conventional feminist assumptions. But alas, the enemy of my enemies is not always my friend. I have serious reservations about The Rules. Partly I dislike its smartypants tone. Mostly, though, I object to the fact that the authors show you how to behave as if you were reticent, modest, and chaste—without insisting you actually adopt those virtues.
Some earlier writers have propounded essentially the same behavioral advice, but with a deeper understanding of the real nature of human courtship. May I recommend the excellent works of Dr. Jane Austen? Many are currently available on video. Miss Austen’s characters not only act according to the Rules but also have strong character too. How does Elizabeth Bennet first attract the attention of Mr. Darcy? She refuses to dance with him. Why does he notice the fineness of her eyes? She turns them away from him. Where does her sister Lydia, who is sex on wheels and not, shall we say, reticent about it, end up? In a disastrous marriage, based on convenience and short-term gratification, the kind that nowadays ends in divorce.
Miss Austen also raises the question many intelligent women find themselves asking: Is all this coyness really necessary? It smacks of insincerity and manipulation even in the best of circumstances. Surely we reasonable creatures could dispense with these convolutions? Even the redoubtable Miss Manners—a clear descendant of Austen—has to wrestle with this one a little when prescribing a dose of Rules behavior to a young woman whose suitor’s ardor seems to be cooling:
Miss Manners apologizes if this [recommendation] sounds like the old keep-’em-guessing routine. She is well aware how exhausting, degrading, and debilitating such antics are for the sure and loving heart. That is why God invented marriage: to give people a rest.
Miss Manners has put her dainty finger on the heart of the truth, a truth which even the Rules Girls, for all their smartness, have not quite reached. The difficult path of courtship is not just a biological quirk; it is a serious promise spoken without words. Love always asks for deeds, not words. In serious courtship, a man conveys to a woman that if she is worth all this trouble to court, she must be worth more than any other mate in the world, and shall henceforth be The One Woman. On her part, the woman promises that if she was this hard for him to get, surely she will, as his wife, be impossible for others to get. The courtship dance is the unspoken pledge of future fidelity—the best of all bases for a happy marriage. The uncertainties of the romantic beginning whisper a promise of stable partnership.
The best section of The Rules deals with what to do with a man once you get him. Their rules here are good ones to follow even if you are planning to be a nun, for they are the rules of the universe: "Don’t lie," "try to be serene and unselfish, or you won’t be a happy princess," "try not to raise your voice or scream too much," and so on. These are the rules for all who would lead a happy life. That, submit Ms. Fein and Ms. Schneider, is why they wrote the book in the first place.
And that, dear readers, is also why I have written this article on the importance of the tradition of courtship—not for you, but for my daughters, Mary and Sarah. Whether I hand on to you motherly advice, tough house rules, or just my dog-eared copy of Sense and Sensibility, it is simply because I want for you nothing more nor less than a happy life.
Mary Elizabeth Podles, former curator of Renaissance Art at the Walters Gallery, has degrees from Wellesley and Columbia and currently lives with her Mr. Right and their six children in Baltimore.
THE VITAL TRADITION OF MANHOOD
By Leon J. Podles
It is a straightforward fact that half of the human population is born male. Being a male and becoming a man, however, are two different things. To become a man, a boy has to undergo a process that is often stormy and perilous.
The primary caretakers of young children are almost always the mothers (in all cultures). A little girl can therefore model herself comfortably, right from the start, on her sexual elder. A boy, however, must at some point pull away from the security of his mother to seek out his male identity. He must confront challenges and dangers, and then learn to nurture in a masculine way by shedding sweat and blood to protect and provide for his mate and children.
Becoming a man requires the young boy to die to his old, mother-sheltered self and be born as a new person. He is forced to leave a warm place to find his natural role. Without a guide on this difficult path a man can easily lose his bearings, fall into the abyss, and even become an evil which threatens the community, rather than a front-line defender of the community.
Most boys learn what it is to be a man from their father. The most valuable thing a father can give his son—far more valuable than an inheritance, or a career, or a network of business associates—is a clear sense of the requirements of manhood. A father knows that becoming a good man requires transcending one’s self, and he knows how difficult that is, and that even he has only partially succeeded. He knows that good men must be taught and trained up that way, and that the body of male tradition and ritual is a very important tool for achieving this.
Fatherhood itself is a tradition—unlike motherhood, which is a fact of nature. A man must be educated into connecting himself to his children, and fathering them. He must have the traditions of previous fathers passed down to him. Staying through long years with the woman he has impregnated and the resulting child is a challenge to a man, who is urged by biology to seek younger women and work only to support himself.
Parents need institutional help in initiating boys into manhood. Pre-modern societies often have puberty rituals, and they are almost always for males. Boys are forcefully taken from their mothers and put through an ordeal which may even result in death, and which always breaks down their personality. They are whipped, tattooed, scarred, circumcised, buried alive. When the old boyish personality is dead, the adult men of the society instruct the boys in the sacred traditions of their society, the myths of origin, the meaning of sex, the necessity of being always ready to face challenges and to expend oneself for the life of others.
Societies that do not have puberty rituals make it even harder for boys, because the boys never know definitely when they have become men. The cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and of the Germans did not have rites; instead they had epics. Every Greek boy traditionally learned the Iliad and the Odyssey so that he could know what it was to be a man in his society.
The Jews, too, wanted their boys to grow up to be men, sons of the covenant. The books of the Old Testament were written, in large part, to show men what it was to be a man. The writers showed the dangers and pitfalls along the path to true manhood, the traps into which even Adam and Abraham and Moses had fallen. The writers showed Israel being guided by a Providence that was slowly forming the perfect man, a man who would learn to be a man by studying the traditions of his people, the books that his ancestors had written.
Institutions dedicated to making men out of boys are always full of tradition in its most concrete form—ritual. The armies and athletic teams and fraternal orders of the world have uniforms, flags, toasts, songs, music handed down from one generation to the next, all as reminders that others have gone this way before and succeeded. It is no accident that members of the male-dominated armed services have below-average crime rates, while underclass boys, living in matriarchal families and experiencing the least male dominance, have the highest crime rates.
Boys who are growing into men need guidance. If a boy tries to become a man on his own, he will probably fail, and in any society where a significant number of men never grow up, there will be suffering. For unmanly men tend to two extremes: either soft and selfish, unwilling to support or defend others, or harsh and violent, accustomed to brutally taking whatever they want.
Alas, the traditions that build manhood are being lost in our society. Many grown males neglect them, and feminists assault them directly. There are attacks on masculine tradition in the American military, in education, and in family life. Men have already vanished from black families and are rapidly vanishing from white families. The churches, even those nominally run by male clergy, have long since been turned over to women. Most now provide little guidance on how to become a man. A lad of mushy personality will now be told to join the Marines to become a man, not pushed toward the seminary.
Wherever they do remain, masculine traditions are derided as irrational. Of course they are irrational. But manhood is not rational. It is not rational to die to protect others. Manhood is a cultural invention that is practical (indeed, vital) for society. But it is not built on individual reason.
Without the guidance of men and the traditions of manhood, boys pick up what clues they can from the media, or gangs of one type or another, and they often make a botch of their growing up. Violence is the only consistent message they see. But while willingness to risk violence against evil is part of manhood, without the full tradition of manhood and the moral guidance it contains, male aggression can convert boys into monsters that prey on society, the Grendels lurking in the dark, the predators who shoot women and children.
It is very, very easy for a boy unguided by the inheritance of the traditional male script to go wrong. Critics who attack "patriarchy" and the teaching rituals of masculinity are wrong if they think the result will be a gentler, more androgynous society. It will be gangsta rappers and—beyond them, when the chaos becomes intolerable—the dark shadows of nihilism and the black uniforms of the S.S.
Leon J. Podles, father of six, has his doctorate in English from the University of Virginia. He is an assistant scoutmaster and is completing a book, The Castration of Christianity: Why Men Think Religion is Effeminate.
