How things are in the real world

When we built our house, I did all the electrical wiring. When the inspector came, he noted that the electrical contractor field was marked “homeowner”. Right away he looks at DH and says “so, you did the wiring,huh?”. When DH told him that I did it, he nitpicked it to death. Not one single real problem just little crap like using the wrong color wirenuts on the ground wires or wanting to know why I’d put in so many outlets.
Same thing with the propane company. When they learned that I ran the propane lines/fittings for a new generator, they insisted on doing a ‘routine safety check’. They’d known about the new lines and gen for several years, but never seemed concerned til they found out I did it. We needed a new regulator and I called the propane company and talked to the maintenance guy and was told they couldn’t legally sell me one. I’d have to pay him to come install it. Dh called and had one the next day. So don’t take it personally. I think it’s just an inborn testosterone thing.

By the way, I’d be interested to know if you and Joel are really the same person. Seems he has a big house building project in the desert going on too. Coincidence?

Hey Claire,

Around 9 years ago my wife and I built our log home. Together we preformed the role of prime contractor AKA Boss for the project. I actually had to fire a guy who could not understand that my wife and I were calling the shots. I must say that there were a few times when I wanted to strangle tradesmen who thought I was a retarded child so I know how you feel. BTW I have learned to pay attention to what my wife tells me since she is more often than not right.

MJR

I wish I had a good answer for that, Claire, but it happens, and not just with construction. I have been known to fluster salesmen in some other male-dominated industries, when my wife Cathy approaches them and they begin by pointedly responding to me. I put forth a firm “best you pay attention, my friend, the ice under your feet just gave a loud crack” gaze and very deliberately say some variation on, “This is Cathy’s operation and she is conducting the present business. Or, not.”

As Randall Munroe put it, it’s
How It Works

Sadly, it is fairly common that a good percentage of these guys still do not get it. (I’m of the opinion that if you get yourself to that stage in the first place, the point has probably already been lost. It’s like a “Condition White” for inter-gender relations.) I’m sure there are quite a few who judge me for the “hey, I’m just the husband” approach, but the joke’s on them: not likely they’ll land themselves a Cathy. 🙂

There are better fellas, though, and I always grin a bit when I watch someone “get it” in the same scenario. There’s the initial assumption of stereotype, recognition of a response anomaly, re-assessment with ears connected to the cognitive processing center, a short bit of wrestling with stereotypes…and then simple engagement with an equal. When it happens, it happens with beautiful speed, and often an extra measure of enjoyment for everyone involved. (And what do you know, we tend to go back to those places. 🙂

The guys could be, quite simply, showing out, probably unconciously. Deep on some hidden layer of their brain they have been inoculated with ridiculous ideas like: “It ain’t right for wimmenfolk to be a’doin such works” and “I sure don’t want them wimmens to find a problem I could have found” and other equally silly nonsense. Now, I’m not insulting said guys at all. They’d probably be embarrased and a little horrified to find such thoughts still rattling around in their heads. Also, I’m not bringing up the old patriarchal bull-stuff excuse: in my experience, it’s most often women themselves who put those ideas in the heads of men.

And much can be alternately explained by the simple fact that, when a bunch of guys get full steam ahead on a complex project, they can be ruder than they mean to be.

Or none of those. My two worthless pieces of compound metal with the picture of a tyrant on ’em. You ask, I opine. 🙂

‘I think it’s just an inborn testosterone thing.’

Actually, Karen, it sounds to me like it’s a simple authoritarian thing, and the examples you cite are devastatingly illustrative. (I’m putting aside, for now, the petty different treatment of man/woman by the propane company, without in any way defending it… 🙂

My wife’s father redid the wiring in his house before he sold it (this was to “bring it up to code”, y’see) and it was a similar story to yours. The “licensed electrician” had to grudgingly admit that yes, he had done everything properly, and that it did pass “inspection” so it could be “legally” sold. At every stage, the impression that this is a racket for officially sanctioned racketeers, and you didn’t follow the playbook like you were supposed to was palpable.

Note how every use of quotations in that last paragraph represents revenue that the state presumes to monopolize. Cui bono, indeed.

And in the end, how about that different treatment of man/woman by the propane company? Whether or not it was a man/woman thing, the attempt to discourage you was based upon the premise that you do not own the decision in the first place, but rather someone else–someone who gets to decide what “legal” is–does. (Hey, look, it’s those quotes again. 🙂

Hi, Claire. Long time no write between us…
When I lived in SC, I ran into that problem every single day – from political debate to employment to getting helped in a store. I’d walk into a farm supply store and get treated like ‘the lil woman’ – sometimes even ignored because a woman obviously didn’t belong over by the tractors but by the small shelf of kitchenware. I learned how to talk like a man, be brusque and firm and abrupt, and say what I meant, especially when I would say, while walking out the door “That’s alright – someone else probably wants my money more than you do.”

Now that I’ve moved to NE, I live in an area where the county trap shooting champ last year was a 13 year old redheaded girl, and where girls compete against boys in rodeos, hunting, and fishing – and frequently take home the prizes. Women here walk tall and do for themselves, and need no may-un, TYVM! I can go into the local feed store – where the co-owner, a wonderful woman, can advise me on everything from saddles to ear tagging my cattle with knowledge and authority. ‘Round here, there’s no ‘macho’ attitude – everyone does whatever they want and are best suited to do. They are only respected for what they do, not for what they say they can. The fellows that are coming to help build the garage know to talk to both DH and me, or not to talk at all.

My DH and I have always worked together and taught each other what we know, and respected each other’s knowledge. Where we come from, that is unheard of – some folks used to shake DH’s hand and say how awful it must be to be married to someone so stubborn and headstrong. Where we are now, it is accepted as a matter of course. I won’t tolerate the ‘lil wimmin’ attitude, and will immediately mouth off to whomever tries it. Which is why I have a rep as a bitch. And don’t really care, as long as I can get what I want. ;->

It’s not just construction. I’ve run into that mentality waaaaay too often. Many businesses have lost out on my money for that crap. And 90% of my classmates in an electronics class dropped out because they couldn’t handle a “girl” who was good at math. At least one guy only learned after getting shot because he wouldn’t listen (training/wargames, it was with a paintball gun, but still)

Unfortunately, I’ve seen women doing the same thing to men on certain topics. Just watch when a non-effeminate guy walks into a fabric store!

Ellendra Said:

“Unfortunately, I’ve seen women doing the same thing to men on certain topics. Just watch when a non-effeminate guy walks into a fabric store!”

Haa! Been there, done that! I’ve been following this discussion wondering when someone would bring up the other side of the coin. My frequent experiences in fabric stores have been irritating at times but nothing I get terribly upset about. Men and women are different enough that we irritate each other on a regular basis. It’s just the way it is.

Hmmm, gender politics now? Do you really want to go there?

Had I done so I would have been labeled a pushy bitch, rather than being respected as “one of the guys.”

Well, Claire, I certainly don’t think of you as a “pushy bitch”, rather as an intelligent woman whose conversation is of considerable value. However, in all honesty, the simple truth is that, in this life at least, you’re not “one of the guys”. And, although I would agree that the men in this situation could perhaps have been more considerate and polite (though like all modern men, they’re already under a lot of chronic stress over these issues, in addition to the stress of the job itself), I submit that it’s modern women’s insistence on being treated as “one of the guys” — when it suits them, but (of course) not when it doesn’t suit them — without the least consideration of the 1.5 billion years of merciless evolutionary process recorded in our genetic code since the invention of sex, that is the primary cause of such problem situations.

We men, I know, are relatively simple creatures; why then is it so hard for wiser women to understand that we get confused when the rules (which, as noted in a recent feminist classic, are made by women) keep changing? (Actually, of course, as Camille Paglia — see below — discusses, this could be just another example of female testing technique: those males who can maintain their sanity and functionality in the face of relentless female irrationality are thus good mate candidates.)

Some years back I was intrigued to learn that among the Pueblo cultures of what’s now the American Southwest (where I’ve lived for a quarter century), in some communities the men did the weaving and the women were forbidden to touch a loom, while in others the women did the weaving and the men were forbidden to touch a loom. Clearly it was not a matter of one sex or the other being naturally better at weaving (though in fact this may be the case, but probably only slightly so, and there are other fields of endeavor where there are clear gender differences).

Otherwise, of course, these cultures differentiated the sexes economically: the women owned the houses, where men entered only with their permission, while the men owned the fields and hunting grounds, and the activities associated therewith. If a man displeased a woman, she would place his personal belongings outside the house and he’d have to find another place to sleep, and some way to store and process his raw food materials; if a woman couldn’t make an alliance with a man, she’d have a hard time finding food.

I’m not saying such an arrangement is the only one possible (there have been others, including e.g. men and women living separately in group lodges), or must necessarily be iron-clad; but it did work, possibly because it was based on certain fundamental realities which cannot — astonishingly enough — be altered by simple fiat, even from an all-female Congress.

For some hundreds of thousands of years, as long as there have been human cultures, those cultures that have survived and prospered have organized separate territories for the sexes. Why? Because if you’re going to put the two most dangerous predators on the planet in one place and not have mutually-assured destruction, each must have something the other wants and doesn’t have, so that each can get what e wants/needs only through peaceful exchange.

However, in the late 19th & 20th centuries, women in America suddenly decided to junk this ancient arrangement, and insist on “equal rights” — meaning the universal application of the “heads we win, tails you lose” policy that men have always experienced in any head-on confrontation with the gentler sex. So now it’s been made politically incorrect (even illegal in many instances) for men to have any territory of their own — physical, mental or emotional — while of course women can continue to exercise their traditional privileges, including various territories where men cannot trespass.

(Oh, and btw, if the sexes are “equal”, why is it, if there’s trouble in a marriage, it’s always the man who sleeps on the couch? I’ve never seen anyone ask this question, though it seems fundamental to me.)

But still… Call me sexist if you want (I’ve been called worse — if indeed there is anything worse), but I’m afraid I must insist, even as the noose is placed around my neck, that there are differences between the sexes. “Eppur, si muove.” And that the differences are, in the end, not reducible to a simple list that can be included in a law or statute regarding intersexual relations. The effort to do so has resulted in what we have now: “Both sexes are equal, but one sex is more equal than the other.” And, I submit, in the end this will prove to be unfortunate for both sexes.

Because, despite what many women seem to think, we are not really separate; we’re two halves of a whole species, and promoting a “war between the sexes” is as silly and futile and destructive as one hand cutting off the other and calling it “victory”.

As always, what I find most interesting, in any discussion of matters of controversy, is the unmentioned, unexamined assumptions behind the position stated. For instance, feminists make a big point of insisting on “equal pay for equal work”. But who decides that the work is “equal”? The woman. In other words, when a woman is involved, the employee must have the absolute authority to define her worth to the employer. And how does she know that her work is “equal”? Well, like all women, she just knows. And it’s just not fair.

Does it really need to be spelled out that men do not, cannot tolerate this kind of “thinking” amongst themselves? As Rich Zubaty — see below — points out, human survival for hundreds of thousands of years (at least) has depended absolutely on highly-refined, efficient teamwork among men (think hunting party facing a mammoth, or defending the village wall against the Huns), which in turn relies on rigidly enforced standards of thinking and communication.

And thus, that when women are allowed into the councils of men, the whole situation changes in ways that make it simply unworkable for men — and thus intolerable for those men who take their responsibilities seriously? Few men, of course, understand all this consciously, but it’s all there, genetically encoded — necessary survival traits tend to be persistent like that — and it has an effect. Thus, annoyance and frustration, and… “pushy bitch” — even if, in this one situation, you aren’t.

No, of course it would be “sexist” to point out any such thing.

And, of course, there’s the other, ever-present issue: When men and women are together, the possibility of sex arises, which confuses and supercharges everything. Women commonly complain about this fact, without recognizing that the reason humans — nearly unique as a species — always have sex on the brain was women’ evolutionary decision, apparently somewhere between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, to display sexual receptivity at all times, not just (like chimpanzees) during the brief periods when they are fertile. And women do play the sex card, at all times, consciously or (mostly) unconsciously — and then get angry at men for either not ignoring it or not responding, sometimes in the same breath.

Like I said, we’re simple creatures, genetically encoded to literally die for a chance at what our hormones tell us we can’t live without. Playing with fire, oddly enough, is likely to get you burnt.

This fact, I believe, is what Jefferson had in mind: “Were our State a pure democracy, in which all its inhabitants should meet together to transact all their business, there would yet be excluded from their deliberations … Women, who, to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men.”

Having grown up in the midst of the War Between the Sexes, and been seriously damaged therein, I’ve felt a lifelong compelling interest in trying to sort out and understand this most tangled skein. The key that began to unlock it all I discovered in a little book I found through a note in Whole Earth Review in 1987: XXXWhy Males Exist, by Fred Hapgood.

This pop science writer set out to examine the question of sex: How did it happen, and why did it become the dominant mode in this particular biosphere? And found that the real question was what he titled his book, when he discovered one simple fact: that while males cannot exist without females, females can exist without males. As demonstrated by the numerous species which used to consist of females and males, but now consist only of females — such as the whiptail lizard of the American Southwest, who reproduces (after a kind of lesbian mimicking of reptile coitus, apparently required to stimulate egg production) by laying haploid (half a full set of chromosomes) eggs that hatch into clones of the mother.

Thus, finally, a solution to the circular conundrum of “he-said-she-said”: There is a First Sex, and a second — and, interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir got it exactly wrong (why is an interesting question) in her famous feminist canon. Thus, I find the notion of “sexual equality” laughable: how can the creature be “equal” to his Creator?

Keep in mind, however, that cases of species who’ve ceased producing males, though numerous enough, are still rare in relation to those who remain sexual, and tend to prosper only in specific, limited ecological niches. Why? Because they can evolve, if at all, only very slowly, as they cannot employ the generational genetic roulette of sexuality to meet arising challenges. They are essentially evolutionary dead-ends.

Take, for instance, the case of the gecko lizards common in tropical climes. They exist in many species, a few of them (what I call) post-sexual, i.e. females-only. The latter populate isolated islands in the South Pacific (where, presumably, a single female arrived on a piece of driftwood and proceeded to reproduce without male assistance); however, as modern human transportation methods spread the species around, whenever a sexual gecko species invades the territory of a post-sexual one, the sexual species (i.e. the one with males) invariably takes over.

Also worth noting is that, so far as I know, there are no female-only species in the warm-blooded, fast-moving kindoms: birds and mammals. Only reptiles and phylogenetically more “primitive” species have gone this route, as well as numerous plants.

Males are indeed expensive (as noted in the title of a recent feminist screed) — not least in that you actually have to put up with the annoying fact that they’re different from females — but the bottom line is they confer a decided evolutionary advantage to sexual species. That’s reality, ladies. And presumably why you still produce males in this species.

The wisdom of two modern Men of Knowledge, both interviewed in Rolling Stone in the late 1980s, also taught me a lot:

Bob Dylan: “Women rule the world; no man ever did anything unless a woman allowed or encouraged him to do it.”

And Jack Nicholson: Rolling Stone: You genuinely like women, don’t you? Jack Nicholson: Yeah, I genuinely do. I prefer the company of women, and I have a deep respect for them. I’m buzzed by the female mystique. I always tell young men there are three rules: They hate us, we hate them; they’re stronger, they’re smarter; and, most important, they don’t play fair.

And the wisdom of an anonymous poster on an Internet bulletin board: “Males are a genetic experiment conducted by females.”

I’ve also found considerable light shed on the subject of “What’s with the sexes, anyway?” in (some of) the writings of feminist gadfly Camille Paglia; I recommend particularly the Introduction (“Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”) to Sexual Personae, and the essay “No Law in the Arena” in Vamps and Tramps. She tells it like it is., perhaps because, as an avowed lesbian, she doesn’t feel the need to maintain the veil of secrecy — and, as a “butch” lesbian, she has (she says) experienced the same frustration with feminine behavior as do men.

What’s really puzzling, as Paglia writes, is that apparently many women actually believe their own “poor little helpless me” PR; thus they exercise their real, fundamental, overwhelming maternal and sexual power unconsciously, with no check of reason or sense, and with unfortunate results for all.

I realize it will be regarded as ridiculous for me to mention this, but as a man, with my admittedly limited intelligence and understanding, it seems to me there may still be another possibility: Could it be, in this situation, and others similar, that there is something the men know that the women don’t? Of course, that’s impossible, since as we all know, women already know everything — at least everything that’s of any importance. And how do they know? That’s not for us men to know — they just know.

Nevertheless, I can only, once again, stick out my neck for the axe, and recommend another book that has helped me substantially in investigating this whole vexed question: Rich Zubaty’s inspired What Men Know That Women Don’t . (A PDF version is available here.)

Well, a few hurried thoughts on a big subject. (I didn’t bring it up.) Someday, perhaps, I’ll write a book about it, once I manage to repair all the damage that women did to me — unintentionally, yes, but very effectively — early in my life.

HaHa!
Has this been entertaining! I gotta say, there sure are lots of female type women around who think their role in life is to exist with a chip on their shoulder because they are girls!
Well, ladies, there are plenty of times you can knock men over. There is usually your one up mans ship in that you have longer life spans, and whether or not you choose to employ it, you probably have the means to bring the next generation forth.
Now I see that that’s not enough, you have to be so fiercely competitive about everything, and so hyper sensitive about the results of this, that some of you would rather pretend to be male than accept your femininity.
What you ladies don’t get is that you are being treated exactly like guys treat everybody else. Yep, that’s right, guys are short to the point of being abrupt and rude-why do you think men fight so much? Hint, it aint cuz we’re all warm, fuzzy and politically correct inside.
If you want to play with the boys, take your lumps like everyone else. Just the way it is, ma’am!

LMAO@the long-winded defensiveness on display. Not to mention the bargain basement sarcasm.

Hehe, this is the most fun, the most enlightening read I’ve had in a long time….and I took notes…..

Nice job, from all the sides represented…..

I think the root cause often boils down simply to prejudice. Once one has ingrained in one’s own mind something about someone else based on an arbitrary class they belong to, one may find oneself unaware that one has mentally divested them of their individuality. One may have difficulty abandoning one’s prejudice if one is not aware that it exists. It may not be a matter of willful disrespect at that point, but merely unthinking habit.

Claire,

Maybe it’s not sexism but just that the “boss” has to verify all data. The “boss” is not the owner or even the most competent but whoever was put in charge and has the overall responsibility, although really I can’t imaging anyone not listening to a potential problem (with the anchor bolts), if they heard it over the din. Maybe there was so much going on it just didn’t register.

When we built the large room onto the cabin, my daughter was “the boss”, even though it was her first construction project. Even the lead carpenter, with 25 years experience, gave her the final say so on anything/everything because it was her job but it was a pretty stress free, laid back project, the kind I like best.

Was there a designated “boss”? Sounds like a pretty stressful situation. I have an older brother who acts like the people you mentioned, so I can say, sometimes its not gender related, just bull headed. Interesting discusion though.

You got it soo right – when my sister’s basement flooded during the rain while the ground was still frozen & she said “we need to dig a ditch to move the water away from the house”, she was ignored. But, when the guy next door says, “we need to dig a ditch to move the water away from the house”, her husband & sons get right to it. They just can’t believe a girl could possibly get it right.