Are Men Necessary?
The author says yes—but then, he would.
(Page 4 of 4)
Anyone who has done a turn as a sportswriter has already seen the way in which professional athletes, the dominant males in our society, enjoy almost unlimited sexual liberties. Wilt “the Stilt” Chamberlain, the great seven-one basketball player of the sixties, has been making the rounds of the talk shows, touting his autobiography, in which he claims to have bedded 20,000 women. That works out to 1.37 women every night of his life since the age of fifteen—or 235.294 women per inch of the Stilt, if one were to become obsessive about it. “I don’t see how he can stand that much human contact,” my sister observed, but of course this is a fundamental male fantasy, to go from mate to mate without entanglements or even the whisper of a relationship. It’s only the family and the conventions of society that train men to the habits of monogamy.
“I’m thinking about having a baby,” an attractive young woman friend of ours told me recently. There was a challenging look in her eye.
“Are you getting married?” I asked.
“Not unless I find a boyfriend,” she said. “How do you like being a father?”
I felt a little uncertain about the terms of this conversation. I asked if she had someone picked out. She said she might have. She had talked it over with him, but she hadn’t decided.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
Was it a fantasy on my part or was she sizing me up as a sire? My children have turned out well, so I’ve got a track record in that department. “I think—I think I’ve got mixed feelings,” I sputtered. What I told her was that men are important in the raising of children, not just in the biological fathering of them. If she just wants a baby, she could go to the sperm bank and get designer genes, but a father is more than a package of chromosomes. My kids have done well in part because I’ve been a feature of their lives. I’m proud of that, and not just the fact that Caroline has my hair and my gumption and Gordon has my voice and my sense of humor—qualities that are all refined and made more attractive in them than in me. It’s not only my genes but my presence that has helped them become the people they are.
That’s what I told our attractive young friend. What I didn’t tell her was, Yes, yes, let it be me. Let me spread my seed and multiply without responsibility. This is so much better than ovular merging.
SOMETIMES ON THE JOGGING TRAIL I pass a man who once was a father. He plods along like a specter among the shirtless Apollos with their sculpted torsos and the women with Dobermans on leashes and visor-hidden faces. During his bitter divorce, his wife accused him of molesting his kids. Now the court forbids him visitation rights. My wife and I were shocked, because everything we knew about this man told us he was a caring and attentive parent—in fact, just about the best father we knew. He asked my wife to testify on his behalf, and although she agreed to do so, she was relieved when she was never called. Who knows what really goes on in another family’s life?
Both lawyers and psychotherapists have noted a trend of false charges of sexual abuse by wives against husbands in custody suits. “With more and more judges awarding joint custody to parents and even sole custody to fathers, lawyers say many women feel forced to press more vigorously in court for what was once presumed to be their right,” reported the New York Times. Dr. Melvin Guyer, a University of Michigan child psychologist, said that when he began evaluating custody cases for the courts in 1982, only 5 to 10 percent of the two hundred cases he reviewed each year involved accusations of sexual abuse. Now that figure is 30 percent. “We never saw this sort of thing two, three years ago,” Dr. Guyer told the Times. “Before, it was ‘he drinks, she runs around’—the usual stuff. This is a new song and everybody’s singing it.”
“The false allegation serves a lot of purposes—in a totally unconscious fashion,” said Dr. Arthur Green, the medical director of the Family Center in New York’s Presbyterian Hospital, in a 1988 article in New York magazine. “It’s a way of getting even, a way of gaining control over your child at a time when you feel very out of control. It’s a way of getting this guy you hate out of your life forever.”
I don’t want children to remain in the care of abusive fathers, and if my friend really did molest his kids, then he is rightly being kept apart from them. But what happened to him adds to the generalized sense men have that their rights are being compromised and that society is predisposed to believe women—at men’s expense. An article in Time in 1987 on wife beating among the affluent boasted that “attitudes are improving” among police officers, who formerly were in denial. The example cited is the Charleston, South Carolina, police department, which has made a policy of arresting spouse abusers even if the victim declines to press charges. “To make the collar sting,” Time trumpeted, “the assailant is arrested at his place of work.” This sounds like police fascism to me.
Behind this attack on men, it seems to me, is the myth of the good mother. In a culture in which fathers are increasingly rare, this myth is bound to gain power; indeed, I see a direct correlation between the exodus of men from families and the popular conception of women as victims. In order to protect the ideal of female innocence, men shoulder the blame.
There has always been a predisposition in the justice system to believe that mothers are better parents than fathers, reflected in the preferential treatment women receive in custody suits, and that females who commit crimes are somehow less guilty than males convicted of the same offenses. The latest example of that is the trend to pardon women in prison who have murdered their husbands. About 60 percent as many women kill their husbands every year as husbands kill wives. In arriving at their sentences, judges and juries presumably have taken into account the mitigating circumstances that led to the murders. And yet in Ohio and Maryland, more than thirty husband killers have been released; many other states, including Texas, are reviewing cases in which women claim to have been so abused that their actions were justified. (The only male being considered is a boy who killed his stepfather.) I’m opposed to the death penalty for anybody, but it strikes me as hypocritical to say that women murderers are essentially innocent of their crimes because they were in abusive relationships, whereas men get what they deserve—both the men who kill and those who are killed. Is this what women mean by equal rights?
I LIFT UP CAROLINE and take her to bed. Nothing in the world means more to me than our love for each other. I love the difference between us, her femaleness and my maleness. It is a powerful and curious experience to see parts of myself manifested in little-girl form; she is a sort of mirror for me, across time and gender.
I’m afraid of what life has to offer her. I’m worried that the family idea is finished and that the sexes have pulled so far apart that some radical and soulless bureaucratic arrangement is in the process of replacing it. I want Caroline to find love and to experience the joy that I have in being her parent. I want her to find a man who will love her as deeply as I do, who will take care of her and nurture her and stay with her the rest of her life. But I think the chances of that happening are small.
I know that her relationships with men will depend, in large measure, on what she gets from me. That is the most important thing I can give her, a sense of being with a man, trace memories of having me tickle her and toss her in the air, of my taking her temperature when she’s sick and rubbing her face with a cool cloth, of dancing on my shoes. She will remember these things in some almost unrememberable way: They will be a part of her character; she will be the kind of person these things happened to. Therefore she will probably be more trusting of men. That may be a mistake. Who knows what kind of men she is going to meet?
But perhaps her generation will come to a different conclusion. They may decide that the sexes have something special to offer each other, and they’ll be able to look at the very things that separate men and women and appreciate them, even savor them. In that case, the language they will learn to speak to each other will be that of love, not blame.
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