In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) (6 page)

The thoughtfulness cannot be a mask, I concluded; it seems so natural, it seems like a genuine sensitiveness to others. It seems to come from identification and empathy.

Although my publishers were young—twenty-eight and twenty-nine years old—they did not introduce me to their wives. They were not invited to share in any of the dinners we had in restaurants or visits to the Noh plays and kabuki. To console myself I collected a large amount of novels, thinking I would then become more intimate with the feelings and thoughts of Japanese women. It was a woman, Lady Murasaki, who wrote the first diary in the year 900, and although it is a Proustian work of subtle and elaborate detail, although the feelings and thoughts of the personages at court are described, the woman herself remains an image. The modern works of women writers are not translated. And the novels, as a whole, did not bring me any closer to the Japanese woman. The same element of selflessness enters into the novels. Very few of the women are dominant or self-assertive. There is a strong tendency to live according to the code, the mores, the religious or cultural rules. To live for a collective ideal. The one who breaks away is described as a monster of evil.

On one of the touring buses on the way to Kiushu, there was a young woman guide in a light blue uniform, with a small white cap and white gloves. She was in reality homely, but her expression radiated such aliveness, such responsiveness, and participation to the voyagers, such warmth and friendliness that she kept the mood of the travellers high through an arduous and difficult day. At each village the bus stopped at, she sang the folk song of the region. Her voice was clear and sweet like a child’s, and yet it had a haunting quality like that of a wistful flute played in solitude. Through heat, through fatigue, through harassing travellers, she remained fresh, buoyant, light footed, carrying her modern burden of work as lightly as if it were a fan.

The children present a different mystery: the mystery of discipline and love dosed in such balance that they appear as the most spontaneous children I have ever seen, and at the same time the best behaved. They are lively, cheerful, charming, outgoing, expressive, and free, but their freedom never ends in sullenness or anarchy. I witnessed Japanese school children being guided through a museum, who came upon an American child of their own age. They surrounded him gaily, twittering and speaking the few words of English they knew. The American child looked sullen, suspicious, and withdrawn.

Through the gardens and the museums, they were responsive, curious. Their gaiety was continuous but contained. In Kyoto, during the Gion Festival, which lasts for several hours, the children were everywhere, but they did not disrupt the ceremony. The heat did not wilt them, the crowd did not dirty them, their clothes did not wrinkle. Had they learned so young to defeat slovenliness and ill-humor, to emerge fresh and gracious from the most wearing day? I thought of the gardens of Japan, the order, the stylization, the control of nature, so that they present only an aesthetically perfect image. Have the Japanese naturally achieved this miracle of aesthetic perfection? No weeds, no dead leaves, no disorder, no tangles, no withered flowers, no mud-splattered paths?

Such is my memory of women and children of Japan.

From
Playgirl,
September 1974.

This last year I spent most of my time with young women in colleges, young women doing their Ph.D.’s on my work. The talk about the diaries always led to private and intimate talks about their lives. I became aware that the ideals, fantasies, and desires of these women were going through a transition. Intelligent, gifted, participating in the creativity and activities of their time in history, they seem to have transcended the attraction for the conventional definition of a man.

They had learned to expose the purely macho type, his false masculinity, physical force, dexterity in games, arrogance, but more dangerous still, his lack of sensitivity. The hero of
Last Tango in Paris
repulsed them. The sadist, the man who humiliates woman, whose show of power is a facade. The so-called heroes, the stance of a Hemingway or a Mailer in writing, the false strength. All this was exposed, disposed of by these new women, too intelligent to be deceived, too wise and too proud to be subjected to this display of power which did not protect them (as former generations of women believed ) but endangered their existence as individuals.

The attraction shifted to the poet, the musician, the singer, the sensitive man they had studied with, to the natural, sincere man without stance or display, nonassertive, the one concerned with true values, not ambition, the one who hates war and greed, commercialism and political expediencies. A new type of man to match the new type of woman. They helped each other through college, they answered each other’s poems, they wrote confessional and self-examining letters, they prized their relationship, they gave care to it, time, attention. They did not like impersonal sensuality. Both wanted to work at something they loved.

I met many couples who fitted this description. Neither one dominated. Each one worked at what he did best, shared labors, unobtrusively, without need to establish roles or boundaries. The characteristic trait was gentleness. There was no head of the house. There was no need to assert which one was the supplier of income. They had learned the subtle art of oscillation, which is human. Neither strength nor weakness is a fixed quality. We all have our days of strength and our days of weakness. They had learned rhythm, suppleness, relativity. Each had knowledge and special intuitions to contribute. There is no war of the sexes between these couples. There is no need to draw up contracts on the rules of marriage. Most of them do not feel the need to marry. Some want children and some do not. They are both aware of the function of dreams—not as symptoms of neurosis, but as guidance to our secret nature. They know that each is endowed with both masculine and feminine qualities.

A few of these young women displayed a new anxiety. It was as though having lived so long under the direct or indirect domination of man (setting the style of their life, the pattern, the duties) they had become accustomed to it, and now that it was gone, now that they were free to make decisions, to be mobile, to speak their wishes, to direct their own lives, they felt like ships without rudders. I saw questions in their eyes. Was sensitivity felt as overgentle? Permissiveness as weakness? They missed authority, the very thing they had struggled to overcome. The old groove had functioned for so long. Women as dependents. A few women independent, but few in proportion to the dependent ones. The offer of total love was unusual. A love without egocentricity, without exigencies, without moral strictures. A love which did not define the duties of women (you must do this and that, you must help me with my work, you must entertain and further my career).

A love which was almost a twinship. No potentates, no dictators. Strange. It was new. It was a new country. You cannot have independence and dependence. You can alternate them equally, and then both can grow, unhampered, without obstacles. This sensitive man is aware of woman’s needs. He seeks to let her be. But sometimes women do not recognize that the elements they are missing are those which thwarted woman’s expansion, her testing of her gifts, her mobility, her development. They mistake sensitivity for weakness. Perhaps because the sensitive man lacks the aggressiveness of the macho man (which sends him hurtling through business and politics at tragic cost to family and personal relationships).

I met a young man, who although the head of a business by inheritance, did not expect his wife to serve the company, to entertain people not attractive to her, to assist in his contacts. She was free to pursue her own interests, which lay in psychology and training welfare workers. She became anxious that the two different sets of friends, his business associates and her psychologists, would create totally separate lives and estrange them. It took her a while to observe that her psychological experiences were serving his interests in another way. He was learning to handle those who worked for him in a more humanistic way. When an employee was found cheating while pumping the company’s gas to the other employees, he called him in and obtained his life history. He discovered the reason for the cheating (high hospital bills for a child) and remedied it instead of firing him, thus winning a loyal employee from then on. The couple’s interests, which seemed at first divergent, became interdependent.

Another couple decided that, both being writers, one would teach one year and leave the other free to write, and the other would take on teaching the next year. The husband was already a fairly well known writer. The wife had only published poems in magazines but was preparing a book of criticism. It was her turn to teach. He found himself considered a faculty member’s husband and was asked at parties, “Do you also write?” The situation could have caused friction. The wife remedied it by having reprinted in the school paper a review of her husband’s last novel, which established his standing.

Young women are engaging in political action when young men are withdrawing because of disillusionment. And the new woman is winning new battles. The fact that certain laws were changed renewed the faith of the new man. Women in politics are still at the stage of David and Goliath. They believe in the effect of a single stone! Their faith is invigorating when they and their husbands have sympathetic vibes, as they call it.

The old situation of the man obsessed with business, whose life was shortened by stress, and whose life ended at retirement, was reversed by a young wife who encouraged his hobby, painting, so that he retired early to enjoy art and travel.

In these situations the art of coordination manifests itself rather than the immature emphasis on irreconcilable differences. With maturity comes the sense that activities are interrelated and nourish one another.

Another source of bewilderment for the new woman is that many of the new men do not have the old ambitions. They do not want to spend their lives in the pursuit of a fortune. They want to travel while they are young, live in the present. I met them hitchhiking in Greece, Spain, Italy, France. They were living entirely in the present and accepting the hardships for the sake of the present adventures. One young woman felt physically unfit for the difficulties and carried a lot of vitamins in her one and only pack. She told me: “At first he made fun of me, but then he understood I was not sure I could take the trip physically, and he became as protective as possible. If I had married a conventional man, his concept of protection would have been to keep me home. I would not have enjoyed all these marvels I have discovered with David, who challenged my strength and made me stronger for it.” Neither one thought of surrendering the dream of travel while young.

One of the most frequent questions young women ask me is: How can a woman create a life of her own, an atmosphere of her own when her husband’s profession dictates their lifestyle? If he is a doctor, a lawyer, a psychologist, a teacher, the place they live in, the demands of the neighbors, all set the pattern of life.

Judy Chicago, the well-known painter and teacher, made a study of women painters and found that, whereas the men painters all had studios separate from the house, the women did not, and painted either in the kitchen or some spare room. But many young women have taken literally Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
and rented studios away from the family. One couple who lived in a one-room house set up a tent on the terrace for the wife’s writing activities. The very feeling of “going to work,” the physical act of detachment, the sense of value given to the work by isolating it, became a stimulant and a help. To create another life, they found, was not a breaking away or separating. It is striking that for woman any break or separation carries with it an aura of loss, as if the symbolic umbilical cord still affected all her emotional life and each act were a threat to unity and ties.

This fear is in women, not in men, but it was learned from men. Men, led by their ambitions, did separate from their families, were less present for the children, were absorbed, submerged by their professions. But this happened to men and does not necessarily have to happen to women. The unbroken tie lies in the feelings. It is not the hours spent with husband or children, but the quality and completeness of the presence. Man is often physically present and mentally preoccupied. Woman is more capable of turning away from her work to give full attention to a weary husband or a child’s scratched finger.

If women have witnessed the father “going away” because of his work, they will retain anxiety about their own “going away” to meetings, conferences, lectures, or other professional commitments.

For the new woman and the new man, the art of connecting and relating separate interests will be a challenge. If women today do not want a nonexistent husband married to Big Business, they will accept a simpler form of life to have the enjoyment of a husband whose life blood has not been sucked by big companies. I see the new woman shedding many luxuries. I love to see them, simply dressed, relaxed, natural, playing no roles. For the transitional stage was woman’s delicate problem: how to pass from being submerged and losing her identity in a relationship, how to learn to merge without loss of self. The new man is helping by his willingness to change too, from rigidities to suppleness, from tightness to openness, from uncomfortable roles to the relaxation of no roles.

One young woman was offered a temporary teaching job away from home. The couple had no children. The young husband said: “Go ahead if that is what you want to do.” If he had opposed the plan, which added to her teaching credits, she would have resented it. But because he let her go, she felt he did not love her deeply enough to hold on to her. She left with a feeling of being deserted, while he felt her leaving also as a desertion. These feelings lay below the conscious acceptance. The four months’ separation might have caused a break. But the difference is that they were willing to discuss these feelings, to laugh at their ambivalence and contradictions.