and on a related note...

http://men.webmd.com/features/11-dont-tell-the-wife-secrets-all-men-keep

this was found while looking at "oppositional defiant disorder" for the thesis of yours trulY. it's on webMD (the most widely-used and well-legitimized online venue for pharmaceutical promotion out there), and on RedBook, evidently. hot.

and if that ain't hot enough- extra, extra...- it's even hotter somewhere in HERE (pointing to my gullet) where my pre-simmered rage- a few pots in fact- is stirring. but alas, only for me to write this stinking and bloody rubbish and let it simmer some more.

Sure, we look like adults. We own a few suits. We can probably order wine without giggling. But although we resemble our father when he was our age, we still feel like that 4-year-old clutching his pant leg.

With that much room left on our emotional-growth charts, we sense we've only begun to admire you in the ways we will when we're 40, 50 and -- God forbid -- 60. We can't explain this to you, because it would probably come out sounding like we don't love you now.

"It took at least a year before I really started to appreciate my wife for something other than just great sex; and I didn't discover her mind fully until the third year we were married," says Newton. "But the older and wiser I get, the more I love my wife."

tshi article makes me re-realize why i've often found myself avowing how i "don't wanna live like everyone does"--and why my hand, as i recall, twithced and recoiled last week when mario bick asked the class who among us "think we wanna get married." and yes my proverbial one-hand was the only one in the room NOT raised. scary. but at once: utterly affirming.

this is really just one of a number of wake-up calls, lately. (and as i say, i've been sleeping. heavily. being awake- and i mean, really awake- is just intolerable. at this (re)freezing time of year, in this hellish and delirious and manipoled pregraduatory moment.)

well actually, there was one item here i found relief in. incidently it's about the only one that doesn't scare the crap straight out of me, too. and yep, it's the eleventh, last on the list. to try and placate my rage upon parting, i know. (just like any skilled sweet-talking prick will, after working me up.) evidently, it says, guys have maintained a tendency to go comatose for a while- or whatever those "dumb guy" and "playing golf" times really are- to escape the constant charade of their own repression around women.

THAT ladies and gentlement, sounds potentialy like some evidnece of sanity, though i of course will never study it myself. relative to the rest of the bullshit in this list here, and... what i see anyway, of 'out there'. (should i place my bets with life on mars instead?)

yes, men should wanna have a life/mind/hobbies 'free' from their romantic counterparts-do their female counterparts- sorry, partners- not want that, too? or are THEY- agh... cough cough... i mean, we....- just unwilling, uncapable, unmotivated, needy, or just too downright dependent for that sorta thing? or could it be that our ultimate expectations- even in this third-wave age- are still to grow up and find someone to 'husband' our selves? Which sounds very different from you guys', when as one of you says:

most of us didn't spend our formative years thinking, "Gosh, I just can't wait to settle down with a nice girl so we can grow old together.

Sounds like you wanted to say "a nice girl who i can take care of out of sheer necessity so i can survive this world, which i realize now is actually more ruthless than i'd ever have guessed back then. Why else would you be clinging to her pantleg... ugh... sir? Instead, in that childhood, you were living your fantasyland childhood

obsessed with how many women who resembled Britney Spears we could have sex with before we turned 30. Generally it takes us a few years (or decades) to fully perish that thought.



maybe this is what scares me: this almost gets me believing (however contradictorily) that men- particularly the straight, maintstream, upper-middle class, white kind- are the only ones in this venue of 'love and marriage' (and need i mention 'no-strings-attached' sex?)- who have a shred of self-preservation left in them.

sure, they're 'protected' by their own cocoons of repression, but just the same: for men, this basic instinct comes rears with a vengeance when it comes to dealing with women- with 'love'. why---- it's their one refuge!! of course, elsewhere, they'll put each other (and their own selves) down, get killed or overworked or overstrapped or otherwise overcompete themselves into oblivion, trying so hard to outperform and measure up in manliness everywhere they fuckin set foot- hell they'll go plotting national invasions, world wars! (and we *know no one who birthed a baby ever did THAT...) But even for the/a woman they will ultimately 'lay their lives down for'- be it bringing home bacon or fighting off beasts in the backyard, because that itself is a vital part of the charade- they come first. it is *their roost, after all.

(AND indicdentally, this might explain best of all why i'm said to really be 'a gay man' lurking 'in a woman's body', fooling you all... and clearly proud-grateful- on all counts. it coudl also expalin why i haven't 'chosen to go lesbian' in the first place, for that matter. after all the radicalization run rampant: self-preservation is, after all- when it comes WAYY down to it...- sexy. and in a patriarchy where men seem to self-preserve the best, what better choice am i left with? i suppose surivival of self (past the fertile-and-fuckety-time) isn't necessary for fit genes, but my cavewomanly mind would- frankly?- rather be fucking someone who'll be alive long enough to help *rear the rugrats. if NOT in marriage
(which honestly sounds kinda like a corporation 'husbanding' my money in one of htose "we'll-fuck-you-over-but-what-little-you-gain-will-be-worth-more-SUCKer!" stock options) then at least to hunt down for child support (with teh help of my cavegypsy comrades) when all the deer hide and the berries run low.

and no, she'd rather not pretend she can really have cavebabies with the cute cavechic comrade who makes delightful noises sleeping in the dark around the corner, either. oh i'll be told it's oedipal or something, i'm sure...)

but anyway. thought-spewage to be reexamined at some later time: avec ou sans avertissement. and when i do either way, i won't make it too violent- promise. my shotgun and butcher knife shall remain at home. back in swansea where i left them i think- lucky for you all- in lieu of words. don't make me change my mind. (and watchout. i'm an aunt. a crazed aunt, with babies on the cavewomanly brain, nowadays.)

demanding and withdrawing: alas, some real shit! for YOU!!!

even sooner, now....

clearly this has remained mostly sleeping as i've sleptwalked all semester. closing in on a thesis wihich should make the world clear, right?

mm. yeah. anyway. another post to remind myself to post AFTEr proj, or AFTEr bard. this is my career in the waiting, yet in the making...

and speaking of biosocial blues: a clarification (bc i was confused persuing the entirety of this my own blog's archives):

the "talking sex" in my poetic rant from july, i believe, was referring to the female gender and particularly references to this gender of mine in both the news at that moment of the summer - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11762186 - and to aNOTHER betty carter tune (not an original) entitled, yep: Girl Talk. I also found and downloaded a Dakota Staton take on it, which i'm also hip to.

ANd this happens to be- or i made it half-happenin, so unwittingly: a perfect example of a 'biosocial' issue that I'm thrilled to bring to the fore.

"We like to chat about our dresses... that we wear tonite. We chew the fat about our hair [tresses] and how our neighbors fight./Inconsequential things that men don't really care to know/ become essential things that women find so appropo./ I'm a dame, it's my game, tis all the same they call it girl talk. Just girl talk. or, as Ms. Staton sings: "But that's a dame, we're all the same, it's just a game, we call it Girl Talk." why women is the gender appointed to these more intimate and relational domains... that's another discussion.


but what i would like to point out, which is to me utterly germane? my most hotly simmering interjection and interrogation to this discussion, really... alright enough prefacing: power. "verbal space" . you see, a close friend (currently in teacher's college) has recently gotten into feminist pedagogy and is learning the hard way that- especially as newbies in any professional environment, and especially as a woman- "no one's gonna give you verbal space. you gotta *take it for yourself!!"

WHICh gets me thinking... do we women SEEM to be talking 'more' (than men) merely because our speech is an act of (re)claiming what we are somehow not *supposed to be claiming in the first place? -that is, a 'verbal space' to which we are not, a priori, entitled?

Do our own mannerisms and self-effacements by themselves not create this dynamic? do we not speak more hesitantly/speculatively, with more qualifications and effacements and prefaces and uncertainty- above all with a more pronounced assumption of *INTRUSION*, than do our male counterparts?? would this alone- assuming we still have the audacity to talk at all- not make us seem longer-winded? 'fluffier'? or dare i say, high-"maintenence?" --annoying?

(not to imply this behavior doesn't stem like men's from the oppressive conditioning pervading our lives, of *course... and that this conditioning includes that whole trope of "nagging our tired man" the npr article is so kind to mention.)

ahhh...

no wonder then, even the liberal-biased NPR wouldn't posit this to explain the sticky allure of that now-erroneous supposition (given that we trust the methodology and ecolgocial validty of the results) that we talk MORE.

oh and this bit i loved too: "Mehl guesses that the talkativeness claim 'evolved as an explanation for what scientists call the demand/withdrawal pattern.' That is, the situation where a woman demands to talk through problems and her male partner withdraws emotionally." --evolved, indeed. but where? when? on african plains c. 48,000 BC? under post-industrial paternalism? have male chimpanzees 'been shown' in experiments to exhibit more emotional withdrawal (than their female counterparts) too? this being the case i guess i'd just have to get cool with gender's "unfortunate constraints" and stay in my place then, right?

But please (Father Science Almighty!) before i do, do tell me how you expect me to stay within my boundaries when you won't even delineate them yourself. and after you've painted them the same damn color as the room we're in!! Just make my cage visible, already, alright!!!??

And then I'll be quiet. Promise.