Some have argued that rational thought makes us human, others that it is the capacity to feel love, or to use tools, or to exist in a world of meaning. All of these have some validity. However, I’d like to make another contribution to that list.
The desire, need, and ability to occasionally edit makes us human.
For the first time in the year - roughly - that I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve decided to remove a post. I removed “Guy Time” because after reading Bridgett’s comment I started to realize that it was a bad piece of writing. It didn’t really capture the events I was relating or my ideas about them so much as the generally foul mood I was in as I wrote the post. The foul mood was mostly a result of a bad night’s sleep combined with hay fever and an end-of-the-semester case of ennui.
In the post I tried to tell about something that was actually quite funny at the time. As I’ve mentioned before, all of my colleagues in the social science department are women. One of those women had a birthday this week. We are a pretty tight group and we always do departmental lunches to celebrate such things.
The location for this lunch was suddenly changed on Friday morning to “Miss Rose’s Tea Room” - and not at the request, or even with the knowledge of, the guest of honor. I began theatrically, and loudly, complaining about this as an assault on my manhood. My colleagues found this hysterical, so it became the running joke of the morning.
I work with a group of strong and confident women who trust me enough to be pretty open and relaxed around me. They also constantly rib me about this stuff - everything from talking about how “Gerald’s gone to his ‘happy place’” when the conversation turns to birth complication horror stories to calling me the “pimp daddy” of the department and referring to “Gerald and his Ho’s”
Just as an aside: I NEVER say any of the stuff about “pimps” and “ho’s”. To this I attribute the continuing good will of my co-workers and, indeed, my ongoing survival. A little lesson to some of my white male brethren who might not have figured this out - history being what it has been, there are some jokes we do not get to make.
Pressing onward with the story - we went to lunch. The venue was very “Steel Magnolias” and the owner laughed loudly when she heard me tell the others that I might forgive them eventually for bringing me here. That got a solid laugh, but I judged that at that point the joke was wearing out, so I just dropped it. Lunch was fine, if a bit pricey.
Afterwards we went back to campus and immediately into our division’s annual program review session - powerpoints, enrollment levels, what did we accomplish this year, what should we do next year, etc… It was in the course of this that the grandmother of the division, an elderly English instructor with the kind of wicked sense of humor you only develop by successfully living a life, inadvertently referred to the “history ladies”. Almost immediately she caught that and started to offer an apology. I had immediately crossed gazes with Allison, my history colleague, and we were both already snickering since this fit so well into the morning’s jokes. Even those who didn’t know about that caught the minor faux pas and the room started erupting in laughter. I loudly protested, “See - ONE trip to the tea room and look what happens!!!” Everyone laughed and then we finished the meeting.
As one would expect, I kept hearing about this all afternoon. I think that was where the trouble began.
I was tired and increasingly uncomfortable (sinus headache) as the day went on. With each mention by someone who wasn’t there, what had been funny started to seem irritating. Still, I knew it was just me feeling out of sorts, so I dutifully chuckled and kept my mouth shut. Right up until the blog post, when what started as a story turned into a rant.
In the course of that rant, I said something about the culture wanting me to be ashamed of being male. Bridgett rightly called me on this, asking if I really thought there was an “attack on maleness” in the dominant culture. I don’t. What I was thinking about at that moment was the nearly universal depiction of men in sitcoms as horny sports-obsessed morons and how that doesn’t fit me, my late father, or any of my male friends. Still, I don’t really see an attack on “maleness” there. If anything, this probably serves to excuse bad behavior as a kind of cultural reinforcement of “boy will be boys.”
I think that, like a lot of men with my level of education and set of beliefs about gender, I am sometimes caught between being comfortable enough with WHO I am but somewhat ambivalent about what it means to be WHAT I am. Call it white male liberal guilt if you are feeling dismissive. I’ve learned there is patriarchy and, wittingly or not, I’ve benefited from it. I’ve learned there is a racial hierarchy and, wittingly or not, I’ve benefited from it. I cannot divorce myself from the historical context any more than anyone else can. That is what I am. Integrating that awareness into who I am and being able to live with the result is an ongoing issue for me, and I’d be willing to bet I’m not alone in that.
So, in a supreme moment of “crotchetiness” I got into the written equivalent of that point in a verbal argument where you stop trying to be reasonable and you just start venting. My purpose in writing this blog is mostly selfish. It is a modernist journal. When inspired to write, I write. Then I do minor copy-editing and I hit “publish”. This is as close as I get to an act of spontaneous creativity. I had to think all night before pulling the “Guy Time” post because it seems to violate that. On the other hand, I’ve not written another post that I looked at later and really felt didn’t represent me, even my flaws, in an accurate way. It was intellectually sloppy. I don’t think that is me.
So I pulled it and I’m still not sure I did the right thing.
