Men (11 page)

Whether or not Hitchens was right and women are inherently less funny than men (he allowed that fat women, Jewish women, and lesbians are the exceptions—THANKS for that), women
are
highly funny when it comes to finely honed observations about the romantic and horizontal conduct of men, and it's on this terrain that Marx is a particularly keen observer. Though I was disappointed to recognize only a few superficial similarities between my own ex and Eugene, my antennae perked up when I came to a small moment between Eugene and the heroine, after he re-enters her life. All that happens is this: the two of them are on the couch; he looks at her intently, makes a beckoning gesture with his forefinger, and says, “Come here.”

That did have an awfully familiar ring. Back when I was on the receiving end of the move, I remember thinking that it seemed a bit Cary Grant–ish, but it never occurred to me that I was getting recycled material. I also didn't realize how comical it was until I read it reprised by Marx, though I felt a little unkind for thinking so. Like I said, I don't really have anything against this particular ex who, despite his own array of temperamental complications (including a monumentally crazy mother looming in the background), moved through the world with a certain courtliness and liked to whip up elaborate multi-course dinners for two. He would soon after embark on the tried-and-true second act of middle-aged male professors everywhere: marry a graduate student and have another child. It's like Botox for men apparently—though he was always preternaturally youthful-looking, when I ran into him recently he looked ten years younger than he had when I'd last seen him a decade before. Is this humor-worthy? Maybe if I envied him the opportunity to marry a graduate student and acquire a late-in-life offspring I'd be more inclined to lampoon his new life, but having taken a thorough self-inventory of all my currently unmet and/or impossible desires, I find that happily this isn't one of them.

On reflection, I'd append to Marx's mockery of our ex the qualifier that if our most intimate moments turn out to be pre-scripted, well obviously these are anxious encounters: failure hovers, rejection looms. No doubt there's a small buffer of added security in playing a role, or relying on what worked last time around. As Nick Carraway remarks of Gatsby, personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures; though maybe he should have added that the most successful gestures have been rehearsed in advance. But it's also more complicated than that. If you believe Freud, emotional life itself is all recycled material: no new disappointments, only old ones revived; no new attractions, only those earliest loves and hates imprinting every subsequent desire forever after.

It's easy enough to see why men might rankle and disappoint in the romantic sphere: bad copies of lost originals—even the best specimens would have to register as inept frauds, at least in the darker recesses of female emotional life. It's from these same recesses that jokes too originate, says Freud. I wonder if mocking male seduction techniques is such a comedic gold mine for this reason, because jokes and disappointment share the same home base.

Now that men have become less economically necessary and there's less reason than ever to pretend to admire them, scorn for men has become the postfeminist fallback position, widely regarded as a badge of feistiness and independence. Nevertheless, men remain conduits to things a lot of women still deeply want: sex, love, babies, commitments.… It's a contradictory situation to find oneself in, to say the least. And not really
that
funny, but get a bunch of women in a room, add liquor, and jokes about men's inadequacies fly like shrapnel. When it comes to dating, single men are dogs, infants, sex-obsessed, moral rodents, or emotional incompetents. And once you finally land one, nothing much improves, since husbands are morons, selfish, workaholics, emotionally unavailable, and domestically incompetent. Single men lie and mislead to get sex; husbands have lost interest in sex entirely. Men are emotionally autistic, except for all the ones who want you to be their mother. Men can't talk about their feelings! Except for all the ones who won't shut up about themselves. They're macho assholes, except when they're wimps—what man could endure childbirth? And so on.

In
Women on Men
, Liza Donnelly, a
New Yorker
cartoonist—thus, along with Marx, another officially certified funny woman—makes the case for ridiculing men as a form of female assertion. In a running commentary about her assembled cartoons she suggests, as potential comedic material, men's misplaced egos, bravado, hot air, childish behavior, self-obsession—their other obsessions include sports, cars, and gadgets—and, of course, their preoccupation with sex, one of her frequent cartoon subjects. (A woman speaking about her husband: “His body is fifty, his mind is thirty, and his penis is thirteen.” Another woman ordering in a restaurant, speaking of her date: “I'd like a Chardonnay, and I'm fairly certain he'd like sex.”) The goal, says Donnelly, is to “Make them uncomfortable. Make them squirm. Because we love them.” One notices that this is love mixed with a healthy dose of aggression. (A man and a woman are ordering in a restaurant; the woman says to the waiter: “What wine do you recommend I throw in his face?” Another man and woman are in a car; the woman says to the gas station attendant: “Forget the windshield. Please just wipe the silly smirk off his face.”)

Donnelly offers a few telling glimpses into how her own life has fueled her humor; interestingly, her dating career seems to have echoed that of Marx's heroine. Donnelly too kept being drawn to men who weren't available—not willing to settle down, not wanting to leave their wives.… “You name it, I fell for them all.” For a long time she thought marriage wasn't for her and married people were aliens, though at some point she realized that all men have their “side effects” (like medicine?), and the real question is which side effects you can tolerate. Her story ends relatively happily: she marries a fellow cartoonist who provides her with plenty of male foibles to humorize about. All in all a good match, except that he doesn't dance. And is a little sex-obsessed. And some other stuff.

Are ambivalent women funnier? This is a category Hitchens neglected to include on his exceptions list, but I'd like to think so. I'm hardly in a position to suggest that women shouldn't be ambivalent about commitment, because everyone should be, in my opinion—note that the same term covers stints in a mental asylum. And if women who are ambivalent about commitment are drawn with suspicious frequency to men who are unattainable, far be it from me to begrudge anyone the consolations of venting about men's immaturity and egotism in response. After all, it's not like getting stuck with the guy and waking up to the same mug day after day is without its ambivalences either, as Donnelly's cartoons attest. A woman to her girlfriend: “I always saw marriage as a stepping-stone to divorce.” A woman to her date: “I love the idea of you, but not you.” Another woman to another date: “You are exactly the kind of guy I could learn to leave.” A woman about her inert husband: “Nobody told me marriage would be an endurance test.”

For funny women, each man is his own unique recipe for disappointment. From their laundry lists of male failings it can be tempting to deduce that women humorists specialize in wanting what men don't have to give, or perhaps in wanting from each particular man the particular thing he's most unable to provide, whether it's an account of his feelings, a respite from ESPN, or lifelong fidelity. And when men
do
come through, look for an ulterior motive: Donnelly says that men who cook for women are only doing it to prove they're good in bed, which caused me to re-evaluate my ex's culinary flair. Hmm, so
that's
what he was up to.

The term “misogyny” is often proffered to explain the historic male–female predicament, but it's not like women are so fond of men at the moment either. Researchers who study these things generally find far higher levels of rage among women toward men than among men toward women. Still, hope springs eternal—maybe the right man will come along soon. Maybe one who will commit! And not interrupt! And a lot of other stipulations. There's no reason that longing to merge with a man has to include either respecting or liking him, which is one of the more comedic aspects of heterosexual relations at present.

The question is whether this is an entirely good-faith enterprise. What I mean is: to the extent that jokes mask disappointed desires, aren't they just an index of your disavowed dependency on the very thing you're so busy scorning? The problem with scorning men isn't that it's unfair to them, it's that it makes them all the more emotionally central. To compound the problem, in these post-conventional times, men have fewer incentives than ever to deliver the goods, which exacerbates their capacity to disappoint, which maximizes their emotional centrality.

Still, it's a universally acknowledged truth that these errant and frustrating men could gratify female needs and desires if only they were somehow different than they are. Less like
men
, to begin with.

 

Humiliation Artists

Among the many sources of humiliation I either learned about or was forced to relive while reading Wayne Koestenbaum's
Humiliation
: having a tiny penis or any form of smallness, soiling oneself and other bodily inadvertencies, writing or being written about, being jealous, being cheated on, being Googled, being mistaken for the wrong gender, impotence, hair loss, inadvertent erections in awkward circumstances, disfigurement, smelling like liverwurst, vomiting onstage before a musical performance, and being photographed after you're dead. As we see, the list goes on indefinitely, with humiliation pursuing us from our earliest childhood memories well into the afterlife. As Koestenbaum, a cultural critic and poet, points out, we all live on the edge of humiliation all the time, “in danger of being deported to that unkind country.” Being gay, he's especially interested in men's experience of humiliation, much of which comes wreathed in sexual shame.

As it happens, while I was reading
Humiliation
, another expert on male humiliation was demonstrating his own proficiency in the subject, this time on the national news. Though straight, this New York congressman also chose sexual shame as his arena. He'd been exposed doing something exceedingly peculiar and, many felt, perverse—he didn't simply have an affair, as per the usual politician scandal; this was worse: he
hadn't
had an affair. Instead, he'd sent a lewd cell phone photo of himself to a twenty-one-year-old college student he'd never met, then committed the fatal error of lying about it to the press and his colleagues once the photo went public, as it inevitably would. When he finally admitted he'd sent the photo (“I'm deeply ashamed”), he refused to resign: he was going to take a leave of absence and undergo some sort of therapeutic regimen. Other embarrassing texts and even dirtier photos started surfacing. It soon emerged that he'd been exchanging raunchy texts, emails, and dirty pictures with at least six different women for over three years,
using his own name.
The fact that the name in question—Anthony Weiner—also happened to be a sexual pun escaped no one's notice.

What
is
the great attraction of humiliation for men, a question we're forced to grapple with when considering the regular parade of elected officials performing similarly imaginative acts of public self-immolation in recent years? Weiner was energetic enough at it to parlay a fairly minor offense into full-scale national disgrace. Consider his opening salvo after the story first broke: he couldn't “say with certitude” that the dirty pictures weren't of him. Congressmen who've had actual sex with actual prostitutes have escaped with barely a ripple in the news cycle compared with the public bloodbath Weiner engineered. The word “humiliation” became a steady drumbeat in the news reports: he'd humiliated his wife, he'd humiliated himself, he'd even humiliated Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

As these events unfolded, a lot of people were saying knowingly that this was a story about how technology has changed the landscape of intimacy and fidelity; I believe this is known as “the Internet made me do it.” But I prefer Koestenbaum's route into the subject, by way of the literary imagination, to the reductive techno-determinism so popular among cultural pundits. People had problematic desires a long time before the Internet came along. Also, with electoral politics looking more and more like a form of public psychotherapy, one literary text in particular struck me as an especially useful guide to such matters: the decidedly pre-Internet
Portnoy's Complaint
, since where else but in a satirical novel about a nice Jewish boy and his libido would the crotch-obsessed analysand's name really be Weiner? Reading the hourly news updates on Weiner's story did feel like living inside a Philip Roth novel, with Speaker Pelosi standing in for the castrating Sophie Portnoy in a rollicking sequel to Roth's classic saga of sexual shame. They should have called the update Weiner's Complaint, instead of the too-obvious Weinergate—there was Pelosi threatening to chop off Weiner's career, and when no less an Oedipal figure than the president of the United States stepped in to say that if it were him, he'd resign, Weiner finally bowed to the inevitable. Taking the proffered dagger, he smote himself dead—politically dead anyway, which was what mattered.
1

Personally, I thought he shouldn't have resigned from Congress, but I wasn't consulted. But rereading
Portnoy
I came upon something I'd forgotten: Roth's epigraph, in the form of a psychiatric journal extract, defining “Portnoy's Complaint” as a disorder “in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” This seemed apropos. Though unfortunately, the epigraph continued, all this energetic exhibitionism and auto-eroticism can yield no gratification, only “overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.” Or such is the conclusion of Portnoy's psychoanalyst, one Dr. Spielvogel—the quote is from his scholarly article “The Puzzled Penis,” for which Alexander Portnoy's sex life provided the case study material. By the way, Portnoy is
also
in government—he's the “Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York.”