1) Cult of masculinity detrimental to men and women (The Daily Collegian, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1991)
2) Grand Canyon reveals a new perspective (The Daily Collegian, Monday, Feb. 3, 1992)
Cult of masculinity detrimental to men and women (The Daily Collegian, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 1991)
Men and women just don't
understand each other.
I reached that conclusion after
watching bits and pieces of the Thomas/Hill hearings. (I also learned that one
of them is a brilliant liar, but that's beside the point.)
Verbal sexual harassment remains
such a nebulous offense partly because neither sex can accurately and
consistently interpret the other's verbal and nonverbal cues. Maybe it's a
hormonal thing.
In her book You Just Don't
Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, Deborah Tannen used this lack of
understanding to explain those bizarre non-conversations that we have from time
to time.
"I never said that,"
the male might protest.
"You did too," the
female insists.
"Did not," says the
male. "Why are you always putting words in my mouth?"
The female looks triumphant.
"Because nothing you say ever makes any sense."
Both parties leave these
conversations with chocolate pudding for brains, asking themselves, "What
in the world did I just talk about?"
But thanks to Tannen, I now
realize that intentions and interpretations don't always mesh very well.
There's often a very practical explanation for the seemingly inexplicable
actions of the opposite sex.
Human beings are so egocentric
that we assume our partner shares a common base of knowledge and experiences.
And it just ain't so, folks.
With that insight burning in my
brain, I raided the bookstores of State College. I bought books about women
written by feminist authors.
I was determined to know women,
whereas Thoreau, for example, settled for knowing beans. So I headed back to my
apartment and began a fevered reading marathon. (This tangled thinking is my
version of logic.)
My roommates got back from class
while I was taking a brief break to spoon down a Wendy's Frosty. One looked at
the feminist books and articles that littered the floor, studying the author's
names -- Ellen Willis, Molly Haskell, Naomi Wolf, Andrea Dworkin.
"What is this?" he
asked. "Know the enemy?"
"No way," I replied.
"I'm just trying to understand women. Besides, college students are
supposed to read."
"Get real," my other
roommate said, the voice of reality. "Here, have a beer."
They rummaged through the mess,
and one held up Andrea Dworkin's novel Mercy. "This book has the
most arrogant prologue I've ever read," he told me.
Maybe so. In fact, I only
finished the first three chapters (partly because Dworkin apparently doesn't
believe in paragraphs). But I always expect my first impression of a feminist
writer to be wrong.
My misunderstanding stems from
an instinctive reaction against the justifiable anger many feminists feel
towards men. After all, it's women who get brutalized by men with, by some
estimates, only about one of 20 assaults reported to the police.
It's women who make 72 percent
of what men earn for the same job. And it's usually women who get groped at
fraternities and bars. Frankly, I think they've shown an amazing amount of
tolerance.
But when I read writers like
Dworkin, a little voice cries out in my mental wilderness. "What did I
ever do to you?" the voice always asks. And in this case, I think
most other men react the same way.
The feminist movement's biggest
mistake, I think, was trying to tell men how to act, and it's still making this
mistake. Social philosopher Myriam Miedzian, for example, urges boys to
"get in touch with their own feelings."
That's not bad advice,
especially since anger is still the only socially acceptable emotion for boys.
But unfortunately, our testosterone also helps make us incredibly stubborn, and
most males still only really listen to other men.
So as your average American male
flees from the feminist makeover experts, he looks around to see what other men
think about the subject. And the most vocal men are members of author Robert
Bly's "male lib" club.
"Iron John" Bly and
his devotees go into the woods, get dressed in animal furs, howl at the moon
for a while, and basically celebrate their return to primitive maleness. Every
man's club is his most prized possession, and all anxiety over penis size
disappears in a magical moment of male bonding. Oh, paradise.
This large-scale regression to a
cult of masculinity scares the Cheerios out of me, so I've come up with A
Plan to stop it. (I'm aware of the irony that now I'll be trying to tell
women what to do.)
First, feminists should
concentrate primarily on raising the consciousness of women. Teach wayward
sisters like Christie Hefner, the CEO of Playboy Enterprises and a woman who
turned the corporation into a consistent moneymaker again, the true meaning of
equality.
Second, instead of preaching
directly to the mass of men, feminists should recruit and . . . nurture, if you
will, males on an individual basis. Then, after having some sense beaten into
their heads, these model males could work at convincing other men that
Neanderthal Man is extinct and getting us to burn our wooden clubs. Some clubs,
of course, will have to be pried from cold, dead fingers.
From an aesthetic viewpoint,
this strategy is incredibly beautiful. It allows women to win the power
struggle between the sexes by using men as their weapons. (My enemy is my best
ally, if you catch my drift.)
Perhaps I'm a naive optimist
because I think this approach might save us from the army of Robert Bly clones.
But I actually believe it's a very elegant solution. Plus, it minimizes the
need for effective communication between men and women.
I guess we'll tackle that
problem later.
Grand
Canyon reveals a new perspective (The Daily Collegian, Monday, Feb. 3, 1992)
The road trip to Arizona got off
to a horrible start.
We were three hours out of State
College when I realized I'd forgotten my Queensryche tapes.
Arizona was 2,300 miles away.
And with only Metallica's tortured vocals to keep me awake behind the wheel, I
started asking myself whether I really wanted to see the Fiesta Bowl and the
Grand Canyon.
I'm not much of a football fan.
In fact, my memories of the 1986 Pitt-Penn State game still occasionally
resurface in nightmares.
After a 34-14 victory, a mob of
our peers tried to break through a police line and tear down the goal posts.
The police held them off. (I imagine they used mace. It's the American way.)
Finally, another mob swept onto
the field and tore down the other set of goal posts. I got pulled along with
some friends from Pitt.
I really hate crowds, so I
climbed up on the posts as the mob carried them to the student section. Faces
turned red when bodies slammed against the posts, and a young woman took
serious facial damage from an elbow. I had a ringside seat.
That game provided me with
enough entertainment to last for over five years, and I didn't need to go to
Arizona to see it.
So by the time we were halfway
across the country, I convinced myself that seeing the Big Ditch was the only
reason to go to Arizona.
"Don't get your hopes
up," John told me. "It probably looks like a pothole -- only
bigger."
"Shut up," I told him,
but politely because we were stuck in the car together for another 3,000 miles.
Driving across this country is
relatively cheap and incredibly boring. We eventually reached Arizona and
stopped at a Chevron gas station, where we learned exactly why Arizona is the
only state in the nation without a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
The attendant, a heavy man in
faded blue overalls, saw our Pennsylvania license plate. "What do you all
think about that Martin Luther King brouhaha?" he asked.
"Most of us think it's a
bunch of crap," I said, still thinking I was breathing the politically
correct air of Happy Valley. Congress, a body that routinely exempts itself
from anti-discrimination laws, dumped all over Arizona. (Even Sophocles said
the lawmakers should obey the laws.)
"Yeah," nodded the
attendant, "I could see if it was a Negro who actually contributed to
society, like Booker T. Washington or that other fellow -- I can't remember his
name. But wherever King went, trouble followed."
"Well, that's what happens
when you try to change things," Rob said. He was staring at me. Later, he
told me my jaw literally dropped open.
"I . . . You . . . I have
to go to the bathroom," I said finally.
What do you do in a situation
like that? Limited confrontation doesn't seem to accomplish much, and nobody
wins if the tire irons come out. We better figure out how to educate people,
though, or we'll see more of David Duke.
At that point, I just wanted to
see the Grand Canyon and get back to Pennsylvania as soon as possible. (We
don't have a race problem here, right?)
But all squeamishness over
choreographed violence aside, I had a blast at the game. I screamed myself
hoarse cheering for the defense as they ground Tennessee's offense into a pulp.
Despite the excitement of the
victory, it was the visit to the Grand Canyon that made the long drive
worthwhile.
From a perch on the Canyon's
South Rim, we looked out on the Colorado River's finest creation. Low masses of
feathery clouds drifted past buttes and through gorges. The sun reflected
shades of red and orange off granite and limestone, and little specks moved
along a winding hiking trail.
"Jesus Christ!" I
whispered in reverent awe.
The canyon was one vertical mile
deep and ten miles wide at this point, and its enormity seemed to pull stupid
and inane words from us and the other tourists.
Further down the rail, a man
peered through his camera's lens. His wife moved over beside him, brushing honey
blonde hair out of her face.
"There's a woman down there
sunbathing without a bathing suit," he told her. It was, perhaps, 25
degrees outside.
"Oh, yeah," she said.
"A 300-pound woman, I'll bet."
Stupid. But I think we all share
that tendency to act blasé when we feel small and insignificant in the face of
nature. (Shuttle astronauts do it all the time.)
Our egos are very sensitive, and
we love to convince ourselves that we each stand at the center of the universe
-- call us insecure.
But we actually need to
experience this humbling effect of nature, and of art. Otherwise, we get bogged
down with school, work, family problems, relationship problems -- the list goes
on. It's all too easy to lose a sense of perspective and ignore the larger
world around us.
But intense self-involvement
leads to a kind of living death. It's the difference between contentment and
happiness.
As we stood there absorbing the
view, a young boy walked by with his mother.
"Oh, God!" he said.
"Guess what kind of sled ride you could have." Children are wise;
certain citizens of Arizona are not.
Luckily for us, Spring Break comes up in March. I want to go see Les Miserables on Broadway, and I want to watch it with a child's eyes. What do you want to do?
An
accident makes the desire for stress relief seem trivial (The Daily Collegian, Tuesday, Feb. 9, 1993)
A strange and upsetting thing
happened this past Saturday.
You may have seen the first
report in the Sunday edition of The Centre Daily Times. A 21-year-old Penn
State student named Chris Miller broke his back and wrist while spelunking in
the J-4 cave in Pleasant Gap.
The accident made me think deep
thoughts for the next few days.
That's easy for me to write
because I may be what conservative Neanderthals refer to as a bleeding-heart
liberal. I like to call myself a human being.
The eerie part about Chris
Miller's accident was talking with him and his friends about an hour before he
injured himself.
I was wandering through the cave
with three friends on Saturday seeking some stress relief, and we bumped into
Chris Miller's group deep into the cave.
None of us knew each other, but
a cave is a place where conversation between complete strangers occurs
naturally. It's an alien environment.
We joked around for a few
minutes and exchanged advice about the various obstacles in the cave. Then,
they headed back towards the entrance.
We descended the Formation
Climb, explored the Dome Room and wandered through the Wine Cellar. Sometime
while we were having an absolute blast, Chris Miller fell about 15 feet and
broke his back.
We rested for a short time in
the Dome Room, snacking on Hershey bars and sitting with our lights out to
experience complete darkness. We talked about women, of course, but not in any
crude way. It was simply a shared interest.
While we were relaxing, Chris
Miller's friends managed to move him to within 150 feet of the entrance. He was
in some serious pain.
Then, he had incredible luck --
the kind of luck that makes you believe there's a cosmic watchdog in the sky. A
group of nine cavers from Tri-State Grotto -- six men and three women from
Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania -- just happened to enter the cave.
They found Chris and immediately sent somebody out to phone in a
"rescue."
In the time it took us to get
from the back of the cave to that chamber, they had contacted the Pleasant Gap
Fire Company and Medics 23 and 24, and cavers from Nittany Grotto were pouring
in from all over Centre County. There were eventually about 60 people involved
in the rescue, with approximately 25 people actually inside the cave.
Caving clubs like Nittany Grotto
and Tri-State Grotto always provide the experienced cavers needed for these
rescues. They take classes in rescue techniques, store the necessary equipment
and basically hope they never need to use it. I've been doing crisis-oriented
work for seven years, and I have to say that the level of professionalism and
calmness displayed by these people impressed the hell out of me.
"They were the caving
knights," one of my friends said later. "We were more like their
squires."
When we reached the chamber, a
"sector leader" asked us to hang out until all the equipment arrived
on the scene.
"We're going to need a lot
of bodies to get Chris out of here," he said quietly. "We'll form a
human chain and reposition as we go, but this will be tough."
We waited as the oxygen and a
flexible basket stretcher got passed into the cave through narrow, twisting
passages and over piles of jagged rocks. I was amazed at Chris' calmness. He
even made a few jokes.
Once the move started, our
procession resembled a horde of army ants on the march. People would pass off
the stretcher, then climb past to take new positions at the next obstacle. The
problems came at the tight places -- the passages only a little bigger than a
garbage chute --and on the vertical moves.
Covering the 150 feet to the
entrance took more than three and a half hours because getting leverage was
almost impossible at certain points. Eventually, they had to take him out of
the stretcher and depend on the neck brace and body board due to the cramped
space.
In a rising chute, for example,
several people would lie on their backs to form a human sled path. While they
protected Chris' head, one person would lie on top of them facing the opposite
direction. That person would grab the handholds on the body board, the next
person would grab that person's belt, and then they'd slowly haul him up over the
row of bodies. We rotated people when someone got tired, but it was a long,
frustrating process.
It also created some interesting
situations. I remember one caver's muffled voice rising out from under
another's crotch. "I've never been in this position before," he said.
"This is a new experience for me."
Once they passed us by, we
waited with other cavers while they eased Chris Miller through the two narrow
entrances pipes and lowered him down the quarry wall. I think that's when we
all started mentally putting ourselves in Chris' situation.
"Well. . ." said a
caver who had been involved in several other rescues, "it happens."
He didn't mean to sound cold. He was just voicing our shared realization that,
for whatever personal reasons, we had all chosen a dangerous hobby.
Later that day, after eight
hours inside the cave, I went to work at the local runaway shelter. I sat on
the couch, thumbing through the National Missing Persons Report and trying to
absorb the day's events. It may sound trite, but the way all those people came
together to help someone in trouble gives me some hope for our future.
Yesterday, I saw in the paper
that Chris Miller is in fair condition.