Abandoned

men are scum who cheat, etc. Sometimes she cries for no reason, and it will last for days; other times she can get so rageful that it literally scares me. One time she grabbed a kitchen knife while we were fighting. I’ve tried to be the good guy again and again. I’ve tried to talk to her, but when I ask her what’s wrong, she just tells me I’m a “fucking man and would never understand what’s going on with her.” I’ve had it, and I’m going to ask for a divorce.

“Sad story,” Callie says. “Too bad he hasn’t sought out professional help.”

Deep, sudden changes in personality always have root causes. The woman this man is writing about could be bipolar and it’s just now manifesting, or she might have experienced a trauma in her life that she hasn’t revealed to him, such as a rape or an abortion or some other personal loss of magnitude. Perhaps she’s remembered something from her past that’s come back to haunt her. There’s always the possibility, of course, that he’s leaving out details and that he’s the source of her trauma.

Assuming his account is factual, this is the story of a woman in crisis, not a woman out to “destroy men.” Callie’s right. It’s tragic.

“That’s actually a fairly nice one,” Leo says. “Most of them are like the first: bitch this, bitch that, she got fat, she won’t have sex anymore, et cetera, et cetera. Bitch Stories on the menu takes you to more and much longer versions of the same.”

“We get the idea,” I say. “Let’s look at the forums.”

He navigates to the forum index page. There are three different forums to choose from: General Discussion, Man Talk, and Bitch Talk.

“I think we get the idea on Bitch Talk,” I say. “Let’s take a look at Man Talk.”

Leo clicks and the forum opens. A list of thread subjects appears. I scan them and see one called Reclaiming the Right to be a Man. “That one,” I say. The page loads.

Men today are marginalized without even knowing it. They have come to accept that they are “the brute,” “the abuser,” “the rapist,” and worse, that these qualities are inevitable and can be reversed only by women. We accept today that we do not hold the keys to our inner selves, that it is the wife or girlfriend who holds the key, and that we must listen to her as our most important teacher.

That men have been brutish in history cannot be disputed. That women have been treated poorly by men, even oppressed, cannot be disputed. But this has gone beyond a dialogue about aberrant behavior; it has instead become the accepted indictment of all men everywhere. John Bobbitt is the image held up, not Leonardo da Vinci. Ted Bundy is the example of “the lows that men can sink to;” Beethoven is not similarly held up as the “heights that men can rise to.”

Because we love our mothers, we have come to accept this image and the inherent guilt that goes with it. There are men who have never touched a woman in anger that live in fear of the possibility they might.

So let’s discuss—what are some things we can do to reverse this process in ourselves? How can we reclaim not our brutishness but our masculinity, which—current opinion aside—does not contain brutality by default as its birthright?

“This is a long thread,” Leo observes. “This first post, the one that starts the thread, is two years old. There are almost two hundred pages of replies and discussion.”

I scan down through some of those that most immediately followed this post.

One reads:

It’s hard for me to admit this, but I read your post and I cried. It was pretty unexpected. See, I’m a decent guy. I was married for ten years, and I have two children, a boy and a girl. I love them to death and I really work to be a good father. I never cheated on my wife. Yeah, I know, a lot of guys say that, but it’s really true. I had my temptations, but I never felt the pull strongly enough to actually stray.

My marriage fell apart about two years ago. I see a lot of guys on this site are pretty angry, but that’s not my scene. We fucked up the marriage mutually, and the real basis of it is that we should never have married in the first place. We weren’t marrying each other because it was what we most wanted. We married each other because it seemed like a good match. It “looked right.”

To make a long story short, I read your post and I cried because I realized the basis of making that decision was exactly what you wrote about. Cheryl was a good woman, and I needed a good woman in order to be a good man. God, what heartache I could have saved us both.

“I’m starting to understand,” James says. “This site is built on a set of dichotomies. Brother Talk is more philosophic. It involves in-depth discussions on the subject of masculinity, as opposed to Bitch Talk, which is more of a full frontal assault on women and feminism in general.”

“That’s a pretty accurate summation,” Leo agrees.

“I can see how that would help our perp,” I say. “He’s not interested in posts like the one we just read. He doesn’t want the grief; he’s looking for the hate.”

When it comes to the relationships between men and women, it always seems to be the extremes that rule: love or hate, no in between.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with the war of the sexes for most of my life. I was raised by a father who treated me less as a female and more as a human being. My father was a dreamer, a man who’d tilt his head up in wonder to search for the blue sky peeking between the tree leaves. He appreciated simplicities, the small things, and he tried his best to transfer this understanding to me.

My mother was the one who loved the dreamer but kept her head out of the clouds. She anchored him to the ground with a mix of love and anger so that he didn’t float away. The problem with Icarus men is that they forget the sun can burn, that even if they manage to escape the earth’s atmosphere, space is cold and dark and deadly.

I landed in between the two of them. I have my mother’s anger, but I’m capable of my father’s wonder, and the truth is, when I think of my parents, I see myself more through my father’s eyes than my mom’s. His eyes said one thing to me: You can be anything you want, and I’ll love you.

He let me shoot guns at eight, even though he hated them himself. He didn’t bat an eye when I told him, during high school, that I planned a career in law enforcement.

The men in my life, those successors of my father, have all been good men, not intimidated by my dreams but loving me for them instead. We’ve used our strengths to fill in for the other’s weaknesses, and not because we were trying to prove something. I don’t cook, because I never learned, not because I’m trying to make a statement about women’s duties in the home. When Matt and I were married, I cleaned the toilets, not because it was “my job” but because Matt begged me to. Cleaning toilets truly grossed him out; I had no problem with it. It was a love thing, not a man-woman thing.

Still, I haven’t been immune. I wasn’t just a woman when I joined the FBI, I was a woman-child, and physically small. This made me a target to some.

The most significant encounter was with an old-timer by the name of Frank Robinson. He was over fifty years old and had been with the Bureau since he was my age. I was assisting on a case in an administrative capacity, and Frank was either second or third in command.

At one point after a briefing, I found myself alone in the conference room with him. I was gathering up papers and putting them into folders. Frank was sitting in his chair, leaning back, chewing on the cap of his pen while eyeing me thoughtfully.

I tried to ignore it, but he kept staring, so I stopped what I was doing and confronted him.

“Do you need something, sir?” I asked.

He smiled, and I saw the shades of ugliness there. The hints of a leer. “I was just remembering why I never liked having young female agents in the Bureau.”

“Why is that?”

He stood up, downed the last bit of coffee in his Styrofoam cup, and let the leer fly. “It’s distracting. Always wondering the same questions. Satin or lace? Natural or shaved? Big clit or little?” He licked his lips and the next words were practically a purr. “And the most important question of all: Does she swallow?”

I remember how shocked I felt in that moment. How violated. He wasn’t touching me, but he was. His hands were all over me, even though they were hanging there at his sides. I felt myself blushing and hated my face for the betrayal. In the midst of it all, his eyes, drinking my reactions down.

Everything I’d dealt with up to that point had been essentially harmless. Less harassment than hazing, testing me to see what I was made of. I’d push back hard, give as good as I got, and that would be the end of it.