Separate Worlds of Men and Women
“Did the women really decorate themselves the way they appear in the old films?” Scott asks, as he comically pushes his hair to one side.
“You wouldn’t believe how many hours they spent putting their hair in weird shapes. They painted their fingernails red. They painted their eyelids purple. They used chemicals to make their cheeks a light red and their lips a darker red. What’s more, they seemed to feel better when their heels were three inches off the ground and their toes sharply pointed in a way that bore no resemblance to the shape of their feet. Both the men and women seemed obsessed with youth. They apparently felt they had been going downhill since the age of twenty. They did everything they could to put up a hopeless fight against aging.”
“I’d hate to live with such sham, such artificiality,” says Scott. “Men and women seemed to build separate worlds for themselves. I believe they even used separate bathrooms.”
“They did,” Hella agrees. “Little boys and little girls were trained in ways that were very different. A little girl was encouraged to be a ‘young lady.’ Her toys were often dolls and doll houses, furniture, and cooking implements. A boy was considered a sissy if he showed much interest in these things. He was given guns and cowboy outfits. A little girl was considered a tomboy if she ran too fast or yelled too loud. In a thousand subtle and not so subtle ways, a woman was molded into patterns known as ‘feminine,’ and a young boy was encouraged to be what they called ‘masculine.’ Since young boys and girls are neither masculine nor feminine, but are just human, this created stress on many individuals. Their cultural training kept men and women from sharing the deeper worlds of feeling.
“Their sexual do’s and don’ts were incredibly complex. Scott, they had rules about everything. Often, no variety was culturally permitted; you had your choice of one if you were married or none if you weren’t. Some cultures even had laws governing the sexual positions people could use. Many societies frowned on women who expressed their sexual desires; it wasn’t ‘ladylike.’ And intimate relationships with those of the same sex were often taboo.”
“People in the twentieth-century Western culture had deeply inculcated guilt feelings which kept them from achieving an intense and ecstatic perfection in sexual pleasures,” Scott points out. “Often a sexual climax was largely a shallow physical experience.”
“In a way, we care for sex both more and less than the thawees I observed.” replies Hella. “It is a more profound experience for us. And yet if we do not have it, we are so engrossed in other dimensions of life that we don’t miss it. It is, paradoxically, more keenly enjoyed and less keenly missed. I find that my sexual feelings usually become more satisfying as I get to know a person better. And yet I enjoy the variety of occasionally being with other men.”
Communication of Feelings
“One of the great differences between our way of life and theirs,” Hella continues, “seems to lie in the degree to which we communicate our feelings. We talk about everything. The thawees seemed ashamed of their feelings. They often repressed them and weren’t even able to face their own feelings, much less the feelings of other people. They hid behind polite masks.”
“Didn’t Mark Twain say, ‘Only the truth is good manners’?” interjects Scott.
“Even husbands and wives would go through their lives miles apart in their inner feelings,” says Hella. “Since they were ashamed of so many of their feelings, they felt it would hurt their image to let someone else know how petty their feelings were. And yet the other person was tortured by motives that were equally petty. This stupid mutual shame seemed to keep them from talking to each other and reaching out to touch each other.”
“I can’t understand how this could have happened,” says Scott. “I don’t believe I’ve ever had a feeling that I was ashamed of. I’ve had feelings that I didn’t consider desirable, but they went away as soon as I expressed them to someone. Because other people have always empathetically received all of the feelings I’ve ever expressed and were not threatened by them I don’t believe I’ve ever accumulated any mental baggage. I live fully here and now. The dead past and the unborn future don’t control me.”
“I remember reading about a twentieth-century man so angry at his wife that for eighteen years he never spoke to her,” Hella says. “They lived together and ate at the same table, but he never talked to her. Finally, they went to a psychiatrist, who urged the man to communicate. The first thing the husband said was, ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ ”
“This was extreme,” Scott replies. “Few people, however, were able to express their feelings fully to any other human being. Sometimes a few managed to do this with counselors. But rarely were they able to do this with those that were nearest and dearest to them and with whom they most needed to communicate their feelings. Instead, they wore masks and assumed personalities they didn’t have. They used words to hide their real selves, both from themselves and others.”
“In the old competitive world,” Hella points out, “it was too risky to expose one’s inner thoughts. They were afraid that other people would judge them, would be overly helpful, would give them advice that was not wanted, would start diagnosing them and tearing them apart and telling them what to do, or would save up this information and use it against them later. It was rare to find anyone who could listen with his heart.”
“Think of all the unhappiness that could have been prevented if they had realized that feelings can be managed
