ARE MEN NECESSARY?

I don't understand men.
I don't even understand what I don't understand about men.
They are a most inscrutable bunch, really.
I had a moment of dazzling clarity when I was twenty-six, a rush of confidence that I had cracked the code. But it was alas, an illusion.
I think I overcomplicated their simplicity. Or oversimplified their simplicity.Are they as complicated as a pile of wood? Or as simple as a squid?

I was loathe to accept the premise of Jerry Seinfield, who claims that men are really nothing more than extremely advanced dogs who want the same thing from their women as they do their underwear, a little bit of support and a little bit of freedom..

I was more prone to go with the thesis of James Thurber and E.B. white in their seminal 1929 treatise, IS SEX NECESSARY?, that the american male was the least understood of all the male and that more attention needed to be paid to his complexity, the importance of what he is thinking and what he intends to do, or at least what he would like to do..

How often do you hear it said that the little whims and desires of a man should be cherished, or even listened to? You don't hear it said at all. What you do hear is that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. A thing like that hardens a man. He may eat his spinach and say nothing, but he is being hardened just the same.

Thurber and white don't date the start of the troubles between men and women to the snaky eve. They contend that things got bollixed up in the 1920's when the female came face to face with the male. The American male's repugnance to charades, which is equaled, perhaps to his repugnance to nothing at all. Goes back to those years the authors explained.

I know women are disorienting to men, too.

In the final analysis, thurber and white, decided matters went irretrievably awry during the jazz age when flappers began to imitate men, smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money(not much but some) and thinking they had a right to be sexual. all these strained attempts at equality they contend destroyed the mystery of the sexual tango, the sexual charleston, if you will.

This spurt of cocky independence faded and over the decades women lapsed back into domesticity and deference, until their only avatars were perfect gingham moms such as Donna Reed, June Clever, and Harriet Nelson. Then came the Sexual Revolution....

But back to me...I came of age during the third wave of feminism...the do-it-yourself..the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s..and despite my undying support of this said movement..I didn't necessarily fit into the movement itself..I hated the dirty, unisex jeans, no make-up zoned outta your head looks...

In the universe of eros, I longed for style and wit, I love the art decor of the 1940s..movies. I wanted to live the life of a screwball herione like Katherine Hepburn wearing a gold lama gown cut to the bias, Cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along fifth avenue with my pet leopard.

In those days I assumed we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. On my twenty fifth birthday my mom sent me a bank book with a modest nest egg she had saved for me. I always felt that the girls in the family should get a little more than the boys even though, all are equally loved, she wrote in a letter. They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's a mans world today more than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries.

I thought at the time that she was being old world, like my favorite jade, Dorothy Parker, when she wrote:

by the time your his, shivering and sighing, and he vows he passion is infinite and undying, make a note of this lady...one of you is lying...

I thought the struggle for eglitarinism was a cinch, so I could leave it to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and birkenstocks. I figured there was plenty of time for me to get serious later...little did I realize that the sexual revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes..