Three Suggestions (response article)

We are indebted to Marilyn Charles for an outstanding article bringing this matter to our attention. Rather than commenting in detail on what she has said, I have chosen to try to answer her question directly.

Given that a person’s mother and sisters are women, one can reasonably conclude that women are not exactly rära avis (rare birds, rarely encountered). Why, then, are women widely perceived by men as mysterious and dark, a “dark continent”? Why do men find women so mysterious? For example, it is common to find ad-

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vice to men on how to chat up an attractive woman one might encounter in a café, supermarket, or bookstore. However, women do not seem to need advice on what to say and how to react in such a situation.

Given the abundance of women that an unsuspecting person is likely to encounter, why all this feeling of mystery? I can think of three reasons: the first is justification for exploitation. Much of the claimed “mysteriousness” of women is likely to be self-serving. If women are defined as “other,” as unlike “us,” it can seem more reasonable to exploit them. We recall from the past, and unfortunately, from the present history of slavery, that slaves were defined as “other” than us, as not completely human. Hence it was acceptable to enslave them, treating them as property, animals. In many Third World countries, women do the work in the fields while the men watch. Marilyn Charles’s stimulating article details very well the second-class status of women in our own society.

My own experience suggests that the two sexes share many attributes with men leaning more toward building and women nurturance. These differences are hardly unknown and seem likely to be genetically rooted to some extent. A close friend of mine, a fine clinician who has published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, tells me that when her first daughter was a small child, she decided to give her a small rocking horse to let her daughter know that it was okay to be active and that she need not be timorous and self-effacing. She left the child to play with the rocking horse for a while and when she returned she found her daughter had placed the horse on its side on a rug, covered it with a blanket, and was feeding it tea. So the nurturing urges within women are manifest, even to social scientists and clinicians.

The daughter, brilliant like her mother, went on to graduate with honors from Yale, then graduated with honors from Harvard Business School, and later became president of an international corporation; she also married and had several children. Building and nurturance can go together. This suggests a second reason for the claimed mysteriousness of women: perhaps we men cloud our vision of women because we are envious that women can build, and can also bring a new person into the world from within them, which men cannot do?

It seems to me that we men are making a determined effort not to understand women. Let me suggest a third reason. Children

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identify with both parents but the process is somewhat different for men. We know that little boys and little girls first identify with the mother; boys have to shift this identification to the father, while girls retain the original primary identification. I think this background renders men more vulnerable to recognizing this earlier identification. Young women leaving a table of friends in a restaurant sometimes say “Bye, guys!” but men are more defensive, and a man would be mauled if on parting he said “Bye, girls!”

Willie Nelson put it this way in his song “Cowboys are Often Secretly Fond of Each Other”: “…Inside of every lady there is a cowboy who wants to come out. Inside every cowboy there is a lady who’d love to slip out…” However, as Willie says, the secondary identification is very threatening for men. So, I conclude, we men have a strong motivation not to understand the woman within us and, by extension, to treat women as mysterious and unknown.

My teacher David Bakan (men can be nurturing too), an outstanding clinician and methodologist, put it this way in his book On Method: Toward a Reconstruction of Psychological Investigation—there is a “mystery-mastery complex,” a conflict between our wish to understand and master psychological processes and our wish that they remain shrouded in mystery. So, concern about the woman inside men gives rise to the idea of women as a dark continent. Women, with less fear of their inner masculine identification, usually don’t feel the need to regard men as mysterious and unknown.

So we men have three reasons for our delusion that women are a dark and mysterious continent: a justification for exploitation, a manifestation of envy, and an expression of defensiveness about our secondary identification. Let’s try to do better in the future.

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