Mary

He had worked with Mary for the first five years of his career in computers. Over the years they had become friends—the kind of friends that weather all sorts of hard stuff together; the kind of friends that can talk about anything safely; the kind of friends who can go two years without contact and then pick up without missing a beat. She had married and gone off to Texas for a career change, and they hadn’t seen each other since the wedding nearly three years ago. E-mail contact had been sporadic but enough to prove that she was still alive and that she and her husband would soon be back in the Silicon Valley with another career adjustment. He looked forward to seeing them again.

Mary had been the first person he ever told about the problems with his marriage. Long before anyone else knew. She was just the right person to first confide in. She hadn’t really known how to help him with it, but did fine just by listening and letting him talk it through. She had said something back during one of those talks that moved him deeply and changed his understanding of women profoundly.

“Men are so damned confident!” she said. “You’re cocky and have the world by the tail. Guys feel like you have a right to succeed, so you just go out and do it. Everything is so simple for you and you just sail through life and nothing ever seems to bother you. Women are really jealous and resentful of that. We don’t get how you can skate through life without a care. Even guys who are total losers have it. Some of them should be ashamed of how bad they are, but still they can strut around on top of the world! It’s not like that for us. We take everything much more seriously. We don’t have that boyish confidence and we’re really pissed off because it looks so damned easy for you.”


Mary had nailed it. This was a fundamental gender difference at a deep level. A level not always articulated, but heartfelt and intense. He had always felt like women seemed a bit uptight about life, and resentful of men. You could see it in their remarks about men being overgrown boys who would never grow up. In their impatience and irritation at how irresponsible men could be. He had always shrugged such remarks off in the past, but suddenly now it made sense. Women really couldn’t help feeling the way they did about men’s playful, lackadaisical self-confidence. It wasn’t that they just needed to “get a life” as he had always thought. There was something intrinsically different in the way women lived in the world. This revelation was a turning point in his understanding of femininity.

Mary had tried to put a light hearted face on what she said, but he knew she spoke for herself every bit as much as for women at large. He had seen her lip quiver almost imperceptibly as she spoke. And he knew the envy and resentment and frustration she spoke of were not all directed outward toward men. Much of it was directed inward at herself for not being able to be as confident and playful as the men around her.

He began to talk to other women he knew about what Mary had said, and in one form or another, they all agreed. Some found it hard to say, others were outspoken. For some it was nuanced, or masked. But it turned out that this was a very common formation in the feminine landscape.

So what did it mean? What could he do with it? It seemed to be partly a real difference between the genders, but more a symptom of 6,000 years of uninterrupted radical patriarchy; layer upon layer of abuse and dominance and insensitivity and brutality. In varying degrees and manifestations this imbalance had continued unabated for 300 generations. He felt wholly incompetent to unravel this problem, and yet compelled by it. He would never forget what Mary had said that day. And it informed his sensitivity to a subject that guys just don’t usually get at all.