The Carpet Matches the Drapes

Why I searched for a guy is a question I turn over in the weird insomniac hours when I awake at four a.m. to recycle the diet coke with caffeine I drank at school. Getting up to use the bathroom, my body says, “Hey Redhead, I’m wired! Let’s toss and turn.” That’s how caffeine works. When I am thirsty in the middle of the day, I am not good at thinking about insomnia in the middle of the night. I am teaching creative writing which leaves little time for restocking the office fridge with caffeine-free soda purchased at Target by the case (and therefore cheaper than campus vending machines) and too much theoretical knowledge to apply to this question of why I want a man. Not just A man, but THE man, and not only that, but ANOTHER man.
For as Tiina is wont to point out, I have been down the aisle before, albeit the institutional-tiled hallway of the county courthouse with the judge’s secretary for a witness at the chronological age of 21. Tiina has yet to marry though she has been in long-term relationships and has an adorable son possessed of long limbs, blond hair, and brilliant eyes just like her. I am the mother of two teenaged daughters. Neither has red hair, and one of my earliest parenting disasters resulted when I told people who complimented me on their cherubic smiles in line to buy Barbie dolls at Kmart that I had a blonde and a brunette, and had I tried one more time I might have gotten a redhead too. I made this remark one too many times when Kimberly, my brunette, confided later to me at home that she wished she had red hair for me. As if I would change anything about her.
Thus I, of all people, should not be surprised that someone doesn’t want a red head, knowing that hair color matters so little when it comes to loving another person. Still, I am always delighted when someone responds to my profile and they targeted me specifically for the reason that I have red hair. It always reminds me of my husband’s reaction the first time we were together, how his eyebrows shot up and his eyes bulged and he said “My God! You’re a redhead down here too.”
“What color did you think it would be?” I asked him.
“Brown. Just like all the blondes have.”
Years afterward, when I related this experience to Tiina, she wanted to know why I didn’t ask him how many blondes that had been exactly. It never occurred to me to ask, and I cannot wish for a time machine to go back and keep us apart, because every time I think of being in marital hell, I also think of those two girls, one blonde, one brunette, and I have to unwish it.

Online Now!

My friend Tiina says I am a writer, yet no one can tell reading my profile. “Tell a story,” she prompts. “It’s what you do.” Meaning, I think, I need to put my best foot forward, since I am not a six-foot blonde with an exotic Estonian spelling of my first name to garner male attention. I have red hair and am four inches shorter. Ergo, too much for the average man and not really distinctive to the taller ones. Also, for the first time in my life I have discovered that red hair, the only thing about me I have ever believed to be pretty, is not an asset to some men. Some men will click on “any” where the website asks for details regarding your perfect match‘s hair color. Some men will click on either blonde or black. Some men however, a significant number it seems to me, will click on every option EXCEPT red. Guys who are careless of spelling or punctuation, guys who have pictures from their wedding nine years earlier with the bride’s illusion lace veil cropped from the picture almost entirely, guys who go to no trouble to click anything that consumes an extra second in any other category, will go to the trouble of specifying no red hair.
My story, when I post it, goes like this: Last week, I was baking brownies and checked for a commercial before turning on the mixer. No man on the couch, no game on TV, no interference in the age of cable reception anyhow, but six years post-divorce I still expect to hear “Cut that noisy thing off!“ So that is what I want to say. I want someone who will come into the kitchen with a sly grin and say can I lick the beaters. If you’re going to yell from the sofa about the noise, keep surfing. If you’re going to come into the kitchen, this is a good place for us to start.Tiina approves wholeheartedly. She says if it does not attract the love of my life, that at the very least I will be “knee deep in dick” within a few weeks. Tiina lives in Florida while I exist in Arkansas. When I relate this remark to my office mates, they find it hilarious and anxiously await more stories, thinking if I do not find that special someone, I will at least regale them with tales in the process. For Tiina is right about what I do: I make stories.

Been Burned: Still Like the Fire

When I was a little girl, Valentine’s Day was my favorite holiday. It isn’t that I had anything against the rest of the calendar. I liked outlining my hand on poster board and turning the thumb into a turkey face, the fingers into plumage with the help of 24 Crayola crayons. I liked weaving construction paper baskets in May and filling them with flowers to be left on doorknobs. I loved candy and fruitcake and home-made cards with gold star stickers and words written in Elmer’s glue sprinkled with glitter. But my favorite was always Valentine’s Day.
The year I was in love with Robert Waltz I had the biggest box for Valentine’s Day in the whole class. We were supposed to bring shoe boxes to decorate. I brought the box from my father’s new hunting boots. I wanted the biggest box thinking I would get the most stuff that way. I remember licking the tiny pink envelopes to the cards I would hand out with my classmates’ names and how delighted I was to have little boxes of Conversation Hearts to give out. Robert had Charm’s Blow Pops that went through two slots in his cards so he didn’t have envelopes, but there were two lollipops in the card he put in my box, one right-side-up and one upside-down to make them both fit. No one else got two except me. Everything about the day was glorious from the cupcakes Lisa Mooney’s mother sent, each decorated with a little Hershey’s kiss, to the recess afterwards when Robert bestowed upon my cheek my first non-chocolate kiss. Heaven.
Except for that cupid thing. My father needed those hunting boots because he was the epitome of macho and while he liked football used to joke that the seasons had nothing to do with weather or sports, but in reality were duck, deer, and fishing. If there had been bears in southwest Oklahoma, he’d have gotten a license for that too. My mother referred to my father’s gun cabinet as her husband’s china hutch and the garage was crowded with compartmentalized trunks filled with colorful feathered fishing lures and spools of monofilament. He did not particularly care for bow-hunting, but he had friends who took it up at about this point in my life, and being daddy’s girl I would often be at the lake where target practice took place.
There is a line from Chaucer about Cupid’s arrow and how it “wounds or carves.” Those are the choices. If he aims at you and you get hit, love either works or it doesn’t. But either way, your skin is pierced by an arrow. The arrowhead, flint knapped stone, moving in a forceful trajectory collides with the layers of the dermis, tearing through muscle for brakes, seeking the flesh of that most vital organ, the heart. And we stand in line, eager for this event.
Pain comes with every love even if you are happily married for fifty years, maybe especially if you are happily married for fifty years, for then someone has to die and someone has to live alone, or you go together and the love is no more, but love is never perfect for the human pair-bond. There was a thirty-year gap between the time I watched a group of bow hunters with arrows and the time I took a literature course in Chaucer, but the one thing I figured out early was that everything comes with a price.
People are never sorry for loving. They are often sorry for losing love. The woman left behind after her golden wedding anniversary isn’t sorry about the fifty years. She’s sorry no more years are forthcoming. I’ve always liked the idea of love and for my entire life, since the first grade with Robert Waltz, I’ve had my iron in the fire. Or as one guy said on his match.com profile: Been burned but still like the fire.

Men's Abortion

Well, I have learned a few things about blogging since beginning this last week.  First, I learned that I say too much in a single blog.  I am blogging like an essayist, not like a blogger.  I apologize for that.  It's kind of funny though because I began my life as a professional writer with the Frederick Leader newspaper in my hometown of Frederick, Oklahoma.  The name of the column I wrote was "Mommy Tracks."  At that time I had a GED and had never attended college, and I don't know where I got the cojones to think I had something to say about being a mom that I thought everybody else in that corner of Oklahoma ought to read.  But I did, and yes, there is something full circle about talking about a mom with cojones and now having a graduate degree in gender studies, so I guess at least I am consistent.
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/02/22/men_must_speak_up_on_abortion_debate
Here's an article from salon.com I discovered via my good friend Teri McGrath, another Oklahoma mother, this one my office mate from grad school, my best friend from undergraduatedom.  The article is well-written, though I can't say I don't have any arguments with it.  But because I have decided to have a blog about gender, because I am asking my professional writing students to also have blogs this semester, and they cannot be "diary" blogs, but something academic, professional, related to being a writer, and so I should do the assignment as well in order to grade it, I picked gender as my topic.
It reminds me of a beautiful essay by Thomas Lynch called "Wombs" which my composition students will be reading in April.  In that essay, Lynch states that if his daughters have the legal right to an abortion, that his sons should have that legal right as well.  That if a man impregnates a woman, at some point in the first trimester when a woman may legally absolve herself of responsibility for the life of the child, a man may also do likewise and declare he will take no economic, medical, emotional, any responsibility for the unborn child. 
Legally, this sounds like a good argument.  Biologically, there can never be equality between males and females.  There is a quote I remember from literature that goes something like:  What is wrong in women's lives cannot be right in men's.  How can we have women's issues that do not intersect with men's lives?  Here is what really got my goat, so to speak.  I was trying to find out the exact quote, so I googled it.  Google kept saying:  did you mean:  what is wrong in men's lives cannot be right in men's?  Like there could not be the word women in that sentence.  Is that a language issue, a man's issue, a woman's, or a technology issue?  Where do those lines get drawn? 

Man of Steel

We live in a superhero culture. If Cupid was shooting arrows, how would he pierce the armor that our culture dresses men up in? Michael Bolton crooned a song called “I’m Not Made of Steel” in which he proclaimed appearances are sometimes deceiving and he could bend, break, and feel but ultimately he hid behind the face of his pride. Karyn White had a song on a similar theme called “Superwoman” in which she said she told the intended target of her song that she was not the kind of woman he could disappoint and think it didn't matter.
When I was a child and Valentine's Day was my favorite holiday, my favorite candy was conversation hearts, those chalky little pieces of pastel sugar with messages imprinted in red dye number two. Because this was the 70's, some of the messages were a bit hokey by modern standards, but back then "Wow" and "Be Cool" meant something along with the traditional "Be Mine" and "I Love You." Me and Beth and Lisa would sort through the whole bag during recess and give the "good ones" to the boys we liked and the ones that were vague to the boys who were smelly. Sometimes, we complained that there were not enough messages and we would formulate the conversations we needed but lacked a sugary vocabulary to indulge: Hearts that said "You Dork," perhaps, or "Get Lost."
The boys merely gobbled the candy and ran around like they had ADHD during recess only we didn't know what ADHD was back then, and paid no attention to us in general unless we were wearing a dress on the monkey bars or had a really cool scab to show them or they needed to borrow a pencil from us. Part of this is because we were playing with Barbie dolls, and Barbie had a wedding dress. Ken had a tuxedo. We had Easy-bake ovens in which we baked our daddies little round cakes with the heat from a light bulb which was practice for making big round cakes someday for our husbands. We had other dolls who were babies that cried maw-maw and toddlers who could really walk and be our play pals.
And the boys all had GI Joe who came with a paratrooper set or a tiger and a cage. Joe was not worried about women or fatherhood or much of anything else. The boys of my childhood had Hot Wheels and marbles and six-shooter cap guns and Daisy air rifles. So while the argument can be made that the way boys and girls notice each other and interact is cultural, it seems obvious that is only part of the answer. Little boys have dormant sperm factories. They do not become operational until puberty when the testosterone starts downloading. Girls, however, have all the eggs they will ever have before they are even born. It is at puberty when the eggs begin to be released in anticipation of fertilization, once the facility to nurture a baby becomes possible. When a female runs out of eggs, menopause occurs, whereas men remain capable of fathering children until their death bed in many cases. Nature is logical that way - imagine if both genders remained capable of producing children to the point of old age and Alzheimer's. We'd have children abandoned not for cultural or emotional reasons (which already strains our society) but biological abandonment through death.
This is part of the reason women cover their gray hair and invest in Botox and plastic surgery and cosmetics. Some women in our culture view any attempt to improve appearance as the effort to please the male gender and they categorically view all such activities as therefore wrong. The simple truth is that cosmetics and all other enhancements, from temporary injections to permanent surgical procedures and everything in between, procedures and products, all of these are designed to do one thing:

make the female look like she has ripe eggs.

Daytime talk shows have a staple topic in tiny tot beauty queens who have nothing to put in the cup of a bra except tissue, but their immature faces look like cover girls who are sexually available. That's what cosmetics do. Eyeliner and mascara makes the pupil look bigger. Blush makes the cheeks bright and lipstick makes the lips look engorged and filled with blood. This is all designed to mirror what biologically happens to the female face during sexual arousal. So in some females, this process is used to age one, but it is also used to reverse the signs of aging as well. When a woman goes through menopause, she can still avail herself of these cosmetics and procedures in order to appear that she still has ripe eggs. Of course, if you don't have eggs then someone who does have sperm is not really interested. (Go figure what is up with pedophiles. Somebody needs to.) For women, looking younger can be about pleasing men and attracting those who have sperm, which is all of them past 13 years of age. But it can also be a means of empowering yourself, of looking like there are still ripe eggs in the ovaries. If men ran out of sperm at a certain age, you can be sure there would be a plethora of research to reverse the process, or at least a multitude of products to hide the evidence. They have a multitude now just to hide the evidence that they are slowing down. If all women were whisked off the planet tomorrow, some men would still want to cover their gray and go to the gym. They want to look good in front of other men. They want to look good to themselves. Women can want these same things regardless of men they do or do not want to impress.

But the Devil Made Me Do It!

Cupid Rhymes with Stupid

-       Or, Taking Responsibility for Your Own Love Life

By Cherri Randall, PhD

In vampire lore, Dracula has to be invited inside your house before he can bite you.  Similarly, the devil does not twist your arm.  He entices you to give in to your own desires, to listen to your treacherous heart, to make emotional decisions based on the easy way out.  He stands outside in the cold wind urging you to open the door - but the bottom line is, it is up to you whether or not to open the door. 

                Everybody wants to choose for themselves, but the homework to make an informed decision is so painstaking.  The problem with relationship advice is almost everyone makes one basic assumption that is not true.  Before that can be discussed, some background is in order.

                Consider the idea that there are basically two ways of looking at the world.  One is that a creator put us on earth to go therefore and multiply.  It does not matter if you believe that creator is God Almighty, Yahweh, Allah, Karma, Jehovah, Krishna, et. al.  What matters is that you believe a pair of humans were made, and their divinely appointed plan was making more humans. 

                Or, you can believe that we evolved from primordial ooze, and that our prime directive is to procreate our species and survival of the fittest will insure that he who parents best parents last. 

This is not to engage a theological debate but to point out that these two disparate world views reconcile on this all-encompassing agenda.  Whichever belief you have, we're here to make babies.  To make babies, we need eggs and we need sperm.  So we put those two things together and procreate

                As humans, we invest in quality of offspring more so than any other species.  Two parents can offer more to a child than one parent can offer.

                There are of course exceptions to this idea.  If a man is abusive, a child might be better off being raised only with his mother.  If a woman neglects her children, those children likely will be better off in foster care or being raised by their father.  If we speak of positive attention, however, it is always in the best interests of a human child to have two parents investing in the future in a positive manner.

                This is where the idea of marriage originated.  What God has yoked together, let no man break apart.  If you don't believe some version of that, then the alternative is recognizing that pair-bonding evolved to insure the success of parenting.  Teenagers today chafe at the idea of abstinence until marriage as if the injunctions against premarital sex were effected just to keep them from enjoying their bodies. 

The simple truth is the necessity of waiting until the pair-bond was formalized meant that any children conceived by the couple practicing sexual relations would benefit from having two parents investing in their future. 

                A formalized relationship benefits any children that are born into that relationship.  In our society, marriage is not just a cultural institution, but also a legal institution. 

                Abortion also has both a medical definition and a legal status which terminates all future interests in an embryo or fetus.  It curtails all investments in the life of the developing child.  An abortion legally means:  I will take no further responsibility for this pregnancy and the life that would have resulted from it.

                Males do not have this legal right.  Proponents of male abortion rights state that a male who has fertilized an egg in a female body should have the right to say, sometime during the first trimester and/or within the same legal restrictions that females have, I will take no future responsibility for this pregnancy and the life that would have resulted from it.  I will make no emotional commitment.  I will make no financial investment.  I will not rock a colicky baby or go to school plays or help with algebra homework. 

This in no way gives the male the right to curtail the female's investment in the future, but it does give him an equal right to curtail his investment if he so chooses.  The female is legally notified in this scenario that she can expect no investment from the male involved. 

                If this ever becomes law, there are a lot of TV talk shows that are going to have to find new subjects.  But the issue is problematic if a woman does not know paternity in the case of rape or multiple partners.  Male abortion rights presume that the father in question can be notified within the time restrictions allowed by law. 

But on some level, this law would make a certain sort of sense.  There are men who have been forced to undergo abortions - men who wanted to take responsibility for their children in cases where the woman decided to terminate the pregnancy regardless of their wishes.  Even without this law, our society is filled with deadbeat dads across the spectrum. 

                The problem with deciding issues about gender, whether about marriage or abortion or rape or anything else, is that we speak of a relationship between two equal parties.  Legally we can do this.  Legally we can term an abortion termination of parental interests, and apply it to either parent, but medically, biologically, abortion can never involve two equal parties, for until a sci-fi futuristic laboratory with artificial uteruses becomes the norm, there will never be an equal investment by the male and female when it comes to procreating the species. 

                As a society, we have learned to manipulate biology to the point that we can prevent conception by fooling the female body into thinking it has already conceived and thus there is no need to release another egg each month. 

We can prevent conception by several barrier methods, all of which prevent the meeting of sperm and egg.  We can plot ovulation on a calendar and deny sperm when the egg is ripe.  We can prevent implantation after conception by interrupting the process by which the fertilized egg attaches to the uterine lining. 

We can also use agents that neutralize the ability of sperm to penetrate the egg or that stop the motility of sperm in reaching that point.  If conception occurs, we can inject saline or we can vacuum the embryo out of the uterus so that no further development occurs.  Most of these methods are recent developments in human history and the impact on behavior is ongoing.

                But for millennia, humans have not had these options.  Females have had their bigger eggs that are biologically more expensive.  In most mammalian females, only one or two eggs are produced each estrus cycle.  Should conception occur, the female will have to incubate the egg for a period of time from days to weeks to months, depending upon the species. 

Males have had their sperm cells, of which they produce millions each day.  These biological costs mean that when conception occurs, the female always has more invested in the mating than does the male.  Whatever you believe about the origins of life is moot in the process of mating.  Whether we are designed by a creator to operate this way or we evolved as a species this way, this is the biological reality we face and it impacts behavior.

                Women say they are unlucky in love and cupid is not smiling on them, and it is not their fault that they cannot find romantic bliss. 

It is popular in academic circles these days to say that gender is a cultural product.  Certainly, what it means to be a man or a woman is determined in many ways by one's social environment.  Too many girls idolize celebrities in our culture. 

Humans learn what it means to be male or female from their cultural context.  This has chilling implications when the most popular girls are flashing their genitalia at the paparazzi with the resultant photographs posted on the internet and the boys are on the sideline of Girls Gone Wild shouting for more nakedness. 

In the here and now, there are over 200 books on Amazon.com about relationships and how to find the love you are looking for. 

There are columns in every magazine and shows on every network and gurus at every radio station.  If we had that many experts trying that unsuccessfully to balance the federal budget, someone would have been fired by now. 

Marriage is like a budget with several components.  In a budget you have to spend but you expect to get some return on your investments if you choose wisely.  You expect to build some equity, to have ownership, to find satisfaction. 

Marriage includes legal status and, in relationships that result in offspring, parenting.  But the human animal is a much different species from the hens and roosters with their very different sex cells.  Hens do not cluck around the barnyard that the rooster is getting it on with 47 other hens while she is laying yet another egg. 

Bambi's mom is not distraught in spring over birthing her fawn alone.  If the bucks were there, it would mean more mouths to feed on a limited grazing area, so there could be no advantage and in fact a disadvantage in having him around.  Hens and does are not lonely for their men after conception occurs. 

Humans are concerned with the body, but also with the mind and the spirit.  The problem with posting naked celebrities on the internet is that no one is concerned with anything beyond the body.  Yet the headlines clamor for our attention at every magazine rack in every grocery store in America:  Stars in Rehab!  Stars in Court!  Stars in Jail!  Stars in every imaginable pain no matter how hot they look or how rich they are!

                The body, the mind, and the spirit.  A balanced budget requires an integrated approach.  Anytime all the attention is given to only one category in the budget, some other category is coming up short.  We learn our gender from our culture without ever realizing that all the mind over matter in the world is not going to change our biology, and biology does impact behavior in some profound ways, beginning with the sex cells.  Women invest more in reproduction, and the ability to manipulate reproduction, to prevent conception or to halt the process once it begins, does not change the behaviors programmed into the mind and body by a creator or millennia of imprinting.  Men invest less.  They have millions of new sperm cells every day and the body wants to spend them. 

                Some argue that this is nature's stamp of approval on male promiscuity, the biological thumb's up, the green light to nail anything that moves.  This is the biological hand of cards that men have been dealt, and it is in the male's best reproductive interests to spend those sperm cells as often and as widely as possible. 

This is the male equivalent of angels and cupid.  Women say they are unlucky in love and cupid is not smiling on them, and it is not their fault that they cannot find romantic bliss.  It is just their destiny to be unloved. 

Men say they have all these sperm cells every day and the desire to spend them at every opportunity.  Sometimes they will cheat on a woman with whom they are committed, bonded, married, and the rationale will be "the devil made me do it."  It didn't mean anything emotionally baby; I just had a weak moment.  I just couldn't help myself. 

                Women do not have a monopoly on failing to take responsibility, on copping out.  They just have different methods.  There's a biological vampire wrangling an opportunity to just have a taste, a devil advertising instant gratification to men that they have all those sperm cells anyway. 

So some of them give in and justify it by saying it is in their nature.  The most perfectly representational example of this is found in the 1988 movie "Earth Girls Are Easy."  Valerie (played by Geena Davis) arrives decked out in newly blonde hair and scrumptious undergarments to the place she shares with fiancé Ted (whom she fears is losing interest as their wedding date approaches) only to discover he is philandering with a nurse. 

After the confrontation, as Ted begs for forgiveness, he tells Valerie:  “You can’t expect me to be higher evolved than I am.”  He could just as easily have said the devil made him do it.  Either way, he was abdicating all responsibility for his actions.  He opened the door of opportunity.  No matter what he rationalizes or believes about that door, he did have a choice on whether or not he opened it.

                Here is the next thing to consider on that list of what you do not want for your life.  You are taking control of your romantic and sexual destiny.  You are ready to say cupid is not in charge; the responsibility belongs to me.  There are likewise two kinds of men:  those who say temptation controls me, or those who take responsibility for their own romantic and sexual destiny.  Put the kind you do not want on your “do not want” list.

Cherri Randall has a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Arkansas and is Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

Angels Among Us

Cupid Rhymes with Stupid

-       Or, Taking Responsibility for Your Own Love Life

By Cherri Randall, PhD

“Angels Among Us”

                The yellow archangel plant, lamiastrum galeobdolon, is a member of the mint family.  As a perennial, it prefers damp places and partial shade.  Imagine trying to grow this plant in your east-facing garden in Phoenix, Arizona.  The success rate is going to be dismal and a botanist is going to shake her head in wonder and ask, “Did you do any homework at all?”  Most of the time when someone is landscaping, she goes to the trouble of researching the climate, soil, and other growing conditions before investing a lot of time, energy, and money into a project that might not pan out. 

                The woman who does a little homework does not invest in plants that won’t grow in her geography no matter how pretty the blossoms or sweet the fruit.  And the woman who plants haphazardly grows nothing.  If the yellow archangel fails to thrive in Arizona, nobody comes along and says “what a stupid plant.”  The plant is not at fault for dying where it does not have the conditions required to flourish.  

                Women research projects, but expect love to fall out of the sky.  There are two cultural taboos working against women this way.  One is that we are culturally constrained to be “nice girls” and to put everyone else’s needs ahead of our own.  As Ursula the sea-witch tells Ariel in Disney’s version of The Little Mermaid:  “It’s she who holds her tongue who gets a man.”  

We are not supposed to ask for what we want and while we are expected to want to be joined in holy matrimony, we are not supposed to articulate our sexual desire.  We want to wear white dresses with lacy veils and carry flowers down the petal-strewn aisle. 

                There’s nothing wrong with wanting the wedding day, but there is something wrong with being programmed to want it.  Almost every Disney Princess movie ends with the wedding scene.  The princess gets her voice back, saves the day, and gets married.  She slips the glass shoe on: voila - she is now a bride.  The kiss of true love, the last withered petal, the spell is broken, and a pretty girl is swirled around in white ruffled satin on the arm of her prince. 

This is the formula for more movies than can be listed, not all of them cartoons.  Wanting a wedding is not the same thing as wanting a marriage. 

Porn, with its primarily male audience, teaches men to look at women as parts to be used towards their own sexual fulfillment and nothing else.  Romantic movies play the same role as porn with a female audience in some cases.  It teaches women to look at men as their ticket to marital fulfillment and nothing else.  Either medium teaches its audience to see means to fulfillment, not the meaning of human beings.       

                So even if you are prepared to make the leap and admit that you are a woman entitled to both an emotional and a physical relationship with a man, another cultural stumbling block arises.  We want love to be spontaneous, at first sight, filled with mystery, foreordained, perfect, a gift from heaven, the coming together of cosmic forces, thunder, lightning, and feeling the earth move.  We want the fairy godmother to wave her wand.  We want to duck into a cozy bookstore out of the rainstorm and bump into “him” in the doorway and know the moment our eyes meet that our ship has come in, our wait is over, and destiny has finally arrived.  We want Cupid to hit the mark with that one perfect arrow.  We want, in a word, magic.  The first order of business is to recognize that some men are never going to be a good match for you. 

Magic cannot be planned, programmed, researched, or scheduled.  Carly Simon sings that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be.  Then, when it isn’t that way, reality sets in and we hear other songs (if love never lasts forever, what’s forever for?) and we blame the fairy godmother.  We curse Cupid.  Fate, Karma, Destiny, by whatever label you affix, the end results are the same:  you have been unlucky in love.  It is a convenient self-serving cop out, to absolve ourselves of responsibility when we do not get the relationship we were hoping for. 

We are waiting for lightning to strike and we do not even go stand out in the rain for it to happen.  And when it does not happen, we tell ourselves it is not our fault.  Or worse yet, we blame the messenger.  We blame the yellow archangel for not growing in our sunny desert.  We place ourselves in a lose-lose situation and say it was an accident of fate or it was the wrong man, and we never consider if we should have been planting some other kind of seed instead because that means planning, and that would mean we were trying.

                There are plenty of wrong men out there.  Some of them are in jail crimes against women.  There are plenty of men out there who are good men, but just aren’t good for you.  There is danger in becoming a female chauvinist pig who bashes every man she meets for the simple fact that he is a man.  Your yellow flower might not do well in the sunshine of your love, but he might bloom in other conditions with a different gardener.  That is what plants do, and to pretend otherwise is to go against nature and all practical advice.

A few women cop out in yet another way.  Like Samantha on Sex and the City, they stay emotionally detached from men and use them only to gratify their sexual desires.  Eventually Samantha gets her heart broken, and it takes some gentle coaxing by Smith to make her pliable again.  But no one is as cynical as Miranda when she meets Steve.  She is determined that love cannot happen to her and she tries her best to sabotage their relationship.

  Happily, fate steps in and she gets the man, but if you don’t have a scriptwriter attending your life, you might want to consider taking matters into your own hands.  If you don’t believe in love, if you think you should love ‘em and leave ‘em, then you are copping out.  Whether you are breathlessly waiting for your one and only to fall from the sky, or you believe he does not exist, you absolve yourself of all responsibility for being in a good relationship. 

                You cannot expect to sprinkle seeds and have them grow with no regard for your geography or climate.  If you want fruit or flowers or foliage, you get the best results when you plan accordingly.  Love may be a red red rose, but you cannot expect much if you depend on wild flowers to provide you with emotional and sexual sustenance.

The first order of business is to recognize that some men are never going to be a good match for you.  You may admire many things about them, much like the yellow archangel flower this article begins with, but the flower does not always match the climate and geography.

  Assessing your own needs when it comes to love should include a list of what you want in a partner, but also a list of the things you do not want. 

                Once you achieve that, you won’t need arbitrary rules.  There are many different lists of rules, and  there is wisdom in postponing the sexual component of a relationship until other components are firmly established, but to give yourself a rule that says “no sex for the first month” or “no sex till he says I love you” or whatever yardstick you want to measure this by is another way of copping out. 

Imagine what a man must think if you tell him this rule during the first month.  It screams “I don’t trust my own judgment!”  It says you cannot manage your feelings or control your responses without giving yourself a curfew.  It says you are not mature enough to set your limits based on each individual relationship, that you bring a set of one-size-fits-all rules with you every time you meet a man. 

This is not an appealing picture for him, and it takes responsibility from you for governing your own life and puts all the authority onto whatever bylaws or boundaries you have chosen.  It takes away your power to define yourself first and foremost, but if the new man in your life knows about your rule, it transfers that power not to your rules, but to him.  He holds the key to your sexual surrender if he will just say the words or wait out the calendar.   

                One of the rules men live by can be found at most university fraternity houses, and the rule is simple:  “Bros before Hos.”  If your girlfriend doesn’t like this, you simply find another girlfriend because they are all hos and therefore interchangeable.  Your brothers are forever.  These men are not flowers to plant in any garden.  They are weeds.  They should be pulled out by their rootstock, and if they cannot be reeducated, they should be left to wither.  On that list of what you do NOT want for your life, please write this down in the number one slot: 

A man who treats me like a piece of meat.

That is not to say that this pendulum cannot swing back the other way.  The music industry is one of the first arenas where women gained economic power, and having attained that, they have creative control of their projects and enormous influence in the media.  Women can now treat men like objects to satisfy their sexual appetites and nothing more.  In an early video by Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love, feminists lambasted the performance because the all-girl back-up band was clearly lip syncing.  The women in the video were not adding to the music in any way.  They served only one function:  to be eye candy.  Dressed alike, they almost seemed to be clones of each other and are saved from the title bimbo by only one saving grace:  they are all brunettes.          Almost simultaneous to the rise of music videos is the career of one of the most financially successful artists ever - Madonna.  In one video, she has a tall, lean, almost naked black man in the background adding nothing to the musical performance except a rhythmic swaying that effectively showcases his physique.  In response to this, critics coined the term “himbo” to refer to a brainless male ornament.

When women achieve success in a previously-male dominated business, they also exhibit the behaviors, for better or for worse, of their male peers.  So despite the economic success of many such artists, and now women in politics, business, and the other arts, women still function in a system organized and operated according to men’s rules. 

                There are two problems to be wary of in targeting a relationship.  One is waiting on cupid to shoot the right guy for you and leave him on your doorstep.  Cupid is a little bit like Santa Claus.  If Santa Claus really existed, why would some children get candy canes and some get Magical Mansions and X-boxes?  If Cupid was really flitting around with that quiver full of arrows, wouldn’t he be working on behalf of everybody?  That’s one song nobody should listen to without shaking their head:  I believe there are angels among us.  Where were the angels when Jon Benet Ramsey and Jasmine Archie died?  There is no superhero waiting to fix your life on any holiday of the year, so get over it, and get busy fixing it yourself. 

                Secondly, there are men out there who are not well-suited to partner with anybody, and there are a lot of men who are not well-suited for you, and there are a few men who will fit a lot of your criteria.  You have to know yourself. 

You have to know if you are Phoenix, New York City, Billings, Montana, or some point in between.  You have to realize that no one is going to be 100% perfect.  Even when you find him, you still have to cultivate the garden in every season to keep love flourishing.  This is your responsibility, and if you cop out, you cannot reasonably expect an angel to come along and make it okay.

               

                Cherri Randall has a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Arkansas and is Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.