My Animal Life(43)

Dear girls of my youth. What talk, what laughter! Only death has parted us. We shared so much as we struggled to be adults; ordinary cheerfulness, everyday intimacy, luck, disaster; we cared for each other. Talking about men, sharing knowledge, telling stories against ourselves, helping each other to find our way in a world where marriage was no longer obvious. In those days, I was married to my female friends. Yet I needed those badly-judged relationships with men. How else could I have made the transition from the oppressions of home to my own, freeer marriage? If you behave for too long, in the end you break out. I carried a burden of anger and sorrow, sorrow for my mother, anger with my father, though I should have felt sorrow for him as well, and I do, now he no longer weighs on me. He didn’t teach me what was tolerable, how much or how little I should yield to men. I found that out, through a decade of conflict. I slowly worked towards a way of being happy.

And now I am no longer young (though I feel it), so if I am to answer this chapter’s questions, it had better be now, before I start forgetting the scraps of knowledge life has left on my sleeve. I grew up with men. I always knew them. But I learned more slowly how to deal with them.

I like men, as friends, as colleagues, as fathers—it moves me to see men with their children, especially since I have entered the world of parents and children—as sexual partners and objects of desire. I love young men for their maleness, their angles, their shiny skins and their firm jaws, their hopefulness and brashness, their risk-taking, their certainty, their shyness mixed with confidence, their courage and light-heartedness. I like the clear line of their necks and shoulders, the bone and muscle jutting bravely at the sky. I’m not sexually attracted to young men; what would I do with one, if I got him? I wouldn’t enjoy feeling elderly stretched out alongside some dazzling Apollo. But I would have loved to have a son, as well as a daughter. I would have loved to give Nick a son.

From my family of men, of brothers and fathers and uncles and boy cousins, I learned to love men, and to see them as touching, though I also learned they were explosive and needy. I mustn’t give everything. Stand my ground. Yet sexually, I yielded too easily. I wanted to please them, as well as myself. I wanted to please them, or I wanted to placate them?

What do men need from women? The answers I grope for don’t come from having got this right, but from getting it wrong, and seeing others get it wrong.

I think they want appreciation of their male virtues. There are lovable traits which I do see as male, not that they are exclusively so. Being brave or rash or funny, devoting themselves to single tasks or causes. Being physically strong. Having big ideas. Dreaming, carrying, and making. Founding states or cities, being ready to die for them. Forgiveness for their male faults: being one-track minded, forgetting the details, not noticing what’s going on emotionally, disliking being told about it, not wanting to talk (though sometimes that’s a virtue), thinking they are sick when they are not, being too ready to fight and die or send others off to do so for a cause. (Of course many women also do these things.)

But what if men use their strength the wrong way? What if they prevail by violence, or fear? Then they need a woman to stand up to them, or leave them. A sad fact: most of us behave as badly as the people who live with us allow.

I have seen how men like to have motherly care. Acceptance, rather than amused, sneering toleration, of their masculine bodies. Sex as an expression of that absolute acceptance and tenderness, which often means oral sex. Men want to be wanted, just like women. Some have been amazed when I wanted them. Emotional closeness—when they feel like it. Friendship. To be listened to. To be admired for the efforts they make, and respected.

Not to be belittled, in public or private. A home where the father is truly welcome, not excluded, plotted against, marginalised. Children who are encouraged by the mother to love them. It sounds obvious, but it doesn’t always happen. This was the guerrilla war my mother fought, because she didn’t dare do anything braver. So she kept Dad in the dark, and laughed at him. Not always, though: ‘Your dad’s a good provider.’ And ‘Don’t upset Dad.’ But also ‘Don’t tell Dad.’ So the kitchen would fall silent when Dad came in. It wasn’t a good feeling. It didn’t make him happy.

What do women need from men? What do I need to be happy? Many of the same things, of course. Love, tenderness, not to be belittled (though I like to be teased. It’s a conundrum.) A child, friendly companionship, a home.

I know my mother craved recognition for the care she gave to men and to children, to Dad and to Grandpa, after his stroke, to all of us: she cooked every single meal, shopped and planned, paid bills and made appointments, did the washing and ironing. To be fair, my father often said thank you, and so does my husband, which is very important, though he has much less to thank me for, because nobody irons, and there’s a washing machine.