I received some excessively bad news today regarding my future. The seniors and I were in their kitchen, making dinner. Well, she and I were making dinner while he pontificated on gender impulses in the human species. He is himself an academic and had plenty of advice for me. He said if I went ahead with the phD I would have no hope of ever getting a man to commit to me. Men, you see, want to be better educated than their mate. It helps them establish intellectual superiority to match the physical dominance they already enjoy. Men like women who are bright and productive but not more so than men. He said that a well-educated woman would lead her less-educated male partner to feel insecure and irrelevant. While he may initially admire her drive and ambition, for it proves her to be a superior female, he is ultimately convinced that it means she is a superior breeder and reproductive partner. When her ambitions do not turn to reproduction and home-making, he begins to see her as competition for the male role in the relationship. He believes she is challenging him. He bows out, emasculated.
I was advised that I could have one or the other: man or career. They cannot exist together, they can only exist in parallel universes. Academic women intimidate men. He said men are far too easily threatened for their own good, and that to deliberately ignore or discard well-educated women is a silly choice, but that it happens in academia with alarming frequency.
I respect him very much, though I like him only occasionally. He has the kind of blunt approach to human relations that is terribly off-putting. Nevertheless, he is often right. So my question is, is he right? I am slightly unsettled. Not because I ever wanted to get married but because I do not want my career and ambition to render me unlovable.
Huh?? Since when did you start listening to what MEN tell you???
ReplyDeleteYes, the BAD news about gender impulses is that they have been ingrained through millions of years of hominid evolution. Contrariwise, the GOOD news about gender impulses is that we are no longer roaming the Great Rift Valley or the plains of the Serengeti -- in effect, we ALREADY ARE living in a parallel universe. I like to call it "civilization".
In our world, men are no longer neatly-predictable two-dimensional primate-caricatures. A whole messily-complex third-dimension has been erected upon that simple evolutionary XY-substructure. Which means that while men do sometimes make silly choices (BWAhahaha), it is by no means true that evolutionary preprogramming dictates all of their actions. The residual effects of male evolution must not be gainsaid (we are, after all, still animals), but they can certainly be effectively manipulated and soothed by a smart woman (or -- if we choose to venture into the realm of bluntness -- by most ANY woman, for that matter).
The inbred, jealous, back-stabbing faculty-lounges of academia are not the only places to go fishing for love. Remember: the only thing more insufferable than a female academic ... is a male academic. Why would you want to get tangled up with one of THEM anyway? Leave them to their petty, sniveling intellectual insecurites and emasculated testosteronic tantrums, I say. Because there's plenty of smart COWBOYS who absolutely love the schoolmarms -- and the smarter the schoolmarm, the better.
(signed) bury me not on the lone prairie