I recently wrote a piece titled With or Without You. It's sort of the relationship version of a much older piece by me titled This is Real. That's not. which starts thusly:
We all grow up in our own little bubble. Getting perspective on ourselves and/or our own lives is one of the harder things to do in life.
A major theme of this blog is that:
Men get socialized for a "public sphere" existence and women get socialized for a "private sphere" existence.
And I wrote a fairly long piece called The Glass Ceiling that posits, among other things, that:
Probably a lot of sexual harassment is rooted in women doing what I used to do, men interpreting it as if it's something it's absolutely not and the two of them continuing to miscommunicate train-wreck style for as long as they know each other because neither of them ever figures it the fuck out.
If you haven't already read that piece or the other pieces linked above, I suggest you do so because in the last few days something is gelling in my mind and since I have no real engagement, I don't really know what I need to say to YOU -- AKA the public, or my hypothetical audience -- to make things clear, so you may NEED that context to make sense of this piece.
This piece takes that thought about a woman and a man communicating train-wreck style and expands on how I think that pattern leads to TWO common patterns:
1. Women generally have less "serious" careers than men, so much so that no matter how successful she is, she usually "marries up," a la multimillionaire Janet Jackson being married to a billionaire for a time.
2. Serious career women frequently are spinsters or much married or otherwise seem incapable of making their personal life work. It seems like IF they actually figure out the Serious Career stuff, they CAN'T also figure out the relationship stuff.
This is often attributed to things like "Why would a woman put up with this garbage from a man if she can support herself?" or to the idea that the expectation of women's work directly competes with her time and energy for her career, a la studies that show women actively choose so-called Pink Collar Ghetto jobs that aren't excessively demanding to intentionally preserve time and energy for the so-called second shift where they need to cook, clean and deal with children at home after working at their paid job.
This piece in no way dismisses such ideas. I take such ideas very seriously and thoroughly agree with them. I have an entire separate blog about trying to eat well without chaining anyone in the family to the stove and a post on this site explaining the backstory for it.
But I don't think those pieces of the puzzle adequately explain what's going on nor adequately provide solutions. Below is an excerpt from a forum comment of mine about how that communication train-wreck pattern can effectively poison a woman's entire relationship to the general public, not just get her mired in a chronic misunderstanding with one or more specific men at work.
One reason my own blogging has so little traction is that I have long had a personal policy of trying to weed out and actively ditch the kinds of negative attention women so frequently attract online. I want attention on my work, not on me per se.I've spent a lot of years trying to sort out how to post good info without it going like it seems to have gone for her. Sure, she made good money, but at what price?
Writing the piece titled With or Without You, which briefly touches on the song by the same title, not only reminded me of the non-relationship version of the idea titled This is Real. That's not., it also reminded me of an interview I saw with the singer of that song, Bono, where he talked about writing the song Sunday, Bloody Sunday.
He talked about carefully writing that song to not fan the flames of a very inflammatory political situation. And what I recall him saying is either quoted on Wikipedia or similar to what's there:
That's an incident, the most famous incident in Northern Ireland and it's the strongest way of saying, 'How long? How long do we have to put up with this?' I don't care who's who – Catholics, Protestants, whatever. You know people are dying every single day through bitterness and hate, and we're saying why? What's the point?
Wikipedia also says this:
U2 were aware when they decided to record "Sunday Bloody Sunday" that its lyrics could be misinterpreted as sectarian, and possibly place them in danger. Some of the Edge's original lyrics explicitly spoke out against violent rebels, but they were omitted to protect the group. Even without these lyrics, some listeners still considered it to be a rebel song—even one which glorifies the events of the two Bloody Sundays to which the lyrics refer.
To my knowledge, though it's a powerful song pouring out their hearts about these ugly events in the history of their own country, it didn't create any particular drama.
In contrast, very early in her career, Madonna lost a big contract following the release of one of my ALL TIME favorite music videos: Like a Prayer.
It's a music video in which she witnesses an ugly murder committed by a White man and then a Black man goes to jail for it. Ultimately, she testifies he didn't do it and he's released.
And Pepsi cancelled her contract with them and my recollection is that this was because of the burning crosses in the video which they deemed to be too controversial. The implication is that she was implicitly promoting the KKK and White Supremacy and never mind that the actual PLOT is her searching her soul in church and deciding to risk her life to do the right thing and take a stand against racism in the US.
I don't think she did anything wrong in that video. And I have no idea if her gender played any role whatsoever in the outcome where she lost that commercial contract.
That was in 1989. Then in 2003, she cancelled the original video for a song titled American Life because it was getting so much backlash prior to release and more recently in 2019 her video for God Control starts with a warning about the video being disturbing and graphic.
Maybe someday she will figure it out. This is probably one of the reasons she's so controversial.
Not just because she's a woman who dares to have an opinion. Not just because as her song What It Feels like for a Girl says, there is an expectation that you should downplay your talent.
When you're trying hard to be your bestCould you be a little less
But also because even a woman as talented and successful as Madonna didn't get the memo that at least SOME men seem to get about how to effectively navigate a relationship to the public.
AKA PR: Public Relations.
This is a theme of Feminine Character Works: women get raised to have a private life and men get raised to have a public life and it goes bad and weird places when women try to get a public life.
And I think a complicating factor is that men are generally expected to initiate romantic relationships and women are supposed to only say yes or no.
So if a man does what men do and he keeps his mouth shut about private stuff and plays his cards close to the chest, there's no conflict for him. Men decide what they want in a woman and they do the asking, so he has no NEED to somehow signal to women "You're my type" or "I'm available" or something like that.
If a woman figures out career stuff enough to shut up at work and generally in public about personal details like what color hair her ex husband has to avoid men misinterpreting that as her flirting or her being rude and loudly announcing "As if!! Not if you were the last man on earth!", then probably NO ONE hits on her and SHE'S not really supposed to initiate.
So women EITHER operate on the default norm for how we were raised and blithely give out personal information and then are baffled when everyone treats us like nothing but a piece of ass OR we learn somehow to behave professionally or something and shut that down, at which point "Good luck getting a date AT ALL!" because at that point men find her unapproachable.
For women to have both a serious career AND a personal life that works requires them to either get stupidly lucky or figure out some complicated formula NO ONE is discussing for how to both navigate the public sphere successfully AND somehow send signals ONLY to men you WANT hitting on you that you're interested in men like them WHILE abiding by a boatload of unwritten rules about men initiating that make it a giant potentially career-ending faux pas to do anything that sounds like you are being the aggressor in the relationship.