An Irish woman’s social, political and domestic commentary
Just to place my views on the record: I like it. I hope we win. I like there being a “Europe”. And its a great competition. Feck the begrudgers. I live reasonably near the course – about 20 minutes. Apparently I could’ve rented my house out for 10k but it seemed like too much hassle.
Just using a separate post to draw your attention to that link provided by Eimear. Very informative site which debunks all this stuff.
While others tut-tutted, the photograph on page 1 of The Irish Times on Thursday made me smile. It showed six celebrating Junior Cert girls queuing for a disco, from the waist down. The half-dozen pairs of pins were identical — barely covered in brightly coloured pleated skirts, tanned legs and lurid stilettos. But then children and teenagers make no bones about their desire to be the same as everyone else.
I am often accused of engaging in gross generalisations about the sexes. To men I attribute one set of attitudes and behaviours; to women, another. “We’re all individuals,” they reply, Ã la Monty Python.
Since I so frequently generalise about human behaviour, I was surprised at being so intensely irritated by The Female Brain, a book by Louann Brizendine, a California-based neuropsychiatrist. Its cover, showing a telephone line squashed into the shape of a brain, promised a frivolous read. By the time I’d read the first page I was already taking umbrage.
Brizendine’s thesis is that the male and female brains are hard-wired differently. In the female brain the area for talking is larger. The male’s area for visual stimulation is bigger. So we like nattering on the phone; they like sexy underwear.
She then examines the stereotypes attributed to men and women and proves, through means scientific and medical, that they’re all true. Men think about sex more often than women (once every 52 seconds for men; once a day, if that, for women). Women read emotions better. The anterior cingulate cortex is larger in the female brain, which means we worry more.
For the independent functioning adult there is nothing more annoying than being told you think a certain way simply because of your gender. We all like to think there is something more profound to our personalities than biology.
But I do believe that since women are the ones who bear and feed children, then it makes sense they should be more suited to staying at home and minding them. Why then did I get so annoyed about this book?
According to Brizendine, it’s all about nature. We are slaves to hormones. Oestrogen, progesterone, oxytocin and, God help us, allopregnenolone: they run riot around our poor little female brains and we are at their mercy until menopause. Every emotion we feel, every decision we take, every lover we choose is influenced by this basic biology.
As she puts it: “Hormones help guide nurturing, social, sexual and aggressive behaviours. They can affect being talkative, being flirtatious, giving or attending parties, writing thank-you notes, planning, cuddling, grooming, worrying about hurting the feelings of others, being competitive, masturbating and initiating sex.”
Even the act of being in love can be deconstructed as a chemical condition that has long been recognised in psychiatry as a state of temporary insanity.
If hormones really guide these activities, it doesn’t look like there is much left for that supposed gift from God — free will — to decide upon.
Knowing that some of us won’t accept being helpless victims in the face of this chemical onslaught, Brizendine says: “If in the name of free will — and political correctness — we try to deny the influence of biology on the brain, we begin fighting our own nature.”
So there you have it: we do have a nature and to fight it is to deny it. Women are more suited to minding babies and men can’t help liking porn.
Before you start listing all the women you know who have no interest in babies, and the men who can’t abide porn, there is an “overlap” rule. She says 10% of men will behave like women and 10% of women will behave like men. The exceptions you can think of are in the 10%. The rest of us are not individuals, we are biological imperatives, according to this theory, which gives little credit to nurturing as a way to overcome our innate tendencies.
But Brizendine is relentless. Due to the fluctuating hormones of the menstrual cycle, she says, women’s moods change like the weather. Men are like mountains, steady and strong, only changing imperceptibly over time.
By blaming mood entirely on hormones, I feel like she’s stealing my emotions. If I cry more easily on day 22 of my cycle than on day 14, that doesn’t mean I’m mad. It just means I’m a woman. Brizendine would like to cure me of my womanhood. She’d put me on the pill so my hormone levels remain stable throughout the month. She would cure me of my feelings.
The most insidious part of her thesis is her attitude to post-menopausal women. After we have coped from puberty through the mommy years and into our fifties, these hormones finally start to decrease. The process by which this happens can be pretty rough: sweats, hot flushes and general misery. Doctors have treated these upsetting symptoms with HRT — hormone replacement therapy. It’s had a bad press, but if I were suffering from such physical miseries I’d take the hormones.
Brizendine doesn’t seem happy to treat menopausal women with HRT for purely physical symptoms. She finds it fascinating that women over 50 are more likely to initiate divorce than a man.
She writes about Sylvia, a “patient”, who found she was no longer interested in making her husband’s dinners, picking up his socks or solving her children’s problems. When the husband objected, she decided she needed a divorce. Brizendine reckoned she needed HRT.
Sylvia’s problem, she diagnosed, was that without oxytocin and oestrogen in her brain to make her a caring mother and wife, she had to take these hormones artificially. Sylvia said no and went for the divorce, but Marcia, another patient, said yes and soon felt like her old self again, “much to her husband’s relief”. He’d been wondering why he’d had to fix his own dinner.
So for most of our lives women are supposedly driven demented by these hormones, and now Brizendine proposes that women who are finally free from their vagaries take more of them. The notion that maybe Sylvia had finally seen sense doesn’t seem to enter Brizendine’s head.
She seems absolutely determined to cure women of being women. Worryingly, she calls herself a feminist.
If a male psychiatrist wrote a book proposing that women’s neurological reality can be cured by a pill, he’d be strung up.
“Motorists travelling to and from Dublin city centre experienced significant delays as a result of yesterday’s taxi protest, with near gridlock traffic at times in some parts of the city and as far out as the Swords Road.”
The various reports go on.
Why weren’t they arrrested and their cars towed? If the Socialist Workers were out blocking streets I can imagine the response of the gardai.
Leon wants to go see Little Man. It looks SCARILY bad. I am not sure if I can cope. Here are some comments:
“I fear for humanity.”
– Loey Lockerby
KANSAS CITY STAR
“Little Man is easily the creepiest movie I’ve seen in my life.”–
Kevin Carr
7M PICTURES
“I honestly cannot think of anything worse that has been made in
between the time the Lumiere Brothers photographed a train pulling into a
station in 1895 and today.”
– Ken Hanke
MOUNTAIN XPRESS (ASHEVILLE, NC)
“It took a century of innovation in the field of cinematic special
effects, but finally the head of Marlon Wayans could be successfully
grafted onto the body of a baby.”– Ken Fox
TV GUIDE’S MOVIE GUIDE
“Thanks to the wonder of digital technology, Marlon’s head was
spliced onto the body of a dwarf actor, thus accomplishing what certainly
will go down in history as one of the more profound cinematic achievements
of our time.”
– Winda Benedetti
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
“If your taste runs to scatology and you find little people
inherently funny, Little Man may be the movie for you.”
– Peter Canavese
GROUCHO REVIEWS
“Some folks reach for nirvana, but the Wayans Brothers —
writer/director Keenen Ivory, writer/star Marlon, and writer/star Shawn — aim for
the nadir, and man oh man, have they reached it.”
– Pam Grady
REEL.COM
“I understand the satirical import of the race gags. But 97% of the
movie will make you need a shower. Possibly two.”
– Marrit Ingman
AUSTIN CHRONICLE
“All the adults are complete idiots, of course, because no one seems
to notice or care about how freakish baby Calvin is – the fact that he
has a full set of teeth, for example — not even the doctor who
examines him.”
– Christy Lemire
ASSOCIATED PRESS
“In the search for gags involving inappropriate contact between
adults and a supposed child, the film doesn’t overlook an orifice or an
excretion.”
– Keith Phipps
ONION AV CLUB
“Most of the jokes fall in one of two creepy categories — slapstick
having to do with the baby’s superhuman strength or slapstick involving
the baby’s sex drive.”
– Peter Hartlaub
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
I’m on Q&A Monday night (around 10.30RTE1). THAT’s why I got the hairdo on Saturday (see comment on column today). Then on Dave Fanning’s show (7pm RTE Radio1) on Tuesday night reviewing a terrible book called “The Female Brain”.
Desperate loneliness, high suicide rates and chronic illiteracy are the problems facing single men over 45 years old living in North Leitrim, Valerie Cox told Pat Kenny on RTE radio last week. There were other difficulties, such as unemployment and the lack of inside lavatories, but the men of Leitrim told Cox the biggest blight in their lives was being “terrible lonesome”.
Most had poor education, some didn’t drive and were dependent on poor public transport, others didn’t have a phone, few of them ever consulted a doctor. But the one factor that made life unbearable for them was their failure to marry. As any research on the matter will tell you, married men fare better than singles. They are healthier and happier.
Given all the evidence that marriage is good for men, it’s odd to see the media awash with gender myths about misbehaving wives making life hell for men. Working women, in particular, are supposed to be emasculating their depressed husbands. Stay-at-home women are freely spending their other halves’ hard-earned money and reserving the right to be bored and bitter.
Fortunately, my male friends readily admit they are on to a good thing. One happily acknowledges he’d be living in a caravan on the side of the road had his wife not screeched until he bought them a nice house in the suburbs. The others have stories of wives sending for doctors despite the protests of sick husbands who insisted they were “fine”.
We feed them, keep them presentable, nag them into good health and responsible jobs and present them with children they were sure they didn’t want but whom they now adore. We improve the quality of their lives beyond measure. In my continuing search for life’s truths, I can say one thing without any doubt: men need women.
Maybe it’s cultural conditioning or biological determinism, but women are carers and the people around them benefit materially and tangibly from that care. In fact, a later item on Kenny’s radio programme put a number on how many women care. Sean Hand of the United Nations Population Fund reported that women constitute almost half the world’s migrants. When they leave their families and work abroad they distinguish themselves from men in a number of ways. They send home a higher proportion of their earnings. Bangladeshi women rate highest, sending home 72%. They also send home money for different reasons.
Men work abroad and save up to buy land or cars. Women work to educate the children they’ve left behind or to care for the sick and the elderly. We’re just better at this stuff than men.
Now if men need us so badly and marriage is so clearly beneficial to them, you have to ask why most of them have to be persuaded into it at emotional gunpoint. And when they do get married and reap the benefits of marriage, why aren’t they just a bit more grateful? Indeed, if marriage is good for men, why aren’t they a bit more enthusiastic about it? Meanwhile, since some surveys also show that married women are unhappier and unhealthier than their single friends, you have to ask why women want to get married in the first place. The lack of gratitude for their work is turning them into martyrs, and nobody likes a martyr.
A recent episode of Casualty shed some light on the matter for me. In the 60-minute hospital drama, a lesbian alcoholic was admitted to A&E with a caring lesbian girlfriend in tow.
The nurse in charge (who coincidentally was drunk) diagnosed the woman’s drink-related illness and found the time to deconstruct their relationship. It turned out that the non-alcoholic half of the lesbian couple had classic co-dependency traits.
For those unfamiliar with the language of addiction recovery, co- dependents have an exaggerated sense of responsibility for the actions of others. While addicts such as alcoholics need caring for, they often find themselves with partners who care so much that they enable the addiction.
The co-dependents have a tendency to do more than their share, all the time. They have an extreme need for approval and recognition and then become hurt when people don’t recognise their efforts. And I love this one: they have a sense of guilt when asserting themselves.
Sound familiar? Your mother? Half the wives you know? Certainly sounds like the laments I have heard from a lot of women. One silly hospital drama and the mysteries of marriage fall into place. The Battle of the Sexes relived as co-dependent dysfunctionality.
Wives work hard making everything as nice as possible for their husbands and all they want is for him to notice and say “thanks”. He doesn’t understand why she wants so much gratitude when he gave her what she seemed to want: to get married and have children.
Men want to just continue having a good time. She knows that having a good time is all very well, but you have to tie things down or life slips through your fingers. He thinks marriage is a “great idea”, just not yet. He does love her; why complicate things by marrying her? Children and houses seem like weights to the young man, yet they are the lifeline of the old man. Women see this earlier and more clearly and feel the need to apply pressure.
How they apply this pressure can dictate their entire future happiness, so they should think about it very carefully.
It’s all about expectations. If the single men in North Leitrim were born in an earlier time, when marriage was about practical partnership, they might have made marriages. But now marriage, despite its practical benefits, is about romantic love.
The last thing a woman wants is to be left standing at the kitchen sink wondering if her husband really loves her. If she had to frogmarch him into marriage through ultimatums or accidental pregnancies, she’ll never really know how much he loves her.
The sad thing is that he may love her. He may recognise he needed a push. He may be delighted she made the best decision for him. But we are socially conditioned to expect him to do the chasing and he’s socially conditioned to avoid marriage for as long as he can get away with it.
So if you’re an unmarried man with a needy girlfriend, you can break her heart now by running away or break it later by reluctantly marrying her now. Or you could save everyone a lot of pain by realising now what those single men in North Leitrim found out too late: men need women. So if you love her, get on with it.
Note for blogreaders: I went for a hairdo on Saturday. More of why later. I got chatting to my lovely hairdresser. He called off his wedding 6 weeks earlier..just before the invitations went out! eeeek!
What a day it’s been. But good news for a change!
A little while ago while rushing to the Savoy cinema on Dublin’s O’Connell Street I took the risk of proceeding straight down Marlborough Street in search of free parking (since it was past 7pm) rather than enter the €2.80 per hours Marlborough Street Car Park. In the past this has proved successful, but the risk is that,should there be no spot available one has entered a one way system from which it takes a good ten minutes to escape. Having passed all the normal spots I came to a No Parking area BUT having examined the sign, I decided to take another risk.
The sign said ” No Parking, Except Buses 7am-7pm”. There were no double yellow lines. I decided to interpret this in the manner that I would “No right turn 7am-7pm” or ” Clearway 7am-7pm” or “Bus Lane 7am-7pm”. No right turning, or parking in the clearway or driving in the bus lane, or parking in that spot between the hours indicated on the sign (except for buses). BUT outside those hours, whatever activity was prohibited on the sign, was then permitted.
So off I went to see the movie. When I came back, I had been clamped.
Those to whom I complained varied in their degrees of sympathy.
MOST said, I shouldn’t have parked. The sign meant No Parking EVER except only buses between those hours. SOME (the more cantankerous members of my family and social group) said, well I wasn’t right BUT the wording was vague enough so as to allow for possible misinterpretation. My father said I was perfectly right and it was an OUTRAGE that I had been clamped. The fine is €80 btw.
So I appealed the clamp and argued my case, quoting clearway signs etc as the convention which I had followed.
I was rejected.
I appealed the rejection to a higher authority.
I WON!!!!!!
The Appeals Officer went with the SOME members. I was wrong, but he could understand how I might have considered myself to be right. He urged me to “exercise caution in the future”. And sent me a cheque for €80. Hurrah! The system works. 
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