"Hiding in my room / safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me"
Simon and Garfunkel, I am a Rock.
Men. We've done some horrible things in our time. We've cheated, looted, raped and pillaged. All things being equal, we're more likely to lose our temper and resort to violence. We can be sophomoric and inattentive. We've mismanaged countries and instigated wars - one of us had Rome burnt to the ground - for our own ego's sake. I don't know what to say -
some men really stink.
But things are getting out of hand.
It's enough to look at the wildly popular Ynet
* "relationships" section to see that there's some kind of war going. For the women, it's as if
most men are likely to do one or any combination of the above offenses - daily, judging by their (women's) talkbacks. Either that or we're spineless wimps not worth the time, effort or heartache (for those rare romantics who still speak of something so syrupy as the "heart"). Those feeble voices trying to defend us are dismissed as naive. The men, for their part, seem to have recoiled in horror from Israeli women, complaining of their allegedly over-demanding nature, like some huge, usurping,
Jabba-the-Hutt-esque blob. So everyone's more defensive towards each other; everyone's more suspicious. What went wrong? Where'd the romance of our parents' or grandparents' generation go?
The answer lies partly in the gradual loosening of social conventions (worthy of its own post sometime), but primarily in today's widespread availability of information. We're getting bombarded by it on all sides, so everyone's become more aware. Go back several generations, and it was a lot easier to have romantic notions. It was, of course, also a lot easier to scam someone, rob a bank, kidnap a child
** and, yes, rape someone and get away with it. Greater innocence meant everyone was easier to take advantage of. Now that we're more informed, we know more of the tricks; we're more wary. But this new awareness, while vitally important in protecting us from the scumbags of society, comes with a price. "Some" or "freak" instances of wrongdoing have intuitively become "most" or "typical". We're not just more suspicious, we're that much more cynical. And cynicism is a
serious romance killer.
Our information is disproportionately negative, so the more of it we get, the more
negative information we get
. Just like on the ynet talkbacks, combative emotions - ranging from argumentativeness to out-and-out antagonism - seem to draw far more people to action than positive ones. Also, there's simply a basic lack of newsworthiness to most things good. Crimes of all sorts, wars, betrayals at the highest political echelons - these grace the news pages every day, but acts of common decency do not. No one's going to come running with report after report of good human behavior, including good
male behavior.
We've all heard about the two-timing, harassing, good-for-nothing man; but you won't hear about the good ones. What about deep, romantic displays of love? An arm around the shoulder on a cold winter's night? A sympathetic ear at a time of crisis? The compliment you didn't know how badly you needed? Errands run, promises kept? who outside your direct circle will ever give you news of this? Statistics on sexual offenses are meticulously tabulated, reaffirming accusations of man-as-incorrigible-predator, but you're never going to get stats on consensual, glorious, tender sex. It sounds funny, I know, but therein lies the most basic of biases in our information - for all sorts of reasons, you're not hearing about a lot of the good stuff, and this means you're not getting the true picture.
I've kind of gone in circles here, but my bottom line is this - if we allow ourselves to get too protective and cynical from all the negative information, we'll end up like the protagonist from that Simon & Garfunkel song. Things aren't as bad as they seem. You may be sure all the good men are gone, but it only seems that way because, in a certain sense, they're less interesting. They
are out there, though, so keep the faith, keep your guard (reasonably) down, and keep your eyes open!
P.S.
(Yes, I suppose I'm projecting ever so slightly... Thanks, Freud!)
* Israeli online newspaper
** Excluding the effects of internet chat rooms and the like. I'm only referring here to people's gullibility.
