The Women's Guide to Independence Lesson 2: Know Your Power

I used to get together quite often with a male friend to just talk. Seriously—we just talked. No flirting, just talking. I think we saw a mental equal in each other and decided not to mess with the chemistry—or I had decided not to, anyway; men seem to have less of an issue getting intimate and then taking it back down a level, as if nothing ever happened. Anyway, I digress.

I used to see this friend quite often, pre Live-In Boy Friend, and discuss everything from spirituality to wine, though the bulk of our time was spent on male-female dynamics. We saw that we had a living, breathing Other in our presence and that we should take full advantage of that fact.

I learned many things about myself through this friend. I had just ended a relationship with a Paper Man (translation: a man that looks good on paper, but whose loyalties tear easily). I wondered why I could never seem to make things work with Paper Men. Either they shied away or remained distant towards me. Secretly I found them boring, but I didn’t stop trying to get one to wrap his starchy arms around me. There seemed to be a thrill in the conquest, but I always ended up with paper cuts.

Likewise my friend always ventured for the unattainable, the inappropriate woman. One who always seemed to be confused and conflicted over her feelings for him. Just an admission of interest from his object of desire was enough to send him into an obsessive, doomed-to-fail infatuation.

Watching and witnessing each others’ love lives we discovered something: love was not luck; love was a choice, despite our unwitting desire to turn it into a lottery. We had been under the assumption that if we made love difficult and painful, the windfall should our luck change would be that much more mindblowing. We also didn’t want to risk the rejection of not being wanted by someone we knew was our match, lest we find that we were never to be truly wanted, or happy. Better to perpetually postpone happiness rather than find that it doesn’t really exist. I suppose knowing we were responsible for the outcomes in our lives had been too much to bear.

My friend took it to a more granular level: “You women love to throw out Turn On,” he said, referring to our unspoken flirtation, the kind that, to this day, I still don't acknowledge I've used. “But then you don’t lay claim to the ground you’ve laid. You don’t acknowledge your power. You don’t see that you could have anything you want.”

I imagined contentment, sitting next to me like a lonely glass of wine, and me letting it sit there lest it belong to someone else and I be caught taking a sip. In a short few seconds I’d had a conversation with myself about that glass of wine: Why would anyone take something that was just left there for the taking? What’s worth having without struggle? Without having PAID for it? If I'd actually taken a sip of wine, for kicks. I wouldn't have enjoyed it.

Like the women that my friend loved to adore, I ignored my desire; I simply turned it off.

Men often have a different problem; they would gladly drink the glass of wine—finders keepers—but if it’s a middling pinot they’ll settle for the lesser stuff. It’s free for Chissakes! Not that they won’t keep looking for better, or thinking, with every sip, that they wish they’d found another glass, somewhere else.

I just read the review in The New Yorker of Neill LaBute’s latest play, “Fat Pig.” The story recounts the travails of an overweight woman who catches the interest of an attractive man—accidentally, of course, through a happenstance conversation. The woman is self-confident but realistic about her chances romancing this man. Over the course of the play she comes close to reaching a relationship with him, but alas the man’s mind can only stretch so far before snapping back to the familiar, regardless of how boring it may be. At least boring is unintimidating.

In this way men are complicit in the cover up; they sense women’s power and, if it's not easily recognized, put it down, nicely for the most part. They go for the easy bait—the cute-but-simple girls, the same way women on their same frequency go for men who don’t approve of them. I suppose the confidence that women require to get what they really want is equal to that needed by men to determine if what they have is what they really want.

For many women, the solution requires a re-wiring of our circuitry: Pretend, for a moment, that the glass of wine is yours. It was left for you to take. Now drink it. Notice it tastes good, but don’t feel badly about it. Finish it. Notice the shift in the room, the length in your back, the fun of make-believe and the possibility that it’s not. No, you’re not drunk.

Now, repeat.

Comments

[Sidney]

National Transportation Safety Board recently divulged they had funded a project with the US auto makers for the past five years. The NTSB covertly funded a project whereby the auto makers were installing black boxes in four wheel drive pickup trucks in an effort to determine, in fatal accidents, the circumstances in the last 15 seconds before the crash.

They were surprised to find in 49 of the 50 states the last words of drivers in 61.2% of fatal crashes were, "Oh, Shit!"

Only the state of Texas was different, where 89.3% of the final words were, "Hey Y'all, hold my beer and watch this!"

[Pat R]

There are as many plastic women looking for authentic men as there are plastic men looking for authentic women.

That they cannot be found is the problem of people failing to use their own lens in which to view the world and the media messages, and then safeguarding that independence, and using it to communicate the unusual "breakthrough" with others that allows authenticity to be the level upon which relationships are built.

Without bonding, there can be no relationship. Without authenticity, there is no communication.

Reaching past the defenses and the self defenses, presentations and posturizations that are the social defenses of the day, and of the gender, to reveal the true person is the key to finding authentic relationshps - good or bad. Everything else is mere windowdressing.

Plastic people cannot make relationships except with other plastic people except one rooted in vanity. Authenticity must recognize equality or it will fail as a relationship.