I've been reading Gail Collins' latest [When Everything Changed] about the stunning revolution in the lives of women since 1960. Having lived it, every single minute of it, it still makes me cross to read about where things stood with women in 1960. I can't read this book before I go to sleep at night because it pisses me off to the extent that I'm sleeplessly thrashing for hours, or, if sleeping, grinding my teeth to the point where it wakes me up and I get mad all over again.
Today on CBS Sunday Morning, I listened to David Edelstein recommending various off-beat DVD's to give for Christmas, and in explaining a couple of funny-in-their-anachronisms hygiene movies from the 50s [How to be a Man, How to be a Woman] he quoted his cousin the sociologist saying that when World War II was over, the men coming home were so shaken by their experience that they did everything they could to shape their world into a normality that never was. The Donna Reed/Father Knows Best society they set up wasn't, then, just a question of men demanding their jobs back from Rosie the Riveter, nor just that men demanded to take up their remembered positions as petty tyrants, pushing women and children around in order to reassert what they felt was their rightful place in God's world. What we know now about PTSD, what I remember in my own life from my father's temperament and that of my friends' fathers, after a nightmarish time in the Pacific Theater, is now shading, just a bit, the conversation in my head about the gender revolution.
Our parents, the Greatest Generation, persisted in their trajectory during the childhoods of the revolutionaries. The men who had been to war stayed manly and refused to talk about the horror they'd done and had done to them, bottling up their emotions (all of their emotions -- can't shut down just one, in case you haven't noticed), closing off emotionally from their wives and children. They doggedly trudged off to work day in and day out, living the only way they felt safe, feeding and simultaneously protecting their families from the bloody violence they knew pulsed and breathed, barely hidden, inside themselves. Their sons grew up angry and sullen; without a model of male self-expression the boys had no definition in their emotional lives, they only saw that emotion was dangerous and that in denial was safety. The daughters of the Greatest Generation, less angry and too wary of the unnamed monster to exhibit "attitude", watched and learned as their mothers embodied household drudgery and -- afraid of the latent violence, and sorrowful in their understanding of their wounded husbands -- kept their mouths firmly shut, conspiring in the silence.
The sexual revolution was executed in very angry terms; all of a sudden young wives were enraged at the treatment they had suffered at the hands of their most intimate lovers -- the stony silences, the belittling, the dry sarcasms and the brute force exerted when the belittling and the sarcasm didn't force their submission. Consciousness-raising groups implanted a sensor in our brains for when that process might be starting, and at any moment there could be an uproar in our stage-set homes. Paranoia struck deep in the heartland, and very soon men who hadn't even been of age to go to the war started wearing hunted expressions, and began to feel abused themselves. "GOOD!" said the women; "How does it feel, asshole?"
When Vietnam came around further hell broke loose, here and abroad; my closest woman friend says we are all -- ALL of us -- broken and battered veterans of war.
I'm just saying.... We could give men a bit of a break here, and acknowledge the sorrow, and the wounds, we all carry from common international misadventure.
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