Do you and your mate argue (covertly) over who is right? Do you have unspoken expectations about how affection should be expressed? Say hello to the Gendergram. It's not something you send. It's a way to uncover the hidden beliefs that make you struggle as you do.
It's 6:00 P.M. in the Barnett household. Alex and Susan have been home from work for about 15 minutes. It's Alex's turn to cook dinner. But the only thing steaming in the kitchen is Susan.
Alex has just hung up from ordering a pizza--for the third time this month. When it's her turn for dinner, Susan tries to prepare something nutritious, varied, and low in fat. She wants their five-year-old daughter, Eliza, to learn to eat healthy at a young age. Alex scoffs at her concern: "Eating pizza for dinner is not going to warp her for life!"
After arguing the point for minutes, Susan realizes there is more to it than meets the eye. "It's not the pizza--it's just that you always take the easy way out when you have to help out around here."
Alex snaps back: "Why are you always criticizing how I do things? Practically all I ever hear from you is that I never do enough around here and the things I do do are never good enough. I do plenty around here that I never get any credit for!"
More than likely, this interchange sounds familiar. We live in a time where gender-based roles are changing and few pathways are marked as we try to figure out the right way to make our lives work in relationships. What complicates gender relations is that the world we inhabit today would have been almost impossible to envision even as recently as the 1950s.
Gender relations in contemporary society present a seemingly paradoxical picture. On one hand, we are told that women and men are rapidly becoming equal partners at home and in the workplace. With women and men moving into each other's traditional spheres, it would seem logical that we would finally be able to understand each other's experiences. Women have now had to compete day in and day out to financially support their family. They have set their sights on many of the same goals as their male counterparts; today there are, for example, more women than men in many university professional schools. Surely women can now understand the societal pressures to succeed that have always burdened their husbands.
As wives have moved in even greater numbers into the workforce, husbands have had to take on more of women's traditional responsibilities for child care and homemaking. It would seem they can now understand the magnitude of these responsibilities, the never-ending routine of care and crisis.
On the other hand, we are told that our social experiences are separated by light years and we need a manual to decode what we say to one another. At the same time, the media delivers daily body counts in the gender wars in stories of spouse abuse, divorce, child custody battles, and disputes over affirmative action.
What has not changed, apparently, since the 50s is the desire of men and women to figure out what is appropriate for their own and the other gender--and to find ways to live together. What has changed is that we are now less sure about what is the right way to be a man or a woman.
And so you, both of us, and Alex and Susan all wrestle with gender issues on a daily basis. At the end of last year, Susan was promoted to vice president of the bank for which she works. She now makes more money than Alex, who is a chemist with a large producer of agricultural products. Under intense pressure to maintain the profitability of the bank's investments, Susan often works long hours. She drives herself hard to exceed expectations for her. Alex has had to pick up the slack at home. When he was under considerable pressure in the first few years of his career, Susan pulled the heavier load at home. Accordingly, both he and Susan have greater empathy for each other's worlds, although at times empathy isn't enough to bridge the gulf between reality and expectations.
To a large degree, the ambiguity everyone's feeling about gender is part of a greater uncertainty about what is real, true, and right in general. Human relations and the search for identity, which translates into ways of believing and being, have grown particularly complicated courtesy of the technological explosion and information saturation we all now experience. Through it, we are exposed to much information and many people in fragmented contexts. As Kenneth Gergen points out in The Saturated Self (Basic Books, 1992), we each have multiple selves--the person we are with our boss, the person we are with our peers or subordinates, the roles we play at home, the image we communicate over the telephone, or via anonymous contacts on the Internet.
This process is further compounded by the challenges in society to many of the beliefs that we have held as self-evident for so long about gender differences, religion, boundaries between the races, to name a few. As Gergen observes, "Gender is but one of the traditional categories of self-identification that now deteriorates." That encompasses not only the belief in two genders but in notions of masculinity and femininity. Result: rampant confusion about how men and women are supposed to act.
Tags:
1950's,
conflict,
contemporary society,
gender,
gender relations,
household,
interchange,
marriage,
pathways,
pizza,
relationship,
roles,
spheres,
third time,
women and men
