Navigating the widening gulf between men and women

Open this book and you’re in familiar territory: men, women, marriage, divorce, children, sexual mores, gender roles. We’ve heard the catch phrases and seen the statistics: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Close to 40% of children these days are not living with the men who fathered them.

Scores of books seem to come out every year addressing these topics. Some conclude that (except in cases in which women and children need to clear out for their own safety and well-being) divorce takes a serious toll on children. Others cite studies that disprove this claim. Candidates for blame include the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, errant fathers, working mothers, the welfare system, the entertainment industry, the culture of narcissism.

In “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men,” Andrew Hacker, a professor of political science at Queens College in New York, takes his turn at explaining the so-called gender gap. Drawing on a wide range of statistics on everything from marriage, divorce and fertility rates to deadbeat dads, single moms, disparities between men’s and women’s income and educational levels and the reasons cited by those filing for divorce, Hacker offers a readily recognizable snapshot of the way we live now.

Much of this is fairly obvious. It’s not surprising to read that income levels are still a lot higher for men than for women, but it may surprise some to learn that women on average are becoming more highly educated than men. Nor is Hacker the first commentator to observe that the feminist movement, by encouraging women to realize they could stand on their own, may have actually engendered more in the way of “men’s liberation” than women’s, giving men an excuse to shun responsibility toward their wives and children.

Not that Hacker proposes turning back the clock to the days when most women put up with secondary status. But he does wish to point out that nowadays, most people, particularly women, have higher expectations of marriage and are less willing to put up with relationships that have grown lackluster and emotionally unsatisfying.

Although earlier generations of women may also have hoped for husbands who were soul mates, sexual dynamos and all-around Prince Charmings, as their expectations faded in the light of common day, it was usually enough if their husbands proved to be responsible fathers and decent providers. But by the second half of the century, more women began to wonder why they should remain in marriages with men who offered so little.

What do women want? For the most part, according to Hacker, nothing unreasonable: along with the essential human decency that everyone wants in any relationship -- be it marital, filial, professional or business -- what most women want from their mates is romance, mutually satisfying sex and (perhaps most of all) conversation.

In one study that Hacker cites, a dozen married couples (many of them graduate students) agreed to have voice-activated tape recorders installed in their living rooms for several weeks. “Most of the time,” reports Hacker, “it was just the two people sitting together. What the tape took in over and over, were efforts by the wife to open a conversation, usually by asking her husband a question: about his work, his reactions to a news item, in fact anything. He would of course reply, but usually with only a word or two, and hardly ever showed any interest in following her cues. For her part, she would try to turn any remark he might make into a chance to get a conversation started.” Not only does this lend credence to the view that women really want to communicate with their husbands but, as Hacker points out, it also suggests that men don’t consider their wives’ comments worthy of serious responses.

Or maybe these men fear they are incapable of keeping up their end of the conversation? Hacker asks us to consider the plight of the woman who would like her man to join her in watching the television adaptation of Henry James’ “The Golden Bowl,” but he bluntly refuses. To put the problem in a nutshell, one might say the problem is a shortage of men willing to watch “The Golden Bowl.” Considering that other statistics indicate that men are more contented with their marriages than women are, men would clearly be wise to give “The Golden Bowl” a try if they wish to remain in the wedded state they prefer.

Indeed, it is ridiculous that so many men consider it unmanly to enjoy literature (much of which has been written by their own kind), ballet (which features supple, long-legged females careening about in short skirts) or art museums (which contain pictures of scantily clad, even naked, females painted by hot-blooded males). But, as Hacker reminds us in a chapter examining the prevalence of rape, men have long been taking -- or mis-taking -- crudeness, violence and misogyny for masculinity.

Hacker buttresses his study with a good many statistics, which, like all statistics, should be taken with a grain of salt. One chart, purporting to give the percentage of female undergraduates at prestigious schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, informs us that in 1970, the percentage of women at Yale was zero, a “fact” that I, having been one of the coeds first admitted to that institution in 1969, can personally refute.

The conclusion Hacker draws is quite simple: Men and women want different things, and this, most of all, is what underlies the instability of their marital partnerships. Insofar as Hacker admits at the outset of the book that he has deliberately overstated (hence over-simplified) his conclusions so as to stimulate discussion, let us indeed discuss this: If the main obstacle to a lasting union is some essential “mismatch” between women and men, then we would expect gay partnerships to be exponentially more enduring than straight ones. Hacker has an interesting chapter on homosexuality as an emerging alternative, but he does not include any statistics on the stability of gay unions. Many of them may, indeed, prove stable and long-lasting, but hardly more so than their straight counterparts.

The real story, more likely, is that too many of us, whatever our gender or sexual orientation, have become too self-oriented to put up with a mate who is just as self-oriented.