April 15, 2005
It’s been stolen -- the last bastion of male stupidity has been stolen -- and women need to give it back.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Sue Shellenbarger, author of “The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis Is Transforming Today's Women,” identifies the latest female trend: Women are now having midlife crises, too.
I suppose it was just a matter of time before women embraced this last traditional male pastime. Women have excelled in all the other traditional male activities.
Women now hold more than half of all professional jobs and nearly 46% of the executive and managerial ones, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Women are better-educated, too. They have 58% of all college degrees and 59% of all master's degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics
These changes are good, to be sure. But women have also progressed in areas that are not so good. Not content to be equal to men, many women have decided to emulate us.
In the old days, it was men who partook in boorish or loutish behavior. We were the ones to get frisky with female underlings or to pressure our girlfriends into physical activities.
It was men who lost our tempers and composure. We based our identities and self-worth on our ability to drink hard and fight.
And it was men who told the occasional off-color joke or ducked into a seedy exotic dancer club, where we indulged in booze and lust and other lowly male recreation.
But times sure have changed.
It is now young girls who pressure boys to get physical.
Women, if Jennifer Garner is any reflection, now aspire to be as tough and violent as men used to be (and there are few things a man fears more than a woman with a hair-trigger kneecap).
If you’ve not visited an exotic-dancer club recently, you’ll be shocked at what you find. No longer the dark places where men linger in the shadows, many have become pubs. Pubs that are frequented by men AND women, who converse as though a totally nude woman is not dancing a few feet away.
Now that the transformation is almost complete -- now that women have embraced the worst of male behavior -- it makes perfect sense that women would embrace the midlife crisis, too.
But enough is enough.
Look, ladies, the midlife crisis has been the last refuge of the American male. We’re the idiots who have felt the need to run off and do stupid things -- things that involve a convertible, wasteful spending and, with any luck, a cocktail waitress.
We make fools of ourselves before our friends, family and community. We embarrass our children. And when we prodigal middle-aged idiots come to our senses, we return to our wives and our families full of remorse. We seek forgiveness and it is eventually granted.
But how can we possibly conquer our adolescent tendencies if women are acting just as bad a we are?
Sure, according to Shellenbarger, our midlife crisis is set off by our perceived failure in our careers or a sense that our dreams will never come true, whereas a woman’s midlife crisis is set off by the death of a parent or loved one, or some other emotional conflict.
And, sure, it is ultimately good for both sexes to escape the daily struggle for a time to look deep inside and hopefully determine what really matters in this fleeting existence.
But do you ladies have to do it like we do? Do you really think you’re helping matters by running off with that Spanish-speaking tennis pro twit Gilad down at the club?
In order for us to be better men, we need you to better women -- distinctly and uniquely different than we are -- and that means we need you to do what you used to be good at: helping us feel shame for where we’ve gone wrong morally, not join us.
A good place to start would be to keep your hands off our midlife crisis.
