To most men, women are an enduring and fascinating mystery. A mystery we spend our whole lives trying to unravel. Misogynists turn their perplexity into anger resenting the complications that arise out of their inability to make sense out of women. But for the rest of us women are to be appreciated and admired in large part for how they beguile us.
(For purposes of this discussion we’ll set gender fluidity and non-binary individuals aside for separate discussion.)
Young boys reject females entirely finding them far too strange and unknowable to even consider. But by adolescence when sexual attraction develops, males start a lifetime of curiosity and exploration about these strange creatures who do things like wear dresses, put on makeup and eschew sports. Those girls who don’t wear make up or dresses and do play sports are further wonders: why aren’t they doing what other girls do?
Women are in control. They often look at us knowingly possessing a strange wisdom we have no access to. Society requires that we come to them to initiate a relationship and they’re generally happy to make us wait. If truly interested in us and if we can’t see what’s right in front of us, women know how to manipulate us. Women are remarkably adept at getting what they want.
It's been said that "women go to Mars to eat candy bars while men go to Jupiter to get more stupider." Truth.
I recently read The Virgin Suicides, a brilliant novel by Jeffrey Eugenides and then watched the equally brilliant film from 1999 faithfully based on it directed by Sofia Coppola. (It was Eugenides’ first novel and Coppola’s first film, what great starts to careers!) The story is about five sisters who commit suicide. The youngest goes first and the others follow a year later as a group. Both book and film seem to be about the girls, their family and what might possess five teenage siblings to take their own lives. But on closer examination I think the story is really about the boys who narrate the story and watch the girls from across the street. The boys devote large portions of their days and nights obsessing over, watching, and trying to communicate with the girls. I've seen The Virgin Suicides described as a coming-of-age story. It is the boys who come of age.
The story is told decades after the girls have died: the boys, now men, still see one another and still discuss and even argue about the sisters. There’s nothing like suicide to deepen the mystery of what makes a person tick. When there are five suicides the mystery is that much deeper.
This is also a story about yearning. The boys yearn to understand the girls, to help them, protect them, to possess them and — though it’s unspoken — to make love to them. They ache as they watch the girls and they ache decades later to think of them.
An important element of the story is the sisters’ repressive parents who limit their daughters' social interactions to heavily chaperoned parties or dates watching TV with the rest of the family. When one of the girls (played by Kristen Dunst in the film) stays out until the wee hours after the homecoming dance, they are all pulled out of school and their rock albums are destroyed. They are prisoners. Obviously this does more harm than good and likely hastens the girls’ destinies.
Of course the parents are bereft at the loss of their children but more than that they are stunned, overwhelmed by the enormity of an incomprehensible loss. Whether they accept any culpability in the mass suicide is left to the reader/audience to ponder.
In the book the boys pursue the mystery of the suicides well into adulthood. Not their years in college, their jobs, their marriages, or their children have stood in the way of their obsession.
It can be like that. Females take up a tremendous amount of space in men’s brains.
What is she thinking?
What did that look mean?
Why did she say no?
Why did she say yes?
Why on Earth does she like him?
What does she do up in her room?
What do they talk about?
Does she like sex, does she think about?
What does she think of me?
What does she look like naked?
It sometimes seems a miracle to a man that a woman he likes finds something to like about him. If this progresses to love…well, that’s an incredible gift and the smart ones among us are eternally grateful beyond words. That we so often find ways to sabotage our relationships with women is a sad commentary on the male ego and masculine-based stupidity.
Part of what makes the Virgin Suicides work is that the boys respect the girls yet don’t put them on pedestals. They see them as wondrous creatures, a gift from the heavens. Any tidbit of information they can learn is cherished as helping forge an understanding of why the girls are so compelling. They don’t objectify the girls — a cardinal sin that men are forever committing. Yes, they’re pretty, but they are even more distant than most girls, even more inaccessible. The brutal finality of their deaths means that they are forever out of reach, rendered topics of discussion and not people to have and to hold and to understand and to a life share with.
We do love a good mystery.
I’ve been on this planet for a long time and I barely understand women anymore now than I did when I was a teenager. I’ve accepted that such is the way of the world and content myself that I know what I need to. The Virgin Suicides serves as another mechanism through which to explore this mystery. I’m grateful for that.
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