When my college age son came home to visit, he would tease me for being “a chick magnet”. He was obviously concerned about his own person being attractive and he accompanied me on my walks with my dog and young women still too old to be interested in him would come to me while passing and chat up my dog. I don’t think I ever earned that accolade and I was well settled in my career with my wife, but it was amusing. My explanation was that girls, who are almost always out to meet a mate, so as to escape into their spouses’ lives, were naturally inclined to meet strangers walking dogs because a man with a dog is reliable. He is responsible for taking care of the dog and has regular habits, and so is more likely to be trusted than someone who is without a four footed companion. While girls may daly or fantasize with bad boys, they want to take a reliable sort home with their mothers and their fathers.This was worth thinking about, this radar on the associations of who is trustworthy and so worth a chase in the courtship sweepstakes, the first moves so important and permanent in their emotional impacts yet made on the basis of very little information, certainly not much when courtships are not arranged but are the result of meeting cute; at a mutual invite in a bar, or in a dating service, or on a bus where neither of you want to get off. It isn’t that guys look only at looks and allure while girls look for the long run. It may be that girls are less interested in an adventure than guys are, even if, once committed, girls will go to the ends of the earth to accompany their persons, accompanied, as might be the case, with their dogs. But the idea of dogs as a chick magnet is an idle speculation, an accumulation of suppositions rather than a premise supported by research, even though these grandmother stories, as they are said in Yiddish, are the basis for managing social life until the outbreak of social science in the late Eighteenth Century. Like Nora Joyce, my own late wife was long past ever trying to explain women to men.
To answer the obvious rejoinder to the Eighteenth Century was when thinkers turned to empiricism to explain social life, the grand theorists of the Seventeenth Century, such as Hobbes and Spinoza, had deep individual insights and each theorists insights tied to a grand theme, but their propositions were “proven”, so to speak, by the mutual articulation of those insights rather than proofs or demonstrations. But Adam Smith invented economics by identifying processes that explained one aspect at a time of activity, such as the idea of relative advantage, and Thomas Malthus invented demography (with some tribute to David Hume estimating the populations of ancient peoples, by finding a formula to predict that nations will fall because their population increases geometrically while foodstuff increases only linearly. Wrong as the theory may be, it was a marvelous invention.
What can be added to old wives tales are the following sociological observations. Women provide for safety when they are in danger of distress. The New York Times recently referred to what it called “vex money”, which was money stashed away if a man abandoned them or was abusive and so needed independent resources. Girls I knew carried “mad money” so that they could get a taxi to go home if a boy bothered them. Women, in general, have to protect themselves because of the anthropological reasons that male lust is difficult to control and because men have greater upper body strength and so can be physically abusive and because women are the ones who carry within them the consequences of sex while men don’t. These anthropological situations, these disparities inherent in the human condition, lead women to rely on forms of social organization as ways to civilize men and make them reasonably malleable, and so might lead to the Radical Feminist conclusion that women are better rid of men, given their testosterone infused nature, were it not that women find men attractive. But there are other conditions, and those remaining extant, that lead men to engage in domestic abuse. Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” documents working class Neapolitan life as a place of frequent anger and grudges that occasionally erupts in male domestic violence even if their verbal vituperation allows the women to get back their own, everybody subsumed with malice and jealousy and other emotions civilization has not tamed but would have, in fact, ebbd during the lifetime of the author. Every Western town needed a school marm to come to civilize the children rather than let the saloon be the center of social activity, as was the case of the bar room in frontier Australia, given as it was to violence and drunkenness and prostitution.
It is difficult to say, however, which of the two sexes had the better of the deal. The women were dependant on their husband’s income, but that meant they had a less arduous life than the men who earned their livings through the sweat of their brows, only havingto acquiese to a husband’s sexual needs. Which one had the better deal? The real difference was a female desire to be independent and equal and that has been fought out over the past four or five generations with remarkable success and despite the age old customs and situations that would keep women subservient. And women may compensate with their weaker upper body strength by being more articulate or more perspicacious about social relationships. Anyway, this is all well plowed ground, much discussed and leading to ideological contentiousness just as the earlier psychological approach was just a matter of gossip. The sociological approach to how men and women relate to one another remains unresolved.
Also, supplying evidence is not all it's cracked up to be. There are many evidence supported propositions that are dubious or contradictory. Whether more government spending leads to inflation is questionable unless all other factors remain constant. Whether economic expansion continues is a matter of consumer confidence, which is not an economic factor at all. Whether the out party will win the first midterms in a new presidency often happens but that may be due to other factors and so is a coincidence of long standing rather than a law. Women tend to be submissive except when they are not and have other ways to influence men while only seeming to be submissive. Looking at propositions means constantly respecifying the terms as, for example, by redefining what submissive means.Is submissiveness just a female version of loyalty? To engage in such efforts, as admirable as they may be, is to go back to Aristotle providing a periodic table for the emotions, each one distinct and with rules about how one or the other of them adapts or changes into being another.You might as well go back to old wives tales as a reliable way to think of life and in fact most people do so, manage their lives, without the benefit of sociology.There has to be a way to assess and manage emotions without either philosophy or social science.
A more incisive and accurate account of how men and women fare in the world can be offered in, of all things, literary criticism rather than social science or folk wisdom or philosophy. That is because the study of literature allows the consideration of the forms and genres of literature as the structures whereby story is comprehensible because life has become embodied in its representations. Literary criticism allows people to discover what might be called the geography of social relationships, its ups and downs and byways, although “geography” is an inaccurate metaphor because human relationships, how they clash and coexist, are invisible and made up only of events and intentions and circumstances and where genres are used to describe the particular kinds of problems, metaphysical and otherwise, that are to be encountered. So Hazlitt said that comedy is about the social disparities in a society so that Malvolio will get a laugh because he thinks wearing his hose as cross gartered will be impressive, while tragedy is full of gloom and doom because fate catches up with Macbeth and Hamlet.
So turn to romantic comedy as the genre which reveals the nature of how men and women relate to one another. The metaphysical parameters whereby people get conjoined, are fated or drawn to one another despite, paradoxically, of the outside chances that they will meet or attract one another, and yet, as is true to life, both participants have unalienable impulses to do so. What that means is that, first of all, each of the two form an intent or an interest for an attraction to the other which is not required by either social convention nor social or economic interest but because of their personalities and not necessarily because of their characters, whose natures are unraveled later on to be meritorious. Elizabeth Bennet, so headstrong and supposedly headless of money and position as an immediate allure, will have a long time finding what is in Darcy’s character. Second of all, this impulse is unalienable in that it springs authentically from the emotion once felt and is recognized as central to both their own personalities and characters however strange that might be, Elizabeth and Darcy clearly finding expressions of their natures even if what they find is unexpected and is now able to redefine their natures. ”Inalienable” therefore is a term that refers not only to political rights or to the legal status of land, but to matters concerning the self. A The term, in the Romantic Age, refers to a liberation or freedom by a person to discover what sort of person that person is by finding a person found so attractive. Sex is part of this business because sexual attractiveness is also unalienable, just striking like a thunderclap, a private privilege rather than a lawful or socially sanctioned one, and also unalienable because it involves feeling what one indeed cannot but be felt, as a rush whereby one cannot deny its calling, however much society can constrain or diminish or work against that feeling. It is not surprising that the romantic novels of Beaumarchais are about love at about the same time of an awakening of political liberty because both love and politics attend to the independence of impulses, to strike out as a form of freedom, as was also appreciated when immigrant girls listened to the crooning of Frank Sinatra to make them independent and American. What unfolds in Romanticism is the inalienability of the self, even if that entity has many facets and fads. There are truths to be told about the self in how people change or alter themselves and so is in accord with Spinoza’s psychology whereby a person is always malleable, one emotion changing into being another even if Spinoza insists that people are all subspecies of the God of Total Reason rather than each a thing in and of itself.
Although any of Jane Austen’s novels show and presume that people in love have unalienated impulses, which is quite foreign to the rationality of Daniel Defoe or the typecasting of Joseph Fielding. A particularly striking example is available in a 2007 ITV production of “Northanger Abbey”, the Jane Austen novel thought of as satiric rather than serious. The heroine, at the climax, everything speeding up to a crescendo, as happens in all the Jane Austen novels, rushes around Bath to find the man she loves to keep him from leaving. That is very different from the immediately prior novel, “Sense and Sensibility”, where women wait patiently for men to take action and mourn for the inactivity of the males. But here Catherine Moreland takes action, flying around the streets, a new city full of bustle and chance encounters, akin to London but more concentrated in its posh residents. The heroine shows herself with complicated emotion: sorrowful that he will be missed, hoping to make contact and declare herself as in love with him, and full of regret about missed opportunities. The actress, Felicity Jones, shows all of those feelings. Moreland knows now what she wants and that is as good as any to be an image of unalienated impulse, the closest there is, in actual life, to what love is, Perhaps Andrew Davies, who wrote the screenplay, decided that scene as the eat to end the film and create the emotional and situational impact of that scene.