Tough Talk In The Interest Of Advancing Gender Relations, Maybe It’s Time To Cut Back On Male-Bashing

She leans into the table to apply the finishing touches of polish to my nails, saying: “I guess I better go make the call before I get the call.” A superb-looking woman in her 40s, she has been telling me something of her marriage and how, after 25 years, her husband still checks up on her. She has been telegraphing the information, with some sly asides, on the assumption that she and I speak the same language. We do.

She rises to make “the call.”

“Men,” she sighs. “Men,” I answer.

It’s true, that is what we talk about when we traipse together to the ladies’ room. And when we stay out late with our girlfriends. And on park benches with an eye on our kids in the sandbox. And on the phone.

We can be very funny, searingly so. Or merely wry. Certainly trenchant. Sometimes world-weary. Occasionally enraged. More often resigned.

But are we right? To guy-bash, that is. Hell, yes. And then, maybe, no.

“Whatever happened to the good old days when men actually flirted with you and asked you all out for a real date?” she asks. “Where they all hiding?”

First girlfriend: “They gay.”

Second girlfriend: “They ugly.”

Third girlfriend: “They behind bars.”

- scene from “Waiting to Exhale”

There is, of course, the commiseration factor. “Riled woman talking” could be the common term for any woman on the relationship continuum, from one extreme (there is no man in her life) to the other (he just dumped her). As she and her friends commune, he becomes Everyhim - not that all men behave that badly, but that every man has it in him to do so.

“There is a war between the sexes, and … guy-bashing is the womanly way of being aggressive. They do it out of hurt,” says Dr. Carole Lieberman, author of a new book, “Bad Boys,” who adds: “When women talk to other women, there certainly is more guy-bashing than woman telling other women how thoughtful and sweet their man is.”

While some are at war, others are merely in conflict - and occasional conflict at that. In these environs, guy-bashing is friendly fire.

“It’s not unrelated to the way parents of small children talk about their kids,” says novelist and critic Francine Prose, whose latest book, “Guided Tours of Hell,” provides a microscopic examination of a skewed relationship. “I think that kind of humor is one way we traditionally deal with power differentials… .It is a way of diffusing the tension and injustice and insanity-making aspect of the relationship.

“It makes it possible not to take things personally … If a woman can say, ‘That’s just guy behavior,’ then you can accept that nature is going to behave a certain way. You can’t expect a mosquito not to bite you.”

“They’re in transition from a monogamous relationship and they need more space. Or they’re tired of space but they can’t commit. Or they want to commit but they just can’t get close. Or they want to get close and you don’t want to get near them.”

- scene from “The Big Chill”

It has long been acknowledged that a woman’s way of knowing is to talk a thing through, sometimes to death. So guy-bashing can be said to serve the legitimate purpose of passing acquired knowledge along to the tribe. But who’s to say what we are reporting has been accurately perceived?

Stereotyping is, after all, tricky, even if it’s useful at times.

“It can be a valuable way of knowing another group, if it’s true,” says Steve Stroessner, assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College, who studies stereotyping up close. “But it’s not if you’re wrong. And you won’t know the difference.

“After all, you are using the stereotype because you believe it to be true.”

We tend to stereotype when we feel a loss of control or where there is an element of unpredictability . Stereotyping provides us with a ready sense of how to deal in an ambiguous situation.

OK, here’s why, maybe, we shouldn’t guy-bash.

“This kind of humor can be corrosive - we’re making ourselves angrier,” says Gina Luria Walker, head of social sciences at the New School. “We’re feeding each other self-righteousness.”

Or at least a sense of superiority. One that is probably false, though the jury’s still out on that.

“It’s a form of female chauvinism,” says social critic Wendy Kaminer, who most recently authored “True Love Lies.” “When women say, for instance, that all men are immature, we are also saying that we are mature. And there are a lot of things about being mature and maternal we like. It gives us an important role. Men then need us for order, discipline and control.”

We are also - a shudder is appropriate here - giving men permission to behave in precisely the ways we demean.

So if we don’t want him to do what he does, it’s best not to promote the general notion that that’s what he’s about. Guy-bashing, then, is out.

Well, maybe not entirely. Cold turkey might be too abrupt. A low-maintenance program, possibly?