In Defense Of Men
One gray winter morning I drove into the parking garage before work and waved at the attendant.
“Your membership in this club has been canceled, Jamie Tobias Neely,” he yelled. “On account of your radical, feminist views!”
Not the friendly parking garage guy, too! This winter, a number of men, and a few women, angrily responded to a couple of editorials I wrote. I wasn’t wild about the Promise Keepers. I suspected Sonny Bono wasn’t the brightest bulb in Congress. And I shared a feminist sentiment or two about inequities lodged deep in our culture.
Was I ever attacked.
Letter-writers described me as someone I didn’t recognize, certainly not the woman I see in the mirror each morning. The person they described sounded braless and unshaven, pierced and furious, a battle-ax who would make Bella Abzug look demure.
And while the response confirmed something I’d always suspected - there are a few men who are every bit as emotional and hypersensitive as the worst female stereotype - it also jarred me into examining my perceptions of men in general.
The angry letter writers had turned me into a one-dimensional cartoon image. In voicing my own opinions, I wanted to be certain I hadn’t done the same to men.
And so I began to consider what it means to live in the company of a gender as rich and complex as my own. I started by looking around me. Here in the features department at The Spokesman-Review, I am surrounded by male colleagues both generous and kind. They regularly share film recommendations, halibut recipes - and parenting advice.
So, too, on our editorial board. My favorite moments with the men there often center on tales of their treasured sons and daughters. I’m always touched by the vision of a steady father nurturing his own children.
It was my first, and most lasting, image of the male gender. It formed in the days when my own 6-foot-2 father loomed so large and secure.
And it’s the vision I enjoy most after nearly 23 years of marriage. My husband and I hold all sorts of differing opinions, of course, but we fundamentally agree about our daughters. I know that he’s the one other person in the world who loves them as deeply and unquestioningly as I do.
Among my favorite memories of him are a montage of the nights the YMCA Indian Princesses met at our house, when a collection of out-sized, testosterone-enhanced dads crowded into our living room, singing songs, playing games and even, to the delight of the tiny girls perched around them, wearing feathers in their hair. These men joined my husband in the exasperating, astonishing task of raising daughters.
One evening this spring I particularly missed my husband. He’d flown to Portland on a business trip. The phone rang at 11 p.m. The van wouldn’t start. Our 17-year-old daughter left the lights on when she parked near the Opera House for a long ballet rehearsal. Would I come to pick her up?
It had been years since I’d jump-started a car. As with a Thanksgiving sage stuffing recipe I concoct only rarely, I was hazy on the details.
So I called some friends. Did I ask for advice from the wife, an accomplished engineer who probably could jump-start a car in her sleep? No, I did not.
I asked instead to speak to her husband, a genial night-owl with a sense of humor, a “manly man” who knows all sorts of important guy stuff about cars and bears, and baseball.
It was his soothingly deep voice and generous chuckle that I wanted to guide me through this minor calamity.
And he did. I hauled a flashlight and jumper cables to a darkened lot. The layers of gunk on the older car’s battery confounded me. If I lined up a positive with a negative, I had visions of both cars exploding in a shower of sparks.
A couple of sturdy young guys in a pickup drove up to offer advice. The ancient van roared into action.
That night, as always, I was encircled in the protective community of men. No, we don’t always view the world similarly. But I’m grateful that we share it.
of The Spokesman-Review’s editorial board. Contact her at 459-5443 or jamien@spokesman.com