Reviving Bitter Memories : The Critical Eye

I’ve diligently read and reread Elizabeth Mehren’s article of Oct. 6 about a new study of American women and their attitudes toward love. Entitled “Hite Casts a Critical Eye at Love, Women,” I could nowhere find the criticism expressed in the title of this disturbing article.

Instead, I found statistics such as, “only 13% of women married two years or more said they were ‘in love’ with their husbands,” or, “79% of the women surveyed indicated that love relationships were not the highest priority in their lives.” Or, “87% of her respondents described their friendships with other women as emotionally closer than their love relationships with men.”

And so it went--a veritable litany of suffering women betrayed by insensitive men. However, except for the shockingly high degree of their current distress, there is nothing in Shere Hite’s study that hasn’t been published in dozens of feminist tracts of our times.

Where is the evidence of the honest analysis and self-scrutiny one anticipated from the headline? Instead of the “critical eye,” we are once more being subjected to the “angry I.” Apparently, it is sufficient for American women to accuse society in general and men in particular when the cosmos doesn’t turn out to be exactly the way Cosmopolitan led them to expect. No wonder men, who have made admirable adjustments to women’s frustrations these past two decades, are so wary and demoralized.

Projecting blame and then withdrawing will hardly narrow the gap between the genders, and I, with masculine bullheadedness, continue to believe that is not what most women really desire. Ladies, look in the mirror and you may discover the real enemy is yourself, as one of my favorite cartoon characters used to observe so wisely.

BURT REINER

Los Angeles