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I’m With Stupid: One Man. One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up by Gene Weingarten and Gena Barreca Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Hilarious There are times when you read I’m With Stupid that you’ll laugh out loud. At other times, you’ll want to read a passage aloud to someone of the other gender. Beware: that person of the other gender will want to then read the whole book, and will, in turn, read passages aloud to you. For the sake of the cause, let that happen. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 5, “Pulp Friction,” pp. 48-54: GENE: Men and women write differently I would never presume to suggest that men write “better” because that would belie the obvious fact that some of the most important writers in history were women. I am thinking in particular of Lucille Dickens, Darlene Shakespeare, and Margaret “Mufsy” Martinez-Yeats. Not to mention Mark Twain, which, as every schoolchild knows, was a pen name for the famous satirist Agnes Plotnick. GINA: Please tell me you are not seriously arguing that women haven’t contributed hugely to English-language literature. GENE: On the contrary I acknowledge that they have. The Brontë sisters alone have filled bookshelves with enormous mounds of feathery, pompadoured literature no male has ever read. Once, I am told, a well-intentioned man actually forced himself to plow through several consecutive pages of Jane Eyre and, tragically, began to menstruate. GINA: Your ignorance is breathtaking. GENE: Do you deny that, by and large, male writers are read by men and women, while female writers are read by women? GINA: I do not deny it. GENE: Do you think we might conclude that women’s writing is of parochial appeal? GINA: I think we might not. Men will not read books by women because, unlike women, men tend toward intellectual cowardice, feeling secure only with themes familiar to them. They will not find such familiar things in books by women, in which people go through life without getting shot, becoming impotent, chasing large sea mammals, traveling through time and/or space in powerful vehicles, or killing Hitler. Women writers, as you point out, are concerned with feathery, pompadoured things: birth, death, marriage, friendship. Girly stuff. Moreover, women do not mind an occasional sentence with a dependent clause or two and no exclamation points. You don’t have. To write. Everything. Like this! GENE: I can see how you would prefer the artistry of Danielle Steel to the work of a hack like Hemingway. GINA: Hemingway is the premature ejaculator of American literature. GENE: That’s cold. GINA: Thank you. The fact is, the differences between male and female writing are enormous. They involve language, character depth, subject matter, even titles. No woman would ever write a book called Around the World in Eighty Days. No woman wants to go around the world in eighty days. Do you know how much packing and unpacking you would have to do? You want to stop, go shopping, sample the food. Many years ago at Dartmouth, a female professor was teaching Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. The class had been reading all the usual contemporary writers like Mailer Updike, and Cheever, so this was entirely new ground. The professor assigned a male student and a female student to stand up and summarize the book. The young woman said that she’d found it delightful and refreshing in the way it spoke to women’s experiences. She loved Isadora Wing for both her strengths and her insecurities, and laughed at how she unexpectedly gets her period in the middle of Paris and must duck-walk around until she finds a tampon. Then the male student got up and expressed his outrage at the previous interpretation. Reading, he said, is not a gendered experience. He said that he, too, felt just as sympathetic with, and connected to, Isadora Wing as he would be to an E. L. Doctorow character. He said that Isadora’s concerns were about being a human, not being a woman, and that they spoke to him directly. And as to the other issue, he said contemptuously, “Do you think men don’t know what happens to a woman’s body every other month?” GENE: Excellent. I acknowledge men can be idiots, particularly callow young men attempting sophistication. But what’s your point? GINA: My point is that men and women are so different in their experiences that there is a mutual exclusivity in their writing. It is incompatible. GENE: Okay Maybe that’s why so few books are written by a man and a woman. GINA: This one is. GENE: Right. But look at the hash we’re making of it. GINA: True. GENE: Plus, we get to fight. Imagine if a man and a woman tried to write a novel as a team, together. GINA: Hmm. GENE: I’ll start. GINA: What are the ground rules? GENE: We take alternating paragraphs and have to build on what came before. A Novel By Gene and Gina GENE: Chisholm groaned himself awake, his head rolling slow and ugly, like a cement mixer with thudding slop inside. His mouth told him he’d spent the night either licking rickshaw tires in a Singapore slum or plying too many cheap women with too much expensive bourbon. Either way, all he’d managed to pick up was a lot of no leads on the case of his life. He grabbed his gat from a dresser drawer filled it with bye-bye pills, set his fedora at an angle he hoped was cocky, and went out into the sneer of a morning sun that didn’t give a crap about has-been private dicks blowing their one last chance at a big payday GINA: The scent of lilacs wafted down the tree-lined street as Jake lifted his tired, importuning eyes to the sky. Yes, the sun was harsh, but the breeze was cool and carried the faint hint of renewal in the early June day For the first time in months, Jake allowed himself to remember Rebecca, the girl he’d loved twenty years before, when he was in the first blush of youth, when his soul was as clean and new as this morning. After all these years, he still hungered for her, for her carillon laughter, for the embrace that welcomed his sharp edges and softened them with its selflessness. Where was she now? Shouldn’t that be the most important “case” on his agenda? GENE: Nah. GINA: Jake didn’t see the car until it was too late, and he couldn’t get the license plate without those glasses he’d had to start wearing since he turned forty-five, the glasses he unwisely kept tucked away inside the pocket of his unbecoming silk-and-worsted sports jacket, which he’d bought when the young salesgirl told him its dark color brought out the fire in his amber eyes. Perhaps he should start shopping with women his own age instead of taking advice from some barely postadolescent floozy who steals glances and husbands with equal casualness. Anyhoo, as the car sped around the corner, the back door opened and a man’s body rolled onto the pavement. GENE: No, it wasn’t a man. It was dressed to look like a man, but a goat can’t impersonate a fish. There was no hiding the generous curves beneath the cheap suit, the sort of curves that belong to the sort of woman who turns a man into a sap with the careless flash of a calf. And she wasn’t real young, okay? It’s not like Chisholm was some freaking child molester, for crying out loud; he just liked women who like to do the sorts of things to men that men like having done to them by women who like being women. The point being that she was a real looker, except for the ax that had split her like Excalibur. The body was deader than Dostoyevsky, and just as hard to read. GINA: Not, of course, that Jake had much practice reading women, at least not in the last twenty years. Bimbos and hookers are a short, quick read, like a washing instruction tag, and about as satisfying. “Poor kid,” he thought, sadly surveying the devastation at his feet. Then he looked again. It was Rebecca! Regret and remorse washed over him, drowning him in incomprehensible sorrow. Actually, it would have been comprehensible had he been the rare sort of man with some inclination toward introspection, some internal topography, a life within that recognized its emotional core. Still, something took hold. Jake heard a sound like a mournful wail, like a thousand grieving voices raised in agony, and he realized it was coming from him. Maybe it wasn’t too late for him. Maybe this tragedy might awaken that part of him that yearned for release. He swore by all that was holy that this was a murder he was going to solve. GENE: After all, when a private dick gets some dame’s body flung at his feet, it’s a challenge to his manhood. GINA: Manhood that, as he may or may not have known, is completely defined by one’s willingness to openly express one’s vulnerability. GENE: Accidentally stepping on the stiff’s face but not giving a damn, Chisholm commandeered a passing cab. “Follow that car,” he barked, pointing at the taillights growing smaller in the distance. GINA: Deep down Jake realized that he was so upset and filled with sadness that he was thinking irrationally and his priorities were all askew. GENE: This made him think of Reuben Askew, the former governor of Florida. God, Chisholm hated pols—fllthy, grasping swine, all of them. Just like the crooked congressman he was being paid serious simoleons to nail—that is, before some stupid skirt turned up dead and ruined everything. Sure, his priorities were askew. What was he doing in this cab, chasing nothing more certain than a bellyful of lead? GINA: Suddenly Jake looked up to see that the cabdriver was Luisa, his lap dancer from the night before! “I can see that you’re trying desperately to turn your life around!” Jake yelled through the Plexiglas divider. He was stunned, humbled, and inspired by her indomitable will. She was a terrific driver, too. GENE: That night they had sex, so the case turned out swell. I would have selected bathroom humor for the excerpt, but the website police might have cracked down. Treat yourself to some fine entertainment by reading I’m With Stupid. Steve Hopkins, May 25, 2004
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