"How We Mate," by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead | City Journal Summer 1999
I'd not have known who the "Masters of the Universe" were if I had not read Tom Wolfe's essay "Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American's World," published in 2000 in his book Hooking Up.
How We Mate
Kiss love and marriage good-bye. Today it's hook up, break up, and get even. Is everybody happy? Barbara Dafoe Whitehead
Summer 1999
After years of shows on breaking up, Oprah is moving on to shows about making up. In a recent program, she separated her studio audience into two sections-men and women-and invited the sexes to talk to each other across the divide. The women launched into an attack. "Why can't you guys be more vulnerable?" "Why are you afraid to commit?" The men counterattacked. "You're trying to turn us into wimps." "You don't respect us as men." Oprah, always the diplomat, searched for ways to bring the two sides closer together.
Oprah isn't the only one engaged in gender diplomacy. A slew of new books focus on healing men and women's fractured relationships. Barnes & Noble's "relationships" section overflows with titles like We; Soul Mates; New Intimacy; and How One of You Can Bring the Two of You Together. John Gray, author of the wildly popular series on gender differences, Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, is now intent on uniting the two in Mars and Venus Together Forever.
But these peacemaking efforts are too little too late. The war between the sexes is not winding down-hostilities are spreading. Men and women's intimate relationships are antagonistic and troubled. Their unions-formal or informal-are ever shorter and more fragile. Even one-night stands often don't last the night. And conflict is as much a part of intimate life today as roses on Valentine's Day.
The talk-show celebrities and self-help authors don't seem to grasp what lies behind this intimate warfare. The trouble between men and women is not a matter of miscommunication or misunderstanding and thus cannot be resolved by decoding sex differences, practicing communication skills, or learning conflict resolution. The source of the strife runs deeper, in a fundamental and probably permanent change in the way we mate.
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