The Estrogen Office, or, Employer Beware

The Wench is back, after a lengthy hiatus. Fear not: Daily drudgery may have prevented The Wench from blogging, but she remains as embittered towards her sex as ever.

This post is prompted by a recent catfight that The Wench's husband was forced to quell in his office. You see, being self-employed, The Wench's husband found it necessary to hire several qualified individuals to help him -- all of whom, incidentally, are female.

The Wench's husband assumed that his employees would simply show up each morning, do the job required of them, and go home. This is how The Wench's husband works, and he considers it a reasonable approach.

Foolish, foolish husband.

His Vulcanite rationality rendered him clueless to the perils posed by an abundance of estrogen in the workplace. He was unaware that female employees generally demand more hand-holding and encouragement than their male counterparts. He was completely oblivious that comments he routinely makes to male employees are considered by female employees to be curt, hurtful and rude.

Most tragically, he was under the delusion that female employees approach any issues with one another directly and pragmatically. He had no inkling of the back-biting and passive-agressiveness that females use to establish dominance over one another . . . of all the slighted feelings that eventually fester to an ugly head and explode.

The Wench's husband was finally made aware of his ignorance when confronted by two sobbing female employees . . . and The Wench can affirm from personal experience that her husband is quite uncomfortable with tears.

The Wench's advice to the self-employed: Avoid the estrogen-heavy office, if possible. Consider the cumulative effect of female hormones raging in tandem. Counteract the indirection, the hushed snarking and sniping, with a dose of testosterone. Hire a male.

When Genitalia Take The Stage

The Wench was delighted at the recent henfest over Jane Fonda's casual dropping of the C-Bomb on The Today Show. Ms. Fonda's potty-mouth was cringe-worthy, although not half so cringe-worthy as Meredith Viera's lock-jawed, steely smile as she registered the gaffe.

The Wench professes confusion over the whole fiasco, however. In her humble opinion, the word "vagina" is equally, if not more offensive than the c-word; at the very least, "vagina" never fails to make The Wench shudder, as does "labial folds".

While "cunt" has the guttural punch of a good anglo-saxonism, "vagina" conjures full-color medical textbook illustrations of the whole banana, as it were. Combine "vagina" with "monologues", and The Wench cannot help but envision a disembodied female hooch, standing on a nightclub stage before a microphone, taking long drags on a cigarette (don't ask The Wench to explain the mechanics). Then the hooch growls into the microphone, sounding exactly like Tony Clifton (don't ask The Wench why the voice is male): "You hear the one about the rabbi, the priest and the mariachi band?"

What amazes The Wench is that neither Ms. Ensler, Ms. Fonda or any other actress associated with The Vagina Monologues seem to appreciate the utter ridiculousness of genitalia, male or female. Put the issue of desire aside. The Good Lord made our private bits goofy-looking for a reason: so that we would never, ever take them so seriously that we would construct an entire dramatic happening around them.

You doubt The Wench? Then try treating other sexual anatomy with the same artistic earnestness. How about The Vulva Confessions? Memoirs of a Scrotum? The Life of (a) Johnson?

Silly, no?

Why is it that the women who demand to be taken seriously are all too often the women begging to be mocked?

Marriage: The Sub-Text

Disclaimer: The Wench is positive that Daniel Jones and Cathi Hanauer are a lovely couple. They are both accomplished writers and editors, and no doubt loving and involved parents. They are just cute as a button, to boot.

Nevertheless, The Wench thinks that the Hanauer-Jones unit really should have given that article they co-wrote for this month's Real Simple another look. A good, long, hard one. Because unintentionally, the article reads like a passive-agressive laundry list of buried resentments and long-held grievances. It absolutely seethes with subtext.

You doubt The Wench?

Take a look for yourself. The Wench gives you excerpts from the piece, with the accompanying subtext:

Hanauer: "So there we were: house, novel, kids. . . I envisioned you donning an apron and serving a delicious stew to us all, then writing the holiday cards to the kids' teachers and babysitters while I worked brilliantly in the next room. OK, I'm exaggerating. But still."

Still. Would it have killed you to get the kids to bed by yourself every once in awhile, motherfucker? You really are the Bastard on the Couch.

Hanauer: "I had always been concerned with fairness, and I felt, as so many women with jobs and small children do, that more of the burden fell on me, even though you were working hard, too -- rigging up our computers, unsticking the windows."

So you know how to stick a plug in a socket and open a window! Nice work, genius. Bet you really broke a sweat on that one.

Hanauer: "And I sometimes got angry, which made you feel defensive and nagged."

Suck it up, big guy. That's how I roll.

Hanauer: "At our low point, we tried marital therapy, but that mostly provided comic relief. I'd yap nonstop about myself and the kids while you stared at the floor hoping she wouldn't "call on" you. She'd say, "Well, Cathi, I think that's something you'll want to bring up in individual therapy". Which I wasn't in, because who had the money, the time?"

But now I do, don't I sweetheart? Lots more money, for lots and lots of therapy. And you're going with me, too. You're going to sit there and listen to me describe in minute detail your shortcomings and failings and what a general dickhead you are: and you're gonna like it, bitch.

Jones: ". . . which is how our conversations have been ever since, your words outnumbering mine five to one. Not that I've minded. My mother claims I didn't talk until I was three. My older brother spoke for me. It seems I traded him for you."

Please, God, put a muzzle on her, already. She's like a yapping, high-strung Pekingnese in need of sedation. Christ, I haven't got a word in edgewise for the past twenty years. Why the hell do you think I lost all my hair????

Jones: "Yet this independence has sometimes been a double-edged sword, at odds with the caretaking and shared responsibility of marriage. You erected walls of self-sufficiency -- 'I can do it myself!' - then felt abandoned when I didn't come to your rescue.

Well, do you need my fucking help or not? Are you the big, strong independent woman or the needy, spoiled princess? Or are you just batshit crazy? Pick a side.

Jones: "We began our engagement by arguing over our wedding vows, which you wanted to amend with 'Ill try' (to stand by me in sickness and health, etc.)."

I should have seen it coming right then and there. And by the way: it's Jones-Hanauer, thanks.

Asperger's and Women: A Match Made In Hell

The Wench recently finished reading Look Me In The Eye by John Elder Robison, and hereby recommends it to anyone wanting a funny and poignant first-hand account of growing up with Asperger's, before there was an awareness of Asperger's.

Robison had tremendous difficulties forging relationships with others, and suffered much rejection and abuse as a young man. Things seemed to turn for him when he began working in the music industry (among other things, creating cutting-edge guitars for KISS) and in engineering.

Certainly, these fields are populated with a fair share of eccentrics and "misfits". But more importantly, in The Wench's view, these fields are populated with men.

The Wench firmly believes that on the whole, men are more willing to accommodate and tolerate differences in other men than women are willing to accommodate and tolerate differences in other women.

And if you're a female and you disagree, your junior high experience was obviously much nicer than The Wench's.

Case in point: The Wench's husband once worked with a very bright, very successful patent attorney with an engineering background. This man possessed an amazing rational mind -- as well as an array of strange facial gestures and other social tics. His voice was never modulated quite right. He failed to meet you in the eye. He sometimes burst out in laughter at inappropriate moments.

And yet: the male attorneys in the office frequently took him out for a beer. Perhaps they made a few jokes at his expense. But they rather thought his eccentricities were endearing.

Contrast this with a female teacher at the nursery school where The Wench sent her spawn. She was a financial whiz who formerly worked in the stock market. She also failed to meet you in the eye, and was rarely seen smiling. Her speech often seemed stilted and she was incapable of exchanging small talk. She would greet a simple "How are you?" with a non-sequitur, like "You need to fill out the permission slip for the field trip."

She worked solely with female teachers, and all of them made no attempt to hide their dislike and disdain for her. Likewise, the nursery school mothers professed to "hate" her -- especially her flat, affectless face. They gossiped that she was in clear need of medication: "massive amounts of Prozac."

(Interestingly, the three-year-olds which she assisted seemed to like her well enough, perhaps because they had not yet learned to judge others as mercilessly as adults.)

The Wench believes it's no accident that the patent attorney fared better than the teacher in terms of colleagues and peers. And gender had everything to do with it. Not one woman accepted the teacher as "eccentric" or a "bit of an oddball." Not one woman accommodated her behavior or tried to understand it. Some of these women had their stomachs tied up in knots with fear that their boys were autistic because they enjoyed machines. Yet amazingly, the possibility that this teacher -- who exhibited some classic Asperger's tendencies -- was on the autistic spectrum never once occured to them.

Sigh. For all our much-vaunted nurturing abilities, for all our much-lauded capacity to protect the weak and spread the love, women can be a vicious, vicious bunch.

All Talk, No Action

Old news, but The Wench frequently stumbles upon articles citing scientific research that reticence and repression are actually better for you than emoting. For example, Christina Hoff Sommers found that:

A small number of researchers are taking an empirical look at the general assumption that speaking out and declaring one’s feelings is better than holding them in. Jane Bybee, a Suffolk University psychologist, studied a group of high school students, classifying them as either "repressors," "sensitizers" (those keenly aware of their internal states), or "intermediates." She then had the students evaluate themselves and others using these distinctions. She also had the teachers evaluate the students. She found that the "repressors" were less anxious, more confident, and more successful academically and socially. Bybee’s conclusion is tentative: "In our day to day behavior it may be good not to be so emotional and needy. The moods of repressed people may be more balanced."

All of which leads The Wench to believe that her gender's insistence on "venting emotions" is not only misplaced, but ultimately counter-productive.

How many times, The Wench ponders, has she heard the same woman yammer on incessantly about the same issues with her spouse/children/coworkers, with no resolution in sight?

How many times, The Wench ponders, has she herself spent the better part of the day flapping her lips about this worry and that, to no avail?

The Wench believes that female "venting" does not, as the word suggests, expunge anxiety. Rather, venting feeds it. And unchecked, venting can become an uncontrollable nervous obsession.

The Wench further believes that female venting is a substitute for purposeful, useful -- and sometimes difficult -- action.

Here's to put up and shut up.

The Sisterhood of Martyrdom

The Wench finds that many of her sex profess to admire tough, unflappable, uber-competent women. Many of her sex likewise profess to want nothing more than to see tough, unflappable, uber-competent women in positions of power such as the presidency.

Bull-pucky, says The Wench.

There is oft-times a gaping divide between what women say they want and how they really feel. The reality is that most females are uncomfortable with tough, unflappable uber-competent women. They feel threatened by them -- in fact, they're threatened by all women who don't care about being "nice" or about ensuring that no one's feelings are hurt when expressing an opinion.

They do not always want to see a tough, unflappable, uber-competent woman succeed.

Case in point: The female voter who asked the question that drove Hillary Clinton to the brink of tears was actually won over by Hillary's emotional response:

"She's a human being," said Pernold-Young. "I know they say women shouldn't cry and neither should men, but so what?"

Likewise, another female voter declared that she was shifting her support from Obama to Clinton because of Hillary's tears:

"That was the clincher," she said.

The above echoes the meteoric rise in Ms. Clinton's popularity among women following the disclosure of her husband's dalliance with Ms. Lewinsky.

Women don't like strong women so much. They prefer female victims -- the more emotional, the better, but in a pinch, a gal who bravely suffers in silence will do, too.

Ladies, when will we stand behind and celebrate the unsentimental, decidedly un-warm-and-fuzzy battle-axes who can actually lead? Such as:

On Freakily Insane Women, AKA Sexual Harassment Suit Plaintiffs

The Wench recently overheard a male commenting that most females who file sexual harassment lawsuits are "bats*** crazy." Why is that, this male pondered.

The Wench agrees that many --although certainly not all -- women plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases are, indeed, bats*** crazy. Or, at the very least, more inclined to be mentally and emotionally . . . ahem! . . . fragile.

As for why this is so, sir -- why it's as plain as the male member in your shorts! It's simply the nature of the beast. And by "beast", I am not referring to the male member in your shorts. I am referring to the nature of sexual harassment itself.

Let's say you are a male sexual predator, out to grope, fondle, leer over, or otherwise harass a female employee. Do you prey upon the gal who responds to your innuendos by flipping you the bird? The no-nonsense gal who clearly and assertively informs you that she will not put up with your behavior, and that if you so much as touch her, she will gladly take a cheese grater to your scrotum?

No, silly. You prey upon the batsh** crazy gal! The one who's used all of her personal days suffering a nervous breakdown over her recent breakup. The one who spends a lot of time crying in the bathroom stall. The devotee of Marianne Williamson and The Secret, who's trying to work on her "positive energy."

Choose your victim wisely, and the harassment will go just ducky. Although it just might come back to bite you in the ass:
.

The Wench Resolves . . .

. . . to speak to her beloved husband more respectfully and humanely in the coming year.

The Wench did not intend to resolve this. The Wench only intended to lose the extra poundage of lard that clings to her thighs so tenaciously. But then The Wench spent the holiday season listening to various women snapping at their husbands, boyfriends and partners as if they were half-witted puppies, guilty of shitting all over the carpet.

The Wench lost count of the times she witnessed a female scolding her significant (male) other like an incompetent child: "I specifically asked you to do such-and-such . . . did you do it? Why isn't there . . .? Why haven't you . . .?"

It occurs to The Wench that, if the shoe were on the other foot, any male who spoke in the same manner to a female would be accused of bullying, brutishness, and abusiveness.

One cannot expect to be treated with dignity when one addresses one's beloved like a scullery maid. The Wench does not advocate simpering sweetness, nor suffering silence . . . merely civil exchange.