A Letter to Matthew

Last night Daddy and I watched, on William E Buckley, Jr.'s Firing Line, a debate on the question of whether women it as good as men, and I have been talking to you in my head ever since. Odd not to be able to talk with you in person-I'm not yet used to your absence-but I thought I would put onto paper some of the things I would say if you were here. They are not the sort of things I would say to Mr. Buckley if ever I met him. Mr. Buckley is an elderly man, fixed by his circumstances within a range of experiences so narrow that new ideas and new behaviors cannot squeeze through the boundaries. He is complete as he is. But you are just emerging into young manhood, still fluid, still making the choices that will determine the shape that manhood will take. I, as your mother and as a feminist, hope that the choices you make-you individually and your generation as a whole-will be transformative, that the manhood you develop will be so radically new that the question in Mr. Buckley's debate, smacking as it does of competition for goods and goodness, will no longer have any more meaning than questions like, Do pigs have it as good as pigs? In many ways, of course, you've dashed my hopes already. You have, after all, lived for fourteen years in a dangerously patriarchal society, and you have put on much of the purple that Mr. Buckley wears with such aplomb. When I find myself disliking you-and I find myself disliking you with about the same regularity, I imagine, as you find yourself disliking me-I can usually tell that I'm responding to some behavior that I identify as peculiarly masculine. I dislike your cockiness, for instance. When you first began to work with computers, I remember, you immediately assumed that you knew all that was worth knowing about computers; when you took up racquetball, right away you set yourself up as a champion. This kind of swaggering strikes me as a very old pattern of masculine behavior (I think of Beowulf and Unferth at Heorot), the boast designed to establish superiority and domination, which trigger challenge and thus conflict. Related to your cockiness is your quickness to generalize and, from your generalizations, to pronounce judgments: calculus is a waste of time; Christians are stupidly superstitious; classical music is boring; Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority are idiots. This is just the kind of uninformed thinking that empowers Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the first place, of course. And, more seriously, that enables people to create the distinctions between Us and Them-the good guys and the bad guys, the left wing and the right, the Americans and the Russians-that lead to suspicion, fear, hatred, and finally the casting of stones. Well then, have you shattered all my hopes? By no means. For you are not merely arrogant and opinionated. These qualities are overshadowed by another, one I have seldom seen in men: your extraordinary empathic capacity, your willingness to listen for and try to fulfill the needs of others. When Sean was threatening suicide, you were genuinely engaged in his pain. When Katherine needed a male model to encourage her creepy little fifthgrade boys to dance, you leaped in with psychological (if not physical) grace. When Anne left us for good, I felt your presence supporting and soothing me despite your relief at being an only child at last. Women have long been schooled in this sensitivity to others, but men have been trained to hold themselves aloof, to leave the emotional

Psychoanalysis · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Philosophy · Psychology

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  Carter Heyward•Frontiers A Journal of Women…•1986

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