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The dog will be good for days on end, staying within the invisible boundaries of our fenceless yard and reappearing in a reasonable time at the side porch door. Then something snaps inside him, and a minute after I let him out, a black streak fast as a panther cuts a diagonal to our neighbor’s back yard. Their dog barks madly, and I, knowing it is futile, yell after him, then grab my garden clogs and clomp over there to scold him home.
By now, when Willie hears the exasperated fury in my voice, he just trots inside, turns left in the hallway, and takes himself to Toilet Prison, which is what we call his enforced stays in the loo. Window too high to see out of, no treats, no cuddles, for a sliding scale of minutes determined by the severity of the infraction. In point of fact, he has only one infraction: running free to the neighbors’ yards. When he hears me yell “No!” he looks over his shoulder, takes a split second to weigh the choice—and runs.
And you know what? I secretly admire him. He craves freedom and loves to run, and we both know that I will keep forgetting that I cannot trust him, kind of on purpose, because I understand that craving and want to give him the freedom. I also take comfort in the fact that I keep forgiving him. The notion that you can be impish and follow a wild impulse—one that drives someone you love crazy—and know they will always forgive you—is just a delightful part of life.
Odd, though, that I should take such comfort in this. My mother had a gift for unconditional love; I knew I had hers no matter what vices I might indulge, what crimes I might commit. But she was also widowed, lonely, and easily worried, so I never wanted to trouble her by rebelling. I stuffed all that spirit inside. And when I reached adulthood, the authorities were nowhere near so forgiving. You had to do whatever the boss or the bureaucracy wanted or face real consequences.
There are often good reasons for obedience. But oh, I love the rebels. The ones who look possible consequences in the eye, face even the disapproval of people they love, and say fuck it, I’m goin’. In movies, these are the characters who do things their own way, ignoring what they were told to do, and bring back results every time. Invariably, they are met with a rueful grin and a pat on the back. They are seldom women.
Like anyone who is not granted automatic power, women have had to learn how to read the authority, navigate the system—and discern just how far we can go in expressing our own opinion, going our own way, taking liberties. It is easy to blame a patriarchal past. But some of our conformity is, I have come to realize, wired in.
Women have a higher prevalence of social responsiveness, a trait that makes us want to please and comply with whatever is asked of us. Recent research points to a gene on the X chromosome that is involved in social cognitive skills; the responsiveness, while not universal or of uniform intensity, is genetically coded.
Which might be why women all trot off together to use the loo? I still remember an evening, decades ago, when a boyfriend nudged me and nodded toward his friend’s date, Mimi, a little French poodle of a woman who was heading for the ladies’. “I think she wants you to go with her,” he whispered.
I looked at him blankly. “I don’t have to go,” I whispered back.
Nothing in my genes kicked in, that evening, to make me want to accompany a woman I had just met and listen to her pee. Why would I be expected to do so? The question brings us back to societal conditioning, whose power even the genetic studies acknowledge. Women are expected to be nurturing, pumping out the glue that sticks a family or a community together. No doubt we also sense that there is power in numbers, allowing us to conspire—even if that just meant whispered confidences in the loo. Still, the expectation that I must accompany Mimi made me bristle. Guys do not trot off together. They show their buddies an easy tolerance. The only consequence for idiosyncracy is that it might win you a nickname.
So what was it about the sociability of women that made people think it mandatory? I am using a hopeful past tense, because many of the old ways have changed. Husbands would no longer dare start a sentence with, “Why don’t you girls…” Ministers are learning not to expect “the ladies” to provide home-baked refreshments after services. A group of women will fill needs, solve problems, get it done, but men are just as capable. They will grill burgers or fry fish out on that church parking lot till midnight. If all along we had expected them to do more than bring a six-pack or a bag of chips to a potluck, they would have figured out how the stove worked, too. And if we had expected them to be sociable and nurture lifelong groups of friends, they might never have drifted into isolation and depression as soon as they left the institutional frameworks of school and work.
Why was the expectation of sociability different for us? Was it because we were more attuned to each other, eager to do the same things at the same times to—what, avoid excluding anyone? Sororities never minded excluding! Which brings up the point that much of this sociable behavior seems to come naturally. It is voluntary, and gratifying. Which bounces us back to physical determinism, because research also shows that women have a greater sensitivity to that glowing, tender, euphoric hormone called oxytocin. We needed that sensitivity to endure pain and exhaustion—oxytocin is released when nursing or rocking an infant—but it also warms us at times of social bonding.
Oxytocin is a lovely treat, and a socially skilled brain is a gift, but the social responsiveness that results can be a curse. We who are cisgender and conditioned by the past need to learn from my dog. Willie knows exactly when to cuddle up, do the good-dog sit, win the approval—and when he can get away with doing his own thing. Our problem is that we never seem to get away with it. We have been told for years now that we should—in fact, must—do our own thing. But permission only lasts until our freedom and assertiveness are seen as somehow problematic, and then everything changes again. Talk about a double bind, a dangled lure that will be snatched back in seconds. Women fight their way to demanding careers and still have to coordinate the domestic stuff. Women stand up for themselves in relationships, and guys turn to solitary porn instead of bothering. Women start a #MeToo movement and it is followed by a loss of reproductive rights.
All Willie has to worry about is twenty minutes in Toilet Prison.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
