'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!', Irvin S. Cobb [bookreader txt] 📗

amazement and consternation; keep a photograph in a drawer of the desk at the office, where the stenographer finds it and says to the office boy: “Can you beat that? And not even pretty!” carry boxes of candy around, hoping they look like cigars; and lie awake nights wondering what she can see in him, and wondering if she is awake too.

They are very dear and very humble and sheepish and self-conscious when they are in love, curious mixtures of determination and vacillation; about eighty per cent, however, being determination. But they lose for once their sex solidarity, and play the game every man for himself. Roughly speaking (although who can speak roughly of them then? Or at any time?) they divide into three types of lovers. There are men who are all three, at different times of course. But these [p25] three classes of lovers have one thing in common. They want to do their own hunting. It gives them a sense of power to think they have won out by sheer strength and will.

The truth about this is that no man ever won a woman who was actually difficult to get, and found it worth the effort afterwards. What real man ever liked kissing a girl who didn’t want to be kissed? Love has got to be mutual. Your lover is frequently more interested in being loved than in loving. And the trump cards are always the woman’s. These grown-up boys of ours are shy and self-depreciatory in love, and they run like deer when they think they are not wanted. So the woman has to play a double game, and gets blamed for guile when it is only wisdom. Her instinct is to run, partly because she is afraid of love and partly because she has to appear to be pursued. But she has to limp a bit, and sit down and look back rather wistfully, and in the end of course she goes lame entirely and is overtaken.

This is the same instinct which makes the pheasant hen feign a broken wing.

There is a wonderful type of woman, however, who goes as straight to the man she loves as a homing pigeon to its loft.

Taking, then, the three classes of men in the throes of the disease of love, we have the following symptoms, diagnosis and prognosis.

First. The average lover. Temperature [p26] remains normal, with slight rise in the evenings. Continues to attend to business. Feeling of uneasiness if called by endearing names over office ’phone. Regular diet, but smokes rather too much. Anxiety strongly marked as to how his income will cover a house and garage in the country, adding the cost of his commutation ticket, and shows tendency to look rather wistfully into toy shop-windows before Christmas.

Diagnosis: Normal love.

Prognosis: Probably permanent condition.1

Second. The fearful lover. Temperature inclined to be sub-normal at times. Physical type, a hulking brute of a man, liking small women, only he feels coarse and rather gross when with them. He is the physical type generally attributed to the cave man, but this is an error. (See cave man, later.) His timidity is not physical but mental, and is referable by the Freud theory to his early youth, when he was taught that big, overgrown boys did not tease kittens, but put them in their pockets and carried them home. Has the kitten obsession still. Is six months getting up enough courage to squeeze a five-and-a-half hand, and then crushes it to death. Reads poetry, and is very early for all appointments. Appetite small. Does not sleep. In small communities [p27] shows occasional semi-paralysis on the curb after Sunday evening service, and lets a fellow half his size see her home. (See cave man, later.) Is always in love, but not with the same woman. Is easily hurt, and walks it off on Sunday afternoons. Telephones with gentle persistence, and prefers the movies to the theater because they are dark. This type sometimes loses its gentleness after marriage, and always has an ideal woman in mind. Some one who walks like Pauline Frederick and smiles like Mary Pickford.2

Diagnosis: Normal love, with idealistic complications.

Prognosis: Condition less permanent than in case A, as less essentially monogamous. Should be careful not to carry the search for the ideal to excess.

Third. The cave man. Temperature normally high, with dangerous rises. Physique rather under-sized, with prominent Adam’s apple. Is attracted by large women, whom he dominates. Is assured, violent and jealous. Appetite fastidious. Takes sleeping powders during course of disease and uses telephone frequently to find out if the object of his affections is lunching with another man. Is extremely possessive as to women, and has had in early years a strong desire to take [p28] the other fellow’s girl away from him. Is pugnacious and intelligent, but has moments of great tenderness and charm. Shows his worst side to the neighbors and breathes freely after nine o’clock P.M., when no one has come to call.3

Diagnosis: Normal love, with jealousy.

Prognosis: A large family of daughters.

A great many women believe that they can change men by marrying them. This is a mistake. Women make it because they themselves are pliable, but the male is firmly fixed at the age of six years, and remains fundamentally the same thereafter. The only way to make a husband over according to one’s ideas then would be to adopt him at an early age, say four. But who really wants to change them? Where would be the interest in marriage? To tell the truth, we like their weaknesses. It gives women that entirely private conviction they have that John would make an utter mess of things if they were not around.

Men know better how to live than women. The average man gets more out of life than the average woman. He compounds his days, if he be a healthy, normal individual, of work and play, and his play generally takes the form of fresh air and exercise. He has, frequently, more real charity than his womankind, and by charity I [p29] mean an understanding of human weakness and a tolerance of frailty. He may dislike his neighbors heartily, and snub them in prosperity, but in trouble he is quick with practical assistance. And although often tactless, for tact and extreme honesty are incompatible, he is usually kind. There is often a selfish purpose behind his altruism, his broad charitable organizations. But to individual cases of distress he is generous, unselfish, and sacrificing.

In politics he is individually honest, as a rule, but collectively corrupt. And this strange and disheartening fact is due to lethargy. He is politically indolent, so he allows the few to rule, and this few is too frequently in political life for what it can get and not what it can give. Sins of omission may be grave sins.

Yet he is individually honest in politics, and in most things, and that, partly at least, is because, pretty much overlaid with worldliness, he has a deep religious conviction. But he has a terrible fear of letting anyone know he has it. Indeed, he is shamefaced about all his emotions. He would sooner wear two odd shoes than weep at a funeral.

Really, this article could run on forever. There’s that particularly manlike attitude of accusing women of slavishly following the fashions! Funny, isn’t it, when you think about it? Do you think a man would wear a striped tie with a morning coat when his haberdasher says others are wearing plain gray? Or a straw hat before the [p30] fifteenth of May? Have you ever watched the mental struggle between a dinner suit and evening clothes? Do you suppose that women, realizing that the costume they wore was the ugliest ever devised, would continue wearing it because everyone else did? And then look at men’s trousers and derby hats!

It is men who are the slaves, double chained, of fashion. The only comfortable innovation in men’s clothes made in a century was when some brave spirit originated the shirtwaist man. Women saw its comfort, adopted and retained the shirtwaist. But the leaders of male fashion dictated that comfort was bad form, and on went all the coats again. Irvin Cobb is undoubtedly going to say that it is just like a woman to wear no flannels in winter, and silk hose, and generally go about half clad. But men are as over-dressed in summer as women are under-dressed in winter.

But in spite of this slavish following of fashion, men are really more rational than women. They have the same mental processes. For that reason they understand each other. Like the village fool who found the lost horse by thinking where he would go if he were a horse, a man knows what another man will do by fancying himself in the same circumstances. And women are called designing because they have fathomed this fundamental simplicity of the male! A woman’s emotions and her sensations and her thoughts are all [p31] complexes. She doesn’t know herself what she is going to do, and is frequently more astounded than anyone else at what she does do. It’s a lot harder being a woman than a man.

So—women know men better than men know women, and are rather like the little boy’s definition of a friend: “A friend is a feller who knows all about you, and likes you anyhow.”

We do like them, dreadfully. Sometimes women have sighed and wondered what the house would be like without overcoats thrown about in the hall, and every closet full of beloved old ragged clothes and shoes, and cigar ashes over things, and wild cries for the ancient hat they gave the gardener last week to weed in. But quite recently the women of this country and a lot of other countries have found out what even temporary absence means. A house without a man in it is as nice and tidy and peaceful and attractive and cheerful as a grave in a cemetery. It is as pleasant as Mark Twain’s celebrated combination of rheumatism and St. Vitus dance, and as empty as a penny-in-the-slot chocolate machine in a railway station.

Not so very long ago there was a drawing in one of the magazines. It showed a row of faces, men with hooked noses, with cauliflower ears, with dish-faces, and flat faces, with smallpox scars, with hare lips. And underneath it said: “Never mind, every one of them is somebody’s darling.”

[p32]
Women don’t really care how their men look. But they want to look up to them—which is a reason I haven’t given before for their sex superiority. It is really forced on them! And they want them kind and even a bit patronizing. Also they want them well, because a sick man can come the closest thing in the world to biting the hand that feeds him. And loyal, of course, and not too tidy—and to be hungry at meals. And not to be too bitter about going out in the evenings.

And the one thing they do not want is to have their men know how well they understand them. It is one of their pet little-boy conceits, this being misunderstood. It has survived from the time of that early punishment when each and every one of them contemplated running off and going to sea. Most of them still contemplate that running off. They visualize great spaces, and freedom, and tropic isles, and—well, you know. “Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.” (You know, Irvin!)

Yes, they contemplate it every now and then, and then they go home, and put on a fresh collar for dinner, and examine the vegetable garden, and take the children out in the machine for a