Boom Boxes: Boom Companions
Mysak, Joe
BOOM COMPANIONS M en, H.L. Mencken once wrote, have a better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another, they die earlier. We are reminded every day just how much better a...
...And still the carping that drove Rip Van Winkle underground continues...
...8. I have to lose weight...
...The responses fell neatly into a few categories, ranging from the generic "Woe is me"—what possible response is there to the Ibsenesque My life is miserable or It's my mother's fault?—to "Failure to Communicate," "My Career," and "Sex"—We had sex last season, for example, and the dark Well I'm not one of your old girlfriends...
...Complaints ran from We don't talk and You never listen to me to You don't take me seriously and, for the completely browbeaten, You never say anything and You never say how you really feel...
...And the stridency has reached a level reminiscent of the days of the Women's Christian Temperance Union's assault on the saloon...
...whose corollary was We don't have any dishware anymore...
...But the formerly swaggering young bucks of today do as men always have done, as they were taught by their fathers: they keep their heads down and suck it up...
...Someday our novelists will discover the profound impact that that system has had on social intercourse...
...The result: An outpouring, a cathartic gush, as to a man they pounded the keyboards with their collected wisdom, wisdom gained painfully and over the course of the first hard months of married life with their little muffins...
...It's the incessant carping that accompanies it...
...We never do what they want to do, and You always .. . As in all surveys of this sort, there was a "Miscellaneous" category, and it predictably carried the more unusual comments...
...So one day, after the paper had been put to bed, I sent the following list to a few male reporters between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-three, all married less than three years and without children...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 39...
...They come home and vacuum the house, clean the bathroom, do the laundry, go shopping, stop by the dry cleaner, and wash the floors, in addition to the fourteen-hour stint they put in at the office...
...2. I have no money...
...1. My life is miserable...
...3. You're never here...
...Joe Mysak (Mr...
...7. You don't take me seriously.You don't take my career seriously...
...6. I hate my job...
...9. You never do what I want to do...
...Consider, under social obligations, "Friends...
...At the same time, I hate my job and I want another career placed high on the list of complaints, along with the slight envy of All you think about is your job...
...We are reminded every day just how much better a time of it we have...
...How about the slightly kinky You leave your beer bottles in bed...
...When you're hit by a line drive in the lip, you don't rub...
...Within ten minutes, my list had grown to 100 items...
...And has anyone, anywhere, ever heard of a woman's boss who was not "insane...
...How else to explain such things as women comics, or the recent issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine that featured an article on "Why All Men Are Jerks" and yet another attack on cheerleading as dehumanizing...
...We all, apparently, do not take our wives' careers seriously...
...Like many Americans, I work in an office with a computer system on which one can write messages to colleagues both in the office and in outlying bureaus...
...The upscale newly married menfolk I know no longer expect to come home to dinner on the table—or anything else, for that matter...
...Mysak, TAS's chief saloon correspondent, is managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer...
...Of course there are plenty of bad habits to beef about...
...and some of us care about our cars more than our wives...
...Feminism, while it may have given new options to women in regard to their careers, and earning money, and whether or not to have children, has also fired up their unrelenting, overarticulate self-fixation...
...The responses ranged from You hate my friends, to which one of the subjects appended (True), to All my friends are insane, All my friends are stupid, Stop making fun of my friends, and the all-inclusive I have no friends...
...Or consider "My Career...
...No commentary, just The List, which I entitled simply The Horror...
...As the redoubtable Mona Charen has written, "It's not just blinding careerism on the part of women that has so aggravated relationships between the sexes...
...4. I don't like this a. apartment, b. house...
...it could have grown to 1,000, although there was some repetition...
...We all either sleep, work, drink, or weigh too much...
...5. My boss is insane...
...Perhaps the best, however, was the response to the fellow who managed to call home around 11 p.m., after a hard night in a nearby saloon: Where are YOU...
...And Why are you always breaking things...
...But let's cut right to the chase...
...among other things, one can conduct informal surveys on it...
...Or, I do not talk on the telephone for 30 percent of my life...
...Then there was the old chestnut, "Communication...
Vol. 24 • January 1991 • No. 1
