Simon Says

"For men, being married is like playing Simon Says for the rest of your life, and you never get to be Simon".
-- Jay Leno

A couple years ago Kim DuToit wrote a controversial article about the defanging of the American male. Although I actually prefer his term, I'm not sure that I want to repeat it here at Cobb. Although I generally agree with the sentiment that du Toit had a little bit too much to prove, he was onto something.

I watched 'Walk the Line' for the first time and cannot forget the exchange between two women in the grocery store.

Lady in the Aisle: Divorce is an abomination. Marriage is for life.
June Carter: I'm sorry I let you down, ma'am.

I'm trying to think of any example in life where Americans would level such criticisms at each other in public life. Not only to dish it out, but to take it with the appropriate humility. It's the most stunning exchange in the entire film and I think I understand it perfectly.

What the characters in that film understand better than most of us do is that marriage is not a respecter of persons. When a man and a woman enter into marriage, they should respect each other, but they should respect their marriage even more. To respect your woman because she demonstrates {list of things contemporary liberated women are supposed to be respected} certain attributes is nothing more nor less than a real friendship. But to respect your woman because she is your wife represents a whole new level. I think it is a level that many married couples must eventually reach, but we are not doing our share as a society to help them understand that. I don't believe that it is anything that requires exclusively religious faith, but we have certainly been reduced to a society in which few others than the religiously faithful defend the principles and purposes of marriage.

So it's rediculous but apt to compare marriage to a game of Simon Says. Why? Because men don't know how to be husbands and women don't know how to be wives. And in a marginally post-feminist society in which 'liberators' who are nothing more than libertines keep producing most of the popular pap, we are overcome by false messages of male submission in marriage. Marriage, so goes the popular myth, makes women less womanly and men less manly. It only improves the standing of gays and lesbians. Of course that's perverse, but it's what makes Jay Leno funny.

And so we pay lip service to jokes about what men must inevitably suffer through and hearing truth in it, mistake that for Truth. We shrug off the inevitability of it all, and then half of us spend half our lives with The Abomination. Some would say divorce is as inevitable as obesity and heart disease. I think it's time that healthy people grab the mic.

So let me state the obvious. A good marriage makes a man stronger and a woman stronger. The act of submission is to Marriage, not simply of weak men to catty women. There is no truth to the essentialism of feminine power that rises from within women during marriage. That dysfunction is nothing more or less than a bad marriage.