LETTERS FROM HOME: WOMEN WHO HATE MEN AND THE MEN WHO NEED THEIR LOVE

Feb. 11, 1999

Dear Leslie,

An old friend sent along some funny lines she thinks deserve to be enshrined on buttons. Ever since, we've been engaged in an e-mail debate over the virtues of male-bashing.

I'm against it.

For the purpose of stating my case, here are some examples:

-- Not all men are annoying. Some are dead.

-- Are those your eyeballs? I found them in my cleavage.

-- I'm not your type. I'm not inflatable.

Those were the tame and kind ones.

Perhaps I react too strongly to barbs only meant to be humorous.

At one time I had a girlfriend who admitted hating men.

"What about me?" I'd say. "You're different," she'd say.

I was left wondering what sort of man a woman who hates men loves. What's more unsettling is that for awhile I commiserated with her.

At the time, I wasn't so fond of my own gender either. What I saw then was a world ruled by men trying to get their way by being angry and acting tyrannical, from Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on a table to little boys squabbling over a toy dumptruck in a sandbox.

Eventually, I had to admit I could be that way, too, in my own way. But the only way to cure our faults is to love them, not pin our ears back because of them.

My friend finds no fault with expressing animosity toward men, saying that the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. It's a distinction that saddens more than reassures.

I have tried and failed to explain how these arrows shot at the pride and peculiarities of men wound more than the men they are aimed at. They damage the possibilities for love. They help doom the very relationships women want.

This isn't an issue DC and I have had to wrestle in our marriage, although my name suddenly has become "Jerk" in a few situations. Call it a kneejerk reaction.

Women have been on the losing end of the war between the sexes for so long that some comeuppance is deemed justified.

My friend has been married and divorced twice. I suggested that maybe it's not males she feels like bashing so much as ex-husbands. Women who complain there are no good men never seem to take responsibility for attracting the rascals in their past.

"That which we spend our lives hoping for is often no more than another chance to do what we should have done to begin with," Richard Paul Evans writes in his novel "The Locket."

The complaint is that our souls lack romance, yet how do you explain William Shakespeare?

A literary critic wrote that Shakespeare captured more of the beauty of the world in his poetry because he had "the greatest power of admiration." All of us could use a Shakespearian boost in our power of admiration.

It is worthy to be, like the poet Pablo Neruda, a man who knows how to love women.

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep."

And, I will concede, it is worthier still to be a woman who knows how to love men. Those of us who are the hardest to love are those who need love the most.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.