Who Wears The Pants?

“I’ll have you know, girls are stronger; we’re smarter and better and we can do way more things than you. We’re mothers and dancers and presidents and doctors and waitresses, and we’re prettier.” All this from the precocious 10-year-old classmate of my son, whom we had invited to a sushi dinner, and who sat directly across from him at the dinner table.

Everyone in our party had heard this and I held my breath expecting my son to return a cross-court, turnaround, backhanded, acute-angled volley. I was turning blue in the face thinking, C’mon, if he were really my son, he’d come back with something clever — a double entendre, maybe, nothing harsh, of course, but anything to make her grapple with the irresponsibility of generalizing gender differences for a few days.

But all he did was deliver an earnest, gurgling, shoulder-shaking chuckle. After which he said, “Really? You think so?” The cute girl replied emphatically, “Yes! I am the boss of you!”

At this point, I narrowed my eyes at my son in an effort to get this message across: Claim your kingdom, son, and hoist the flag! Still, all he did was smile, both at me and at his classmate, who now sat smugly, face contorted in a satisfied smirk.

He shoved a block of spicy tuna roll in his mouth, then leaned over to me, and whispered, through the blobs of raw fish and rice swirling around his mouth, “Dzzzon’t whozzzy, Mom…” “Stop,” I said to him. “Finish chewing that please, then talk.” After a few seconds and a caveman swallow, he turned back to me and said, “I said, don’t worry, Mom, I just let her think that so I can enjoy my sushi in peace.” And then with a wink and a flash of a toothy smile at me and at the girl across from him, he popped another wedge of sushi in his mouth and chewed away.

Heck, where did he get that? From TV? The Internet? His friends? Maybe. But I think it is something that’s hard-wired in the brain of all men from the time of conception.

I remembered an interview I caught on the E! Channel with the newly married Hollywood actor, Jay Mohr. When asked about married life, he answered, “Everything’s perfect.” He was then asked what his formula was for a happy marriage and he said, “Happy wife, happy life. Just keep ‘em happy and you’re good.”

Is it really true, do you think — this conspiracy of the male species to fool us all into believing we’ve got the upper hand, when in fact, they hold all the puppet strings? We’ve all heard the Machiavellian motto — It’s better to be feared than loved — and many a great man down through the centuries has applied this by enthroning a woman and endowing her with powers to rule alongside him as a buffer for the people’s discontent and resentment. Truly cunning. Think of the late strongman, Ferdinand Marcos, or of the former Argentinean military junta leader, Juan Peron — same mentality, same principle.

What then of all these seemingly flattering, popular sayings descriptive of the prized position of women in their partner’s lives — “the power behind the throne”; “wind beneath my wings”; Rasputin; St. Peter at the gates? Notice that in every clause, the allusion to the woman is never on equal footing with the man; she is either behind him or in front of him as the first line of defense against the mob. Go figure.

A friend of mine, a venture capitalist, joked about how domestic matters are settled between him and his wife. He jested, “When she badgers me about needing to have her way once in a while in the home, when she gripes about her opinion weighing nothing, I always remind her as I have stated from the very beginning that I take care of all the minor decisions that concern our family and she gets to decide on all the major ones. But so far, no major ones have come up yet, so there.” Really sly.

So who really wears the pants? Over a bottle of wine at a café yesterday, I sat with Lindy, a stunning, worldly, street-smart, 19-year-old Columbian/Bulgarian/Australian, and a daughter’s friend. Men of all shapes and sizes surrounded us, finding every excuse to get close to her; but she sat there like mighty Aphrodite, knowing exactly how to handle herself. I asked what she thought about this matter between men and women. She said, “Men are stupid sometimes, but we women, we’re manipulative. Ooohhh, aren’t we? We take things, flip them on their heads, and spin them around. We’re bad. We can play with minds.” Very forthcoming.

As I worked my way to the rest room, I chanced upon a man along the hallway, red in the face and glassy-eyed, hand cupped over a phone receiver, speaking loudly into his mobile, obviously to his significant other. “I remember clearly telling you that I was going out tonight… one beer, just one… an hour, tops… We’re all boys… Of course, I’m sure… You wanna talk to George… I said about an hour, hour-and-a-half, maybe, tops…”

It was too much of a temptation and, of course, I couldn’t resist. So, playfully and in the spirit of the moment, I stopped in front of him, wagged a finger, and clucked my tongue, “Tsk, tsk.” He looked at me stunned. I gave him a wink and ambled on.

Perhaps, in synch with the spinning of the earth along its axis, the universe contrives to shift ascendancy between both genders. Equally? In time and billing? Who’s to know? In the meanwhile, let’s make each other think so. In my 10-year-old son’s words, “For the sake of peace.”