Bruno

Discussion ¬

1. 
   Pete Rogan

   August 27, 2016 at 10:34 pm | #

   What a lot of guys can’t imagine is how the changes sneak up on girls. I mean, they’re so obvious! But I knew a woman who was startled, embarrassed to mortification, mystified and then, yes, ashamed that things she had no control over were attracting that carful of guys to hoot and holler at her thirteen year-old self. She never saw it coming. And for the rest of her life she was shocked and ashamed of it. Nothing she could have done, mind you, but she still felt responsible for their conduct in some way.

   Puberty is very different for all of us, but between men and women there is a difference larger than their toolset — and I don’t care if you take that metaphorically or not. The things that bother a gender the most are not the same as those that bother the other gender, and the difference is not perceptible and not really capable of being communicated meaningfully. Puberty is confusing enough without having to deal with somebody else’s.

   I still find it most useful to remember that men are, like wolves and owls, sight hunters. They absorb most of their information visually, from without and at a distance. Women gather sensations and memories and things that are useful, and recognize the work becomes them as they become the work. In adolescence and later these two worlds don’t so much work together or even collide so much as they grate against each other, generating their own very different kinds of frustration. This is a language without words, a territory for which there is no map and can’t be, because the shape of it is ever-changing. That men and women can get together long enough to propagate the species sometimes fills me with amazement. Because it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier, however much else we learn.