The Measure of Man, the Weight of Woman

I am not a believer in gender equality. In this regard my liberal background has been in constant tension with my tutelage as a gentleman. Should women be treated the same as men, or not? The answer for me is “not.”

About this idea - of inequitable treatment - I am quite a chauvinist, in fact. And I mean “chauvinist” in the historical sense of the Bonapartists - I am rabidly loyal to this concept. Simply put: women are different, so I'm going to treat them that way.

Not only is the difference ecstatically obvious during certain physical activities, it is also visually obvious. In fact, it's so obvious that it passes the proverbial “even a blind man can tell” test, being obvious to all five senses. And if that's not enough evidence, a recent paper in Genome Research notes that gene expression differences between the sexes (in mice) range from 15% to 72% different depending on the tissue type (data here, and a layman description here.)

True, we are not mice, but should I feel guilty that I enjoy opening a door, paying for a meal, buying a gift, or hogging the remote control? Look, I enjoy my mate to be sometimes girlish and sometimes sexy. I like it if she puts on stockings, wears La Perla, likes her hair long, and wants me to protect her. Anything else is to deny beauty and to turn a blind eye to some of the greatest art and emotion this world can offer. Thank god we can once again embrace femininity and masculinity; attraction and power; ying and yang.

And on top of this all, I really like the role that this puts me into, as a provider, a planner, a protector, and, yes, even a picker of television shows. It makes me enjoy buying her a sexy ten-grand Roberto Cavalli outfit, or taking her on a runabout to a private island in the Maldives, or dressing her up in outrageous clubwear. I even enjoy my work more because she adds more context and meaning to it, and I love how she loves the way I work.

Some men don't think it's a good idea on principle. The theory goes that if you spoil a woman too much, it's a one way street and she will take nothing less. My view on that is: yes, isn't that the point? I suppose in theory it is possible that a women will feel entitled to good treatment and start treating her mate less well, but isn't it also possible that she will feel like treating her mate better?

Now I do not want to confuse this with the legal issue of equality. I am a supporter of women having equal rights under law. Not because it is completely rational or fair, but because any alternative leads to exploitation of certain natures in us all that diminish opportunities for people to reach their potential. And protecting us against those tendencies is one of the values of social law.

Yet I do measure men and women in my life differently. I find that I judge women by their potential and men by their accomplishment. I do not do this deliberately nor with any malice, and there are important exceptions, but generally I see this behavior in myself, and many of the women with whom I consort. Is this fair? Not by several liberal measures, but the world isn’t fair. I love developing potential of all kinds, in people and in companies. This is my business. But I have found even greater joy in developing potential in women because it affects me in a masculine way.

Alas, this could be a temptation that leads men astray or into the arms of younger women. So this desire to be a provider and protector is yet another tendency that deserves my vigilance, with the assistance of my life partner. Yet another scenario to add to the Nightmares. In fact, Jenny has been coaching me a lot on the appropriate behaviors with regards to situations that might involve other women.

Perhaps the fact that I measure a man by his accomplishments and a woman by her potential is really a matter of looking forward versus looking backwards. I’m the sort of person who always likes to look forward and seldom dwells in the past. I judge the future of men by their past, and the future of women by their future. For men, they help me create the future with their accomplishments; for women I build the future around them. In the context of a relationship, this allows me to enjoy a partner who will be part of my predilection toward the future, while also being able to enjoy the successes of my past reflected in her eyes.

This attitude may be the reason why I have been taken advantage of in past relationships. Perhaps this is one of the many reasons why men and their Y chromosome are doomed — in about 125,000 years according to Bryan Sykes (others think it’s a few million years away, but most think the whole idea is sensationalist crap, see the figure to the right. But then remember the Angels and the obsolescence of men!)

Or maybe I think of women like developing nations because socially their rights are still relatively new. Or because I want to try a land grab while the grabbing is good. Or, hell, just because the risk adjusted returns appear higher in a developing nation!

But whatever the reason, I recognize this is the way I am, and this is the way that many women like me. And I am optimistic that with my well-matched partner, my antiquated and Victorian attitude can be a wonderful asset to building a better future.

Vive la Différence!

P.S. Clandestine Call Girl made a comment that stimulated another thought: Although there are many things that are negative about the role of women in Asia, there is a certain comfort in knowing that there are roles that help define the relationship. It removes frictions. Since I was uncomfortable with taking the entire package of social roles from the East, I instead advocated being explicit about the roles that Jenny and I wanted. So far this has worked. And we have defined many, though not all, roles along stereotypical gender lines, probably because our tendencies evolved that way.

Why is Real Estate So Complicated?

In trying to figure out where we will live, we have been taking a world tour of properties. If you think the experience of buying a house is a bad one, just try it in a dozen countries.

Real estate is a curious business. It defies much conventional wisdom. For example, why is it that real estate only becomes more complicated in cities that appear to have the highest volumes of transactions? Would it not be reasonable to expect the transactions to become more efficient? What perversion in human nature seems to push the statistical tendencies towards inefficiency, opacity, and a general all-around unpleasant experience? There is no monopoly organization that forces exclusive terms yet there are monopolistic rules that govern transactions and appear to set customer service standards far south of reason.

I have just purchased a place in Manhattan. I am in the process of closing a place in London. And I recently had a transaction in a major city in Asia, one that shows up in the top five most expensive real estate locales in the world. I commonly hear complaints about the prices, but the process is even worse.

I actually don’t mind paying a lot of money for a place I will enjoy. Color me strange for expecting that the process of parting with large sums of money would be made into a somewhat enjoyable experience. Yet the process is primitive, inefficient, maddening, and, to add insult to injury, also expensive!

There is nothing pleasant about it, and much to vehemently dislike.

Now I get to look forward to the remodeling and decorating experiences. I am already told that the businesses involved there are even less rational than the real estate businesses. What joy.

Kick to the Finish

The pace of posts has gone up for a bit. I'm intending to finish the blog in a few days, so I am trying to get at least half of the long-unfinished entries finished and out. I will be focusing more on abstract pieces rather than travelogues, so apologies in advance to those hoping to catch up on my last Europe, South Asia, Central China, Northern Canada, and Middle East trips, not to speak of some of the really backdated posts on my ski party and the South America trip last year, and some bachelor party previews. Oh, well...

What Hath Love Wrought?

Some notes on the effect of love thus far, to me. Sensitive readers, please bring along your airsick bag. You have been warned.

Mostly love has been the force that helps me balance contradictory forces:

I have found that love has guided me to provide to Jenny an Aspect of innocence: to learn from her and to follow her, but also to provide in me an Aspect of wisdom: to teach and to lead. These in balance make her feel like a woman, like a mother and a daughter.

I have found love has driven me to value the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual attributes independently in both of us. To cherish it in her, and to develop it in me. And to step away from comparing between us how we are similar or different, but instead to draw upon both of our attributes to solve problems or make progress.

Love caused me to understand that I do not want to take her to my world, and that I do not want her to take me away from my world, but instead that I want to forge a new place for both of us, that world of light, together.

I am fascinated that this love was born of independence and freedom: I had a total lack of expectations in any relationship with Jenny due to the fact I had not planned to live in Asia. At best a relationship with Jenny would be a fling, or a long distance relationship slowly expiring. I knew I would be leaving, and she did also. The ability — no, more so — the sensibility of leaving, it puts love into a different context. There must be a struggle to keep it alive, and to keep it from turning into a desire to possess, to become routine, to turn love into a kind of slavery. At the same time this must be balanced against our natural desire to avoid turning a beautiful dream into dreary reality — but it’s wrong headed thinking: it is really turning potential into wonderful reality, a hunk of dark rock into a brilliant diamond, an opportunity to turn two disconnected dreams into a single reality, two half lives into a whole, like Plato’s sorb-apple. It focused us away from the body which we know will be apart, and toward the mind and spirit. And maybe that gave us the time to think, to ponder, to consider the form and framework under which our love could survive.

And the travel and adventure certainly did not hurt.

Love is also challenging. It demands attention and work. It suffers from mis-set expecations. I’m guilty of this: I have set expectations poorly, and not kept myself free of unvoiced expectations of the other party rather than communicating expectations for goals together. On occasion I fail to be as truthful as I should, and then I correct this. It’s difficult.

And I worry too much. There are times an important perspective must be regained: to just be thankful for what we have and the journey we share, for however long we share it.

Ok, hopefully that’s it for the mushy stuff.

The Value of Arguments, and Arguments of Value

Jenny and I argue. We actually argue a lot more than I have argued with other girlfriends (with one exception, see the sidebar “FLASHBACK: Repelling Myself” in this post). This is a direct side effect of our crazy experiment with truth, honesty and explicit contradictions.

And we value our arguments. One might ask: Why?

It is a strange thing. It is directly contradictory to the advice we often hear from others. But argument is part of creating adaptive chaos and never taking the other for granted. Certes we have both met other people with whom life would be more, well, comfortable or easy. But we are two people who really enjoy work and challenges, and have a long history of picking the hardest thing to do rather than the easiest, just for the hell of it. I fire people for not arguing with me. The executives in my companies are expected to argue. But respectfully.

And that’s a big difference. These aren’t no-holds-barred I’ll-bury-you-and-spit-on-your-grave arguments. Passion is ok, but the framework is oriented toward continuous improvement and problem solving. It’s all part of commitment. So underlying our argument we can see the other person’s commitment.

Also, as I wrote in my Nightmare Scenarios, argument plays proxy for “crying” — an annoying early warning system to protect the health of the third, abstract and most important member of our asset, the relationship itself.

To preserve the value of argument, it is important to confine arguments to certain domains. Constructive arguments are good. In our view several types of arguments become constructive that might otherwise seem selfish. Advancing feelings and opinions within our framework, for example, is very constructive. It’s amazing how a small shift in your framework can make the exact same words feel different.

One mental model of argument topics is that topics should all have values, and by that I mean be representable in numbers. Yes, it sounds awful, but when you can develop a metric for the issue at hand, you have done most of the work in making it a constructive argument. It sounds strange, and it is not easy to do at first, but eventually it becomes easy, and it really makes a huge difference.

Does it sound too mathematical and emotionless? Then your imagination has failed you. Listen to one of our arguments and you would never think it lacks passion, emotion, and drive. But importantly there is a blueprint for construction, which means that during the sulk stage a person is far more likely to come back with some positive suggestions. And such suggestions are easier on the pride than, “I was wrong,” or even, “I love you.” They show a commitment to the relationship, even if it isn’t too each other. And soon the rest follows. It really works.

At least for us.

At least so far!

Nightmare Scenarios

I am afraid. Continuously afraid. I can demonstrably be paranoid as hell even through massive success and over two decades.

But I believe only the paranoid survive.

My fears are legion. And multiplied with the addition of another interwoven life.

1. Can I maintain my abstractions?
2. Will my constructive attitude regarding continuous improvement, the attribute that allows me to tolerate the honest and sometimes hurtful feedback, degenerate into retributive punishment (as appears to be the natural tendency of humans)?
3. The unholy trinity of effective self-ignorance: is one of the following true:
• Will I change so much that the assumptions upon which I have bet two lives will no longer apply?
• Have I deceived myself in my self-analysis to date?
• Have I convinced myself to behave in a manner other than what is possible over the long term?
• Are there other factors I have failed to consider? For example, do I have the cheating gene?
4. Will I be able to satisfy my mate to the degree needed to achieve long-term success?
5. Will other random events displace the carefully constructed system we have put into place?
6. Will my work become competitive with my personal life? Will I miss some aspect of my work life that I may have consciously or unconsciously given up?

And there are many others. Unlike many other people I know, and perhaps surprising to people who know me, I find little utility in listing the possible downsides of an endeavor. That is the optimist in me — I prefer to focus on the constructive ingredients and add a pinch of preventive planning, but to go overboard on the risks is only a way to convince myself to build an excessively defensive position. Like great chess, it is more about position and sense than it is about a eight-ply plan.

But my basic approach to avoiding the nightmare scenario is simple:

Never sleep.

And that is ultimately the plan. Stay vigilant and careful. The asset here, the relationship, is important. Thus it is ok to create artificial mechanisms to move things to alert status (without overstimulating the alert response). In a sense, much of the chaos we have embraced as well as our incorporation of conflict and honesty, is really about keeping the relationship near alert status. And since our lives are largely about dealing with a constant stream of emergencies, we are used to it. In such lives the key skill is triage, and this approach keeps issues concerning our most important asset high on the triage list.

Evolution has given a baby an important tool for survival — crying. Babies require a lot of attention. So they start crying well before they start dying. Humans are sensitized to respond to crying, that’s why it sounds so darn annoying. A relationship needs this, too: a crying reflex so we’ll pay attention. That is the value of honesty in my relationship with Jenny. It creates tension and argument, which is our relationship’s version of crying. As long as we understand the value of it, we’ll treat it appropriately. But the value of argument is a topic for another post.

Invasion of America

In posts about evolving friendships and avoiding temptation I wrote that I was trying not to meet my Asian business friends in Asia any longer. The hope was that by meeting them in the United States I could avoid some of the distractions and temptations that their lifestyle tended to throw my way. My hope was that the United States had a different, cruder immorality that is more easily resisted — rather than educated girls in a comfortable high class environment who would pour you drinks, sing, and work their way into your heart over years, we here in the United States had silicone inflated strippers who would work their way into your wallet over several hours. Instead of highly-trained competitive sexual services, we had Internet hookers who were about as formally trained and competitive as your average short order cook. Instead of a history of developing hedonism over a millenia, we had a few hundred years derived from a group of Puritans who found even the relatively moderate western Europe filled with too much moral decay.

Thus comfortably ensconced in the limited-temptation environment of America, I could have the home field advantage over the Mongol horde. With this in mind, I confidently accepted my first business meeting in New York with drinks at a club chosen by a friend of a friend, let’s call him Steve. Steve had made a few hundred million selling his company to a US-based multinational and was currently an executive there.

And it turns out there is a subculture within the United States which is a copy of the Asia business experience. High end clubs modeled on the ones back in Asia, managed by the same women, and staffed with girls imported from Asia. Yes, they were discreet, usually looking run down from the outside or in the middle of nowhere, and they were selective, only allowing people in by appointment, but they were substantially the same as the places I had visited in China, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere in Asia.

Steve blew thousands of dollars “sponsoring” about a dozen girls that evening. By the end of the evening I had the Asia experience of fending off the familiar situation of an attractive and educated girl asking for my phone number.

And then having to report it to Jenny per our agreement.

Ok, I’m taking a little editorial license with my level of naiveté; I had known these places existed in the United States, but had not realized the degree to which they were used by a subculture of Chinese or Koreans (in separate places) in their business dealings. Jenny told me about them; some of her close friends had spent time and found patrons in San Francisco, Dallas, and New York.

I don’t know how many other services are also available. I suspect on the sexual services side that the lack of volume means less competition and therefore less quality and probably no high end. For example I certainly have never heard of anything like what I saw in the Asian high end in the United States Asian massage parlors.

But beware — we are being invaded. Many write about how Western culture is polluting the East, but perhaps the reverse is happening more than you’d know. Too bad it’s only reserved of Asians in America. I think the general population could learn from a wider distribution of this culture.

Evolving Friendships with Secrets

I wrote about friendship in an earlier post, about three categories of friends: enduring, situational and distant. I noted that I had four male and no female enduring friends (in my narrow definition of that class,) and yet many more female than male distant friends. I went on to say that many female friends and ex-lovers had ended up distant rather than enduring due to a combination of changed circumstance and societal norms; they would focus on marriage or career, and societal or possibly workplace conventions would make it difficult to remain close to me.

As this blog indicates, there are three relatively recent features of my life that force me to consider how friendships may evolve differently in my future. The first and most obvious is my changed status to a “taken man,” but the second and third, perhaps more interesting, are the emergence of two new classes of personal relationships I have acquired in the past few years of my adventures in sex and relationships. Let me focus on that for a moment: my life rolodex now holds two new categories of entry:

• Secret Friends. Not an ex-lover, not a friend, and definitely not a co-worker, these are mistress candidates and providers with whom extended time has forged a relationship. The social differences are vast: in this new class of relationship false names may be the coin of social intercourse, and impenetrable firewalls are common for ordinarily shared personal information. For example I can introduce an ex-girlfriend to a co-worker, but it is awkward to do so with a mistress-candidate or provider. I might not even be able to introduce them by name! (I call this category Secret Friend because I have found that several cellular handset models in Asia have a special address book category for “Secret Friends.” Among other things, calls and text messages to and from Secret Friends are not logged, their caller ID may not appear on the front of your phone, their calls may not even audibly ring your phone, and information has a special associated password. I am told that some even have two passwords, one of which only shows innocuous information to allay the concerns of a suspicious lover!)
  

• Friends Keeping Secrets. These are usually business associates with whom I am particularly friendly, but they are powerful and in Asia, so they fool around. And it is so socially acceptable that they do so, that they freely involve me in their escapades (and I have involved them in mine.) But these are friends who hold a secret about my behavior that, although acceptable in their social circles in Asia, even in certain kinds of mixed company, are not as acceptable in the ones I have in the United States. By convention in their society, these behaviors are not talked about openly. But also by convention, you continue to do it, even after you are married.

Every adult in America has heard of or experienced the challenge of evolving a friendship through marriage. As I noted in my previous posting about friendship, I believe it is easier for men to bring male friendships forward as they are married than it is for women to marry and bring their male friends forward. On the other side, being a man heading into marriage, I do not see any problems bringing my male friends forward; and as I have discussed previously in a post about temptation, discussions with Jenny indicate no problems that are out of the ordinary in my bringing female friends forward, in particular since all my female friends are distant anyhow.

But these two new categories are a little different. They surface dichotomies in my life, which creates new challenges:

• Secret Friends surface a dichotomy between the 1) clandestine society layer of life where patrons and providers interact, and the 2) open society layer where American society stays blind and happy, typified by my United States-based work and charitable-giving circles. These two circles want to be separated by a one way mirror, the first likes to look at the second, but the second just doesn’t want to know anything about the first lest it’s carefully constructed edifice of Morality be exposed to rational self-examination. Odd, isn’t it? That the clandestine society is so open-eyed, and the open society so closed-minded?
  

• Friends Keeping Secrets surface a dichotomy between my Asian ethics and my Western ethics, which at best have an uneasy peacekeeping relationship. It is a fairly new moral fracas, so the territorial boundaries just aren’t very clearly marked and, worse, the arsenal of weaponry available to each side is uncatalogued and with unknown effect. At best I know they have different strategies: Asian morality is patient and Western is urgent. More on this below.

So if there is a land-mined demilitarized zone between these two sets of rival sides, clandestine vs. open, and Asian vs. Western, then the navigation of this problem calls for some tricky driving across the minefield.

Let me address the Friends Keeping Secrets first, since I’ve talked about some of it in the temptation post. As I noted there, some friends have been quite supportive. But even the supportive ones expect at some point for me to “come back” to their society and rejoin the fun. They can wait. And this is the sort of attack that Jenny worries about — the slow burn that erodes your will back to the animal hindbrain — an attack against which I may be inexperienced or uncertain. And perhaps even more insidious is their ability to freely and skillfully mix business objectives into this potent elixir of temptation. They’ve had a thousand years to perfect it, and it’s just not a mode of negotiation to which I am accustomed. Recall this is not the blatant “I hired him a hooker to blow him in the cab” kind of thing that appeared in the movie Wall Street (and in retrospect was a remarkably prescient view to Charlie Sheen’s later experiences), or that I did recently for Mark (although in a slightly more Asian fashion.) This is far more subtle and long term. Setting up relationships and circles of friends and family, tied up with business and pleasure, and looping your life into the Gordian Knot to the point where it all is no longer separable. You are bound by so many interlocking obligations and, voila! part of the society. So indeed I wonder and second guess myself: I am changeable and adaptable, in both positive and negative ways, and I am vulnerable to this sort of attack.

The reader knows the decision I made on this one. I elected not to migrate this group of relationships, and have attempted to the best of my ability to delegate it all to somebody else — The Man. And I have tried to meet this group only on my home turf (I’ll write more about that later).

So I ran away on the Friends Keeping Secrets. Now what about the Secret Friends?

There is an conventional wisdom that states that you do not pay providers to come to you, you pay them to leave. And part of the implied contract is that there is no expectation of a relationship beyond the transactional nature of the business. Yet my experience indicates that in some cases the conventional wisdom is completely wrong — both provider and I will enjoy interacting beyond the boundaries of a transaction, but still trapped under this strange umbrella of subterfuge inherited from the clandestine manner in which we were introduced.

Similarly it is often understood that providers keep dual identities so at some point they can leave their provider life behind. It is less rarely discussed how they can migrate relationships from the provider side to the real world side, and when it is discussed, it is almost universally labelled a Bad Idea. In symmetry, a patron keeps his two lives separate so he can deny the clandestine and socially unaccepted life. In many cultures this is not so much socially unaccepted, but a way to provide face saving to a cheated wife or lover. In the United States, of course, there is The Moral Code, but we still have to make an offering of face saving to society at large — those people at work or family members or, dammit, the kids! who may know how life really works, but certainly don’t want to see it. And here, too, migration of a relationship from one side to another is discouraged.

Beyond the issue of the Moral Code — which is properly only a Moral Hazard to the patron and provider — much of why migration is discouraged, I propose, is because the migration is in the context of love. Don’t fall in love, we are all warned (on both sides of the patron/provider relationship.) Spill-over into the real world only creates complications because of the irrationality and chaos of love and sex combined with the social pressures that would befall the social outing of “that kind of relationship.”

Again, implied is the idea that the relationship was mostly about sex. Hardly surprising, since prostitution is about sex, but there is this other kind of provider — the one where the choice to patronize was based on other attributes of beauty such as conversation, wit and deportment; maybe a sex act never even happened.

Perhaps that is still considered cheating in a relationship. But it’s interesting to consider why would that be infidelity? Is it because sex was possible, a contemplated part of the deal? Or because it is clandestine and appears sneaky? Or merely because a spouse or lover should provide all stimulation of that sort and so it is wrong to even entertain the potential of another?

So I have this issue. Several very interesting women, some of whom are still providers, some of whom are not, and some who never were... but all of whom I have met under these socially disreputable circumstances... some of with whom I might have had sex and some not... do I migrate them or not?

Of course it isn’t a unilateral decision. Some providers have opted out already. Others are uncomfortable. But for the most part the decision is in my hands because I was the patron, and the expectation is that, well, remember that “conventional wisdom?”

I don’t have the answer to this one yet. Partly I’m interested in comments and advice. Partly I’m still working it out. At the moment given how I ended up dealing with the other dichotomy, I am skeptical I can deal with this one very well. Certainly it’s easier to see a natural migration from Secret Friend to distant friend, and then migrate as usual (see above.) In certain very carefully controlled cases I could see migrating from Secret Friend to situational friend, in a work context. But that is a real narrow set of cases, and it may have a null set result.

Baths, a Watery Communion

I have a little fetish that most people who know me would find surprising.

I like to take baths.

Long, luxurious, hot baths, where I read a book and relax, refilling the tub several times to keep the temperature perfect, slowly cooking myself until I am all wrinkly. I become a human hot water bottle -- my core body temperature rises and I can keep the bed warm for several hours.

Whereas scheduling and availability of decent bathtubs made the expression of my fetish somewhat sporadic, recently Jenny and I formalized this into a weekly (or the closest schedulable day) ritual, a fleshy communion with the British Thermal Unit along with our tithe to the heating company. Alas, the first several iterations of this new ritual were not at all relaxing and more resembled a turbid 1970's hot tub porno scene rather than a Calgon-take-me-away moment. But eventually we no longer could generate novel combinations of body fluids and bath add-ins with which to test our miscibility theories, and thereafter the ritual became more peacefully contemplative.

And the dessert is the “good night massage.” Not a therapeutic massage — Jenny and I took lessons that we use on other occasions but not this one — this is just time to touch and caress each other — usually using long, sweeping strokes. Each of us takes turns massaging on separate evenings — Jenny receives one week, and I receive the next week. This way you can relax and just receive. So far it puts the recipient to sleep 100% of the time. It’s almost as good as a vacation: having a hot bath and then having your body stroked by warm oil by the hands of your lover, putting you to sleep. Yes, the sheets are a bit messy, but it’s a marvelous sensual experience.

I recommend it.

A forced hiatus

My computer blew up while I was overseas. It's actually pretty amazing that this happens as infrequently as it does. Fortunately most things are backed up automatically on an IT-managed server. Everything that is not TOO incriminating, of course!

My new machine just arrived via DHL so I should be back in business. I have a few posts that should go up in the next couple of days while my backups download to my new machine.