We hear it all the time: Women are more emotional and more “complex” than men. Men will often fall back on this excuse when they claim not to understand their female partners, and women too will concede men are incapable of truly understanding them.
Just because this rationale for miscommunication between the sexes is everywhere, it isn’t necessarily true. But according to Laura Schlessinger (who is known on the talk radio airwaves as “Dr. Laura” because she holds a doctorate in physiology, not psychology or a related field) it is.
When I found out Dr. Laura was coming to UCLA for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last weekend, I was very excited. I rushed to get tickets and to find friends to come hear her speak. I got extra tickets to give away to others because I assumed many would want to go.
I even got in touch with Dr. Laura’s publicist to try and set up an interview on which to base last week’s column.
If you’ve read this far and think I agree with Dr. Laura, let me calm your fears. I’m one of the many who listens and goes to see her because I disagree so much with her backward, black-and-white, 1950s picture of how women and men should relate to each other.
So when Dr. Laura agreed to do an e-mail interview with me, I dashed off some questions expecting, and receiving, generic answers about college relationships, divorce and hook-ups.
Dr. Laura responded that women believe they can be attentive mothers and have careers “because (they) have been threatened by the feminist movement/liberal establishment to believe that they are nothing if they are wives and mothers and sacrifice for those ideals.”
She also thinks oral sex as an alternative to sexual intercourse is, predictably, “sad and pathetic.”
In her talk Sunday, the following was Dr. Laura’s response to misunderstandings between men and women.
“Men are simple and women are complex,” she reasoned, and it seemed simple enough.
While I fundamentally disagree with Dr. Laura on almost everything she stands for, many of her statements promoting civility, kindness, and treating others how you would like to be treated, are hard to argue against. And those are the ones I agree with.
But it’s not as simple as saying women are complex and men are not – people are complex, and Dr. Laura embodies this, as she holds a simplistic, right and wrong mind-set that makes her appear, superficially, to have all the answers.
But the hypocrisy is the most interesting part of Dr. Laura’s message, evident in the way her callers’ lives are exposed and harshly critiqued like an open book, while any questions about her personal life are dismissed as inappropriate.
During her talk Sunday, an audience member asked for her opinion on the war in Iraq, and she pointed to her book, “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands,” as the discussion’s limit, refusing to comment.
In response to a question I asked about the infamous posting of nude photos of Dr. Laura on the Internet, Dr. Laura wrote to me, “I regret helping you. Never contact me again.” I immediately understood how her callers must feel when she denigrates them for committing a number of her “no-nos”: having sex before marriage, being gay, getting divorced, etc.
While Dr. Laura’s “specialty” is love and relationships, refusing to say anything on any of her personal views or history displays a double standard, used to make herself look good and others shameful.
In an attempt to solve this emotional conundrum, I sought a second opinion from the opposite of a self-promoting pop cultural icon – a UCLA anthropology professor.
According to Professor Daniel Fessler, who taught “Evolution of Human Sexual Behavior” winter quarter, scientific evidence supports the fact that women and men do act differently, but this doesn’t mean one sex is more complex than the other.
Fessler points to anger as an example of an emotion that elicits different responses from the sexes, with men being “more likely to confront the target of their anger than are women, and women are more likely to recruit social support against the target of their anger.”
These varied emotional responses in no way point to men as “simple” and women as “complex.” Such a baseless definition makes me think of modern-day man as someone out of the Stone Age. And yet, being progressive is not something Dr. Laura professes to esteem, so perhaps this image really does illustrate the backward world in which she lives.
My advice to modern daters out there: Approach the emotions of your partner (of any sex) as complex, valid and worthy of comprehension, if you only take a moment to try and listen.
Bonos is the 2003-2004 copy chief. E-mail her at lbonos@media.ucla.edu if reading this column elicits an emotional response.