Even though I am retiring from dating at the top of my game, I still
find articles on the topic fascinating. So does Richard over at Just a
Gwai Lo, who found a New York Times article titled The Girls from Impanema are Not Impressed.
In the article, three young women who’ve come to New York from Brazil
talk about their dating experiences with American men, and precious
little of them are good. The key excerpt:
Forget getting a job, learning English, finding an apartment. The
true challenge for the young, single and foreign-born who arrive in New
York is cracking the code of the dating scene.
For Brazilian
women, who come from a place where public displays of affection are a
way of life and men rarely lack for amorous gusto, the task is
particularly confounding. Ask Brazilian women what they think about
American men, and most respond precisely the same way: with gales of
laughter. Then they tell disturbingly similar tales of men who fear
making advances lest they be accused of date rape and who coldly
calculate how many days they need to wait between meeting a woman and
asking her to dinner.
There’s a bit of a culture clash here. Brazil — like my
native country, the Philippines — is a
Latin culture. I’ve never been to Brazil, but I’ve gone clubbing in the
Philippines, and if you’re a guy, you have to dance and you have to
approach the ladies directly. On the other hand, the U.S. and Canada
are WASP cultures, and as the
joke goes…
Q: What do WASPs say after sex?
A: “Thank you much. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
An aside: my former housemate Paul is currently in Prague and observes in a recent entry on his site:
I first noticed on the tram, girls sitting on guys laps,
and I thought maybe they didnt want to take up two seats. But then I
saw it on otherwise completely empty park benches. And people nuzzling
each other while waiting for the subway, kissing in the street; boys
with arms around girls shoulders. None of the
we-musnt-show-affection-in-public of north america. So cool.
Another source of the problem: universities and colleges. The university dating scene
circa the early 1990s — remember, this wasn’t much long after the late
1980s explosion of “political correctness” and Marc Lepine’s evil rampage in Montreal — was a social minefield. At Crazy Go Nuts University,
“Every man is a potential rapist” was a popular phrase used at womyn’s
(note the spellyng) empowerment gatherings and most
socio-politico-complexo-migraino discourse had been pretty much reduced
to people saying “We’re white, we’re straight, we’re sorry!” Still, we were dating paradise next to Antioch College, who passed a student code of conduct that required explicit consent for each sexual act. It’s every policy studies professor’s wet dream — they effectively turned sex into a series of negotiation meetings!
Along with the good things that university feminism teaches is at least one very bad thing:
that “gender is solely a social construct”, or more simply: a man is just a woman
with a penis and an attitude problem.
I am donning my flame-proof accordion as I write this. Let me be
clear that I am not advocating date rape or any form on non-consensual
sex nor am I advocating viewing women solely as sex objects. I am also
not advocating everything in the Brazilian Man Repertoire, asthe women in the interview did say that:
American men have other good qualities – their faithfulness, for
example. Brazilian women often say that Brazilian men are safados –
shameless – and love to chase the fairer sex. Americans actually mean
what they say (at least more often than Brazilians do). And they are
sweet.
What I am advocating is understanding that men and women are different,
and as my gay and lesbians friends would say, “we’re born that way.”
Anyone who doesn’t believe me should watch toddlers, who haven’t had
enough time for much social conditioning, play.
Simply put: more Astrid Gilberto! Less Cathy!
In the meantime, until such a social revolution comes, guys may want to
start taking up the accordion and carrying it when they go out. It
requires confidence (and upper body strength) to tote one about,
teaches you the fine art of The Swagger, gives you an excuse to be more
forward and lends you the power of the Electra Complex (“Oh! My dad/grandfather used to play the accordion!”)
Want to read that article? It’s available, but hidden behind the New York Times registration wall. Failing that, the blog
agádoisesseóquatro has it transcribed in this entry.
