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Authors: George Saunders
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cars? Is she not, by
tolerating this non-car-fixing, short-penised friend of mine,
indicating that, on some level, she wouldn't mind being married to a
woman, and is therefore, perhaps, a tiny bit functionally gay?
And
what about "T"? Doesn't the fact that "T" can
stand there in the shower room at our gym, confidently towelling off
his tiny unit, while "O" is at home changing their
sparkplugs with alacrity, indicate that it is only a short stroll
down a slippery slope before he is completely happy being the "girl"
in their relationship, from which it is only a small fey hop down the
same slope before "T" is happily married to another man,
perhaps my car mechanic, a handsome Portuguese fellow I shall refer
to as "J"?
Because
my feeling is, when God made man and woman He had something very
specific in mind. It goes without saying that He did not want men
marrying men, or women marrying women, but also what He did not want,
in my view, was feminine men marrying masculine women.
Which
is why I developed my Manly Scale of Absolute Gender.
Using
my Scale, which assigns numerical values according to a set of
masculine and feminine characteristics, it is now easy to determine
how Manly a man is and how Fem a woman is, and therefore how close to
a Samish-Sex Marriage a given marriage is.
Here's
how it works. Say we determine that a man is an 8 on the Manly Scale,
with 10 being the most Manly of all and 0 basically a Neuter. And say
we determine that his fiancée is a -6 on the Manly Scale, with
a -10 being the most Fem of all. Calculating the difference between
the man's rating and the woman's rating—the Gender
Differential—we see that this proposed union is not, in fact, a
Samish-Sex Marriage, which I have defined as "any marriage for
which the Gender Differential is less than or equal to 10 points."
Friends
whom I have identified as being in Samish-Sex Marriages often ask me,
Ken, given that we have scored poorly, what exactly would you have us
do about it?
Well,
one solution I have proposed is divorce—divorce followed by
remarriage to a more suitable partner. "K," for example,
could marry a voluptuous high-voiced N.F.L. cheerleader, who would
more than offset his tight feminine derrière, while his
ex-wife, S, might choose to become involved with a lumberjack with
very large arms, thereby neutralizing her thick calves and faint
mustache.
Another,
and of course preferable, solution would be to repair the
existing marriage, converting it from a Samish-Sex Marriage to a
healthy Normal Marriage, by having the feminine man become more
masculine and/or the masculine woman become more feminine.
Often,
when I propose this, my friends become surly. How dare I, they ask.
What business is it of mine? Do I think it is easy to change in such
a profound way?
To
which I say, It is not easy to change, but it is possible.
I
know, because I have done it.
When
young, I had a tendency to speak too quickly, while gesturing too
much with my hands. Also, my opinions were unfirm. I was constantly
contradicting myself in that fast voice, while gesturing like a girl.
Also, I cried often. Things seemed so sad. I had long blond hair, and
liked it. My hair was layered and fell down across my shoulders, and,
I admit it, I would sometimes slow down when passing a shopwindow to
look at it, to look at my hair! I had a strange constant feeling of
being happy to be alive. This feeling of infinite possibility
sometimes caused me to laugh when alone, or even, on occasion, to
literally skip down the street, before pausing in front of a
shopwindow and giving my beautiful hair a cavalier toss.
To
tell the truth, I do not think I would have scored very high on my
Manly Scale, if the Scale had been invented at that time, by me. I
suspect I would have scored so Fem on the test that I would have been
prohibited from marrying my wife, "P," the love of my life.
And
I think, somewhere in my heart, I knew that.
I
knew I was too Fem.
So
what did I do about
tolerating this non-car-fixing, short-penised friend of mine,
indicating that, on some level, she wouldn't mind being married to a
woman, and is therefore, perhaps, a tiny bit functionally gay?
And
what about "T"? Doesn't the fact that "T" can
stand there in the shower room at our gym, confidently towelling off
his tiny unit, while "O" is at home changing their
sparkplugs with alacrity, indicate that it is only a short stroll
down a slippery slope before he is completely happy being the "girl"
in their relationship, from which it is only a small fey hop down the
same slope before "T" is happily married to another man,
perhaps my car mechanic, a handsome Portuguese fellow I shall refer
to as "J"?
Because
my feeling is, when God made man and woman He had something very
specific in mind. It goes without saying that He did not want men
marrying men, or women marrying women, but also what He did not want,
in my view, was feminine men marrying masculine women.
Which
is why I developed my Manly Scale of Absolute Gender.
Using
my Scale, which assigns numerical values according to a set of
masculine and feminine characteristics, it is now easy to determine
how Manly a man is and how Fem a woman is, and therefore how close to
a Samish-Sex Marriage a given marriage is.
Here's
how it works. Say we determine that a man is an 8 on the Manly Scale,
with 10 being the most Manly of all and 0 basically a Neuter. And say
we determine that his fiancée is a -6 on the Manly Scale, with
a -10 being the most Fem of all. Calculating the difference between
the man's rating and the woman's rating—the Gender
Differential—we see that this proposed union is not, in fact, a
Samish-Sex Marriage, which I have defined as "any marriage for
which the Gender Differential is less than or equal to 10 points."
Friends
whom I have identified as being in Samish-Sex Marriages often ask me,
Ken, given that we have scored poorly, what exactly would you have us
do about it?
Well,
one solution I have proposed is divorce—divorce followed by
remarriage to a more suitable partner. "K," for example,
could marry a voluptuous high-voiced N.F.L. cheerleader, who would
more than offset his tight feminine derrière, while his
ex-wife, S, might choose to become involved with a lumberjack with
very large arms, thereby neutralizing her thick calves and faint
mustache.
Another,
and of course preferable, solution would be to repair the
existing marriage, converting it from a Samish-Sex Marriage to a
healthy Normal Marriage, by having the feminine man become more
masculine and/or the masculine woman become more feminine.
Often,
when I propose this, my friends become surly. How dare I, they ask.
What business is it of mine? Do I think it is easy to change in such
a profound way?
To
which I say, It is not easy to change, but it is possible.
I
know, because I have done it.
When
young, I had a tendency to speak too quickly, while gesturing too
much with my hands. Also, my opinions were unfirm. I was constantly
contradicting myself in that fast voice, while gesturing like a girl.
Also, I cried often. Things seemed so sad. I had long blond hair, and
liked it. My hair was layered and fell down across my shoulders, and,
I admit it, I would sometimes slow down when passing a shopwindow to
look at it, to look at my hair! I had a strange constant feeling of
being happy to be alive. This feeling of infinite possibility
sometimes caused me to laugh when alone, or even, on occasion, to
literally skip down the street, before pausing in front of a
shopwindow and giving my beautiful hair a cavalier toss.
To
tell the truth, I do not think I would have scored very high on my
Manly Scale, if the Scale had been invented at that time, by me. I
suspect I would have scored so Fem on the test that I would have been
prohibited from marrying my wife, "P," the love of my life.
And
I think, somewhere in my heart, I knew that.
I
knew I was too Fem.
So
what did I do about
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