What Does a Man Really Want?

I happened to be driving in Delaware the other day when I passed a Harley Davidson dealership with a sign out front that read as follows: “Your wife called, and she says it’s okay.” This is quite possibly the most effective advertisement I have encountered since Miller Lite’s “Tastes great! Less Filling!” debate (the genius of which hinged on reformulating an age old question into its new, consumer-friendly form: “Is the glass half full or is it half full?”, which mutant question covers the range of sanctioned options living and voting in a 21st century western liberal democracy), and it works so well because it overtly winks at the fantasy on sale in the showroom. Which is the fantasy of male autonomy. The Harley’s signature exhaust blap is the trumpet fanfare announcing a man alone on his motorcycle, with the slight but noticeable edge of the outlaw, i.e. one who makes and lives by his own set of rules. So, in regards to the winking signage, what exactly does it mean to ask and receive permission to pretend to be that (autonomous) man?

Every married straight male knows that it is impossible to win an argument with your wife; if he doesn’t know it, he won’t be married long. As Camille Paglia puts it, “It is woman’s destiny to rule men.” (Us blokes do play our part, though, for, as Paglia also explains, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”) So it turns out that for men it is better, indeed, to ask permission than forgiveness. In order to spare us this indignity, women have always known that the best way to get a man to do or agree to something is to make him think it’s his idea. Along these lines, perhaps the best way to get a man to feel autonomous is for a woman to let him pretend that he is.

The danger in this thinking, however, is in painting women as the source of male frustration, when, in fact, women have been, and always will be, the fountainhead of (straight) male desire. We must be careful to portray the woman who preemptively calls into the Harley dealership in order to grant her permission as a woman playing along with the fantasy, as opposed to understanding her as the demonic force undermining male autonomy, even, and especially, if that autonomy is an illusion perpetuated by female fiat. Because the former maintains the fragile male ego even as it sustains women in their place as masculinity’s legitimate holy grail, while the latter plants seeds of misogyny.

Understanding all of this requires getting at the root of male desire in order to see exactly why the illusion of male autonomy is enough, why men will (almost) always be satisfied by a game of make believe, by a Harley Davidson. Doing so requires asking two simple questions: 1) Is marriage a better deal for men or for women?; and 2) Which exactly is the weaker sex? Correctly answering both of these will provide the answer to a third elusive question, one that eluded Freud, who famously never asked “What does a man really want?”

Taking our questions one at a time, we begin with #1) Is marriage a better deal for men or for women? The data, quoted from Foxnews.com of all places (http://magazine.foxnews.com/food-wellness/love-better-mens-or-womens-health), is nearly unanimous, category by category:

• Longevity: “The link between marriage and longevity is much stronger among husbands than wives… Marriage is especially good at warding off fatal accidents, violence, and other semi-avoidable calamities, which are more common in younger people… But regardless of age, men's life spans appear to benefit more from marriage than women's.” (emphasis added)

• Heart disease: “While married men are three times less likely to die from heart disease than men who have never tied the knot, marriage only halves the risk of cardiac death for women.”

• Healthy choices: “Simply put, women may be a better influence on men than vice versa. Wives tend to be the more emotionally supportive partner and are more likely to encourage their husbands to refrain from drinking or smoking.”

• Stress: “Contrary to popular belief, men tend to get stressed out more easily than women. Lab experiments have shown that when given a stressful task, men exhibit greater spikes in the stress hormone cortisol than women. Fortunately for men, being in a romantic relationship — not just marriage — may curb their stress response. A 2010 experiment found that paired-off men had smaller spikes in cortisol levels than single men after taking part in a competitive game, whereas single and spoken-for ladies had comparable cortisol increases.”

• Sex: “where sex is concerned, marriage appears to be a better deal for men. In a landmark national sex survey conducted in the 1990s, 49 percent of married men said they were ‘extremely’ emotionally satisfied with their sex life, compared to just 33 percent of men who were unmarried or not living with a partner. By contrast, only 42 percent of married women were extremely satisfied with their sex lives, compared to 31 percent of women who didn't live with a partner.

So, men get more longevity, better health, less stress, and better sex out of marriage than women. One can either wonder at the odds of a marriage proposal being accepted, 1 in 1.001 (it goes without saying that 95% of proposals come from men), or one can consider the possibility that men get more out of marriage because they need more. Which brings us to question #2) Which exactly is the weaker sex? If we take our Darwin seriously, the data regarding this question are just as definitive. Because women, it comes as no surprise, outlive men, i.e. they are basically fitter. But what just might surprise are the facts as reported by Robert Krulwich at NPR.org :

“Women, it turns out, don't just win in the end. It seems that women consistently outlive men in every age cohort. Fetal boys die more often than fetal girls. Baby boys die more often than baby girls. Little boys die more often than little girls. Teenage boys, 20-something boys, 30-something boys — in every age group, the rate of death for guys is higher than for women. The difference widens when we hit our 50s and 60s. Men gallop ahead, then the dying differential narrows, but death keeps favoring males right to the end.” (http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/06/17/192670490/why-men-die-younger-than-women-the-guys-are-fragile-thesis)

Of all the possible reasons Krulwich explores for this longevity gap, only one seems to stand up to the simple fact that the gap exists in every age cohort, even in utero, and it is also the one which dovetails nicely with the idea that men bring more needs into marriage. The culprit? Simply put: male weakness. Krulwich’s 1934 quotation from Mayo Clinic doc E.V. Allen is well worth repeating:

"For each explanation of the lack of inherent vitality of the male there are objections, but these do not influence the fact; the male is, by comparison with the female, a weakling at all periods of life from conception to death. Venery, alcoholism, exposure, overwork, and various other factors may influence the susceptibility to disease and the greater mortality of the adult male, but they are only straws placed on the greater burden of his sex-linked weakness. There seems to be no doubt that, speaking comparatively, the price of maleness is weakness."

I would argue that men intuitively know this about themselves, and that a man’s greatest wish is to transcend this weakness. To answer the question Freud never asked by way of borrowing a phrase from Spok, what a man really wants is to live long and prosper. Given what we know about the effects of marriage on male longevity and prosperity (in the holistic sense of the word), when we say that what a man really wants is to live long and prosper what we are really saying is that what a (straight) man really wants is a good wife.

It would, however, be naïve to close without recognizing that this arrangement is not without its complications. Or else the odds of a married couple reaching their 25th anniversary would be higher than 1 in 6. (These odds, as well as the aforementioned odds of a marriage proposal being accepted are courtesy of Stewart O’Nan’s captivating novel cum meditation on marriage, The Odds: A Love Story.) I will leave it to the stronger sex to explain why men are so bloody difficult to cohabitate with, but will take a brief stab at explaining the undercurrent of resentment that men feel towards women, even and especially as women function as our salvation, a resentment perhaps best captured by the old saying “Women, can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.” By way of explanation: Women, can’t live with ‘em (because, per Paglia, they rule over us), can’t live without ‘em (because without them we will quite literally die). The solution to this paradoxical masculine impasse: the fantasy of male autonomy.

So ladies, do let your man have his Harley Davidson, and do call up the dealership to let them know it’s okay. Let your husband spend quality time in what Mr. Rogers liked to call the Neighborhood of Make Believe, and he will, again quite literally, have more years to spend right here on earth with you, his good wife, which is all he really wants.