The Blue Monkey Review

West’s simile comes alive for me at the Mex “super” market in the person of one of the two checkers. If you saw her in Santa Monica, even in her Mex red apron, you would assume she was an actress. She could easily fill in for a bad blonde in a Mexican telenovela. Yet she shows little animation in her work, and falls short even in the conventional friendliness that I’ve received from checkers at other stores here. Even her colleague at the Mex meat and cheese counter gets a kick out of my fractured attempts at communication (and I’m just going to mention the counter-girls at the bakery who treat my visits like a game). But the check-out movie star offers little more than “izvolite” when she hands over my change.

I had a chance to explore this with several of my students. After my the last lecture of my course, a few of them joined me for drinks at the Atrium. Three of the young women considered my question about the difference in optimism between young men and women.

“I am not a pessimist,” said Tatiana Metikoš.

Ana Ponoš agrees in rejecting pessimism. “I am a realist,” she said.

Both probably have reason to take a pragmatic view of their lives. Both were born in Croatia, but their families had to leave when the war started because they were Serbian—that is, they went to the Orthodox church. Both had to move more than once, living in Serbia and finally in Montenegro.

But I wasn’t willing to abandon this little exploration of gender differences. I asked the women students if they think that boys and girls are treated differently in Montenegrin families. They were unanimous.

“The son is a god,” said Ana. He receives better treatment, bigger portions at meals, nicer things. There is a word in the language for the male child, even one with sisters. “They refer to him as the only child.”

The women told me about families that keep having children until they finally have a son. They told me about another of my students, a young woman who was the third girl born in her family. “Her aunts were crying when she was born” because they had expected a boy baby.

Perhaps the most telling comment came from Neda Kosorić who says, “I would like to have a son because I think he will have better opportunities.... He will suffer less.”

Of course, my male students didn’t let these comments go unchallenged. That was “200 years ago,” Alexander says when the girls talk about the preferences for boys. I asked Ranko Bulajić if his sister receives as much as he does. Yes, he said, “maybe more.” And, it should be added, the young women are spoke generally, not about their own experiences. I ask Tatiana Metikoš if she has a brother. “No. Fortunately.” Still, the male counterattack was blunted a bit when Alexander asked me if a preference for the male child isn’t true even in American society. I’d have to say that for as much of my white, middle-class milieu that I have a sense of, the answer would be no.

In a discussion of an issue about which they have more personal experience, the women also had telling insights. I see very few boy and girl couples, I told them. Lots of girls couples, holding onto one another, and lots of guys hanging out in pairs or in groups. The women had a poor opinion of Montenegrin men as boyfriends.

“I met some boys,” Ana tells me, “and they think that if they go out with girls they will be considered weak.” The ordinary guy on the korzo doesn’t dance because he doesn’t want anyone to think he is gay.

I had to take a moment to review this information. Young men here probably have as much homophobia as the average barfly in Greensburg (maybe more). But they assert their masculinity by spending most of their time with other guys, and in Montenegro, remember, that means more physical closeness than even grade school boys would accept in the U.S. In the U.S., sadly, if a boy beyond the 5th or 6th grade puts his arm around the shoulders of his best friend, he’ll be cruelly ridiculed. Here not only do adult males hang out with one another, they often hang on to one another. And, recall, friends kiss when they meet.

Yet this male bonding apparently exists to keep the females at bay. Even when they go out with girls, “They don’t act like gentlemen.” They enter the cafe first but they assert their pride by insisting on buying drinks.

The women explained this by talking about the traditional needs of Montenegrin society. Men were always at war, so they always needed more men to take up arms against the Turk. In the 1930s Rebecca West characterized the attitude as, “A man should have everything, because he is a hero, because he is half divine in his courage....” Yet even though warrior virtues are highly attractive in war, they don’t leave much room for a work ethic. They certainly don’t include housework. The following Saturday I went to a pic nic with people from the small Protestant church I’ve attended. One of the young women told me that women simply expect to take care of men in the home. “I can’t imagine a man ironing,” she said. “That just seems like a woman’s job.”

Well, let’s keep things in perspective. Ironing probably remains a novel, one-time experience for most of American manhood, or else it is like bungee-jumping, something that they have nothing against but will probably never try. And, it’s certain that the young men I’ve met and talked to will, or already do, take more of a hand than their fathers did in caring for children and keeping the house in order. But I still think the generalization holds true, that in this culture household labor falls primarily on women.

And for many men, even work outside the home might seem dreary and unappealing. My landlord, who works very hard himself both at the steel and in taking care of his apartment, told me that only 20,000 of 600,000 Montenegrins have productive work. I suspected he was exaggerating, especially when he added, “We have many police.” But it’s clear that unemployment, underemployment, and retirement, account for huge portion of adult males.

If boys and young men really are as spoiled as these young women assert (and all of my second-hand information tends to confirm their view rather than that of my male students), then marriage can’t be a very attractive prospect, even for women who want careers. Most women here who have work outside the home also have the second shift, back home, taking care of all the needs of the children and home. Also, as I’ve written before, many young couples need to move in with the husband’s family to make ends meet. So, you move into the home where your new husband was treated “like a god.” If that is the prospect for young women, no wonder that “realism” makes the future look a little unappealing.

I had an unexpected additional piece of evidence fall into my hands. The essay question on my final exam asked students to choose one of the documents from the second half of the course to examine. I didn’t think much about this, but if I had I might have expected the excerpt from Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery to appeal to students because of its accessibility. Or, perhaps, Martin Luther King Letter from Birmingham Jail because of its idealism. Both of those documents proved quite popular. But the most frequently chosen document was the first chapter of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, “The Problem that Has no Name.” Again and again the female students in classes wrote about how much they saw the problems of 1950s housewives persisting in their world, and of how much they identified with the issues in the text.

If the attitudes of my students indicate larger trends in the culture, then a feminist consciousness will make its appearance here sooner rather than later. And I suspect that my female students are probably better prepared for the economic future of this country than most men are. After all, the women expect to work, and to work long hours. In a world of capitalist expansion, even highly attenuated warrior virtues will seem more and more anachronistic if not perverse.