Envy of Female Privilege

     The many conversations I had with the love-shy revealed a deep-
seated attitude of envy towards female privilege. In most cases this
envious attitude focused primarily upon the right of the female to be
passive in male/female relationships, and to exercise control over her life
destiny simply by saying "no" to each male (and amorous advance) until
the "right" male (and amorous advance) came along. In essence, merely
by playing the odds, women could usually end up getting what they
wanted simply by exercising negative control vis-a-vis somebody else's (a
male's) assertive risk-taking. In not being able to work this way them-
selves, the love-shy men perceived themselves as second class citizens--
as "surplus refuge" whose feelings and needs society simply didn't care
much about.
      And there were many other areas of life where envy of the female
sex was evident. One young man told me about how his parents would
not allow him to use a multi-colored umbrella he had purchased--because
"only females have a right to use pretty umbrellas.' A few people men-
tioned hitchhiking, and the fact that a girl is usually picked up within
two or three minutes, whereas a male will frequently have to wait for
three or four hours. Another love-shy man who liked to sing recounted
this story:

     "When I got to high school one of the first things I did was to sign
     up for the chorus class. For some reason I was never shy about
     getting up to sing so long as I could do it before a large audience as
     part of a structured program, and not before some small group of
     people like a bunch of guys at somebody's house. Anyway, when
     I joined the class I was shocked out of my bloody wits. The teacher
     told me that I was a base, and he assigned me to sing base. I soon
     found out what base actually was--that it was the shit ugliest part
     of music--the garbage dump of the chorus. Well, I just didn't coop-
     erate. I insisted on singing the beautiful notes that the composer
     wrote. They allowed the girls to sing the notes that the composer
     wrote. They call that soprano. But they give the boys the shit to sing
     just because they have the misfortune to be male.

     Anyway, all the guys around me kept bullying me and punching
     me as I would be standing there singing the soprano part--which
     is the only decent and pretty part of a song. And they would be
     punching me, trying to get me to sing the shitty base along with
     them. Anyway, before the first concert the teacher threw me out of
     the class for refusal to cooperate. I mean this is just another illus-
     tration of how girls are treated as prima donnas while boys are always
     left to do the ugly dirt. It was just as well anyway because I didn't
     even like the kind of material we were required to sing. I like to sing
     the love ballads of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and
     the like. All they had us sing was religious and patriotic garbage. I
     hate religious and patriotic music.!" (21-year old love-shy man.)

      In essence, love-shy males often insist upon singing their own song
and marching to their own drummer--quite in spite of their introverted
tendencies. The above young man had been told that the base part
contributes a countermelody that typically enables an audience to enjoy
a choral piece better than they otherwise might. However, his feelings
had been dominated by two major questions:

     1. Why should men be discriminated against? Why should all men
         have to sing the ugly part simply because they are male, while
         all girls get to sing the pretty part just because they happen to
         be female? That is arbitrary and capricious discrimination against
         the male sex.
     2. Singing base or even listening to it being sung removes all the
          joy from the activity of singing. The fact that the audience may
          enjoy it is quite beside the point. I have to enjoy what I am
          doing or else I won't have anything to do with it.

      Another major area wherein females were often bitterly envied had
to do with the draft and the military. This subject will be dealt with in
a later chapter. At this juncture suffice it to say that the love-shy feel
that they are human beings too, just as females are; and that males have
emotions and feelings just as females do. Hence, the love-shy deeply
resent the United States military treating males, but not females, as
"dispensable pawns", and forcing them to suffer severe physical pain
and injury, and exposure to enormously anxiety-provoking situations.
They also resent the way military organizations endeavor to standardize
male personalities, and the way they put males, but not females, through
a host of degradation ceremonies--such as hair cutting.
     Again, there is the quite frequently recurring theme in the love-
shys' conversations that males, unlike females, are "dispensable" and "sur-
plus"--that they count for much less as human beings than females do; and that
their feelings and emotional needs count for nothing. I think these feelings are
largely due to the deep-seated introspective tendencies that are endemic
in highly inhibited, love-shy people. And they are undoubtedly also due
to the heavy amount of bullying and mistreatment the love-shys had
been forced to endure throughout all their years of growing up.

     "I've been around, and I've never seen any girl bullied the way boys
     are bullied. Why shouldn't I be envious when all through life l've
     seen males required to take all kinds of abuse just because they are
     males. Girls are treated in a far more humane way by everybody.
     Parents don't beat girls the way they do boys. At school it's always
     the boys who are getting it from the teachers. And the worst cruelty
     of all is what you have to take from people who should be your
     buddies." (19-year old love-shy man.)

     Some of my colleagues have suggested that love-shy males may
have some latent transsexual tendencies. But none of the love-shys with
whom I talked had any desire at all to have their genitalia removed so
that they could become women. Of course, many of the love-shys did
wish that they had been born female in the first place. But they did not
wish to become women during their current lifetime. Indeed, if by some
stroke of magic the love-shys were suddenly transformed into women,
they would all remain highly attracted sexually (and in every other way)
to the female sex. This is why I suggested in chapter five that severely
love-shy men are "male lesbians" at heart. They are "closet heterosexual"
males who, even if they were women, would still want the love and the
sexual attention of another woman, and NOT of a man.