Monday, May 19, 2008

Misery Mapping

"Why do you girls keep talking about us men?" Asked my husband once. There was exasperation there, and let's face it, some degree of condescension, maybe a dash of arrogance.

"I mean, you are perfectly emancipated, perfectly self aware, perfectly liberated, thinking, randomly talented, myriadly gifted, world-view oriented, financially independent career women. So why do even women like you talk, if not only, then largely, about us men?"

I stayed with that question a long time, and it actually brought about behavioral changes. Best friend and I actually did stop discussing men and discovered we had many other things to talk about. That was good.

BUT. The fact remains, we do talk about men. And apart from it being weak and demeaning and needy and dependent and a pile of horseshit, it's also great therapy. I tried to figure for months why perfectly intelligent, perfectly world-aware blah blah women keep swapping notes on men and their behaviour and their actions. And it's not because we are deeply caring in our sisterhood bond and it's neither because we are heartless bitches dying for a slice of gossip.

The truth lies somewhere midway. I call it Misery Mapping.

It may be an ego trip, it may be an empathy moment. It may be an epiphany or it may be a superiority complex. Where our minds and our psyche fits into the mapping varies from woman to woman and conversation to conversation. Sometimes, your man is so crap you make me feel good about mine. Sometimes your man is so similar to mine that I realise my situation is not so unique. Sometimes your man is so much better than mine that you help me make up my mind.

Misery Mapping is like a home grown remedy to a common cold. Its not always accurate, its not entirely scientific, it often takes much longer than medication would, but guess what. Its often effective.

Yes, I agree. Women should not spend all their time talking about men. But Misery Mapping achieves a few things men don't benefit from, because they don't do it.

Because its cathartic, becuase it behaves like the safety valve of a pressure cooker, it prevents us from drinking and beating you up. It prevents us from chasing hot things in tight clothes the moment our belly expands and our jaw line sags. It prevents us from leaving your committment and loyalty of several decades to go chasing after a younger, flimsier dream. It prevents us from giving in to the infantile need of turning every emotional moment into a joke. And it prevents us from bursting out one fine day into cholestrol and heart attack and high blood pressure and hyper tension and dying in your arms leaving you to pick up your pieces.

Simply because we rely on this supremely non-intellectual, home grown remedy called Misery Mapping.

We talk about you. We discuss you. We dissect you. We analyse you. So that you don't kill us. Our insides, our values, our emotional integrity, our fidelity.

Of course we also do all those other things that are considered typically 'male'. We cheat, we lie, we sleep around, we abandon, we are cruel, we leave, we forget, we ditch, we inflict hurt, we humiliate, we forget. This is not a piece about making women out to be angels and men to be devils.

It's simply a relatively straightforward point. Misery Mapping - whoever should chose to do it -gives the participants a context and a rooting into their own lives. And allows conversation to achieve what would otherwise only get achieved with a lot of dangerous action.

Its Lipstick Therapy. Part II

2 comments:

F.L/ D.L. said...

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Anonymous said...

so bloody true
riya we need to catch up on some misery mapping soon!!!!