Gender Conundrum: Who Wears the Dress?

if i weren’t surrounded by westerners i would be blissfully unaware of the fact that Chinese women castrate their male lovers.
It started a few hours after my supervisor picked me up from the airport. One phone call at the airport. Another once we were on the four-hour drive from Beijing to Huludao. Then another about an hour later. Another to say it’s snowing in Huludao and therefore she was concerned. Another to see how his drive was. Another to tell her we were stuck on the highway for unknown reasons. Another half an hour later or so to tell her he’d see her tomorrow, for then at midnight we were looking at an overnight stay in the car, surrounded by overloaded semi trucks on a pitch black highway. After about three or four calls I had still been able to hold back my contempt for what seemed ridiculous clinging but my supervisor sensed I was not that type, and therefore he proceeded to explain that Chinese women are not the same as Western women. Um hmmm, I’m thinking, and I’ve heard that about Italian women and French women and eastern European women. Something men say to explain why they dominate or submit to their female companions.
Three or four more phone calls more ensued over the course of the next day’s 90-minute drive into Huludao.
Another dose of masculine spinelessness and female cunning cold cocked me 15 minutes after my entrance into my new abode.
“Seriously, if my girlfriend calls, you’re not here,” says my Australian roommate, a 23-year-old male with what appeared to me like accidental blonde highlights. “She’ll kick my ass.”
“Hey, I can’t help it if you can’t handle your woman,” I retorted. (Though he seemed unphased, I did apologize the next day.)
Now, mind you, I’m going through a sort of cognitive dissonance over this gender relation scenario. I flip back through memory folders going back to my upbringing. I think about how appalled I was when my mother suggested i just keep writing as a hobby and get married so he can pay the bills in case I fail. I contemplate the countless Italians and Italian Americans I’ve dated. Those who hold their hands around their southern promises and talk about their “sauseeges” or the “ole’ bragiole” when they feel their masculinity has been threatened. I think about a man I knew (and drove nuts because I would never fathom sleeping with, let alone befriending), a quintessential Italian machismo with the gold chains and Ferrari, the accent and the womanizing right before his wife’s eyes. His son was my lover and had unfortunately learned a few too many of his father’s bad habits, eventually becoming more and more possessive to the point of trying to dictate my social life from 200 miles away, and eventually becoming so jealous of any male around me that he proved it by imitating his learnings in front of me. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree and I wasn’t going to be a second-generation scandalized wife.
I don’t know why it’s gender that first arrests my interest during my first week in China. Perhaps its the fact that the guys who actually interest me are those who challenge me outright and at once. One was a Jewish American, one Italian American and the other Serbian. I’ll let them have me, so long as they give me a very long leash. Otherwise I find American men to be confused. The Feminist Movement of the 1970s really did them in. Now they can’t figure out if they or their wife wears the apron and their words and actions are constantly in conflict. Overall I find too many of them want another mother, or at least need a woman to tell them where the keys are, how to stay hygienic and what to do with their careers and lives. How dull.
The term pussy-whipped has never appealed to me, for its simple banality and vulgarity, but it has recurrently appeared in my head– and likely on my face– when I watch my roommate turn from young man to cream puff simply by the sound of her calling. These Chinese women have men trained like god damned Pavlovian dogs.
“What the hell, man? I mean, does she have platinum down there?” I ask the Aussie. He’s boring on with how much trouble he’s going to be in; he should be in his bedroom with the door closed, talking to her on the phone or on Skype so that she can see he’s alone. “Just tell her I’m a lesbian.”
“They don’t believe in that here. You don’t understand. I’m dead if she finds out I’m here with you. She knows a lot of people who work in makeup,” he says. We’re shopping for some household goods and stumble across the cosmetics department around 130 PM. Now keep in mind that in China anyone assumes that any male and female together anywhere for any reason are romantic partners. Despite the fact that we’re Westerners, they still hold that opinion; it’s their culture. To me it matters nothing. I figure if a person wants to assume something like that based on preconceived notions, with no potential for latitudinal possibilities, they’ve dug their own trap.
It finally boiled down to my looking at my roommate’s nether regions and loudly asking him “Where are your balls?” in the middle of a grocery. It mattered not that I was what most Americans would call loud; it’s customary to see men and women engage in shouting matches that lead to knock-down/drag-outs. But at this point I’m wanting to give the 19-year-old Chinese girl a lesson in trust and independence and the Aussie a lesson in how to stand up to a woman.
It’d be for naught, though. Half an hour later he’s talked two times on the phone with her. At lunch he texted her. When we get in the cab he calls her again. “I bet if I tell her I bought her something for Valentine’s Day it’ll help me out,” he says and, on the phone, goes into a falsetto that even American romantic comedies wouldn’t touch.
Sure enough, when he commences his get-me-out-of-the-doghouse suck-up on the phone I glance in the rearview mirror at the cab driver. There are things you can read in another human being’s eyes, regardless of race or age. I read confused entertainment. “What’s this foreigner doing talking to a girlfriend when his girlfriend’s sitting right next to him?” I barely refrain from laughing at both of them.
Not 10 minutes later, once we climb the six stories to our apartment, he’s back on the phone with her, wearing his falsetto like a dog collar and I’m starting this blog post to you.