Recently, while sitting at a neighborhood cafe in San Francisco, I sat next to a young French couple, clearly at the high tide of their romance. One of the things that struck me forcefully was the sweetness and charm of the woman as she related to the man, who also showed no fear in displaying his affection for the woman. I was charmed too, and envious.

            My problems with American women can be summed up thus: aside from the sexual pleasure their bodies give me, I don’t particularly like them. The minds of American women I find all too often to be small, rigid, and closed, moralistic, conformist, and authoritarian (whether on the right or the left of the political spectrum), and their personalities either manipulative and deceptive or abrasive and charmless; on the whole, I find them narcissistic and self-absorbed to the point of brain-aching boredom. Whenever I have found an American woman I thought I actually liked (let's leave aside “love” and the delusion factory of sexuality), sooner or later she has proven to be just one more self-absorbed bore with a pretty face and a sexy body.

            All men complain about how frustrating, nagging, maddening, etc., they find their women – this is a perfectly acceptable way of beefing about the war between the sexes. But rarely do they say how boring a woman can be – this seems to be forbidden, or at least risky: the man thus complaining might be admitting that, in some profound sense, he is not interested, not only in this but in any woman, and therefore – yikes! – must be gay.

            I often wonder if all American men – at least straight men, and perhaps even gays – don’t in fact feel this way about many of the women they know, but are afraid to admit it since it would cancel whatever sexual privileges with women they have or hope to have; as well as making them question their sexual identity. But the point has nothing to do with sexual identity: it has to do with the fundamental lack of emotional compatibility between American men and women – an ability to partake of each other's rich emotional lives, to make the relation more important than their ego satisfactions, the indulgences of the individualism with which we are so infatuated as a culture.           

            Speaking personally, I have never known an American woman with whom I felt emotionally compatible, and I have spent most of the dates I have ever had hiding my feelings and emotions from the woman I was with because I realized instinctively that she would not understand them. When I have slipped and exposed my actual feelings to an American woman, I have always regretted it: in every case, it has been the beginning of the end of the relationship – the woman has turned, often quite brutally, against me. This is the problem of what I call my ‘happy date/boring date’ syndrome: when I am bored by my date, she generally seems to have a great time, seems contented, relaxed, and happy, takes the initiative in making plans for out next get-together, etc. But, when I am happy on a date, the woman pulls back, responds bizarrely, and often breaks off the relationship not long afterwards. American women seem actively to dislike me whenever I am happy, though they are willing to stick around as long as I am glum. This was true even of Deena, my longest relationship, who loved having me in an extremely bad temper and could behave very nastily toward me when I was in a good, happy mood.

            My conclusion? Women and men are, at some basic level, opponents, rivals for acceptance, even enemies, but some cultures are more effective at accepting and negotiating our fundamental incompatibilities than others are; such things as feminism, political correctness, etc., are merely futile attempts to whitewash this fundamental and recalcitrant fact. Marriage? In most cases in America, a marriage is a defeat of the male by the female. Sexuality? Ditto, though less long-term. In fact, from one American male’s point of view, one of the few honest and respectable sexual acts in the United States is with a prostitute: in that case, the act of monetary exchange frees the male from both deception and humiliation.

             Partly because of our insensate individualism, our inability to bend our selves to the fulfillments of relations between selves, the ultimate relationship between American men and women is not love, not sex, and not marriage: it is betrayal, misunderstanding, and disillusionment; it is divorce. Many “happy” American marriages are those in which both sides have inwardly divorced but remain together out of habit and a fear of solitude and isolation.

            Perhaps the great spiritual masters were right after all when they advised celibacy. Celibacy may be the only wisdom; the gonads are crazy fools. Perhaps the only way American men and women can get along with mutual self-respect, if they refuse to give up the wine of self-absorption, the drugs of Narcissus, is to expect as little from each other as possible and to look forward to the time when cloning becomes the reproductive method of choice. In such a world, ego will be all, and the only love self-love.