Monday, November 18, 2002

Solitude vs. Company

Charles Murtaugh cites Caitlin Flanagan on what women apparently crave:
The photography in her [Martha Stewart] various publications seems to reduce all of female longing to its essential elements. A basket of flowers, a child's lawn pinafore draped across a painted rocking chair, an exceptionally white towel folded in thirds and perched in glamorous isolation on a clean and barren shelf: most of the pictures feature a lot of sunlight, and many show rooms that are either empty of people or occupied solely by Martha, evoking the profound and enduring female desires for solitude and silence. No heterosexual man can understand this stuff, and no woman with a beating heart and an ounce of femininity can resist it.

He comments:
I'll take her word for it. And perhaps women will take my word that many men, at least the men I know, crave almost precisely the opposite: not solitude, but company, and specifically the company of other men.


Are women really such lone wolves? Or are we just saying that we are in order to exert our independence?

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