Men are pigs. Also, they are sheepish, bullish and dogged; they are liars, cheaters, equivocators, self-deluders, tender mates, caring fathers and rotten bastards; they are hardheaded, overly sensitive, confused, unkempt and capable of wonderful things; they welcome gender equality in the home and office; they rue the breakdown of traditional male-females roles; they help with chores, and damned if they don't do whatever the hell they want; they frequently leave their underwear on the bathroom floor.
In other words, men are like normal people, but with a twist. "Your sperm makes you evil," writer Vince Passaro's wife told him, speaking of men in general. "You're all cowards," she added. "In between the two is just a charred landscape." (Can you believe he dumped her?!)
That charred landscape is mapped with varying degrees of acuity by the tour guides brought together for The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom, edited by Daniel Jones (a sequel to The Bitch in the House, a compilation of dispatches from the woman's side of the gender gap, edited by Jones' wife, Cathi Hanauer). The pieces case guyville pretty thoroughly, from love and sex to fatherhood vs. career; from the perils and thrills of bachelorhood to the deep contentments of marriage; from the shifting ratios of honesty and lying in a marriage to our determination to do the right thing. Turns out there's more to us than is suggested by The Man Show.
I consider myself a man, or at least a male. I'm plumbed for it, after all, and I have the usual upgrades: wife, kids, homestead, responsibilities, grade-A workaholism, stress that'll lop five years from my lifespan and debt that I won't be free of until I do, in fact, die. What I'm saying is that I've lived this stuff. When Rob Spillman writes about trying to establish a domestic policy that doesn't delegate household and child-rearing chores in traditionally unequal ways (wife does everything; husband takes a load off), it's like he and I are comparing scars. When Ron Carlson describes his unease at acquiring such trappings of permanence as a house and expensive furniture, I momentarily shut the book in silent recognition. When Kevin Canty writes about the primal male urge to behave badly when displays of maturity are called for, I'm, like, there, dude. When Sean Elder writes about how his wife's consuming job has ruined their sex life, well, next subject, please. Thankfully, I can say I've only experienced divorce through David Gate's essay about music and wood-chopping, one of the best pieces in the book.
Which isn't to say that everyone will find themselves mirrored in Bastard—not everyone is in the media game, after all, as are most of the contributors. Spillman and his wife, for example, are both stay-at-home writers, so their unique solution to taking care of the kid and household—each week, one or the other does everything—will strike the lunch-bucket reader, who's lucky to see his kid for a couple hours after work, as hopelessly elitist and privileged. Christopher Russell writes amusingly about being handed a daily list of chores by his wife, but he's a self-employed ceramics artist—unlike most of us, the guy's got plenty of flex time. Even Gates, who has a day job at Newsweek, spends three days a week at a cabin in upstate New York. I suppose that's the chance you accept when you ask writers to pen personal essays.
But even when the specifics of a writer's experience are opposite your own, there are basic lessons here. You needn't have been a bookish football stud to finally identify with Elwood Reid's recollection of being a bouncer slowly shedding his hard shell—learning to be himself in the presence of the woman he loves.
The Bastard on the Couch won't mark a turning point in the history of men and women; not even a swerving point—its strength doesn't lay in any sort of cumulative impact, but rather in the small insight, the minor truth reinforced, the grace note skillfully rendered. It's worth reading on those grounds, until it's your turn to do the dishes.