This guy does not deserve cookies

Via the Yahoo news/highlights thing that pops up when I open their IM client, comes a piece by a man called Aaron Traister, writing something called Redbook, which appears to be yet another women's/girlie magazine, with all the usual crap you get from those. He writes about taking 4 weeks to "become a better husband".

Given the source, and my usual reaction to these "lifestyle" pieces (I would say that I don't know why I keep clicking on them, except that it's obvious that I like getting riled up and blogging about being riled up by them!), I expected to get - well - riled up! Instead, I think a lot of this can be field under "Well, DUH!" The rest - well, well get to that in a minute.

Mr Traister says that:

During a recent argument, my wife, Karel, told me I needed to "grow up," so I thought I'd give it a shot. I'd spend four weeks making myself over, and I wouldn't tell Karel, just to see if she was paying attention. Among other things, I changed up my clothes and returned to my teenage wrestling workouts — because nothing says maturity like playing dress-up and trying desperately to relive high school.

His first change was to reintroduce his courtship policy of buying her flowers every day, which I guess is nice, although what that has to do with being grown up is beyond me. The "well, duh!" bit of this is that if you like someone (say, enough to marry them!) then why wouldn't you want to give them nice things every so often, just because you like them?

He reports:

I put the first bouquet on the dining room table in our "fancy vase," and Karel noticed immediately. She couldn't stop talking about it and kept asking me what she'd done to deserve random flowers. Clearly, this needs to happen more often.

It's a little bit annoying that it's so stereotypical, but hey, in terms fo what he's doing, it's part and parcel of part 2:

Karel and I hang out together every night, but I surf the Internet while I'm sitting next to her, so she gives me static about only being present physically. To be with her more completely, I scaled back my Internet time

Again, I file this under "well, DUH!", because if you like someone that much that you marry them, then I would have thought that when you spend time with that person, you want to spend the time on that person (no, not like that, you filthy people). When I am at my computer, I am often multitasking, and may have two chats going on, I'm listening to music, and reading or writing something at the same time. But when I'm in meatspace with another person, then (although by conventional body language it may not always appear that way) I am completely focussed on that person - or, I make it clear that I need to focus on something else, and that that is my focus. I don't try to split the difference, because it becomes an example of Solomon's wisdom (trying to split my attention ends up meaning neither gets any of it really). What Mr Traister has rediscovered is that basic thing of paying attention to his partner. (Do you now get why I called this post "this guy does not deserve cookies"?)

There was one jarring element to this:

No dice for Karel, though. It irks her every time I touch my laptop after the kids are in bed, and maybe she's right to police my cyber habits. Next time I'll try no computer at all after 5 p.m., but only if she quits BlackBerrying after work too.

These days, the internet is an important way of keeping in touch with friends. While I clearly believe that Mr Traister should pay attention properly when he is with his wife, and has said he's being with her, I do not think it is reasonable for anyone to be so jealous of their partner's social life as to try to restrict it to the extent that's implied here. 15 minutes emailing seems like a very fair amount of time to spend on one's friends, and to make it "this time is for me and my friends, and it is not yours" seems to me perfectly appropriate. For Karel to resent even that time starts to seem controlling and even resentful of him having friends.

The story gets more interesting, and a little less obvious for most of society (though still pretty basic from most feminists' point of view, I think), when we come to his next change:

Karel complains that I never let her initiate sex. She says I seize every opportunity for action I see: a hug has to turn into sex; folding laundry has to turn into sex; getting back from the vet has to turn into sex. I don't let things develop "organically" or let her make the first move and show me how "sex-positive" she can be. So I took a step back. The first week went well: I don't know if Karel noticed my restraint, but she did take the lead. (And, by the way, organic sex doesn't feel that different from conventional or processed sex.)

It may not have been much different for him, but I wonder about how Karel found it? Was the fact that she was initiating, and having sex when she chose and was most enthusiastic for it, something that made a difference for her?

Unfortunately for proving how good a feminist sex life can be, it seems Karel was not quite as on board with the project. While Aaron may have stopped trying to buy sex from her (as evidenced by waiting for her to initiate), it seems that she did not stop trying to use sex to buy things from him:

The trouble started in week two, when Karel announced she was cutting me off sexually until I finished a book proposal that should have been done a year ago.

He did, eventually, finish the proposal (despite, according to him, the sex ban actually making him ore distracted by sexual thoughts than ever...) and "earn" sex with her again, but sex should not be a bargaining tool like that. When Mr Traister reports that "I've gotta tell you, I don't know if I learned anything from this one," I think the reason is because the underlying framework of a feminist, non-commodity interpretation of sex wasn't there. Like the "cargo cult" phenomenon, he did the right things (by letting her be enthusiastic for sex and initiate it) but because they hadn't negotiated that sex is for fun, a zero-sum game, and therefore not a trading token or a prize that she gives him - the experiment failed to produce the proper results.

I got in shape.

I ran or exercised for at least half an hour every day (except two) last month. Karel complimented me on my rapidly improving physique... But the biggest impact was on me alone: I felt healthier, stronger, more alert, and just generally better. Even if Karel hadn't noticed, I'd try to stick with this one for me

It's true - exercising regularly does make you feel better. I am bothered by the emphasis on physique here, because there's enough of fat-shaming in the world as it is. But even tubby bitch me knows that exercising is good as its own thing (to some extent - I have a problem with extended exercise for its own sake, which is why I am seeking out team sports as a way to get exercise). Even the 5-10 minutes of strenuous exercise a day I do (plus every other day, 40 minutes or so of walking to the shops, half of which involves carrying heavy bags) has made a huge difference (as it happens, I have lost over a stone in weight since Christmas, which is a bonus).

His final change was an attempt to (in his words) "dress like an adult" - although I am not sure what that means, although apparently, "flannel, jeans, and thermals" aren't it (they are, he says, "like a refugee from a 1993 Alice in Chains concert." though that means nothing to me in terms of what an adult looks like). He got some ashion advice from the fashion columnist of the magazine, but as it happens, this wardrobe change got vetoed by Karel, who told him, "you're too scruffy to wear clothes like that." (Reminds me of my own feelings about dressing up smartly). I suspect that a more carefully-planned attempt to change the wardrobe, that actually took into account the sort of person he is, might have had better effects, but that's just my thought.

Mr Traister concludes thus:

With the exception of the clothes, she seemed genuinely surprised that all my new habits were staged for an assignment — and after some reflection, I could see why. I'd been meaning to make all of these changes; I just hadn't gotten around to them. I know how lucky I am to have an amazing wife and kids, and I don't want to take them for granted by treating my body like crap and checking out early, or failing to show them how much they mean to me ... But I'm going to keep after the other improvements, the ones I've had percolating inside me for a while now, plans for the man I'd like to become.

Everyone needs a round tuit. But old jokes aside, this reveals two things: people often need a specific push to get to a better place, somewhere they actually want to be; and Mr Traister himself admits he was not performing to minimum standards, and therefore does not deserve a cookie.