Imagine going to a play and the opening started with, “All women are bitches.”
The reaction of the crowd would most likely be far from receptive. The one-man comedy act starring Rob Becker in Defending the Caveman, however, raises this point after the crowd bursts into laughter when an echo of women’s voices blare, “All men are assholes.”
When he addresses this reaction, people in the crowd go silent. Did they realize Becker had a point that society is so quick to deem men as assholes?
In Becker’s defense of the caveman, he strives to highlight the differences between men and women, dating back to the time of the caveman. Men were the hunters. Women were gatherers. Each sex served a specific role and those roles were respected.
And those roles have transcended into the 21st century in small, but noticeable ways. Men still have a hunter instinct, just maybe not as aggressive. Women are still gatherers, but those skills have less to do with necessity. For instance, Becker describes the shopping habits of men and women. When men need a new shirt, they zone in at the store on finding a shirt. Once they have hunted their shirt down, they are done. When women go shopping, you might as well plan to block out the whole afternoon. We pick through rack after rack, trying on twenty items in the dressing room. We gather.
Another major difference? How men and women collect information. Say you and your boyfriend are at another’s couple’s house. You and Nancy sit and talk for endless hours, while Rob and Joe are in the other room playing pool. When you and Rob are driving back home, you can’t wait to share all the information you gathered while talking to Nancy. When you ask Rob what he and Joe talked about, all you get is, “Nothing.” Then you might say, “You and Joe talked about nothing for three hours?!”
Or this scenario...
My boyfriend loves watching hockey games and I’ve learned an invaluable lesson when he is doing this: do not try to have a meaningful conversation with him. His mind is fixated on watching the puck dart across the TV screen. He is hunting the TV. Me on the other hand, when I watch TV, I flip back and forth through different channels and I can gather what happened on each TV show without having watched the whole thing.
Becker tries to get his audience to understand that men aren’t being assholes when they don’t respond to a question their wives or girlfriends ask when watching a game. It’s just that they really cannot hear you. As he describes it, “Men are simple-minded,” and most men don’t have the skill nor capacity to gather information from those multiple channels at one time that women do.
For centuries, both sexes have tried to understand each other to almost no avail. Such as: Why are women more emotional? Why don’t men listen? Better yet, why do men suck at communicating?
Becker’s take on the differences of each sex is well thought out, and he successfully details why the genders have taken on various roles. It’s not a matter of men being assholes or women being demanding. It’s a matter of us having innate differences. While not every man has the hunter instinct or every woman loves to share her feelings, there is certainly something to be said about the way men and women interact.
Those differences in interaction are not bad and it certainly doesn’t make one sex better or worse than the other. It simply just makes us different. Instead of us trying to get the other to change, Becker encourages the audience to simply try and understand each other. Becker provokes the couples in the audience to step into each other’s world, even if it’s just for a brief minute. Ladies, watch the game in silence with your man and see that him just being next to you is a form of intimacy for him, not avoidance. Men, go shopping with your lady without finding the nearest chair to sit on while she browses through the racks. Look with her.
I encourage couples to go see this show, playing at the Pittsburgh CLO Cabaret Theater, until January 8, 2012. It will give each person a better understanding and appreciation for each other.
(Perhaps we’ll begin to see that cavemen aren’t so bad after all.)
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twoday magazine wants to know: Do you think men really are hunters and women gatherers or are these myths made up by male anthropologists?
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