Akemi Johnson, Night
in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in
Okinawa (New York: The New Press, 2019), 69.
[U.S. marines and sailors based in Okinawa, Japan, who
intend to marry someone from the island are required to attend a military-run
premarital seminar. The author attended one of these two-day seminars in 2009. One
of the speakers was a young chaplain.]
“Guys and girls are wired differently,” he explained. “They
just work differently.” He showed a PowerPoint slide about it. Men were “Mr.
Fix-Its,” wanting to fix everything without asking for help, programmed like
that since childhood. Women were “pursuers,” wanting to make a connection with
their partners “at all costs.” His message was that men and women were
biologically different, leading to inevitable inequalities and conflict.
On screen he showed a cartoon of a woman standing at a
bathroom sink, her wet hair obscuring her face. She reached behind her, hand
outstretched. The caption read, “Hand me the hairdryer.”
The room rumbled with low male laughter. Horror crawled
through me. The man standing behind the women in the cartoon was about to pass
her a handgun.
[Two examples of this folk cartoon, from 1980 (below) and
1983, are collected in Alan Dundes & Carl Pagter, Never Try to Teach a Pig to Sing (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1991), 404-5.]
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