How does a childless marriage remain a marriage? What makes and unmakes it? These are the questions Rock Paper Scissors ponders under the guise of a mystery novel. The mystery is great but the way the novel traces a collapse of a childless marriage is even more fascinating.
What I find particularly interesting is that the husband removes himself completely from the management of his own emotional life. He’s a ragdoll that active, pushy women shuffle from bed to bed. He’s a very successful man, earning a great living but he’s completely absent from any decision-making capacity in the emotional realm of his existence. As we have seen in our discussion of novels by Anthony Trollope, this isn’t “just how men are.” This is how men and women have become but by no means is this a baseline.
It’s particularly curious that the women who push around the successful husband don’t amount to much by themselves. Childless, sociophobic, petty, with nothing going on professionally and socially, they turn the marriage into both their child and job with the inevitable result that the marriage withers from being overly tended to.
The husband in Rock Paper Scissors suffers from an extreme case of face blindness. He can’t recognize his own wife and is completely dependent on her to tell him the names of any people he interacts with. Prosopagnosia is, of course, a metaphor for his utter helplessness in the social realm. What gave rise to our widely held belief that women need to manage the emotional side of relationships is a fascinating question, and Feeney’s novel shows how ugly the results of this phenomenon are.
Clarissa's Blog 
“our widely held belief that women need to manage the emotional side of relationships”
Is that in Ukraine too? I know male/female relationships there start off and continue on very different cultural assumptions…. but I’d never thought that Ukrainian women would much into managing emotions of partners (bossing them around, yes, emotionally ‘taking care’ of them….. no).
I cannot honestly say that’s a dynamic I’ve witnessed much in Poland. There are differences… for example women are supposed to keep the conversation going (rather than just supporting topics the guy brings up). But the whole idea of ‘managing’ emotions or ’emotional labor’ are kind of non-starters here…
And while infantile adults do exist it’s not a generalized female thing.
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Yes, it’s an American thing. And British, apparently, since this is a British author.
I’m noticing it precisely because it’s not normal to me. I never observed women in my family do this for men.
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OT: police raid some of the biggest nightclubs in Moscow…. lots of young men taken to conscription stations…
https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1862732460192313745
One woman talks about how scary it is “to feel vulnerable on your own home soil”…. displaying the traditional callousness and lack of human empathy that russia is known for….
https://x.com/igorsushko/status/1862743388472451547
The ruble was collapsing before being withdrawn from exchange (turning it into a de facto black market currency internationally) and the russian side in Syria* is also collapsing…
Would russia risk a nuke in Syria? Probably more likely than in Ukraine….
*I have no real idea of the different sides in Syria (too many unfamiliar actors and organizations) so I tend to have no real opinion as I suspect I would be against them all…. but the ongoing collapse will have repercussions in lots of other countries…..
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Great news about the bars in Moscow. These are people who deserve everything they get.
The collapse of Syria means more Muslim fundamentalists. This is always bad. What people don’t understand is that a more chaotic, dangerous world is an inevitable result of the West’s withdrawal into navel-gazing instead of making sure everybody sits quietly and doesn’t bother anybody else. I don’t know when that lesson will be learned.
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“collapse of Syria means more Muslim fundamentalists”
Someone once pointed out that religious minorities in muslim majority countries are usually safer when under the stated (or implied) protection of a dictator or monarch.
Democracy usually means the majority votes to roll minority rights back…. I’m sure Assad was a pure sob but religious minorities there were probably safer under him than they will be going forward….
“the West’s withdrawal into navel-gazing instead of making sure everybody sits quietly and doesn’t bother anybody else”
Said has a _lot_ to answer for…. or would if he were still alive….
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Nobody forced or is now forcing us to embrace these insane beliefs.
Only this morning I was having a Twitter debate with a right-wing dude who is convinced that the USSR was more free than today’s US. So who lost the Cold War, honestly? American patriots are simping for the USSR. I thought I’d never see the day.
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“Nobody forced or is now forcing us to embrace these insane beliefs”
But Said, whether he meant to or not, gave the west haters the rhetoric and model to use to enable the middle east degrade into an inferno or religious fanaticism while the west castigated itself for the sins of the past.
He probably didn’t mean to. A lot of Arab Christians embraced nationalism as a hedge against the nearer danger of political Islamism. But then Eli Whitney didn’t intend for his nifty invention to make strengthen slavery in the US South.
Intentions are one thing, practical results something very different.
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RE Syria:
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Here is a good explanation:
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Israel has nothing to be happy about if those rebels win (“the Sunni insurgents also pose a significant threat. Hamas exemplifies the dangers of Sunni jihadism, and if Assad’s regime collapses and Sunni insurgents gain control of Syria, Israel could face an even greater security challenge.”) but I am happy we did this:
Imagine combined 9.10 from Hamas and Hezbollah, with chemical weapons and such.
From an Israeli “Arabist” (is this the word?) expert (telegram channel):
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The rebels suck but Russia takes an L, which is always good.
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