Yet more defeatist gendering

Another frustrating example of taking for granted that women are inherently different than men in causal ways comes in today's Modern Love column, Sleeping With the Guitar Player by Jean Hanff Korelitz.

In this, she describes and generalizes her husband's "Guitar-in-the-Basement phase" -- that in which her spouse of eighteen years purchases first one guitar, and then a whole band's worth, and aggressively pursuing his newfound hobby with the zeal and abandon of a never-been-burned amateur. She attributes this naïveté not to something in his character -- call it optimism, maybe? Or devil-may-care-itude? -- but to his gender:

... I'm a woman, which means that, in my heart of hearts, I have long understood that certain things are never going to happen in my life. I won't, by way of example, be modeling swimsuits for Sports Illustrated, representing my country as an Olympic gymnast or dancing Coppélia for the New York City Ballet.

I have dealt with these disappointments and, in the idiom of our age, moved on. But my husband - my wonderful, endearing husband, who is extremely successful at writing and teaching poetry - believed, at the age of 53, that it was utterly possible for him to become a rock guitarist. On a stage. In front of an audience.

...

Unlike women, for whom menopause serves as an unignorable transition, a line dividing one part of life from another, men have no midlife marker to brake before, or even to steer around, in the hinterland from their youth to their age; there is only a great, elastic middle. Is it any wonder they lose track of where they are, and think they can do anything? And evidence being what it is, I'm forced to concur.

I usually like Modern Love, this relatively new addition to the Sunday Styles section (admittedly, the first section I pick up on an indolent weekend morning, in which I shamefully skim the ages of the women getting married, and which schools they went to). In addition to being well-written (which is why I read the Times to begin with), it's often poignant without being soapy, a nice quasi-fictional addition to the paper, à la The New Yorker. And while this article didn't go too far towards tarnishing my fondness for the column, nor did it do anything to bolster it.

I mean, really -- "I'm a woman, which means that ... [I have a] midlife marker to brake before, ... steer around, in the hinterland from [my] youth to [my] age"?! Taken out of context, that statement is relatively benign: menopause as a divider in a woman's life, a biological change that will probably provoke self-scrutiny. But to chalk up the putative ambitiousness of an entire gender to the lack of such a division? Overstepping the bounds of biology, I believe, and doing women a disservice in the process.

Korelitz singles out what she knows of the Guitar-in-the-Basement Dudes, isolates a cultural phenomenon, and attributes it to their gender. I'm fine with the belletristic portrayal of the first two; her conclusion, I bristle at. Goddamn it, stop siding with Maureen Dowd and playing the help-help-I'm-just-a-little-woman card!