"Strange the way a man has to walk with a woman. She follows his lead like they're dancing, she wasn't even a wife or girlfriend... (It's not a Chinese custom for women to walk behind men. That's a base stereotype.) No, Wittman didn't want to slow down for anybody either, become an inclining, compliant owned man. Husbands walk differently from single guys." -Tripmaster Monkey
I talked about this during section, but I'm still thinking about it and the politics of walking. I'm going to be honest, I was once thought that "asian wives" had to walk behind their husbands and that they were subservient to them. As a child, I thought this was wrong, but I accepted it as a fact and figured it was simply a difference between cultures. I believed it in the same way you believe stereotypes like "women can't drive" or "black men are violent" or anything else ridiculous like that– everyone jokes around about it all the time, so it must be true.
As someone online pointed out, "Is everything I do 'cultural'? Some Asian husbands walk side by side with their wives, hand-in-hand and obviously in love. Some follow behind in fear and apprehension, carrying bags and otherwise being subservient. Some never go out with their wives at all. Some White husbands, or Black, or Hispanic, or any racial descriptor you can think of, do the same." But there definitely is a way that people walk with each other.
I personally have a bad habit of being the "follower" when walking with someone, usually from fear that I don't know where I'm going. I try to stay on equal footing or behind the person I'm walking with. When walking down the street, the polite thing is to stay to the right so people can pass you, just like driving. I have friends in a hurry who'll walk 10 feet in front of everyone else. But do any of us walk differently based on the gender of who we are walking with? I hope not. I believe what Wittman was doing in this quote, as he does many times in this book, is see what he wants to see. He believes it to be true, so he believes that's what's happening, when in reality Nanci is walking with him the way she is because Wittman is taking them somewhere and she doesn't know where that is. You follow the person you trust to know where they are going. Being an "inclining, compliant owned man" and a husband vs. a single man is that you and your partner trust each other to know where you are going together; there's no such thing as an "owned" person.
In a way, none of us want to slow down for anyone. We want others to walk at our speed, but some people are willing to slow down for others. To let them catch up. Wittman doesn't want anyone to catch up to him. He wants everyone to be what he wants them to be, to sprint along side him immediately and never stumble or trip. Is this a matter of superiority? Is it a race or gender thing? Or is Wittman simply a man who expects to much and puts in no effort for others?
Personally, I'm a fast walker and most of my friends have trouble keeping up with me. Interestingly enough, a friend of mine just got back from a study abroad in Thailand. He told me everyone in Thailand walks like I do: fast and forward without waiting for anyone. He said he absolutely hated it and I thought to myself, "Well, that sounds like my kind of place."
ReplyDeleteI think it is, perhaps, a cultural thing, but maybe it is Wittman trying to exert a sense of power. He knows where he is going and doesn't want to be the subservient man, following.
As for a person being incapable of being "owned," I would argue that some relationships have an uneven distribution of power and one person in the couple may end up "under the other's thumb." This could be reflected in the way in which they walk together.