Quest for the Missing Man

Nelda Ault

There’s a dusty, 1970s smell in the air, and in my creative nonfiction writing class I’m supposed to be looking for something that’s not quite right. I’m searching for the details that are ripples in the ordinary pattern of reality that scream to be traced back to their sources in an effort to explain how they got there in the first place. Our classroom is painted an indecisive shade of light blue, with chalkboards lining two of the walls. The tall windows allow that elusive Utah winter sunshine to warm the room—clouds and pollution permitting. The desks probably hearken from the same decade as the vinyl window shades, along with the carpet that seems to be five different colors at the same time. My eight classmates and I are surgeons and dissectors, hoping to find cures for what ails our writing, our thinking, and our worlds.

It is here, one Thursday in January, where I find a ripple to write about. After three years of college English classes, I’d almost come to not notice the oddness anymore. Seated in these old and off-balanced desks are six women and four men—about a 1.5:1 ratio. Hoping that the sun will somehow penetrate the glass and warm me up, I realize that this is the least disparate ratio I’ve ever come across in any of my upper division English classes. The first day arrives, the syllabus is disbursed, and someone invariably throws out a comment that spotlights the two or three or five male students in the room. Twenty or more pairs of female eyes smile and joke because this is not the first time this has happened.

The next week I find myself sitting in the middle of the viola section in orchestra, and the fuses ignite. Out of almost sixty string players, women reign exclusively in the violin and viola sections, and the two male cellists and two bass players enjoy this corner on the market. Between sections of a Prokofiev piano concerto, I think about every orchestra I’ve ever been a part of going all the way back to fifth grade and conclude that not much has changed in this respect. There have always been more girls than boys.

The shockwave of this realization reverberates, and I ask about band and choir and visual arts classes. The words and stories and opinions point me all in one direction, and I don’t realize where I’m going or which path of not-quite-rightness I’m on until I’m sitting on a grey-beige fuzzy floor with half a class of high school freshmen. We’re looking up at the work of California artist Claire Falkenstein while the education curator at the museum recounts the artist’s life. Falkenstein taught and did her work during the Depression era in the United States and was mostly known for her postmodern work. Flourishes of crayon-like color collide with swipes of ink in her sketchbooks, making these curved and sharpened collections of paper seem to be on fire. While the ninth-graders work on their own colored pencil versions of Falkenstein’s sketchbooks, I try to remember not to lean against the wall and decide that somehow Falkenstein’s work, right here on the main floor, seems something like a tourist attraction. There are many other well-known Californian artists in this particular museum, and a great many postmodernists who placed color and line into collision orbits. It’s because she’s a girl something in the back of my mind tells me, and I think about the female artists’ works downstairs in the permanent collection. Those pieces are always the novelty items, the ones the other docents and I point out as if they were startlingly unusual animals at the zoo. In a split second all those violinists, those ceramics students, those English majors flash through my head. Then I look at the art museum, the professional music circuit, the books I’ve been reading for years and I wonder, where did all those girls go?

“That’s why I’m an English major,” Steve says. “For the sex.” The bill of his baseball cap shadows all of his face except the luminosity of his sarcastic smile and the glint of light on his glasses. Somehow, this corner-of-the-classroom cynic, even though he sits on an overstuffed couch in a college student apartment, still manages to brew the Marx-spitting, diatribe-prone storm cloud of discontent overhead. He chews his gum and off-handedly surveys the reaction of the room to his words, then goes on with deadlines and other matters, which is the reason we are all together in the first place. Jordan’s living room has that incongruous, Dalí-esque aesthetic about it, a bare outrageousness that only complements the Brazilian hiphop on the CD player. Jensie, who sits next to Steve, rolls her eyes and turns back to the conversation at hand, which concerns the underground newspaper struggling to be born in front of us on the floor. I conceal the mental double take that I just did, not wanting to give Steve the satisfaction of shocking me.

Steve was referring to the proportions that we all knew about because, as English and almost-English majors, we’d seen them and been a part of them. The female majority extends beyond the English programs to the larger realm of the humanities and arts. The dictionary defines the humanities as “the branches of learning (as philosophy, arts, or languages) that investigate human constructs and concerns” and at Utah State the humanities consist of the Art, English, History, Music, Theater, Interior Design programs, as well as the triplet majors Languages/Philosophy/Speech. The serpentine College of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences enjoys the status of being this university’s largest college. I “investigate human constructs and concerns” in my English classes, in the orchestra, at the art museum, and in the Merrill library. The more time I spend immersed in words and thoughts and forms of expression, the more I ask myself what got me here. Going home to my family to figure out the origins of this just multiplies the questions.

My dad knew he was going to be a starving sculptor the day his red-green colorblindness finally convinced him to set aside his father’s sign painting business. After he and my mom finished their few years in the Army at the end of Vietnam, they marched off to college in western New York. My mom went to nursing school in New York and California while my dad took art classes and anything else interesting while he waited for her to finish. By the time my sister and I were born, a great many business ventures had been embarked upon (and disembarked from), a large collection of found objects and other people’s junk occupied our backyard, and my mom was a registered nurse. We had a stay-at-home dad who packed our lunchboxes before we went to school, made lots of tablesaw and wood chopping noises in the garage, and helped my mom cope with the tricky math and people problems that are inherent in nursing. When I was in fifth grade and every other girl brought her mom to the puberty speech and video, it was my dad who came. It wasn’t until I was older and could imagine myself in my mother’s shoes that I wondered how much different my family was from the others I knew.

My dad wears a black and blue plaid shirt with chewed up jeans when I ask him why he thinks there are always more girls in fine arts classes than guys. “Because the boys are always out beating each other up playing football,” he growls while he eats a piece of apple pie with a knife. “And the ones who are in class,” he continued, “only want the easy credit.” I assume he doesn’t mean himself. His arguments don’t make any sense, as I state that classes like orchestra are anything but easy credit. In his mind I think he equates, as many others do, the subjectivity of humanities classes with easiness—that famous kind of easiness with no wrong answers. I don’t have time to ask if he thought he was one of those easy credit guys or if I was some kind of slacker for choosing my major and doing what I do.

Another Steve, this one an art education major, squints into the half darkness of the room as he tries to understand what I’m asking him. Steve’s also a docent at the art museum. A movie is being projected onto the wall behind us, and over the chatter of people watching the wall and the film’s Polynesian soundtrack, I stumble over my observations and wonder what he thinks. The first thing he makes clear is that there’s no “easy credit” about any of the world of an art major. In his classes there are always more women than men, though usually not in English class proportions. He mentions a conversation he had with a girl he’d just met, one who’d exclaimed, “You can’t be an art major! You’re… normal,” when she found out what he did. Surprised, he’d explained that he was in education, which somehow softened the shock. “Oh. That’s why.” For some reason, the art major nametag meant to this girl that Steve was probably weird and possibly gay. Steve assured her that these details could be found in any major. As far as professional female artists go, he thinks a lot of fame and reputation are wrapped up in what the art critics have to say, who have traditionally been men with traditional views. But even before anyone breaks into the world of critics and museums and curators of collections, Steve says, there are those men who find themselves in classes full of female ceramics students and are driven to achieve because they’re in the minority, and that points them to the top. I didn’t have time to ask him where he thought he landed.

Back in the library, I find a study done on the teaching tactics and attitudes in music education that are recorded in The Music Supervisor’s Journal. This publication ran for ten years starting in 1914 and reported studies, advice, and research that would come in handy for music educators at all levels. The journal’s slogan was “Music for every child, every child for music,” and spent a great deal of publication space, the study found out, addressing the apparently common problem of attracting boys to music and keeping them participating. The association between music and negatively viewed effeminate qualities was a hard one to break. Music wasn’t “manly” to these boys about whom the articles spoke, which was the reason for their lack of participation. Music teachers in 1918 resorted to posting bulletin boards cluttered with facts like “All the great composers were men” and that all the men who play in the famous orchestras and sing in the opera houses had the physique of any football or baseball player. Some journalists blamed the music teachers (who were frequently female) for choosing “superficial and flabby” songs to sing in their choirs, which subsequently turned many boys off and made them regard the music world in general “contemptuously.”

Over eighty years have passed since some of those articles were written, and has anything changed? I ask my viola student Kiel, who stands in an elevator-sized practice room before his lesson, what he thinks about the female majority in orchestra. Kiel’s fourteen, a whole head-and-a-half taller than I am, and just started growing out his hair in that shaggy, return-of-the-Beatles-but-with-more-gel look. “I think,” he begins, as he starts to tune, “that stringed instruments are seen as more feminine. That’s why.” My eyebrows rise. “And you’re okay with playing a feminine instrument?” I ask. He shrugs and says “Yeah.”

Ever since 1972, when Title IX of the Educational Amendments was approved, numerous groups like the American Association of University Women have been keeping tabs on the advancement of girls and women in academics and athletics. Gradually, enrollment of high school girls in math and science classes and women in college has increased. The turn of the twenty-first century saw a college student body that was nearly sixty percent female. I flip through pages of comparative graphs and statistics and get a feeling similar to the one that I get when I sit through a whole season of chamber music society concerts with my violin-playing friends and see only men in tuxes the whole time. It’s somehow different, though. In all of these graphs and charts that are supposed to be documenting progress, where are the boys? One of my music ed friends lends me an article from her multiculturalism in the classroom course that describes the “new gender gap” dividing today’s Title IX-ed girls and the boys. All the attention and special programming designed to encourage girls in math and science do not have counterparts that encourage boys in reading and writing, which have not in recent years been that sex’s strong points. The article cites all types of research done that points out boys’ developmental differences with girls when they start school and blames a culture that socializes out of boys their innate high aptitudes for emotion and expression.

This two-year-old article came from an issue of Business Week Online, and I’m not sure what to think about the research they presented. Do I believe the research that asserts that boys’ nerve endings in their fingers develop later than girls’, which makes writing harder for them to learn? Are boys really “more empathetic, expressive, and emotive at birth than girls”? How do you test something like that? One thing I am sure about, though, is that reasons for everything usually boil down to questioning what it is our culture wants from us and tells us to do. Modern Western culture is based on a foundation of patriarchy and a set of expectations that ask different things of each of the sexes. Boys are supposed to grow up to be men who can lasso a steady income and provide for a family. Where I grew up, girls are supposed to grow up to be women who nurture that family in the home. Changes in costs of living and other factors have altered the face of these expectations over the years, but the traditional undercurrent still pulls strongly.

I am tired and my contacts are drying out. Randy’s taking me home while we listen to “Dark Side of the Moon,” the red Buick splashing through puddles of late February thaw. I’m walking him through the musings of my paper, trying to verbalize all this stuff I’ve seen and tried to figure out. Randy plays the cello in the orchestra and started out his college career as a music performance major. He spent two semesters in the music business and two years in El Salvador serving an LDS mission, and when he came back, he changed his major to biology. The streetlamp light is broken up in the melting streams of water running down the windshield, and I ask why he thinks there are always more girls in orchestra. Randy begins in a tone of voice that matches his statistician’s plastic-rimmed glasses, “Because you can’t support a family with music.” He pulls up to a stop sign. “That’s why I’m not in it anymore.” For most people around these parts, college is a means to an end, with that end being a career. The paths to careers are not isolated from the surrounding culture and traditional expectations, as shown by the full classrooms of women in family and human development and early childhood education, and the male majority in the engineering and business colleges. On the whole, the surrounding culture both directly and indirectly encourages men to pursue a more professional, administrative, scientific route, and recommends the women take hold of the more nurturing occupations and careers. Almost all of these careers started out as college majors, and what the graduate finds when he or she finishes with a degree is that they’ve been living in a microcosm this whole time.

“But things are changing,” Russell says as he perches on the wheely office chair in what looks like some kind of yoga position. I’m loosening my bow and scooping up my technique books as my viola teacher stares at me in this inside-out, what-is-it-that-I-want-to-say way. Russell’s answers to my questions fly straight to the professional world, where, as a musician and teacher, he’s lived for the past seven years. He and his wife Rebecca are the cofounders of the Fry Street Quartet, which was born in Chicago and spent a few years in North Carolina before somehow ending up way out west in Utah almost three years ago. Russell was one of those Suzuki children that you see pictures of—those rows and rows of tiny violin-playing bodies learning the Twinkle Twinkle variations by ear and bowing formally to thank their teacher after every lesson. Every orchestra he’s been in since then, including the one at Northwestern where he did his graduate work, was female dominated. I point out the male majority of the professional music circuit, and he shifts in his chair to what could easily be desk-sitting bird, variation one. “Yeah,” he begins, still rummaging around in his head for the next thing to say. “Why is that?”

He talks about the communication differences of men and women, about how many women choose to dedicate their time to families instead of professional careers. He recommends a book by Deborah Tannen, and ultimately comes back to what he said before: “But things are changing.” His own quartet is a good example of this conclusion. Both the violinists as well as the cellist of the Fry Street are women, which puts Russell in a musical situation that he’s been familiar with since the beginning.

Even for the men who make it all the way through college and/or graduate work in what many would consider “women’s fields,” the professional world has its own unique set of characteristics. I sort through piles of old sociology articles about gender and the workplace, hoping to flesh out the skeleton structure of what I think the career world must be like. I squint down at a barely readable article from 1992 that reports the findings of studies done with men who were making a career out of “women’s work.” Researcher Christine L. Williams interviewed male nurses, elementary school teachers, librarians, and social workers and discovered what she termed “the glass escalator.” Related to the glass ceiling that women run up against on their way up the professional ladder, the glass escalator restricts professional men not by inhibiting their movement, but by catalyzing it. The men Williams talked to recognized that their maleness was often considered a positive difference as they were being hired for their job. Going back to art ed Steve’s thoughts, these men felt that there is a preference for hiring men because there are so few of them. The glass escalator powers up and begins its upward ascent when the people around these male schoolteachers and social workers start prodding them into tracks that ultimately lead to administrative positions. “[T]hey face invisible pressures to move up in their professions,” which Williams calls “being ‘kicked upstairs.’” The nurse who wants to study family and child health is “dissuaded” from doing so, being directed toward adult nursing instead. The kindergarten teacher who succeeds in his classroom is encouraged to apply for a position as a principal or a professor. The librarian who coordinates story time is pointed in the direction that will make him head of the reference area. Despite these individuals loving exactly what they’re doing, many influences around them tell them that this isn’t it for them, and the way is often paved in front of them to advance into something else.

The men who stand their ground and continue doing their work are often approached by attitudes that tell them they aren’t living up to their full potential—the attitudes that glance sideways and say in not so many words, “oh—couldn’t get a real job, eh?” The traditions and entrenched ideas and slow-to-change patterns of thought that keep women standing on a ladder underneath a pane of glass also want to get the men on the same ladder out of there.

So is that where believing that music and literature are effeminate gets us? Are our grade school boys destined to think that these girly fields are not for them, and if they get into them, they wouldn’t be satisfied there? And how does it work out that so many of the really famous professional musicians are men? I think Steve had something when he pointed out the motivating factor that minority status sometimes includes. That motivation, accompanied by the glass ceiling (which is gradually being shattered), accounts for a lot of those performers I see. Russell sees on the horizon a steadier stream of the Suzuki girls like the ones he started out with making careers out of their musical studies, and more women in general making their presence in the professional world known.

Three years of college feminist studies classes have led me to agree with him and disagree at the same time. I see the changes, read the numbers, and realize that we American women are not who we were fifty years ago. There are organizations set up to promote women in the sciences and in business, and these support systems are not without positive effects. Amidst these moves toward stereotype-destruction and toward more equal representation, I think of how much tradition weighs and the clout it has when people cry out in its name for things to stay the same. When it comes to meeting this tide of opposition, I think that if women want to achieve equality with men in whatever arena, the work has to go both ways. The equality can’t be achieved without equalizing actions. The fact that there haven’t been programs devised to encourage boys’ writing and reading and that there aren’t groups to promote men in the humanities does not speak well for the heirs of the women’s liberation movement. My friend Tonya Brown, proud member of the Society of Women Engineers and electrical engineering major, laughs when I tell her about this, and says that the women’s rights people would “have a heyday” with a humanities club like that. “Join the new club—putting the man back in humanities!” Men have been the focus and standard for so long. Now that it has come to everyone’s attention that there can be more than one spotlight, the audience is still widely afraid to look at the new center of attention, and the spotlight technicians are afraid of losing their jobs if they aren’t on constant lookout. Both teams have their reasons for being afraid to look at each other. I think, though, it wouldn’t be so frightening if each of the players on stage looked at themselves first.

I’m sitting underneath a set of fluorescent lights, a smoke detector, and a glowing green exit sign on the bottom floor of the music department. A saxophone player blows out arpeggios to the ticking of a metronome, which would almost seem romantic in a dimly-lit jazz lounge sort of way if I hadn’t just spent the last six hours with these concrete walls and linoleum floors. It’s another late night in the music building; the adrenaline and afterimages of bright stage lights from tonight’s performance of the contemporary music ensemble still hang in the air. I’m trying to figure out, between scales and broken thirds, if I’ve somehow been shunted into the reading, writing, and music playing I do by teachers or family or society at large.

My entire life, wherever I heard people lament the absence of girls in the math and science worlds, I felt like I needed to do something about it. The staunch individualism I’d learned at home that made it okay for my dad to be at home, my mom to be at work, and my interests to fall where they would also led me to develop a kind of strong contrariness for contrariness’ sake. My dad’s theme of being the different one showed up in a million ways as I grew up, and before throwing my lot in with the crowd, there’s always a slight moment of hesitation as I decide if I actually want to include myself, even if the crowd is unquestionably right and I agree with them. As teachers, news reporters, and sociologists waxed epic about this problem and inequity, I felt that I should be on the battleground, forging ahead.

But I hated math and science. I was in sixth grade when it dawned on me that I couldn’t be a fighter in this war. My nascent feminism ran into one of the orange brick walls of Mount Logan Middle School when I realized that I couldn’t help out by being the firefighter, the computer engineer, or the physicist. I’ve come to find that my words and my books are where I belong, and I’m happy here. I find meaning and purpose and direction in this small humanities department that I call mine. I fight the social critic in me that says I feel this way because I’ve convinced myself that I won’t ever have to win bread for my family. Memories of countless performances on stage with lights making halos around musicians’ heads and explosions of this organized sound we call music enveloping me from the inside out, of smiling at the intense concentration of my students, of reading Steinbeck and Ayn Rand late at night turn into my rebuttals to the arguments that want to pull me from where I belong. After this writing-induced period of self-inquiry, I decide that once you find the place you can fill by completely being yourself and can share what you find with the people around you for the benefit of everyone, that’s where you should be, regardless of your sex. The hard part will not only be letting people trust themselves enough to dive into what they can do, but showing that the people who do go against the traditional grain can make it and be happy at the same time.

I smile, and let this argument rest, as my words echo down the hallway with the rattle of saxophone keys.

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