Breaking The Glass Ceiling

Southern women are different. That is a fact. It is not posturing or hyperbole. It is less about vanity than self-respect, a crucial distinction often lost on non-Southerners. When a Southern woman fusses over her appearance, it does not reflect insecurity, narcissism, or some arrested form of antifeminism that holds back the sisterhood. Southern women are postfeminist. The whole issue is a nonstarter. Why pretend the world is something it isn’t?

The reason Southern women take care of themselves is simple. Southern women like being women. We’ve always known that anything a man can we can do better because we usually do it wearing heels. The difference to our other geographical sisters is we are also smart enough to recognize what works in our favor. A Southern man knows that women are their intellectual superiors. Why? Because their mama said so. Because of this relationship, southern women are sympathetic to their men and allow them credibility to define their roles. In a society that painfully requires new approaches to masculinity, we are just fine with our men being men.

When Yankee Candle introduced a scent called “Riding Mower” recently, as part of a line of products it calls “Man Candles,” it was evident that, despite the world’s strides toward gender neutrality, there persists an impermeable divide. Southerners still hold to, and seem to insist on, the difference between men and women. We allow manliness to still operate in a society that has no legitimate place for it. I call it the grass ceiling.

At the home of the nuclear family next door, the grass is often kept tidy by the man of the house. He may mow while his wife trains for a weekend marathon of soccer games while managing to cook, clean, and keep children alive all at the same time, but there he is, the family's lawn ranger, marching back and forth, intensely studying his straight lines. Afterward, he'll fire up the grill, or perhaps drive the family for ice cream. These are the last permissible acts of sexism: mowing, grilling, and piloting the family car with the wife in the passenger seat. These are allowable offenses, the soft sexism that's still okay, even in a nation that is too easily offended. After all, they're the ones doing the "chore" that deposits them in the sun, breathing the fresh air all while enjoying the admiration of neighbors. These are tender bones we throw to comfort the men we love.

These small acts of manliness — testosterone shots if you will — are important to prevent the collapse of the collective male ego. Already weakened by decades of feminism, it grows more delicate each year, as more and more things that used to be the stuff of men are mass-produced in pink hues. Sure, you can buy a hammer and wrench decorated in daisies, but at what emotional cost to your brother?

Oh, but there is a legitimate place still: the lawn, where waits the splendor of the grass. Of all domestic chores, lawn mowing is the most pleasurable and fulfilling, the only one with a fragrance worthy of candles. No one inhales rapturously over a wick of a freshly cleaned toilet, now do they? Now don’t get me wrong, I seeded, weeded, and mowed the yard for years post-divorce, but I never enjoyed it. I had to face facts that if I waited for the Grass Fairy to visit, I would have dandelions growing out of my kitchen cabinets.

A strong Southern woman loves a man's strength and still values it. She doesn’t want a guy to sacrifice who they are so she can look good. She actually enjoys an equal match; someone who has as much strength as she does, and there is nothing wrong with allowing your partner to play a particular role in your relationship especially when it is something they enjoy doing.

The John Deere tractor has yet to be feminized, and should not be, out of simple compassion. Until the day someone can come up with a plan to design a lawnmower that doubles as a margarita machine, I am just fine allowing my husband to move the lawn. All eight acres of it.