Gynophobia

I was taking one of the company shuttles back from a meeting, and was chatting with the driver to fill the time. She was from Chile, and she'd told me that she'd met her husband while she was visiting the United States, and stayed after marrying him. Then she asked me how I'd met my wife. I told her that I wasn't married, and then she asked me if I was a divorcé. I told that, no, I'd never been married.

"Afraid of women?" she asked.

I chuckled. There was a phrase that I hadn't heard in a long, long, time. It reminded me that Latin America is still a more socially conservative place, by in large, than the United States. I found myself wondering if that concept even still existed in the United States, and so I quickly Googled a couple of variations. Nada, except for perhaps a couple of articles about "fear of commitment."

Personally, I'd always thought that "being afraid of women" was something like "confirmed bachelor," in that it was social code for homosexual men at a time when homosexuality wasn't commonly spoken of. This would explain why the concept has more or less disappeared from the American social consciousness. Homosexual men can openly have relationships, and even marry, and so the don't need the coded descriptors anymore.

But in much the same way that the link between a "confirmed bachelor" and a homosexual man isn't intuitive to me (I tend to think of it as intentional bachelorhood, in the sense of simply choosing to remain single), the phrase "afraid of women" doesn't immediately strike me as being related to homosexuality. Instead the first thing that comes to mind is a literal fear of women. And so, back in the day, I'd always found the idea confusing.

Because women, as a whole, could be a lot of things, but, generally, scary wasn't one of them. Sure an individual woman, especially if angry and/or armed, could certainly be frightening, but the idea that one would find women in general to be scary never made any sense to me. One of the prices for being single, however, was to forever be accused of being, essentially, a coward. Whether it was fear of commitment, of rejection or of meeting someone who wouldn't simply roll over on demand, I remember being told that I was afraid of this, that or the other time and time again, whenever I'd forgotten that I was supposed to keep the fact that I was intentionally single a secret. (Or, I simply couldn't hide the fact anymore.) For a time, the constant accusations of cowardice were infuriating. (I think perhaps I understood then, as I understand now, that no one was calling me a coward out of concern for my well-being.) But when I moved from Chicagoland to the Puget Sound, it pretty much stopped. Why that was, I'm not sure. Perhaps it had something to do with being in a social circle that had many more single people in it, or maybe I had aged enough past the common age of first marriage that people figured that nothing was going to change.

Thinking back on this morning, I know that it was the more literal part of my brain that parsed her phrasing, hence the chuckle, but now I wonder if she wasn't using the coded connotation. Who knows. In any event it was an interesting reminder of a time in my life that I'd nearly completely forgotten.