This is from
Worldhum.com and is written by Rolf Potts.
Let’s pretend, for purely rhetorical purposes, that I—an American male journalist—wrote a travel book about a quest for sensuality and spiritual growth. Let’s say that the plot of my book could be briefly summarized as follows:
Do you think American women would embrace this book and turn it into a bestseller? Or do you think American women would react with hostility at such a self-absorbed, culturally oblivious and vaguely sexist narrative? No doubt it would be the latter reaction—and I would be reduced to dodging rotten fruit at book readings.
Reverse the genders on this synopsis, however—turn the protagonist female—and you get the essential (if somewhat snarkily summarized) plot of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, the best-selling American travel narrative of the last couple years. Since an enthusiastic female readership has driven the success of “Eat, Pray, Love,” it’s tempting to conclude that women have serious double standards when it comes to defining acceptable behavior.
Of course, part of the reason Gilbert’s book is so popular is that she writes with charm and insight, even as she presents herself as an imbalanced and not entirely sympathetic narrator. What might be derided as a cliched and blatantly male “mid-life crisis narrative” seems honest and soulful when distilled through the sensibilities a woman. Through such a raw and fallible self-portrayal, Gilbert allows female readers to vicariously examine their own lack of satisfaction in their lives—and ponder how travel might bring them spiritual balance. (For men, who are less likely to empathize, reading “Eat, Pray, Love” is like traveling the world with a lovely and intelligent girlfriend who can’t stop talking about herself: You’ve come to admire this woman—and you wish the best for her—but you wish she’d stop yapping about emotional minutiae so you could both look out and enjoy the scenery from time to time.)
At this point, I could probably dust off some evolutionary psychology and examine all manner of male/female behavioral expectations, but I think this is less about behavior than the difference in how men and women read. In “Why We Read Fiction,” cognitive literary critic Lisa Zunshine argues that the pleasure of reading fiction is that it “lets us try on different mental states.” According to Zunshine, women read more novels than men do because novels explain people’s behavior through their feelings, beliefs, thoughts and desires. “They want to experience other ‘minds in action’—which is another way of defining ‘empathy’—much more than men do,” she writes.
Even though Zunshine was referring to fiction, the same idea could be applied to travel literature: In broad demographic terms, men like their travel protagonists to pursue outward journeys and physical challenges; women prefer the traveler’s inner journey, her emotional challenges. Thus, for those seeking a vicarious emotional experience, “Eat, Pray, Love” reads like a survival tale, every bit as harrowing and inspirational as a north-face ascent of K2.
So while Gilbert’s tale is nonfiction, the appeal of “Eat, Pray, Love” lies in its sense of fantasy. Around the middle of the 20th century, pulpy American men’s magazines published what has come to be known as “adventure porn”—breathlessly told tales that involved hairy-chested men fighting crocodiles, exploring rivers and surviving diseases in far-off lands. Women characters didn’t figure much in these stories, unless they were helpless victims, hot-blooded savage-vixens or hookers. Though this era of men’s travel writing has been ridiculed, these stories no doubt lent a sense of escape to the working stiffs who read them—men who weren’t likely to ever leave the country, but enjoyed the vicarious problem-solving that came with the pulpy adventure.
The legacy of “adventure porn,” I think, is not the kind of adventure writing you see in Outside magazine, but books like “Eat, Pray, Love.” Instead of wrestling crocodiles in distant lands, our protagonist wrestles despair; instead of exploring rivers, she explores emotions; instead of surviving disease, she survives heartbreak. Men occasionally appear in this survivor’s tale, but they are as one-dimensional as adventure-porn wenches, and mainly serve as a sounding board for the protagonist’s feelings. When these men are giving our heroine love and help, she gushes with admiration; when they can’t intuit her emotional needs, she reacts with despair (and vague contempt). Rarely does she ponder what—besides emotional availability to her—might motivate these men in day-to-day life.
Fortunately, I don’t think women read “Eat, Pray, Love” as a prescription for practical behavior. As with adventure porn, the pleasure of reading lies in its vicarious problem solving—the passive joy of projecting yourself into the protagonist’s shoes, pondering how you might hold up from situation to situation, and hanging on for the happy ending.
Call it “travel porn for women.” Just don’t expect me to relate.
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I think that this perspective is spot-on. He goes on to mention that once upon a time men who were stuck in their respective jobs read adventure porn the same way that women read this book: to escape from their hole-in-the-wall lives the same way that men from the fifties escaped theirs to "civilize the natives" and seduce a few of the white women caught on the wrong side of the cultural divide.