Sex and Money

Sigmund Freud is supposed to have said something like this: I know what a man wants – love and work. But what does a woman want? Well, duh, Sigmund. A woman also wants love and work.  

This is a story I tell my students when we read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, a novel that explores the relationships between men and women.

To illustrate the point, I divide the class into boys and girls, and ask each group first to come up with the top ten things a woman wants. When each group has its list, I write them up on the board. Then I ask each group to make a list of the top ten things a man wants, and I write those lists up on the board, too. This activity produces 40 items and a lot of giggling. Everybody likes to talk about the differences between men and women, especially adolescents, who are just wading into the swamp. Like Freud, everybody seems to agree on what men want, if not on specific rankings. There’s considerable disparity between the two genders when it comes to what women want. When the laughter dies down, I ask the students to look at the 40  items and find common ground – what do both men and women want? Usually, it boils down to two things: sex and money.  

I’m not surprised that teenagers choose to use the word “sex” instead of  “love.” Sadly, any high school kid talking sincerely about love leaves himself or herself wide open to ridicule, at least in public.

What concerns me more is the substitution of “money” for “work.” I’ve done this exercise with several different classes, and out of the hundreds of items on the various lists, no one has ever come up with anything like “an interesting job,” or “a fulfilling career.” When I ask them about it, my students seem puzzled that anyone would consider work an end in itself, something that gives pleasure or pride. To them, work means a painful or boring task, something to be completed as quickly as possible in order to move on to the finer things in life.  

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