Dear Carol,

I have a question that's not so much about sex, but I still need some info. It's a relationship question, I guess. My boyfriend (I've been with him for a few months) tells me that I'm not as feminine as other women he's been with because I don't keep minute track of where he is and who he's with all the time. He says "real women" do that, and while I don't think he's trying to get me to bug him about where he goes when he's not with me, he does think it's a big enough deal to talk about it.

Am I a failure at being "girly" because I'm too laid back? Please help!

--Girlene

Dear Girlene,

Oh. My. Goodness.

Your boyfriend appears to be judging the world as a big sex-role-stereotyped place, probably judging from his own past experience. He's partly right, in that plenty of women *do* micro-manage their mates, apparently including any and all of his exes. That, or he has a secret fetish for *being* the jealously-observed object of a gal's attention, and he is trying to goad you into embodying his idea of micro-manage-y perfection. My advice: Don't take the bait! Instead, let's deconstruct this a little bit.

Because, as you already know in some corner of your soul, your boyfriend is also completely full of it. No offense meant, but he's not only committing a very common and very big relationship faux pas, namely, judging the person in front of him through the lens of a person who's already split -- he's also giving you negative reinforcement for a quality that many other men (and women) you might choose to date would totally, completely value. You're not a jealous, nosy maniac! Hey, in most people's book, this is a really big plus.

It's a plus, and I bet that if you polled heterosexual guys and asked for qualities they'd cherish in a girlfriend, this very quality would rate high. Is your boyfriend perhaps one of those people who only really feels loved when his partner is breathing down his neck? Or he can't trust himself to be true unless he enlists your very active participation in keeping tabs on him? If he has a preference for this behavior, I suppose you can learn to do it, but get him to request it specifically, please, not pester you into doing it. That's just not a good way to communicate in a relationship, even if the underlying idea being communicated is the very key to someone's happiness. It's passive-aggressive, and the reason you seem uneasy about it is that it's neither appropriate nor clear.

Then there's the gendered part: implying that you're not being feminine. There are several ways to approach this as we deconstruct your issue. First, we might wonder why it matters how feminine you are. (He seems to be into you in other ways, so is it actually a big deal?) We might say the obvious, as I did above: Nonsense. Not all women, or even most women, do this, so it can't be a basic definition of femininity. And of course, there's the gender deconstruction method I use whenever any type of sexism may be rearing its head: Is this behavior really gender-linked? In other words, I ask myself: If it's true that women do it, do men do it as well?

So using this standard of inspection, it seems clear that your boyfriend doesn't read "Dear Abby," because that column is very often full of women's letters talking about their very own jealous, micro-manage-y male partners. In fact, many men respond this way to female partners (and to male partners as well). So what are they being: feminine?

Bosh. They're being jealous, micro-manage-y *people*. They're being non-gender-role-defined *humans* with a particular relationship twist. And while it's true that this quality (and many others) can be expressed in gendered ways, the behavior is neither masculine nor feminine.

Feel better, girly-girl? Now sit that man down and ask him if he's really hinting that he wants to be spied on when he stops for a beer after work. Does he only feel desired when you're hitting "redial" on his cell phone? Or does he wish you'd wear a garter belt to bed, and he settled on some far-distant way of talking about feminine qualities? In which case, tell him to communicate *directly*, please. And by the way, I've known a few manly men who looked *hot* in a garter belt. Suggest to your boyfriend that he stop trying to view and judge the world in masculine and feminine categories. He might be surprised at how many excellent *people*, with diverse and unpredictable qualities, he finds all around him.