FED UP WITH MEN 🖕 (pt.🖕🖕)

A quick check-in

In our last post, I’d been talking about an interaction I’d had at a local tube station, where a woman chastised me for being a selfish asshole (even if she was right, there’s no way she could have known it at that point, which gives me the moral high-ground). My crime, apparently, was that I hadn’t helped her carry her stroller down the stairs, and I’d therefore failed to fulfill my gentlemanly obligations. (In my defense, though, when I’d arrived to the top of the stairway at street level, she was already on the last step; I’d have had to sprint down and rip the stroller out of her hands if I’d wanted to get involved.)

In light of that, I’d been reflecting about how things have become quite confusing nowadays. One person’s “chivalry” is another person’s “infantilization”; what one person sees as “friendliness”, another sees as “creepiness”, etc. At this point, anyone who’s remotely clued-in has had it drilled into them that, if in doubt, your best bet is to just leave people alone. (Or so I’d assumed, until I ran into the stroller lady.)

This general shift is obviously a response to decades/centuries of oppressive social norms. But at this point I think it’s safe to say there’s been an overcorrection: risk-aversion and misanthropy has bled into aspects of our lives where it’s deeply unhelpful. The baby (i.e. healthy, normal social behaviors) has been thrown out with the bathwater (all social interaction). It just so happens (incidentally, I’m sure!) that this shift has coincided with the rise of technology that’s designed to atomize people and make them distrustful of each other by allowing/incentivizing us to record and analyze each other at all times. People are pretty much compelled to become neurotic and self-conscious, in the knowledge that everything they do is under surveillance by the digital panopticon. There’s no room for mistakes (or so it seems, at least); in the end, the only safe bet is to just stay inside, where things feel under our control.

Unsurprisingly, young people are having a lot of trouble figuring out how to proceed: they either become intimidated by other people, resentful of them, or both. There have been a bunch of studies on this: way over 50% of men say they haven’t approached a woman within the last year. Less than a quarter of men have even approached one. (For the record, I’m not saying I would have hit on the pram-lady¹, we’re just using her to talk about the broader point.)

On the other side, things are just as confusing. About 70% of women say they’d like to be approached more—but then you come across this gender wars slop/rage-bait, like the “Would You Rather Be Stuck in the Woods With a Man, or a Bear??” debate, that racks up millions of views, with many, if not the majority, of the “votes” being vocally on the side of “bear”².

It’s clear that there’s some very serious cognitive dissonance being wrestled with here. Because everyone is performing; obsessed with having the right opinions—and, more importantly, being seen to have the right opinions—a rift inevitably forms between what people actually want/think and what they feel obligated to say they want/think (this applies to politics, relationships, or anything else.) In the end, the tension can become so severe that it fries our brains, resulting in a pretty incoherent worldview: a cocktail of desperation and loneliness and frustration and self-loathing, which we end up projecting onto unwitting strangers… and this of course elicits exactly the sort of negative responses we’d assumed we’d get beforehand. A self-fulfilling—but of course self-defeating—prophecy.

This—ad absurdum—is what we saw from the tube-station lady. I read into this a bit more, and found a good piece on the issues of modern dating/relationships by J Sanilac; she talks about how a lot of women have been shunted into an ultimately self-defeating position she terms “aggressive indifference”.

Aggressive indifference to the desires of the opposite sex sounds contrary to nature. But it's pervasive among women today nonetheless. That's because three ingredients — self-defense from unattainable ideals, modern ideology about independence, and the pornographically escalated desire to be dominated that we've just discussed — have accidentally mixed together into a poisonous cocktail. This cocktail intoxicates women with the feeling that not caring about men's desires is the ideal feminine attitude, and one that they ought to pursue deliberately.

Given that reproduction/finding a worthy mate is literally the most important thing for humans, or any living organism, to do, you’d think that people would be impervious to attempts to make them act against their own interests in this, if no other, aspect of their lives. Not so. It turns out we’re just as susceptible on this front as we are when it comes to, say, shopping for a new pair of shoes.

The dating apps epitomize this. Surely, this would be the one arena where outright disdain for the opposite sex would be so self-defeating that it would not exist. Anyone who can’t even manage to present a facade of friendliness (let alone sex appeal), even just in service of trying to elicit a “match” or a message to satisfy their own vanity, would surely not even bother to make an account in the first place; they’d be wasting their own time, as much as their perceived enemies’. You wouldn’t show up at a speed-dating night and intentionally piss your pants in the parking lot before heading inside. “I’m going to ward off any men who might have gotten the idea that I was going to hook up with them tonight. That’ll show ‘em.” And yet, the online equivalent is rampant; half of the “bio” sections are things like:

• FED UP WITH MEN 🖕

• DON’T BOTHER MESSAGING, I WON’T RESPOND

• I DON’T CARE ABOUT THIS ACCOUNT/MY FRIENDS MADE IT FOR ME AS A JOKE

• I WILL PROBABLY LIKE YOUR DAD/YOUR DOG MORE THAN YOU

It seems like a lot of people have been tricked into a reverse-arms race where being a progressive/“modern” woman is inversely correlated to their opinion of men (and one’s interest in appealing to them).

Obviously, like with so many social movements, if you go back far enough you can see that the original intentions/concerns/advocates were perfectly legitimate. But once it goes mainstream, and becomes commodified, things get murkier: all sorts of unscrupulous actors jump onboard, using it as a vehicle/smokescreen/trojan horse to further their own interests (political, financial, or even just personal).

“You look great, babe! Us girls have got to stick together!”

These actors know that, because it’s a self-proclaimed “progressive” movement, it therefore receives an aura of moral infallibility; any dissenters are shamed/criticized (for being brainwashed, for being a self-hating traitor, etc). And so regular people (who may have perfectly valid concerns) end up figuring that it’s easier to just get along to go along.

Regardless of how you got there, though, at certain point you end up in a bizarre situation where you’ve got a critical mass of people cutting off their nose to spite their face. And this is bad news for any society that wants to, well, not collapse. We’ve become so atomized that we end up trusting nobody; seeing every interaction (especially with the opposite sex) as a zero-sum game that must be “won” at all costs.

This, but unironically 🔫

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So it’s important that we be discerning about who we get our ideas/opinions from—however empowering they may sound. As tough as it is, in a world of parasocial relationships with our favorite celebrities/thought leaders, we’ve got to remember that the they are far less morally/ideologically stringent than their public personas would have us believe.

An example: I was unlucky enough to hear a minute or so of a Call Her Daddy episode a few years ago. The host, a woman named Alex, was giving advice to a listener who’d written in or something, and was telling their millions of listeners (almost all of them young women, you’d have thought), with great authority/confidence, to get it into their heads that every man cheats, it’s just a matter of when; all you can do is cheat on them in advance, as a sort of preemptive strike.

Funnily enough, I then saw her at a hotel last summer, having dinner a couple of tables away. She was with a boyfriend (whom I’ve just looked up and learned is her husband). I wonder what’d changed. Is she still dispensing the same sort of advice? Is he aware of those episodes? Or can she invoke the classic podcaster defense of “I’m just a comedian/it’s just a stage persona; I don’t actually hold those views in real life.” In fairness, if I had a podcast deal worth a few hundred million that was contingent on getting/keeping an audience of jaded, lonely young women, I’d dispense the same sort of inflammatory advice, lest they go off and find a better use for their time than listening to me.

A good rule of thumb, I guess, re: this trojan horse/ulterior motive issue, is that, any time your social movement is being supported/echoed/propagated by billionaires and/or corporations, alarm bells should be ringing. (This means that it has been deemed not to be threatening to the status quo/entrenched power.) Anything that leads to more atomization/tribalism/activism-via-consumption is music to their ears.

If I were a corporation, for example, I’d be thrilled to promote the idea that the best way for a woman to empower herself would be to… dedicate herself to her career at my company, working herself to the bone for a few decades. (For good measure, I’d happily profess my indignation about the lack of female CEOs. I would maybe even add a couple of token women to the board/C-suite to dangle the carrot for the young women to focus on.)

Likewise, if I were a dating app company, I would be thrilled to help promote the idea that the best way for women to stick it to men would be to… try to emulate them when it comes to relationships/the dating “market”. I don’t care how/why people use my app, I just want them to use it, after all. And so I would want to create as few meaningful, steady relationships as possible. I’d want as many people as possible to be seeking short-term gratification, and if I could convince them that this was not selfish/destructive, and was in fact a form of empowerment/liberation, then all the better.

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. . .But you shouldn’t listen to me, I’m just a guy trying to deflect from the fact that I was an asshole to that poor single mother on the stairway. These posts are just a transcription of all the mental gymnastics I’ve been doing to try and avoid the truth. More on all this next time! Remember to subscribe/share ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

1. She wishes 💅🏻

2. I’m sure this is an outdated example at this point; regular tiktok users are encouraged to write in and get me up to speed on what the current gender war fuel is.