Against the gender wars

Up close again

There have been many social media posts by women decrying straight men and heterosexuality and so on over the past few weeks. And this trend has been going on far longer than that. In an essay in the NYT on this trend Marie Solis wrote: “In the last year alone there has been an explosion of young women who say they are deleting dating apps, whose market value has plummeted; female celebrities (among others) who have taken vows of celibacy or identify as “self-partnered”; divorce memoirs by older millennial and Gen X women expressing profound disillusionment with heterosexual marriage; and trends like “boysober,” which preaches the virtues of “decentering men” to focus on self-improvement and platonic relationships.” I have been thinking about all this for a little while.

(I read this substack by Magdalene J. Taylor too on this trend. I liked her piece and basically agree with much of what she says. But she didn’t say lots of the things I have been thinking about and we don’t write the same way. This is not to say her thinking is underdeveloped. Just that we all, naturally, have different perspectives and approaches. Anyway, that was a piece I liked. Here is a different essay I hope you will find interesting.)

I have written a good deal about heterosexuality and the popular discourse around heterosexuality over the years. There are lots of reasons for this. One is, to put it bluntly, I’m not queer. I am a heterosexual woman, these matters concern me. Another is I tend to gravitate towards writing about messy subjects. A little while ago I wrote an essay for Slate about the manner in which women were being encouraged to relay our dating experiences at that time. This was around the era of The Crane Wife and a good tactic for going viral at that time was to write a polemic bad date or bad boyfriend essay which drew allusions to the universal relatability of your experience.

The message of these essays and posts was: I had no choice to be in a relationship I found unsatisfactory. None of us do. My boyfriend went out on my birthday with his colleagues and I just went to the restaurant we had booked by myself and cried. Later I smiled and asked him about his day while he drank beer, like a good woman. And this is all heterosexuality can ever be. He dumped me.

One thing that bothered me about this trend was the framing of women as inherently docile, even servile, and lacking agency, living lives centered entirely around men. This did not feel like an accurate depiction of many of the women I see around me every day, or even the women I know in my mum’s or grandma’s generation. That essay was provocative at the time so I was pleased with the broadly generous response. Similarly when I wrote about the Crane Wife. I remember I got a small amount of stuff saying I was trying to be a “pick me” or a “Cool Girl” from the monologue in Gone Girl. I read that monologue again, as I do whenever I see it referenced:

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

What a ghastly figure. And what a terrible presentation of men too, all beer swilling video game dudes. For the record nothing could be a worse description of me. I complain constantly for a start. I complain about the temperature all the time. Men hate this. I always wear inappropriate footwear and then I complain about that. I hate team sports. I hate poker. I hate dirty jokes and video games. I hate burping and farting. I even hate references to these things. I do eat pizza but I am not a size 2.

But I understand that the aesthetic preferences are not really the point here. The point is that the Cool Girl is hot and servile to men. This is, to my mind, exactly the mode of being which is described in the “bad boyfriend” essays. The behaviour of the women here is the same. The difference is that the Cool Girl is triumphant and the “bad boyfriend” woman is, in hindsight, regretful. You can imagine the Cool Girl going through a bad break up and then reflecting on her experiences similarly. But this is a change of circumstances more than a change of perspective, a temporal shift rather than an attitudinal one.

What struck me when reading the Cool Girl monologue again last week actually was the aesthetics. The brashness of the Cool Girl, probably in white denim hotpants. How outdated she feels now. Her vivacity, the video games, the laughter. This all feels outdated too. When I think of that line “they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want” my mind jumps immediately to the Trad Wife. A beautiful, demure, pristine woman who lives a life orientated around keeping a beautiful home and having as many beautiful babies as possible for her worshiped husband. A woman so dead-eyed I would rather be trapped in a lift with the Cool Girl than spend a coffee date with her. I don’t need to say that, ten years on from the Cool Girl, the Trad Wife is a regressive development. And who knows what she will have evolved into, ten years from now.

Set against these modes of servility I have to say I feel cheered by the recent displays and performances of anger and man hating. (I am not implying that this is the only time in history that either of these trends have happened but things go in cycles. I am interested in the cycles.) Even though I don’t exactly relate to them. Of course I feel a great deal of anger too, towards certain men, about certain situations. There are some interactions I have, as a woman living in the world with men, which actually feel designed to make me hate men as a collective. So much so that I have come to suspect some of these interactions are probably designed with this idea in mind. But in the weeks since the US election I have been thinking a lot about how some of the sweetest and kindest friendships in my life are with straight men. A lot of those are with women too. But I have never had a friendship circle that looks like one big girl gang. In my early twenties I used to think this was due to a personality defect of mine. Then I realised I had never tried to make a big girl gang, probably because I didn’t really want one. This is the kind of friendship advertised on lots of TV shows. Is it generally the way friendship works in real life?

You don’t see those Crane Wife style essays anymore. I doubt something like that would get the same response now. I don't think it is fashionable anymore, among young progressive women, to advertise how stoically you endured a substandard heterosexual relationship. Or to present this as a heroic endeavour. The trendy thing now is to be “just soooo done” with men. Just done! I can sense that the weary, passive resignation of heteropessimism is taking on a spikier shape, becoming more charged and purposeful. Why do I feel cheered by these posts if I don’t relate? Because resignation is passive and anger is active. Anger is an expression of a will for change. And I have never believed that substandard heterosexual relationships are something we should just put up with or endure.

There are less vitriolic sentiments, smaller things I notice too. I recently read another piece about how bad dating is in London presently. These are common. Exhaustion with heterosexual dating seems widespread. The author of that piece had posted online asking for stories, a normal method journalists use these days. I also do this. Although I noticed when she did so she said she needed to talk to men especially, because she has no straight male friends. She was saying this proudly. This is not a unique post, this is a trend too. It is a statement of defiance, almost, to have no male friends. A sign you don’t put up with any nonsense. You are above pleasing men! As if a real adult friendship would ever be as one sided as this.

I know this is just online. And I know many of the women who share these things and even who post them are not doing so totally earnestly. Or maybe they feel earnest right in that moment but less so on reflection. One of the best descriptions of the way people behave online I have ever heard was from a young man I know. I was asking him why a certain challenge where you pour ketchup all over your face was big on TikTok. “That’s how you go viral this week,” he explained, with no irony. A perfect, succinct description of the way so much of life works now. If putting ketchup all over your face is the way to get attention this week or month then lots of people will indeed go and pour ketchup all over their face.

But get away from online. Go out into the world and talk to people and this anger is in the air. Talk to young women. Talk to young men. (God forbid.) I know a lot of straight young men who tell me dating is a minefield at the minute, from their perspective. They tell me lots of stories about this anger. They can detect it radiating, buzzing around. I don’t think these specific men deserve this specific anger. (If someone arrives at a first date angry, that feels more about a general complaint than an individual one to me.) But their stories remind me of something I saw a long time ago that I think of often.

There was a boy in my primary school class who nobody wanted to be friends with. His life at that time was a series of constant rejections and myriad cruelties, big and small. He was always left out of everything. In any situation where people were being picked for teams or groups he would be last. If we played a game about who would marry who and someone got his name they would scream. Once I remember he took someone’s pencil case and took all the pens and pencils out of it and then cut the pencil case up and left it back on their table, shredded to ribbons with all their pencils and pritt-stick rolling around beside it.

The person he chose to do this to was random. She was not one of the children who had led the charge against him. She had just meekly gone along with it, as we basically all had. Of course he chose a girl, a quiet girl. Another soft target. But when people are down they often do kick another soft target. I don’t think he did it for revenge. The pencil case was easily replaced. I think he had been treated badly and he was in pain and he wanted to make a statement about that for all of us to see. It was a futile gesture, of course. The bullying continued, even worse than before, now that he had done something to make himself seem deserving of it. But I suppose if he wanted to teach us a lesson it worked on at least one of us. I think of that shredded pencil case all the time.

This anger on first dates, and the performances of anger on social media, reminds me of the pencil case because that is what it looks like to me: A statement of pain rather than a solution. I know this can be read as an affront. Why can’t the person who has been treated badly be angry? Of course they can. And I actually think they should. And they should sit with that for a while. And if it feels helpful to publicise that anger then do so. Post about how much men suck on social media. Make TikToks about it. Turn up to dates angry. But after a while of this we need to think about what a way forward might look like. And about the kind of lives and relationships we might want.

Over the past decade the warped version of identity politics which grew popular online made a hero out of the performatively, stridently unreasonable and uncooperative figure. (I think we are at the end of that era now.) The person who was JUST DONE! Who said JUST NO. But the problem with “just no” is so what? You aren’t playing, ok. But what then? The day after the US election I was talking to an older liberal man at a party. I mentioned the episode of Joe Rogan I had been listening to earlier that week. I thought it was interesting to know what such a popular person is saying, anthropologically at least. He reacted in this aghast manner. He declared: “I would never listen to that!” I wanted to say: “Well congratulations. Write your address down here in my notebook. I will have them send your medal in the post.” Because what does a statement like this do other than seek affirmation that you are good and right thinking? Ok yes, you’re a good and right thinking person. But what then?

There was a great piece by Jia Tolentino which opened with the line: The two big genders are said to be at war. A great first line. Provocative and arresting, and the piece was far more nuanced than that line of course. But I read that line and thought: Oh no, I don’t want to be at war with men. I don’t want to have an angry, hostile and combative relationship with men. I want us to have friendships and to have good sex and fall in love and all the rest of it. The thing is, if women and men literally are at war then women lose. I think we all know that.

I have thought a lot about that post about having no male friends. My first (uncharitable) thought when I saw it was: “Well of course dating isn’t much craic then. How are you going to date someone you wouldn’t countenance being friends with?” I decided to put that thought down here because, as I said about the angry posts, I think it is useful for all of us to see something of each other's various frustrations relating to this subject. That initial reaction morphed into a softer idea: Maybe that is actually where this problem starts.

There was something in that substack I shared by Taylor which I did not quite agree with. She wrote: “Most people want things to be normal.” Or I suppose it is not exactly that I don’t agree. I do hope this is true. But I do not think it means this anger and pain, among young men as well as young women, is a marginal position. We seem to have gotten to a point where men feel like aliens to a lot of young women and vice versa.

We could all go and look at all the data on this, just like Nate Silver. But I think writers can tend to forget what data actually is, in a context like this. (Not me, I come from the hard sciences where we don’t believe sociology is real anyway). Remember data is just information about people, and their opinions and their lives, which has been abstracted and condensed down into a format that makes sense on a spreadsheet. I don’t think more abstraction, more distance, is the answer here. Or it can not be the whole answer. We are not spreadsheets. I think we need to find a way for those of us who feel angry and in pain and alienated to see each other up close again. To see each other's disappointments and frustrations and hopes and dreams and sadness. All the small, pathetic things that make up another person's life. Which are never so different from our own.

Till next time xxxx