I had a lot of interesting conversations this week about last week’s post on “that crazy girl, who was mental” so I’m returning to the theme. Being sent interesting stories and anecdotes is my favourite thing to happen after I write something. Once this happened with a piece I wrote about gossip. A load of people emailed me all the gossip they had heard. I felt like a priest but with none of the lifestyle restrictions; it was brilliant.
This time women sent me messages with their own stories of the times they had been manoeuvred into the role of the crazy girl, and I got a lot of related dispatches from the dating world, including stories of men acting fairly unhinged (as in truly quite feral) and being indulged because the woman involved had the good grace to accept that sometimes fancying someone does make you go a bit loopy.
Also men messaged to say thank you for saying that men are scared to talk about their feelings, and that they often don’t have anyone to talk to about them with, even if they weren’t scared.
A lot of men seem absolutely terrified to talk publicly about their problems, and the ways in which gender constructs and patriarchal ideals weigh on them too, at the minute, lest they come off as an incel, a tradcath, or someone who secretly thinks Andrew Tate’s agenda is either sympathetic or cool.
And, at the same time, whenever these topics (of Andrew Tate or the incels or the like) come up, a lot of the men who do feel comfortable voicing their views basically just start talking rubbish.
They’ll say girls are doing better in school and teenage boys are frustrated and anxious because of it. To me this sounds like a parent’s anxiety projected onto a child. What teenage boy even notices that girls are doing slightly better in their maths A Levels on average these days? I mean, have you met teenage boys?
Or they’ll say that advances in feminism have made young women so employable and well paid that men are no longer needed as breadwinners and, thus, young men feel lost and purposeless. Even leaving aside the sorry state of feminist progress as it stands today (the fact that abortion was banned in many states in the US last year, for example, or that statutory maternity leave in the UK is still only 6 weeks before a substantial pay cut). The reality is most young people I know (of any gender identity) pay the bulk of their salary to rent a bedroom in a house share or alternatively shack up within a few months of dating to split living costs. Not too many young women are living like Carrie Bradshaw these days; in a financial climate which has us all living on top of each other this strident female independence has yet to materialise.
All this is anecdotal, but then this entire topic is always discussed in anecdotal terms. And because of my status in my wider friendship group as a sort of “person who will listen to things and not wig out or be judgemental”/“person who is often doing weird or not particularly commendable things themselves so is hardly likely to be pious” I talk to a lot of men (and women) in their 20s and 30s about their problems. I have to say this breadwinner anxiety never comes up. It’s possible they just don’t tell me, but to be frank I’ve heard a lot of stuff which is far more embarrassing so I think it’s unlikely.
There might be some young men who feel emasculated by not being able to provide for their girlfriends, but most of the ones I know have mothers who work, so I’m unsure where they’d even have gotten the idea they should be a breadwinner from. The concept of a single salary supporting an entire family has not been a widespread reality for a long time.
Another thing that the “men who do feel comfortable speaking” often say to explain the incels is that mainstream feminism is preoccupied with the oppression and struggles of young women only, at the cost of young men. I don’t think this is fair to the many, many women who are bending over backwards to have a conversation which is broader and more nuanced. This piece by Laura Bates (a typical mainstream feminist response to Andrew Tate) is a good demonstration of the fact that the opposite is true.
I suppose this is a good example of the “people who feel most comfortable speaking are often the ones who should be doing the least of the talking” thing.
But anyway, back to the anecdotes, and one which stuck out to me because I found it hilarious.
I was having lunch with a friend and he said he’d enjoyed the crazy girl post, and then he went: “I did actually know a girl who was crazy, in that way. But we all loved her for it!”
I started saying: “No she wasn’t!! I bet she wasn’t! Men always say women are crazy for doing normal things.”
But we had also just been talking about that thing where you’re talking to someone in a friendly conversation and then they spin round and try to catch you out for being problematic over a bad faith semantic point (“oh so you think x” about a thing you don’t think and also didn’t say), even though they know, from all your other conversations, that you hold basically the same young-degree-holder-who-lives-in-a-city progressive views as they do. And how it makes you feel cagey and hectored and railroads the conversation for no reason. So I told him to tell the story anyway.
So the girl he knew, he said, had recently been dumped, and was sitting around the pub moping to her friends (a group which includes my friend), saying she’d tried everything to make it work, and now he wouldn’t even take her calls, she didn’t want to let it go but felt she had run out of options, and so on.
Someone said: “Well have you tried phoning him and pretending your house has been broken into and you’re terrified, and asking for him to come round and help?” She said she hadn’t. He said: “Well if you haven’t tried that you haven’t really tried EVERYTHING have you?” She said she’d try it later; nobody took her seriously.
But, sure enough, that evening she made the pretend terrified call. The ex agreed to come around and rushed over. When he arrived she said she thought she had startled the potential burglar off, but couldn’t bear to be in the house alone. She asked if the ex could sleep on the sofa. He agreed and, well, in the heightened and dangerous-feeling atmosphere, one thing led to another. The ex boyfriend ended up joining her upstairs.
“Ok fair enough,” I said. “That is pretty crazy. How did it end? Did he ever speak to her again when he found out?”
Indeed he did, said my friend. They stayed together for another year. The ex-boyfriend-turned-boyfriend-again found out it had all been a ruse a few months down the line and considered it funny by that stage.
“And we all loved her for it!” repeated my friend, beaming.
So there you go, it takes all sorts. Sometimes it pays to be the crazy girl, who actually was mental.
Till next time xxxxx
Some Things I Liked Lately:
The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury. I have laughed at least once at every page of this book so far and I’ve underlined way too much of it. Here is one example passage:
On her way to the counter Louise checked to make sure the [pregnancy test] package had a price tag, so the clerk would not take a sliver microphone and ask all over the store for a price check on the pregnancy test.
I went to see some paintings in an exhibition called Hinterland (A great theme, grouping together works exploring the wilderness, and rugged elements of the natural world. A lot of them have a slightly apocalyptic vibe, in a good way.) recently at the John Martin Gallery. You should go if you’re in London it’s really great. I went to see some paintings by Mircea Teleagă, an artist whose work I admire a lot, but there was lots of other cool stuff there. I’m kind of transfixed by this picture of the back of my head looking at one of his paintings.
That crazy girl, who actually was mental
I feel like there is potentially something more complex at play between that man and woman. (Granted I don’t know why he dumped her nor anything else that transpired.) And yes she lied. But did this shes-in-danger-i’m-a-brave-man situation make her freshly appealing? Did this awaken the inner hero in him and reignite his masculinity?