#newstateman

The truth is that most men in their teens and twenties have not yet learned to treat women like human beings, and some never do. It’s not entirely their fault. It’s how this culture trains them to behave, and in spite of it all, there are a few decent, kind and progressive young men out there who are looking for truly equal partnerships with women.  The trouble is that there aren’t enough of them for all the brilliant, beautiful, fiercely compassionate women and girls out there who could really do with someone like that in their lives. Those men are like unicorns. If you meet one, that’s great. You might think you’ve met one already—I’ve often thought so—but evidence and experience suggest that a great many unicorns are, in fact, just horses with unconvincing horns. If you don’t manage to catch a real unicorn, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. Either way, you should have a plan B.

“In patriarchal culture,” as Bell Hooks observes in All About Love: New Visions, “men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands.”  Women, by contrast, learn from an early age that love is work. That in order to be loved, we will need to work hard, and if we want to stay loved we will need to work harder. We take care of people, soothe hurt feelings, organise chaotic lives and care for men who never learned to care for themselves, regardless of whether or not we’re constitutionally suited for such work. We do this because we are told that if we don’t, we will die alone and nobody will find us until an army of cats has eaten all the skin off our faces. Little boys are told they should “get” girlfriends, but they are not encouraged to seriously consider their future roles as boyfriends and husbands. Coupledom, for men, is not supposed to involve a surrendering of the self, as it is for women. Young men do not worry about how they will achieve a “work-life balance”, nor does the “life” aspect of that equation translate to “partnership and childcare”. When commentators speak of women’s “work-life balance”, they’re not talking about how much time a woman will have, at the end of the day, to work on her memoirs, or travel the world, or spend time with her friends. “Life”, for women, is envisioned as a long trajectory towards marriage. “Life”, for men, is meant to be bigger than that.

I think that it’s usually better for women to be single. Particularly young women. Particularly straight young women. Not just ‘alright’, not just ‘bearable’—actively better.  Nothing frustrates me so much as watching young women at the start of their lives wasting years in succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men who were only ever looking for a magic girl to show off to their friends, a girl who would in private be both surrogate mother and sex partner. I’ve been that girl. It’s no fun being that girl. It’s not that her dreams and plans don’t matter, but they always matter slightly less than the boy’s, because that’s what boys are taught to expect—that their girlfriend is there to play a supporting role in their life. *********************** Today, whatever else we are, women are still taught that we have failed if we are not loved by men. I’ve lost count of the men who seem to believe that the trump card they hold in any debate is “but you’re unattractive”. “But I wouldn’t date you.” How we feel about them doesn’t matter. Young women are meant to prioritise men’s romantic approval, and young men often struggle to imagine a world in which we might have other priorities. The trouble is that in order to win that approval, we are supposed to lessen our power in every other aspect of life. We are supposed to downplay our intelligence, to worry if we have more financial or professional success than our partner. We can be creative and ambitious, but never more so than the men in our lives, lest we threaten them. And there are so men that are worth making that sort of sacrifice for. When I’ve spoken critically about this monolithic ideal of romantic love in the past, most of the pushback I’ve received has been from men, some of it violent, and no wonder. Men usually have far more to gain from this sort of traditional arrangement. Men are allowed to think of romantic love as a feeling, an experience, a gift that they expect to be given as a reward for being their awesome selves. That sounds like a great deal to me. I wouldn’t want that challenged.