If men want to be a part of a female-led world, they're going to have to get emotional.
Last week someone sent me a social media post about how men don't marry women for sex or even love, but rather for security. The post goes on to talk about how women need to make a calm, safe environment for men, asserting that women should “aim to be the calm in his storm, the stability in his vision (of marriage), the respect in his heart.”
I’m not even sure exactly what they mean by those things… but the thing that bothered me the most is the implication that I should focus on making myself a certain way in order to get a man to marry me.
As a “woke” woman - or at least one seeking to be (I still can’t fathom how woke-ness became a bad thing), I refuse to assimilate the message that women should be striving to be anything FOR men - or for anyone else for that matter. Fundamentally, I don’t believe anyone should strive to make themselves a certain way for anyone else. I can completely get behind the idea of working on ourselves in order to be the best version of who we want to be. I can even support the idea of learning together to compromise in relationships when our partner might need something from us that we aren’t naturally inclined to give.
But, honestly, the suggestion that women need to make ourselves a certain way in order to be in a relationship isn’t my core point - because it isn’t news. That idea has been postulated to us for decades. Centuries, even. However, the number of women for whom that kind of messaging is falling on deaf ears IS newsworthy.
Women are collectively bucking the patriarchal relationship system and that reality has spawned loads of discussion about the “male loneliness epidemic”, the suggested reality that men fear dating woke women, and the societal upheaval in general that’s come from women opting out of dominance centered relationships.
In fact, I think if we look just a layer or so deeper we can see that the constant argument about who and how women should be for men - and who and how men should be for women - is a actually a collective identity crisis. The old paradigm of gender roles that suggested that men needed to protect and provide for women - and that women needed them to do so - is shifting and it seems as though it’s leaving everyone a little un-moored around how to be in relationships.
In the interest of full transparency I want to acknowledge that the person that sent me the aforementioned post was a woman, and a woman who came from the “old paradigm” generation. One in which women wanted - needed - to be protected and provided for. So it was just an obvious extension of that reality that they would need to make themselves into women that men would want to provide for and protect.
And while I wholeheartedly agree that things are shifting, I think the suggestion that the females of our species no longer need to be provided for and protected is a tad too simplistic. In fact, I want to suggest that at least some women do very much want to be protected and provided for - just not in the same way.
The woman who shared the social media post with me grew up in a very different world. One in which women had very little choice but to make themselves who they thought men wanted them to be in order to attract (and keep) a "good" man. One that would theoretically take care of her basic needs while she took care of the home and family. Collectively, we pretended it was love but more often than not - even from the very earliest iterations of the institution of marriage - it was not love. It was an economic transaction. Trying to make it about love actually complicated the situation horribly for women. The women of the following generation (mine) were raised to believe that it was possible to find a man that genuinely, deeply, loved us - and could provide a stable economic reality for us and our children. Which, at face value, doesn’t seem like such an impossible ask. But the truth is much more nuanced and thorny than the sweet fairy tale we were conditioned to believe. Especially now.
Men can’t necessarily provide for us. Given the various system changes that have been made over the last 40+ years, it’s quite literally impossible for the vast majority of men to wholly provide for a family. Even well educated men are struggling to find work that pays enough for them to support a family. There is currently no place in the US where an average wage job can cover the expenses for an average home. So either women have to work too, or the family has to live in poverty.
More poignantly - at least to my mind - is the reality that men can’t love us the way we were told they could. At least many men can’t. And the reason is because they were never taught to actually connect to their emotional selves. They were taught that their emotions made them weak, and that their inner world was not to be explored - much less lived in.
So, of course, the matrimonial narrative broke down. Men didn’t necessarily love their woman, they loved the version of life in which someone else took care of them. Emotionally, and physically. A partner that gave them the sexual gratification they needed, the emotional support they couldn’t give themselves, the physical care of cooking and cleaning and child rearing. They took their value in being the “king of their castle”; dominating their partner and their children, establishing rules, controlling resources, directing the subjects of their proverbial kingdom. They had to over-inflate their ego with the evidence of their awesomeness as dictated by their title or paycheck or the size of their house or the brand of their car in order to be valuable in the world. And they got bonus points if they could lift a small tractor over their heads and their wife was an ex-model that catered to their every whim.
Understandably, when their castle came tumbling down with the change in the economic structure - a system that eased the tax burden on the very wealthy and shifted it to the middle-class kings with middle class castles - their identity tumbled down along with it. As their delicate egos were eroded, they looked for escape into drugs or alcohol or video games - or they looked for validation in muscled bodies and the attention of other women. Or some combination of those things.
Meanwhile, women were left to pretend that we were really happy with dominating, condescending, controlling men who provided for us. We had to swallow our distaste for subverting our intelligence, dreams, inner wisdom, and desires in favor of what the great provider wanted. We had to accept the reality that while life with men was hard - even miserable in many cases - it would be harder without them.
Or we had to pretend that our love was so strong that we didn’t care about the fact that he couldn’t actually cover the grocery bill, or that we didn’t care that the house would soon be foreclosed, or that he had a wandering eye, or came home drunk, or didn’t come home at all. Because, love.
The system was setup so that women would be dependent on men (partners or fathers) to provide for us. So, in many cases, when the partner left or failed in his role as provider, the submissive woman was left to figure it out on her own. And since she’d been focused on her role as mother, she didn’t have the benefit of years of career experience to fall back on. Even if she had continued to work, she wasn’t paid as well as a man who had earned the exact same education and had the exact same amount of experience. For many women the choice was essentially to try to make herself desirable enough to “catch” another man - especially if she wanted a family - to whom she would have to be subservient, and on whom she’d have to stake all hers hopes and dreams, again.
I can see how women of previous generations may have wanted to be saved - saved from a life of poverty and only partial rights over themselves, their resources, and their lives. And, ironically, the only way to do that was to give those things up to a man - but, ideally, one they could trust to genuinely care for them. Exhausted as I am by taking care of myself (and, unfortunately all too often, the men in my life) I can see the appeal.
So of course women from previous generations felt they needed to be saved. By whom? Well, the only beings with any power, of course: white men. From what? Well, that’s the question that the women of my generation began to ask, and the answer began to change everything.
From WHAT do we need to be saved? The systems that gave men dominance over us. (And, unfortunately, the violence against us that is almost exclusively perpetuated by men.)
For me, this is the crux of why women are raging against men. Correction - not against men, but against a dependence on men. More specifically, we’re raging against systems that give us no choice; those which obligate us to be dependent on men.
As women begin to take back their power, realize that they too deserve to be the humans they want to be - not just the accessories their partners want them to be - we’re beginning to understand that we never really needed men in the first place. Men created the systems that oppressed us, and we can (to a rather significant degree, actually) simply opt out. You won’t pay us equally? Fine, we’ll live quite happily alone in studio apartments. You won’t give us rights over our own bodies? Fine, we’ll master masturbation and lock down your access to our bodies. (Sex was never as important to us as it seems to be to you guys anyway). You think we care if you won’t marry us? We’d actually rather vet a wonderful sperm donor with great genetics and raise our children with our girlfriends rather than have to prioritize your career and your sexual desires and try to keep the peace in order stay in your house. Because the truth is, we were told that “good” men would protect and provide for us. But they didn’t.
They understood “protection” as protecting us from the stranger (man) breaking into the house at night or the (male) thugs on the street that would attack us on the way to our cars.
They understood “providing” as providing enough money - for the mortgage and groceries and car payments and whatever else the family needed.
They failed miserably at protecting us because they can’t be by our side every minute of every day - so we had to learn to protect ourselves - from the other, dangerous MEN. They failed miserably at providing for us too - because the system failed them. Now, even with a decent job, they can’t provide for themselves AND a partner - much less a family.
So of course women are raging against men. Not even against men - against the SYSTEMS that made our dependence on them obligatory.
I keep hearing about how men are biologically oriented toward being protectors and providers, and that as “woke” women evolve to provide for and protect themselves, men don’t know what role they can play in our lives. But at least some women from my generation would still very much like to be saved; rescued from doing everything related to domestic life (which is 80% of life) ourselves, saved from the servitude to men and children that’s been asked of us for so long. Liberated from the patriarchal systems that continue to try to hold us down.
Which, of course, begs the question: what do the roles of (traditional, cis, hetero) men and women look like in a world in which women don’t need men to protect us, provide for us, or even help us procreate? A world in which women no longer need men to save us?
Well, I think I have at least AN answer. If men want to fulfill what they claim to be their biologically ordained role, to be providers and protectors, we need them to speak the language of emotions. We need them to learn to protect our hearts, and provide US the peace, space, and support to be the radiant beings that we are. When I suggested this in a post on Threads, the sole response was from a man who said that “a man cannot speak the language of a woman as he is a man. Like, I don’t want to explain you how better to speak to me as a man.”
Perhaps obviously, I find the responsibility dodging and shift of blame here to be the most fascinating part of the response. First of all, claiming that a man can’t learn the language of a woman because he is a man is like saying an English speaking person can’t learn Spanish because they’re from South Dakota. Secondly, of course men can learn the language of a woman because the language of women is emotions. Which, obviously, men have too. Third, I never asked anyone to explain to me how to speak to a man. I know how to do that because I was taught how to do that: 1) lead with visuals (bonus points if it’s sexual), 2) talk about logistics, 3) default to his “right-ness”. (For clarity sake: I’m not in any way suggesting that women should default to men’s “right-ness”; they aren’t inherently right. But I am suggesting that we learned to do that as a way to meet men in a space where we stood a chance of being heard.)
Ultimately, I think the example just highlights my general point that men have not been forced to manage their emotions alone, so many don't know how to deal with them. Even that phrase in the Facebook post I mentioned at the beginning of this exploration: “aim to be the calm in his storm, the stability in his vision (of marriage), the respect in his heart,” implies that the woman should be taking care of the man emotionally. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible for ANYONE to have their emotions taken care of by someone else. In fact, I think that’s the reason that many relationships fail - because WOMEN were taught that if we could find just the right man, he would take care of OUR emotions. Or, at least, our emotional well being.
I believe we all have to learn to take care of (express, regulate, heal) our own emotions and that the theoretic fellow in the Facebook post should, in fact, learn to calm his own storm, create and nurture his own vision of stability, and be held exclusively responsible for holding respect in his heart.
Men, themselves, aren't the problem, nor are relationships. Women aren't the problem either. The problem is a perspective or operating system in which one is higher, more important, more powerful than the other, and a desperate grasp for an identity which requires a human to act a certain way based on their genitalia.
If men want to be invited to participate in the world that women are creating - one in which all humans have equal rights; in which care of others is valued far higher than financial or social advancement; in which peace and security are the core values of the governing body - they’re going to have to evolve their emotional selves. We had to evolve in various ways to be able to fit into the world they built - but their version is crumbling.
The world is changing. Gender roles are changing. And if men want to come along, they’re going to have to learn a different way to protect and provide for us. They’re going to have to learn self love in order to love us. They’re going to have to learn humility in order to work WITH us to provide a life that both partners want. And they’re going to have to start by connecting with their emotional selves.