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Alan Schmidt's avatar

It used to be you had mothers and aunts that would dissuade a young girl of nonsense because they had a strong interest in getting her married so not to be a burden on the family, and of course continuing their genetic line. Young women in the same circles can't afford this sort of blunt talk, even if they wanted to. They are also dissuaded from leaning into their intrinsic value to men. Many men are also more than happy to encourage their delusions for short-term goals, ruining it for the rest of us.

To be fair to women, if men suddenly had intrinsic value and women catered to their every whim, they would crash out in different but equally catastrophic ways.

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Amber's avatar

This article came at an interesting time for me because increasing female pickiness segues into female intrasexual aggression and competition. The biggest struggle with female friendships in college is that the women around me have no clue what their social status is and have no way of evaluating it. They either default to the way they would “evaluate” a man, ie projecting how much money they would make in the future, or default to blind aggression where the meaner and more you look down on somebody, the higher status you are — I’m sure this has been directly copied over from Disney movies. I am average in most traits but unusually open and disagreeable and I also do not hide that I have a strong maternal instinct. This means that since the boys around me entered puberty, I’ve had boyfriends who were specifically attracted to the traits they viewed as feminine or soft. This feeds back into the female aggression loop because many of my “friends” directly expressed to me that they felt disgusted and frustrated needing to compete with me for male attention because on all accounts, by their own standards, I was supposed to be lower status. It didn’t matter that the boyfriends I did have were awful and much lower status than me! They just could not even attract a guy who wanted to be a boyfriend. Now that I have a boyfriend that is higher status than me, the female aggression is off the charts and my female friends can barely stand to talk to me because now that they have boyfriends, they still feel like they’re “losing” even though they’re still projected to be doctors, lawyers, money making boss ladies and I’m very open that I would like to raise 5 kids. It’s never occurred to them that they’re evaluating themselves from the wrong set of criteria — they imagine they would be better than men but can’t hack why being better than men doesn’t make them desirable. They have failed to acknowledge that it leaves them worse off as not very good women. I just can’t figure it out. I imagine that being pickier and pickier leaves women lonelier and lonelier and creates the kind of “80% of women chasing after 20% men” phenomenon I’m seeing. Another problem is that I’m blunt because I genuinely care about these women, yet one of them stopped hanging out with me because I told her that if she could treat a man how she wants them to treat her, she would be able to get a boyfriend. This is a woman who complained about a date that wasn’t funny yet isn’t funny at all herself unless she’s drunken herself into a stupor. I guess I believe half of this insanity is human nature and human beings are necessarily this stupid and conflicted. But I think half of this is the misogynistic feminism that many of us have been drinking at the teat since we were old enough to remember that strips women of what makes them women.

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