In which I discuss the greater female need for commitment, the absurdity of anti-freedom "solutions" to it (coming from reactionary feminists) & argue the only thing that can help is a better Culture
Interesting essay. I think you're right that the reactionaries can be blind to trade-offs. A lot of the reactionary female intellectuals are smart, insightful, and have hit on something true - but they also seem to be mostly college-educated with flexible, remote jobs in the knowledge economy. I wonder if they'd be so excited about "trad" life if they could swap places with the fundamentalist women I know, who were "homeschooled" (aka pulled out of school to take care of younger siblings and totally uneducated), have no job prospects higher than Walmart cashier, and would face extreme social stigma, even from their own families, if something was going wrong in their marriage. Trad life sounds fun if you've managed to use modern liberal feminism to wiggle your way out of all of the trade-offs first.
This was an interesting article, and I don't really disagree. My issue is with your framing, which, believe it or not, is still the dominant frame of most women in developed countries. i.e. We can't go back to the past because things were horrible for women in the past. There’s nothing particularly *wrong* about your framing, but overall it will lead to bad results on the important values in life for the vast majority of people. Any valid frame needs to consider the interests of both men and women and families.
For most people, forming a stable family and being loved by the opposite sex is their greatest desire even if they don’t realize it early on in their lives. Being loved by the opposite sex implies loving the opposite sex, and people genuinely don't want to stick their loved ones with bad deals for some selfish benefit. So any deal likely has to be good for both men and women compared to alternatives.
When looked at in its totality, it's clear the current arrangement does not work. There's a graph floating around on twitter strongly implying only 50% of women born in the 90s will ever marry. Along with this, birth rates keep going lower. It would actually be appropriate to use the word 'unprecedented' to describe this as this level of involuntary childnessness has literally never happened before in history for women. Men historically have seen much worse but let's set that aside. How could the need to be loved and to have children of one's own be better served in our culture than the one a hundred years ago? The statistics look pretty bad.
The current arrangement puts young people into the chaotic churn of dating in their 20s, focusing on their short term pleasure and spits them out in their 30s when they realize they truly desire to be loved, to love and to have children. Freedom and independence and sexual pleasure are all great, but they need to be tamed because they are not the ultimate values in life. And that 'taming' used to be done by society as whole so that when one is ready to get married, one has already been in the practice of subordinating those desires toward more important ones like family and loving others. Children, if left to their own devices will prioritize candy and fun over learning discipline and good character, but a good society continually nudges and shapes them such that by the time they become an adult, they have quite a lot of experience controlling themselves in order to accomplish higher values. The same is true of young adults in their 20s. A young man or woman who has indulged his independence and sexual appetite with no abandon will actually find it difficult to course correct.
That describes one issue, the issue of people being untrained in virtue because nobody tells them what virtue really is or how their view of virtue will unfold over their lifetimes. The other issue is the mismatch in terms for young men and women. Young men, unless they are very charismatic or handsome, find it difficult to engage in the casual sex their society tells them they ought to enjoy when young. Young women have the problem they don’t very much enjoy casual sex though they can usually indulge it. In our culture, one is expected to get married in their late 20s or early 30s. But many men, who have earnestly believed they wanted a loving marriage their whole youth, suddenly find as they approach 30 that they now *can* engage in casual sex and this is too tempting of an alternative compared to lifelong monogamy with the girl next door. As we mentioned earlier, they have no training in subordinating their impulses for a greater good so they indulge. And, after all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander right? But if this behavior is not corrected, I believe it becomes permanent and many men get stuck in the eternal enticing promise of putting off marriage to the next year. No doubt breaking a lot of hearts along the way.
These things cannot be handled in isolation since one man choosing to forgo marriage necessarily means some hapless woman has to do the same.
I think these two issues go a long way to describing why marriage rates keep going lower along with fertility rates. The hotspots in our culture where people are still getting married are predominantly religious subcultures where they continually focus their minds on the higher order values and focus their minds away from the lower order values. I think Mary Harrington too is getting at something like this, though in a somewhat clumsy way by attaching herself to the anti-pill cause. The lesson I believe she wants to impart is to ask you whether you are using the freedom afforded by the pill in the way that is good for you (and as a result for your future family) in the long run. I believe these are new problems so nobody really knows what exactly to do about them. I don’t think we should go back to the mores of 1950. My contribution is to point out that any analysis of gender issues *must* take into account both sexes because it is the union of sexes that has life giving vitality and it is the union that most people desire.
I suspect people are overcomplicating the issue. There is (I think good) research that shows that when there are many women for each available man that the amount of casual sex increases substantially relative to committed relationships. Exactly what you'd expect when men gain more relative market power.
I'm pretty sure all these takes are written by college educated women who see their potential romantic pool as largely composed of college attending men. In recent years the ratio of women to men in college has dramatically increased.
And if I'm right it's not really anything hope to address it with cultural norms about casual sex. You need to fix the gender ratio in college.
I do think there's some nascent wave of feminism that seeks a special carve-out from social progress in the dating realm because that makes straight women happier (and straight women's happiness is the core ideology of this version of feminism). But yes, on the whole in terms of progressive politics, there's been a great reluctance to admit obvious gender differences in men and women's preferred sexual standards. I'm guessing it's because recognizing that would mean there are some innate biological differences, which goes against a lot of the rest of their ideological platform. Also, the very concept of women being needy in any way would undercut their social power, which is again a no-no. Women have to win the race to care less.
I think a big complicating factor is that many of the most strident anti-casual-sex women would probably still like to engage in it if the occasion is right. Say like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to have a one night stand with an idol of theirs. Or some short burst of promiscuity to get it out of their system. But then, of course, if these possibilities exist, every guy will then want their shot at also having casual sex, which is heightened by the fact men and women's social peaks aren't perfectly synced. So as long as men think there's a semblance of a chance that they can improve their station later in life to have better sex with more women, many will resist settling down and will become very resentful at basically being told they're not good enough for that kind of sex. The solution to this would be harsh and public slut-shaming of women to get everyone to buy into the system, but that of course has great downsides too.
Your points are well taken; I don't think anyone wants to go back to the dark days of coverture and legalized spousal rape. Also the arguments of Harrington are so theoretical that they often (in my opinion) lose sight of the flesh and blood women who would be losing significant freedoms in her world.
Still, reactionary feminists do have a point about the prevalence of casual sex. I think it's fair to assume that most women don't really want to engage in casual sex, but feel compelled to do so in a world where men can easily get casual sex. This creates a race to the bottom and creates a hook up culture that benefits modern-day Saltykovs who can get almost any woman they want. And those women, like Catharine, yearn for the relationship that they never will get. Of course, these dynamics (super-charged by online dating) mean you have a small number of satisfied Saltykovs, a large number of yearning Catharines and then an army of normie men who can't get the time of day from any woman at all--and some of this cohort goes on to become incels.
Your suggestion on how to change this is a new culture of resilience--women who are rejected by heartless Saltykovs need to get back on the horse and be strong. This is fair, and your point about how modern therapeutic culture has dismantled toughness is well-taken. Still, the way that women traditionally solved this problem was by shaming women who were willing to have casual sex. It seems undeniable that a large enough population of women willing to have casual sex drives down the value of sex, leading to the race to the bottom among women. Obviously, all this was facilitated by the pill. Harrington and the reactionary feminists clearly think that only something as dramatic as banning the pill will turn things around--I share your skepticism on this account.
What you are really looking for here is a cultural shift in which women are more inclined to refuse the Saltykovs of the world--how confident are you that this can be accomplished without using the brutal method of slut-shaming?
"In many ways, anxiety expands to occupy the space it’s allowed to"...that is a very, very good way to look at things. And powerful sources in society are doing their best to maximize the volume of that space.
Abagail Shrier has a book out on therapy culture...review and comments from Stuart Schneiderman:
Social desirability bias effects on self-reporting can (not saying does) account for most of the gap. Men often think it ummanly to complain they're getting too high a sex:love ratio. We're supposed to be, pretend to be, or want to be soulless fuckboys, they think, but really all I want is to hold someone's hand while watching a Ryan Gosling movie.
But of course there are men who complain about being unlucky in love -- we call them incels. Berkson's paradox strikes again: women are only aware of men who are hot enough to have the opportunity (and incentives) to become soulless fuckboys.
As a tall fit man usually assumed to be a dangerous and soulless fuckboy I'm fairly certain this is all rather nuanced.
Hello, Ruxandra and thanks for your perspective. But I'm a bit skeptical about your conclusions, perhaps you could bring perspectives I'm losing.
I don't think women in general are being gaslighted to don't discuss their emotional needs, at least in their individual level of their social circles. Althought the tolerance for casual fling rose a lot, slut-shaming being still a thing is not by accident. And I think female friends still talk about those things.
Even culturally speaking, "Single Ladies" by Beyoncé exploded in the lifetime of most millennial women and some Gen z ones. And, lest we forget, Taylor Swift
I still think hypergamy is a far bigger problem, and just changing "culture" (esp only the female ones) won't help if the competition doesn't cool off. I don't think women should date bottom 10% men (the famous "men are overepresented in genius and felons categories"), but lots of dateable, less desirable men are being threw out the pool because women still prefer men who earn more even after the reduction of men-women wage gap, women being deluded standards by dating apps and the "doom loop" of not learning to talk and flirt with women in early ages and now have to bore even higher barriers to entry in a less physical, more virtual world. Unsurprisingly, lots of them are dropping out from dating pool.
The other side of the coin is that more desirable men live in state of abundance that make them more picky even if they want a long-term relationship and harder to commit. And the fact that most recents gains for women aren't particularly attractive to these men don't help. Upper-Middle Class men in fact usually care about their spouse social class, wiith a bachelor degree, but both a kindergarden teacher and a product manager have one.
This is leading women to fight for a ever smaller slice of a shrinking pie, with 40% of men doesn't dating at all. They will be far more tempted to break the "cartel" of casual sex in the hopes to lure an eligible and avaliable bachelor to a LTR, just like 90's eastern europe (if we can believe in the stories).
Perhaps lots of frustrated women would end dropping dating too (as we are seeing already), but I don't see how this solution would deal with their "neediness".
women initiate most divorces not because they are more fed up with marriage than men, but because they are almost always the poor partner in marriages. Historically, men just walked away -- and many would prefer to do that now, too. They often manage it, in fact. Modern divorce paperwork -- famously hated by men -- settles child support and property outcomes at the end of the marriage. Without it men would be under no obligation to pay anything or divvy up anything. That's why women file more often than men do; often in cases where the husband has walked away already.
That being said, this was beautifully put: "misunderstanding of what female neediness is fundamentally all about: it’ not simply the desire to be tied to someone that cannot get rid of you because of a Law. It’s a yearning for love, actual love, something that cannot be merely be imposed from the outside through rules"
This yearning is part of what is best in women but sets them up for just horrible humiliations, too. Not all -- to be fair -- inflicted by men. The yearning can cause women to set themselves up; every woman has seen it in her friends and done it at least once to herself. I'm a feminist but I also think there is a "human frailty, female version" aspect to this that is sort of inescapable.
This was very good. A thought about the "need for status" and how it relates to this though. I think men often see a woman with the "need for status" as exhibiting something they find quite... ugly. In the same way women can be grossed out by men's casual sex behaviors, men can be grossed out by women seeking out status.
I think higher status men also often find it gross and lose respect for women they see showing that behavior. You can imagine how high status men will treat a woman they don't respect because of this: casual sex and it definitely isn't progressing past that.
Excellent writing. I'm left wondering where is the male mirror image of this essay? Need some kind of yin-yang balance to understand all this. Are there trade-offs here for men, what are they, and are they worth it? Yes, I think. But this debate often assumes a certain passivity from men, and an indifference from women to men's preference, when in reality mostly these are joint decisions. I.e. women's neediness is partly conditioned on their expectations of men's roaming. If the expectations were rather of clinginess and obsession you might see the opposite.
I think that a lot of these differences in preferences about sex are downstream of or at least mixed up with attitudes towards family and children. Real equality would mean that the costs and difficulties (and satisfactions!) of having and rearing kids would be shared equally by men and women. The fact that they are not seeps into everybody's sense of self including their most intimate desires.
I'd never say things were better in the old days, but I *do* think that women and men (or upper-class women and men, which is mostly what this discourse is about) are expected to get more of their sense of self-worth from their careers than most career is capable of giving. I don't think that feminism is the reason for this, it has more to do with economic change, but a certain feminism takes too much satisfaction from an ambiguous development.
The old man-works-woman-raises-kids family had a million problems and injustices but it occasionally could and sometimes still does work very well in the right circumstances. It is still a useful compare-and-contrast mirror to look at our new world where women (not just an exceptional minority of them) have careers and sex lives relatively independent of family and childbearing. The reactionaries are at least right that this is a very new world, we are still figuring out how it works.
> In this way women can self-impose stricter norms regarding their behaviour: if they understand from the get-go that casual sex is probably not going to lead to long-term satisfaction, they can self-select out of this activity on their own.
The historic coordination mechanism for accomplishing this in the West has been the Church. Unlike Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity has been female-dominated for millennia. At its core, it was the mechanism by which high-SES older women prevented low-SES younger women from messing around with their husbands. For example, I remember coming across a paper with data from northern France in the Middle Ages, showing that a majority of legally punished adulterers were men. And a substantial fraction of punished women were prostitutes who had slept with married men. In other words, even though prostitution was largely legal at the time, it was only a legal service for unmarried men.
Arguably, such legal actions are necessary, because women self-imposing stricter norms will never be 100% effective (particularly for low-SES women). And it takes only a small number of prostitutes (formal or informal) to enable a large fraction of married men to cheat.
I'm surprised you had to go back through hundreds of years of history to defend the effects of the contraceptive Pill which was introduced in the 1960s, but you do nevertheless draw the same conclusion as Mary Harrington, that "women should self-select out of this activity on their own". I think this is a sensible antidote to the sexual exploitation of girls and they may already be doing so, as teenage pregnancies in the UK are a third of what they were in 2011.
But another issue MH highlights is the stark difference between the career opportunities of the middle class women that benefit from blank slate sexual equality: highly educated and remunerated lawyers, doctors, etc compared to working class women (in Britain anyway). Retail, admin and domiciliary care work do not pay enough to allow a woman to outsource her housework and childcare. Retirement age is now equal to men's which means women with post-menopause arthritis have to drudge along in a repetitive job in a factory until age 67. When I started work, retirement age for women was 60.
With regard to your conclusion, there is another theory: a persistent lack of adversity in life ironically leads to mental distress. Cold water swimming/bath therapy apparently rebalances the chemicals in the brain that get out of whack when life is unrelentingly easy, dull and painless!
Interesting essay. I think you're right that the reactionaries can be blind to trade-offs. A lot of the reactionary female intellectuals are smart, insightful, and have hit on something true - but they also seem to be mostly college-educated with flexible, remote jobs in the knowledge economy. I wonder if they'd be so excited about "trad" life if they could swap places with the fundamentalist women I know, who were "homeschooled" (aka pulled out of school to take care of younger siblings and totally uneducated), have no job prospects higher than Walmart cashier, and would face extreme social stigma, even from their own families, if something was going wrong in their marriage. Trad life sounds fun if you've managed to use modern liberal feminism to wiggle your way out of all of the trade-offs first.
This was an interesting article, and I don't really disagree. My issue is with your framing, which, believe it or not, is still the dominant frame of most women in developed countries. i.e. We can't go back to the past because things were horrible for women in the past. There’s nothing particularly *wrong* about your framing, but overall it will lead to bad results on the important values in life for the vast majority of people. Any valid frame needs to consider the interests of both men and women and families.
For most people, forming a stable family and being loved by the opposite sex is their greatest desire even if they don’t realize it early on in their lives. Being loved by the opposite sex implies loving the opposite sex, and people genuinely don't want to stick their loved ones with bad deals for some selfish benefit. So any deal likely has to be good for both men and women compared to alternatives.
When looked at in its totality, it's clear the current arrangement does not work. There's a graph floating around on twitter strongly implying only 50% of women born in the 90s will ever marry. Along with this, birth rates keep going lower. It would actually be appropriate to use the word 'unprecedented' to describe this as this level of involuntary childnessness has literally never happened before in history for women. Men historically have seen much worse but let's set that aside. How could the need to be loved and to have children of one's own be better served in our culture than the one a hundred years ago? The statistics look pretty bad.
The current arrangement puts young people into the chaotic churn of dating in their 20s, focusing on their short term pleasure and spits them out in their 30s when they realize they truly desire to be loved, to love and to have children. Freedom and independence and sexual pleasure are all great, but they need to be tamed because they are not the ultimate values in life. And that 'taming' used to be done by society as whole so that when one is ready to get married, one has already been in the practice of subordinating those desires toward more important ones like family and loving others. Children, if left to their own devices will prioritize candy and fun over learning discipline and good character, but a good society continually nudges and shapes them such that by the time they become an adult, they have quite a lot of experience controlling themselves in order to accomplish higher values. The same is true of young adults in their 20s. A young man or woman who has indulged his independence and sexual appetite with no abandon will actually find it difficult to course correct.
That describes one issue, the issue of people being untrained in virtue because nobody tells them what virtue really is or how their view of virtue will unfold over their lifetimes. The other issue is the mismatch in terms for young men and women. Young men, unless they are very charismatic or handsome, find it difficult to engage in the casual sex their society tells them they ought to enjoy when young. Young women have the problem they don’t very much enjoy casual sex though they can usually indulge it. In our culture, one is expected to get married in their late 20s or early 30s. But many men, who have earnestly believed they wanted a loving marriage their whole youth, suddenly find as they approach 30 that they now *can* engage in casual sex and this is too tempting of an alternative compared to lifelong monogamy with the girl next door. As we mentioned earlier, they have no training in subordinating their impulses for a greater good so they indulge. And, after all, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander right? But if this behavior is not corrected, I believe it becomes permanent and many men get stuck in the eternal enticing promise of putting off marriage to the next year. No doubt breaking a lot of hearts along the way.
These things cannot be handled in isolation since one man choosing to forgo marriage necessarily means some hapless woman has to do the same.
I think these two issues go a long way to describing why marriage rates keep going lower along with fertility rates. The hotspots in our culture where people are still getting married are predominantly religious subcultures where they continually focus their minds on the higher order values and focus their minds away from the lower order values. I think Mary Harrington too is getting at something like this, though in a somewhat clumsy way by attaching herself to the anti-pill cause. The lesson I believe she wants to impart is to ask you whether you are using the freedom afforded by the pill in the way that is good for you (and as a result for your future family) in the long run. I believe these are new problems so nobody really knows what exactly to do about them. I don’t think we should go back to the mores of 1950. My contribution is to point out that any analysis of gender issues *must* take into account both sexes because it is the union of sexes that has life giving vitality and it is the union that most people desire.
I suspect people are overcomplicating the issue. There is (I think good) research that shows that when there are many women for each available man that the amount of casual sex increases substantially relative to committed relationships. Exactly what you'd expect when men gain more relative market power.
I'm pretty sure all these takes are written by college educated women who see their potential romantic pool as largely composed of college attending men. In recent years the ratio of women to men in college has dramatically increased.
And if I'm right it's not really anything hope to address it with cultural norms about casual sex. You need to fix the gender ratio in college.
I do think there's some nascent wave of feminism that seeks a special carve-out from social progress in the dating realm because that makes straight women happier (and straight women's happiness is the core ideology of this version of feminism). But yes, on the whole in terms of progressive politics, there's been a great reluctance to admit obvious gender differences in men and women's preferred sexual standards. I'm guessing it's because recognizing that would mean there are some innate biological differences, which goes against a lot of the rest of their ideological platform. Also, the very concept of women being needy in any way would undercut their social power, which is again a no-no. Women have to win the race to care less.
I think a big complicating factor is that many of the most strident anti-casual-sex women would probably still like to engage in it if the occasion is right. Say like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to have a one night stand with an idol of theirs. Or some short burst of promiscuity to get it out of their system. But then, of course, if these possibilities exist, every guy will then want their shot at also having casual sex, which is heightened by the fact men and women's social peaks aren't perfectly synced. So as long as men think there's a semblance of a chance that they can improve their station later in life to have better sex with more women, many will resist settling down and will become very resentful at basically being told they're not good enough for that kind of sex. The solution to this would be harsh and public slut-shaming of women to get everyone to buy into the system, but that of course has great downsides too.
Your points are well taken; I don't think anyone wants to go back to the dark days of coverture and legalized spousal rape. Also the arguments of Harrington are so theoretical that they often (in my opinion) lose sight of the flesh and blood women who would be losing significant freedoms in her world.
Still, reactionary feminists do have a point about the prevalence of casual sex. I think it's fair to assume that most women don't really want to engage in casual sex, but feel compelled to do so in a world where men can easily get casual sex. This creates a race to the bottom and creates a hook up culture that benefits modern-day Saltykovs who can get almost any woman they want. And those women, like Catharine, yearn for the relationship that they never will get. Of course, these dynamics (super-charged by online dating) mean you have a small number of satisfied Saltykovs, a large number of yearning Catharines and then an army of normie men who can't get the time of day from any woman at all--and some of this cohort goes on to become incels.
Your suggestion on how to change this is a new culture of resilience--women who are rejected by heartless Saltykovs need to get back on the horse and be strong. This is fair, and your point about how modern therapeutic culture has dismantled toughness is well-taken. Still, the way that women traditionally solved this problem was by shaming women who were willing to have casual sex. It seems undeniable that a large enough population of women willing to have casual sex drives down the value of sex, leading to the race to the bottom among women. Obviously, all this was facilitated by the pill. Harrington and the reactionary feminists clearly think that only something as dramatic as banning the pill will turn things around--I share your skepticism on this account.
What you are really looking for here is a cultural shift in which women are more inclined to refuse the Saltykovs of the world--how confident are you that this can be accomplished without using the brutal method of slut-shaming?
"In many ways, anxiety expands to occupy the space it’s allowed to"...that is a very, very good way to look at things. And powerful sources in society are doing their best to maximize the volume of that space.
Abagail Shrier has a book out on therapy culture...review and comments from Stuart Schneiderman:
https://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2024/02/bad-therapy.html
Social desirability bias effects on self-reporting can (not saying does) account for most of the gap. Men often think it ummanly to complain they're getting too high a sex:love ratio. We're supposed to be, pretend to be, or want to be soulless fuckboys, they think, but really all I want is to hold someone's hand while watching a Ryan Gosling movie.
But of course there are men who complain about being unlucky in love -- we call them incels. Berkson's paradox strikes again: women are only aware of men who are hot enough to have the opportunity (and incentives) to become soulless fuckboys.
As a tall fit man usually assumed to be a dangerous and soulless fuckboy I'm fairly certain this is all rather nuanced.
Hello, Ruxandra and thanks for your perspective. But I'm a bit skeptical about your conclusions, perhaps you could bring perspectives I'm losing.
I don't think women in general are being gaslighted to don't discuss their emotional needs, at least in their individual level of their social circles. Althought the tolerance for casual fling rose a lot, slut-shaming being still a thing is not by accident. And I think female friends still talk about those things.
Even culturally speaking, "Single Ladies" by Beyoncé exploded in the lifetime of most millennial women and some Gen z ones. And, lest we forget, Taylor Swift
I still think hypergamy is a far bigger problem, and just changing "culture" (esp only the female ones) won't help if the competition doesn't cool off. I don't think women should date bottom 10% men (the famous "men are overepresented in genius and felons categories"), but lots of dateable, less desirable men are being threw out the pool because women still prefer men who earn more even after the reduction of men-women wage gap, women being deluded standards by dating apps and the "doom loop" of not learning to talk and flirt with women in early ages and now have to bore even higher barriers to entry in a less physical, more virtual world. Unsurprisingly, lots of them are dropping out from dating pool.
The other side of the coin is that more desirable men live in state of abundance that make them more picky even if they want a long-term relationship and harder to commit. And the fact that most recents gains for women aren't particularly attractive to these men don't help. Upper-Middle Class men in fact usually care about their spouse social class, wiith a bachelor degree, but both a kindergarden teacher and a product manager have one.
This is leading women to fight for a ever smaller slice of a shrinking pie, with 40% of men doesn't dating at all. They will be far more tempted to break the "cartel" of casual sex in the hopes to lure an eligible and avaliable bachelor to a LTR, just like 90's eastern europe (if we can believe in the stories).
Perhaps lots of frustrated women would end dropping dating too (as we are seeing already), but I don't see how this solution would deal with their "neediness".
women initiate most divorces not because they are more fed up with marriage than men, but because they are almost always the poor partner in marriages. Historically, men just walked away -- and many would prefer to do that now, too. They often manage it, in fact. Modern divorce paperwork -- famously hated by men -- settles child support and property outcomes at the end of the marriage. Without it men would be under no obligation to pay anything or divvy up anything. That's why women file more often than men do; often in cases where the husband has walked away already.
That being said, this was beautifully put: "misunderstanding of what female neediness is fundamentally all about: it’ not simply the desire to be tied to someone that cannot get rid of you because of a Law. It’s a yearning for love, actual love, something that cannot be merely be imposed from the outside through rules"
This yearning is part of what is best in women but sets them up for just horrible humiliations, too. Not all -- to be fair -- inflicted by men. The yearning can cause women to set themselves up; every woman has seen it in her friends and done it at least once to herself. I'm a feminist but I also think there is a "human frailty, female version" aspect to this that is sort of inescapable.
This was very good. A thought about the "need for status" and how it relates to this though. I think men often see a woman with the "need for status" as exhibiting something they find quite... ugly. In the same way women can be grossed out by men's casual sex behaviors, men can be grossed out by women seeking out status.
I think higher status men also often find it gross and lose respect for women they see showing that behavior. You can imagine how high status men will treat a woman they don't respect because of this: casual sex and it definitely isn't progressing past that.
Excellent writing. I'm left wondering where is the male mirror image of this essay? Need some kind of yin-yang balance to understand all this. Are there trade-offs here for men, what are they, and are they worth it? Yes, I think. But this debate often assumes a certain passivity from men, and an indifference from women to men's preference, when in reality mostly these are joint decisions. I.e. women's neediness is partly conditioned on their expectations of men's roaming. If the expectations were rather of clinginess and obsession you might see the opposite.
I think that a lot of these differences in preferences about sex are downstream of or at least mixed up with attitudes towards family and children. Real equality would mean that the costs and difficulties (and satisfactions!) of having and rearing kids would be shared equally by men and women. The fact that they are not seeps into everybody's sense of self including their most intimate desires.
I'd never say things were better in the old days, but I *do* think that women and men (or upper-class women and men, which is mostly what this discourse is about) are expected to get more of their sense of self-worth from their careers than most career is capable of giving. I don't think that feminism is the reason for this, it has more to do with economic change, but a certain feminism takes too much satisfaction from an ambiguous development.
The old man-works-woman-raises-kids family had a million problems and injustices but it occasionally could and sometimes still does work very well in the right circumstances. It is still a useful compare-and-contrast mirror to look at our new world where women (not just an exceptional minority of them) have careers and sex lives relatively independent of family and childbearing. The reactionaries are at least right that this is a very new world, we are still figuring out how it works.
> In this way women can self-impose stricter norms regarding their behaviour: if they understand from the get-go that casual sex is probably not going to lead to long-term satisfaction, they can self-select out of this activity on their own.
The historic coordination mechanism for accomplishing this in the West has been the Church. Unlike Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity has been female-dominated for millennia. At its core, it was the mechanism by which high-SES older women prevented low-SES younger women from messing around with their husbands. For example, I remember coming across a paper with data from northern France in the Middle Ages, showing that a majority of legally punished adulterers were men. And a substantial fraction of punished women were prostitutes who had slept with married men. In other words, even though prostitution was largely legal at the time, it was only a legal service for unmarried men.
Arguably, such legal actions are necessary, because women self-imposing stricter norms will never be 100% effective (particularly for low-SES women). And it takes only a small number of prostitutes (formal or informal) to enable a large fraction of married men to cheat.
I'm surprised you had to go back through hundreds of years of history to defend the effects of the contraceptive Pill which was introduced in the 1960s, but you do nevertheless draw the same conclusion as Mary Harrington, that "women should self-select out of this activity on their own". I think this is a sensible antidote to the sexual exploitation of girls and they may already be doing so, as teenage pregnancies in the UK are a third of what they were in 2011.
But another issue MH highlights is the stark difference between the career opportunities of the middle class women that benefit from blank slate sexual equality: highly educated and remunerated lawyers, doctors, etc compared to working class women (in Britain anyway). Retail, admin and domiciliary care work do not pay enough to allow a woman to outsource her housework and childcare. Retirement age is now equal to men's which means women with post-menopause arthritis have to drudge along in a repetitive job in a factory until age 67. When I started work, retirement age for women was 60.
With regard to your conclusion, there is another theory: a persistent lack of adversity in life ironically leads to mental distress. Cold water swimming/bath therapy apparently rebalances the chemicals in the brain that get out of whack when life is unrelentingly easy, dull and painless!
Fantastic article. You might enjoy watching HBO's The Great, a satirical (and purposefully ahistorical) comedy based on Catherine the Great's life.
Why is it better for women to self-impose prohibitions against causal sex rather than have those prohibitions imposed by society?