Transcription
Inevitably, the adult progressives and their carefully curated cultural superructure tells on itself. And what are they revealing? Their profound lack of wisdom and maturity.
This was proved spectacularly true once again by the New York Times, which published a lengthy and impressively toned-e think piece by an unsatisfied female book editor on the problem with men. The article is full of insight, but little of it is directed inward. Instead, the author surveys a self-created wreckage of her love life and decides the problem lies elsewhere. In a wordy, narratively confusing exercise in intellectual masturbation that sounds very much like she did an MFA in creative writing somewhere fancy.
She seeks answers to relationship problems. But instead of asking functioning, happily married adults, she does this by asking her cackling friends and academics. She even introduces to the mainstream a catchy new term like most terrible things that comes from academia, hetereroatalism. I will summarize the essay.
A woman in her early 40s with a young child, newly divorced from an open marriage after falling in love with one of her partners, realizes that finding fulfillment on the open sexual market is far from easy. In part because her type is a male feminist. She describes him thusly, gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather differential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a good guy. He tends to signal in various ways his exemption from the tainted category of men, and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him. This meets all the progressive woke bonafides. So she feels like she's making the right choice.
But in practice, what she gets is the kind of guy who cancels your booty call because he tells you he's going through some intense anxiety today and needs to lay low with a little frowny face. Then she has the audacity to ask Sex in the City style with four girlfriends in a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Where were the men who could handle the hard stuff like leaving the house for sex? Honey, are you really a New York City book editor asking where oh where did the hard man go? Maybe, just maybe, they have been demoralized by two decades of cultural feminist slop pumped out by book editors like yourself or driven underground by me too hysteria or emasculated from kindergarten to university by suffocating professional managerial class women and their soy boy handfellows. Or horror of horrors. Maybe they're all Trump voters now. In which case, Miss Garnet, you're never getting laid again.
The article tries to dress up hetereroatalism as some kind of groundbreaking new concept. To me, heteropatalism sounds a lot like what it feels like when you realize something ain't all it's cracked up to be. When your sensual and romantic notions are let down by the reality that you are dealing not with an idea but another person. This is not new. This is a problem all young people encounter sooner or later. What is new to me at least since I left the market quite some time ago is that seeking a man who is embarrassed by his very existence is somehow supposed to be a good thing. Girl, if you think a man who consider considers himself part of a tainted category is ever going to give you what you want in the sack or in in a relationship, you are borderline. You will never ever be on solid ground with a man who considers his own existence to be an embarrassment.
Garnet never gets to the answer of the question that the title poses, the trouble with wanting men, because she has zero clue what a man is. Thinking she is wisely choosing the sweet good ones, the kind of guy who probably thought Tim Walls was manly, she is then surprised to find out that these penis havers she picks lack decisiveness, confidence, and muscular agency. Instead of noticing the common thread, immature woman with a child's view of the world, it's comforting to throw around a smart sounding term like heteropatalism that she and her friends can complain about over dinner. And thus the circlejerk is complete.
This conundrum, I want a real man, but I also think real men are patriarchal genocide doers, is endemic in the progressive feminist liberal mindset. This kind of woman will have a very hard time getting what she wants because she can never be honest to herself about what that actually is. It's like human nature is erupting within. But the social engineering is too strong and fear of breaking the socially enforced consensus is too great to actually go for it.
In another article written in 2022 for the Paris Review about her open marriage, Garnet makes similar admission about dealing with her defiant toddler using the disastrous gentle parenting technique. She wrote, "I am trying to remember to use the language from the book. I can see you're really upset. Even though my instinct is to impose consequences, demonstrate who has the power because the book. The words from the book aren't having any effect. I'm trying them in every kind of cadence with every variation of emphasis. I don't like it when you hit me." End quote. That's because the book is wrong, you dummy. Your instincts are correct, but the book is wrong. And you are making the incorrect choice to force yourself to follow some stupid book over what your very soul is telling you to do. Gentle parenting and polyamory, two of the great fallacies of our time. And this lady believes both of them. Oi.
Despite her profound stupidity about human nature, some of the longing she describes was intensely familiar to me. A man should want me urgently or not at all, she wrote. And yeah, I know that feeling. That's what all women want from just the right man under just the right circumstances until the spell is broken. And we don't anymore. So, good luck figuring that out, fellas.
She writes, "It seems to me surveying the field as a dating novice that this kind of studiously irrroachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who can't." Have these men not heard of don't want to. Ah, but there she got me. When I read those words, I was transported back to my teens and my 20s when I knew quite a few men who put themselves in the I can't category. The loosening of sexual norms meant that boys and men could simply invent any reason why they can't. But they could still reasonably petition us for sex. The reasons they used back in the day did not include anxiety, which did not really exist then. Instead, they told us they can't because they're not over the last girl. They can't because they're really focused on work right now. They can't because they're not ready for a serious relationship right now. The reasons why they can't are usually followed up with a sad smile and an invitation to come upstairs. Anyway, almost always that invitation is taken up. Disappointment invariably ensues.
Garnet writes, "Being a good guy, he intimated from the jump that he did not know how to do relationships, giving me to understand that if I expected one from him, or as he may have conceptualized it from him, I did so at my peril, which was his peril, too, since he would hate to hurt me." I have 100% known this man. I even dated this man for years, in fact. And to no one's surprise, he broke my heart.
I find this woman particularly frustrating because she does speak to common female experiences in dealing with men who are in key ways very different from us. We obsess over men as a category in ways men do not obsess over us. We overanalyze. We make excuses for their not calling us. We ruminate. We invent scenarios. I'm told men obsess over women, too. And of course they do. They are famously horny and all that. But I don't think they obsess. Actually, I think they select then pursue. Doggedly so if the woman captivates him. But single-mindedness is not the same thing as obsession. Actually, in my experience, they are often not thinking about much at all. While we fret and moan in long conversations with our girlfriends who validate our overthinking and tell us that we are not the problem, we are at the very least part of the problem. I appreciate Garnet's honesty on that front. And to be fair, she does seem to be attempting, not successfully, a tongue-in-cheek tone that implies she realizes her own part in this. And I find it very easy to believe that women in big cities have it harder than ever when it comes to finding men. But you cannot indulge in all of the idiocies of liberal morality and then complain that you can't find a hot, dependable guy. If you want that guy, move elsewhere and don't expect him to be liberal. And trust me, I know of what I speak.
Really, what her world comes down to is this. A secession of people coming and going to serve her interests, which is access to sexual pleasure, and then write torturous think pieces that could easily have been hundreds of words shorter. This is why the piece struck a nerve with people on the right. It is the ultimate expression of progressive liberal self- reggard. And this woman is not 25. She's too old for such nonsense. At some point, life ceases to become just a game played for the objective of amusement and flattery. At some point, you must submit to restrictions and boredom and the mundane. And yes, you give up on your adolescent dreams. This is called growing up.
How do I know this? I played the game and lost in many ways. When I was around the same age as this woman is now, I ended my marriage and had to face the very destabilizing and scary reality of starting over. I was lucky enough to meet a good, hardworking man who made his intentions very clear, and he was very hot to boot. But it came with giving up hopes I had cherished since I was a girl. When it came down to it, I had to choose. I chose stability over fantasy. So I have learned the hard way that when you survive the loss of something extremely precious to you, when you find yourself living anyway without the cherished dream, it actually gives you a superpower and that is the superpower of doing without. Be still. Do nothing. Stop struggling. Except my own experience with this process is at least in part what shook me out of the liberal culture that I grew up in. Doing without and carrying on anyway for no glory or pleasure whatsoever is impossible for the liberal mind to comprehend because the liberal is convinced that if you don't get what you want instead of accepting that you should rearrange heaven and earth to get it. Whatever your desire is, you deserve it. Those of us who are grown up know that this is not the path to a good life.
Being a good guy, he intimated from the jump that he did not know how to do relationships, giving me to understand that if I expected one with him, or as he may have conceptualized it, from him, I did so at my peril, which was his peril, too, since he would hate to hurt me.