The Trouble With Wanting Men (They Don't Want You)

Good morning, y'all. This article from the New York Times has been making its rounds around the internet, and I wanted to dive into it because, per usual, um, it's quite enlightening on the mental state of women uh right now.

But before we dive in, I wanted to introduce you to the author. Her name is Jean Garnett. Uh, I couldn't find a LinkedIn profile about her. So, uh, I have this bio on the communityofwriters.org website. Um, so she's a freelance editor and writer. Um, and this apparently is what she looks like. So, I'm assuming she's 30s, 40s probably. Uh, and then she was referenced here in this piece uh from layoffs that happened at a publish small publisher uh, last year. So, it looks like she used to be in publishing for a while and then um got axed from that gig and so now she's just doing freelance writing.

So, this piece is titled "The Trouble with Wanting Men." Women are so fed up with dating men that the phenomenon even has a name, hetereroatalism. So, what do we do with our desire? So, um, yeah, this is another piece of women making up new terms to, uh, try to justify their behaviors and their actions in society. Uh, so, right off the bat, this this piece is about desire to some extent, but I'm going to be totally honest, when I read through this, I had a lot of trouble following and connecting the dots. And I feel like people who consider themselves to be high culture, they create like abstract art and they write stuff like this and they think it makes sense when I just want to see well-written, you know, content and I want to see, you know, a Da Vinci or a Renaissance period piece of art. I want something that I can understand. Um, and this is kind of one of those things where the way she she like tries to write her opinion within a narrative of dating and I it it lost me. Her writing style is not my jam, but apparently for some people it is.

Um, so right off the bat, she's objectifying this guy that she's sitting down uh for dinner for dinner with. And I I wanted to call this into attention because women hate being objectified. You see like the gym culture stuff all the time where women hate like you see pretty much basically naked women at the gym wearing super tight workout clothes and I see them too like they're super distracting but they they wear super tight workout clothes and they film themselves at the gym and then they complain when someone stares at them because they're being objectified. It's like hello, if you're not wearing any clothes like of course people are going to look at you. Um, so I I I call this out because this piece is obviously a rant. Um, not so much against the patriarchy, but just kind of like the paradigm women find themselves in when it comes to dating and women hate being objectified, but right off the bat, she is objectifying this man. Um, she like kind of goes into this quasi romantic like physically intimate scene of, you know, "I felt he wanted me, which was what I wanted." It's all it's all about her physical desire. This is all about her desire. It's clear this woman um has some unmet physical needs and she's trying to find a way to express them and she isn't doing very well. Um, and this line really stood out to me because it's really a projection. Uh, yeah, this is her projecting her expectations onto him. And I think this is one of the problems with men and women and why women are getting really frustrated with men because men and women don't really see eye to eye. Like women and whether it's a society, whether it's, you know, biology and um evolution and that kind of stuff, whether it's innate, I don't know. But, you know, women have all these narratives about what love is supposed to be like, what romance is supposed to be like. And usually it's not that like physical intimacy is nothing like you see in the movies. You know, relationships aren't Disney fairy tales. Reality is just so different. So, I don't know how much of this is her projecting. Like, she says she felt he wanted me, but I mean, in that moment, he's a guy being a guy. I doubt he actually did want her in the way she thinks uh he did. She says that "a man should want me urgently or not at all." Again, this is kind of that narrative where it's like all or nothing and it's like Prince Charming and you know, a knight in shining armor and it's all or nothing and he needs to want me. This I think this is a very toxic narrative. Um, especially for young girls cuz you grow up and you think that's what like relationships are supposed to be and you think that's how the world the world is. Um, and that's not it's not how it is at all. Um, and you know, men behave differently and women, we've done a really terrible job of trying to see what men want and learn what men want. So, we have expectations of men that are just reflections of our perceptions of what they want, not really what men actually want because again, women are narcissists, obsessed with themselves, and they only care about getting their needs met, not considering what the needs of of the man is. And you can tell that like we're only three paragraphs into this, and that's very clear. That's all this is all about her her needs, her wants, and then her perception of how a man should respond to meeting her needs and her wants.

Um, this is so so okay, so she dives in, she's she talks about um this within the context of meeting her her gal pals for dinner. So imagine, you know, Sex in the City from 20 years ago, right? That that whole, you know, scene of, you know, 30-something women lamenting about their their lives and having dinner together somewhere in New York, right? Uh, so so one of them says, "He'd been anxious, too." And then they they dive in awe, "Poor baby," cried the historian. "And we all cooed and moaned for the poor widow, fatted cat, booing ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men's inability to man up." And you know, um, this is why men are anxious. I find this juxtaposition really fascinating. So she ends this paragraph by saying he's been anxious and then gives the explanation why he was anxious. Like, I don't know about you, I would never want to be in any sort of interaction with someone who's going to talk like this behind my back. Like, it's just I don't like that drama. It's not worth my time. I hate it. It's dumb. It's dumb. It's just such a waste. I know people enjoy engaging in this, but like I wouldn't want to be interacting with someone who's going to go back to their friends, whether we're talking like a professional relation, you know, professional engagement, um, romantic relationship, friendships, it doesn't even matter. Like, I wouldn't want to be around someone who's going to go to their friend group and say mean things about me. So, of course, like why why would anyone want want that? And this is exactly what she's doing. And the thing is, it's not just her. This is um the second piece I'm covering uh from the New York Times that a very similar narrative of, you know, going to dinner and talking about how men are anxious and men don't want to engage and they're kind of like put off by women. Um, and it's like, where did all the where did all the the the good men go? Oh well. And I wonder why because women are treating men like this and it's it's disgusting. It's no one wants to be um no one wants to be part of this. And you know, I've said this before and I will continue to say it. Watch Mean Girls. Watch the original Mean Girls. This is exactly this is a scene out of Mean Girls, right? Like there's um Regina George, you know, is complimenting a girl at the high school, her her outfit and her bracelet and all that kind of stuff, and then she turns back to the plastics and is like, "That's so hideous, you know, that's so ugly." And that's that's normal girl culture. So if you've never watched the original Mean Girls as a documentary to understand like how females think, I highly recommend, you know, taking two hours out of your day, watch it, and it's pretty much like play-by-play how girls behave. And the infantilized ones that haven't grown up from high school, that's how they still behave today. And that's why you get women like this who sit around and make fun of anxious guys.

Uh, okay. Where and then so they they end this by saying like, "Where are the men who could handle the hard stuff and you scared them away?" Like like this this is sandwiched so nicely like talking about why this person is anxious, you know, given the reason why they're anxious, and then lamenting that there's no men left to handle the hard stuff. Well, of course not. Why would why would anyone want to be your punching bag? I mean, it seems pretty obvious to me.

Uh, okay. So, she she dives in that she's been bruised by the ambivalence of men. "How they can first want me and then become confused about what they want. And this body diminishing humor soothed me, made me feel more powerful, more in control." I think she just played her her hand right there. This is all an exercise of power. Women do this. Women play these games as a way to exert power over other people. Again, Regina George in Mean Girls, that was literally what she did, putting people down, managing the social expectations of that, you know, specific high school. But, but women do this. Um, they put other people down in order to elevate themselves. It it really is like that cut and dry. And it's all about power politics to them. Um, and they just want to feel more powerful. So, the way for women to feel powerful is to put men down. It's not to elevate them, and it's not to elevate other women for that matter either. Um, and so, so this is textbook Mean Girl stuff. Um, okay.

So, she says, "I haven't been dating long. Just the other day, my ex-husband and I received our judgment of divorce as an email attachment." Anytime I see stuff like this, like you have to take it with a grain of salt. Like, who who do you want your your cultural advice from? Who do you want to set the cultural narrative and the expectations of society? Do you want, you know, this woman who's recently divorced, which we'll dive into why she's divorced in a few moments? Um, or do you want like the lessons learned from a couple who's been married for 30, 40, 50 years? I mean, I'll take the latter personally. Um, but but the problem with our our culture and our society is this is the stuff that's getting published. This is the stuff that's getting disseminated. This is the stuff that is informing the narrative. We don't celebrate people who are in long marriages anymore. We don't elevate them. We don't seek wisdom from people. You know, we look to the New York Times for quote unquote wisdom about dating, but how many how many of these people like especially this woman writing this would go to say a nursing home or if you know you have grandparents who are alive or if you're a member of church community or religious organization, there's elders within that um community. Like how many people are willing to ask them, "Hey, what's the secret to a 50-plus year marriage?" No one does that, right? We all look to this this garbage and this slop. Um, and so this is what we get. This is why we keep getting stuff like this published in in the New York Times and why all of these stupid new terms are coming up to complain about, you know, how hard it is to build relationships. Well, because we're not learning the right lessons. We're we're taking garbage and we're trying to implement it and then we're wondering why we're getting garbage in return.

Um, okay. So, throughout this whole piece, she talks about straight versus queer. So like that's like a subplot if you will of this about why it's bad to be like heterosexual, which is just this majority of people. Like you can do whatever you want, I don't care, but the vast majority of people are not queer. So this whole like cultural narrative that you should be ashamed and embarrassed to be part of the majority is just It's so bizarre to me. But so so this is you'll see splices of this throughout where she adds, you know, commentary to talk about the queer uh straight paradigm. Um, but one of the reasons why her marriage ended um was that she fell in love with another man. And um later on in the piece, she talks about how she was in an open relationship with her husband. So this was permissible. Um, but she kind of pushed the boundaries a little too far. Uh, I don't know much about like the whole polyamory world. Um, so if you do feel free to like, you know, inject your comment your thoughts into the comments. Uh, I have met a couple couples who um were in open marriages and my observation uh was that they were in open relationships because the man couldn't meet the needs of the woman and the woman initiated it. So again, I don't know if that's normal for all open marriages and my sample size is pretty small. Um, I just don't not really into that world. Uh, but my observation is that it seems to be that that the women are the ones who are initiating open marriages and that it's the men who are obliging. I think in an effort to save their marriage and they think like if they just agree things will get better and it doesn't ever seem to get better. Uh, I you know, I don't know, I don't know how people do that, but um after seeing after kind of talk seeing this and and reading through it, uh it's not a surprise that she's divorced and struggling to you know, find love and and date because she just seems to have a lot of um seems to have a lot of baggage that that she's she's bringing along and she's wondering why like men aren't desiring her the way she wants to be desired. And you know, I I don't know. Look in the mirror. Like, look at your personal rap sheet. It's not too good.

Uh, okay. So, she she fell in love with another man, put her um, you know, destroyed her marriage to put it frankly. And then she talked about him pursuing her. And again, like, did he actually pursue or did she want him to pursue? This theme keeps coming up throughout this piece. It's her expectations and projections of what she expects from from other people in relationships. and it like creates this myth in her head of what the world like is, but what it but in reality, it's reality doesn't align with her expectations. So she's getting frustrated and then her frustration is kind of being put out into the woman's sphere. Um, so she said that again, like I said, her husband her had an open uh relationship and she was the one who violated the terms um because she cared for this gay person but also being married to another another person. Um, so it's it's on her, at least she admits she's the one who ruined her her marriage. So I mean, kudos to her for at least admitting it. But um, yeah, she she's doesn't seem to be doing too good here.

Uh, okay. So, going back to this idea of male anxiety and you know, there's the lonely male epidemic and whatever you want to call it, there's clearly an observation being made by the feminist types that men aren't living up. They're not playing the part they're supposed to be playing. And so she says, "Maybe the men are taking a beat, laying low, unsure of how to want, how to talk, how to woo. Maybe they are punishing us for the confusion." Again, I'll give her credit here. Uh, because I think it is confusing. I mean, I'm a I'm a girl and I think like the friendship aspect of being in like relationship with other women is really confusing. It's just girls are mean. Girls are really mean to one another. Um, every which way they put each other down and it's, you know, single girls, young girls, old girls, um married like mom groups are pretty vicious. It's just women constantly put each other down. So I don't blame a man for wanting to take a beat. And I honestly think this might be a manifestation as a result of social media, right? So, social media, I mean, we've had it probably in earnest for about two decades at this point, but it really like app-based social media platforms like Instagram and that kind of stuff really took off, I'd say, in like the mid-2010s. So, for the last, you know, decade or so, decade and a half, we've had access to culture in ways we never had access before. And now you're able to see how women think and how women behave in a more public way. Uh, and men are observing this and they're like, "Hard no. We don't want anything to do with this." You look at, you know, examples of this would be like the Me Too movement, right? Men saw that and they're like, "Oh, nope, nope, nope. Don't want to take the risk." Well, now the the whole tea app thing um with with uh, you know, the fact that that existed and there was an entire app of women spilling tea on how awful men are apparently. Um, you know, I think I think there's men are seeing a pattern and so yeah, they're they're they're laying low cuz they're like, "Okay, we're tired of being your emotional punching bags. We're tired of being blamed for all your problems and your lack of personal responsibility accountability." I mean, this isn't in the political sphere, too. This is in the economic sphere. It's not even just culture and so society. It's everywhere. Like, men have been hated on for for decades at this point, and they're just they're they're kind of tired. And now social media has brought into focus things that existed um, I think behind the scenes that weren't that that were part of girl culture and it was, you know, understood within the women's sphere. Um, but it wasn't really exposed like it is today. Okay. And so I think men are are yeah, they are punishing us for the confusion because they're they're tired of dealing with all the shenanigans.

Um, so again, she looks to some um sexuality scholar. Uh, and so they call this hetereroatalism. It was originally heteropessimism, but now calling it hetereroatalism and describes the outlook of straight women fed up with mating behavior of men. Again, this is why like I I said like the queer um heterero paradigm. This is just weird. I don't understand why she's like this has anything to do with it. Like I don't understand why your sexual preferences and being queer or not queer has anything to do with the rel the gender relationships, the social gender relationships between men and women. That has nothing to do with it in my opinion. And so I don't even know why she's looking to a scholar that's coming up with new terms for this. If you interpret this differently, please educate me because I don't I I think it's like conflating two completely different things, but that's just me.

Okay. So, then she talks about a friend of hers. So, you know, not even her own account, but like, you know, telling a story about a friend. "On more than one occasion, when my friend checked in with the lawyer, um, apparently his friend was seeing a lawyer dude to confirm tended plans. He did not respond to her for many hours or even a day." Granted, he worked a punishing schedule, but my friend Reason it takes 90 seconds to send a quick reply. Okay, let me tell you something. I struggle with this. Okay, I think a lot of people do. And I would say during the day, like men are more focused on their jobs than women or they tend to be. And so it's not just 90 seconds, right? Like I'm constantly going through this all the time. I keep um like a notebook. I've had notebooks. I keep a Moleskine notebook. I've kept the every year. Like I decades worth of these, right? Um, and I write down all of the tasks I need to do in a day because I can't remember. And the mental load of having to remember is it fragments my my mind and my ability to focus. Like I'll sit down to start something and do like deep focus work and then it'll pop into my head. Oh, I need to I haven't texted this person in a while. I should text them or I should check in with this person. Uh, like there's someone I've been meaning to text for weeks at this point and I just haven't done it yet. And it's not it's not just it's a 90-second send a quick reply. It's there's so much in a given day that you have to remember and do that if you don't write it down or like for me if I don't write it down, it it really doesn't get done. Um, and so yeah, this definitely happens and any person, any adult who has responsibilities, um, you know, they're going to struggle with this. I, you know, I have, you know, most of my friends are married and have young kids, so they're constantly like their attention is constantly fragmented and being pulled in all sorts of directions. So, you know, my best friend who I, you know, we've been friends for almost 25 years at this point, like she's basically family to me, you know, we used to for our entire lives, we didn't go a day without talking. And now, like, she has an infant, so, you know, maybe I don't talk to her every day, you know, and that's just a different season of life. Change of pace. It doesn't mean anything. It's just your attention is fragmented. There's so much to do and there's just it's all these little things. It's like, you know, "Oh, I need to I need to do this. Oh, I need to put a load of laundry in. Oh, I should change." I was thinking about this just not too long ago when I did the laundry. It's like, "Oh, I should change the sheets today, right?" There's all these like little mental notes you're taking constantly. So, it's not just 90 seconds, right? It's not just 90 seconds because then the expectation is once you send that text, you're going to engage in a conversation and if you don't reply quick enough, she's also going to complain. So, it's like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. So, why bother? And if it's not someone you're really into, it's just a draw on your mental energy. So, I completely understand why the lawyer dude here didn't confirm. He clearly isn't into her as much as um she thinks he is. And he's just got way too much going on and just is tired of like the the phantom energy, the phantom loads just like sucking energy out of his his brain. It happens. It happens to all of us. And you have to you have to manage who gets your attention. I mean, that's just how the world works.

Uh, so so then he kind of she kind of alludes to this at the end of this paragraph. So he understood that he said, but their communication skills were obviously too different for them to continue dating. And yeah, I think communication skills are important. And if you're someone who wants a response the minute that you know someone sends a text um, you know, you need to get with the program. It's, you know, there's you're not the center of the world. You're not the center of this person's attention. There's other things happening. Um, and they'll get to you when they get to you. But be patient. It's not, you know, it's it's one thing if like you're about to go out and you're trying to confirm like like you're like you hadn't heard from this person, you had something planned for that day and then it comes to be the time and like they haven't confirmed. Okay, I can see some leeway there. Um, but I don't know. Yeah, like it just here she conflates it checked in with the lawyer to confirm tiff plans. He did not respond to her for many hours or even a day. So, it just seems like they have fragmented communication, which I think is is normal for busy people.

Uh, okay. So, she goes into the lament of kind of the traditional roles between men and women. So, uh, "What I can't absorb," she writes, "was his plunging us back into the cruelty of old-fashioned man-woman stuff, turning me into a woman who waits for a phone call that never comes and himself into the man who must avoid the woman who is waiting." Okay, two things here. Turning me into a woman who waits for a phone call. You are a grown adult. You have agency. You don't have to sit and wait for a phone call. Okay? If this were a business, you wouldn't sit and wait for a client to get back to you on a proposal. You would continue doing outbound business development to sell your services, right? Like, you're not going to sit around and wait. You're not going to play the victim. Um, that's a voluntary thing that this person is if if this is how this person sees the world, man, woman stuff. Um, if you're going to sit around, wait for a phone call in the year 2025 as a grown adult woman, like that's on you. You have agency. You can do whatever you want. Um, and then, you know, turn himself into the man who must avoid the woman who is waiting. No, he clearly doesn't want you. Read the room. Like, if he wants you, he will he will reach out to you. He will move mountains. He will pursue you. But what I'm observing just reading to this point is there's nothing worth pursuing here. You got nagging. You got a divorce who left her marriage to pursue a some other random lover. Um, you got the cattiness of girl culture and going to her friend group and, you know, making fun of making fun of a guy for being anxious. Um, if the roles were reversed and women were expected to put forth most of the effort to pursue men, I think women would be anxious too, to be honest. But, you know, that's traditionally hasn't been the case. So women, you know, have the I think have it easy. Um, you don't ever see women like this approaching men, asking them out on dates, and there's a reason for that. Um, so so yeah, up until this point, it's like clearly there's nothing that this person is offering her or her friend, you know. Um, cuz she she integrates this narrative with her friend in this piece, too, which is also confusing, but there's clearly nothing there. So of course, like guy's not going to respond. Why would he? Like what's he get out of this? Nothing. All right.

Um, so then again, we go back into the the queer stuff. So, "The feeling that further thinking about all this is futile. Surely we have done enough. Thinking about..." "I wish I could just be gay with you," she said. Uh, and I said, "I wish that too, so much." "This was our commiserative routine. What Sarris might call our performative disaffiliation with heterosexuality. Our spin on 'Take my wife, please.' 'Take my straightness, please.' Take my attraction to men." I'm I'm interpreting this as this woman is so disaffected with dating. And again, I just said like it's all because her rap sheet's not doing very good. She's not bringing much to the table, but she doesn't see that. So disaffected with dating culture that she would rather be a lesbian. Like she's wishing that her straightness could just go away. And that's just like that's weird to me. I but it's part of the culture now. You know, you think of um, you know, the shame around race, right? You have people you have white people who are flagellating themselves because they're white and they're trying to punish themselves for whatever reason. And it's just it's very strange to me that this has become so normalized. But her conclusion from all of this isn't like, "I'm the problem. How can I fix this? How can I be a better person?" It's, "I should just stop being straight. I wish I could be a lesbian." And then you're not even solving anything. Like, you're just making probably making things worse, to be honest. Um, because you're taking that level of cattiness and and girl culture and you're um you're like condensing it within um, you know, a lesbian relationship. And I've I don't have the stats off the top of my head. I know there tends to be more domestic violence, I think, within lesbian um relationships. And then I think divorce is higher, too. I should have looked those up before um I started recording, but I'm I've I've heard that before. So, I What do you Is it going to be much better? I you know, I don't know what she's trying to get at here. Why she would rather not be attracted to men. It just doesn't seem like a solution to me. But, okay.

So, she goes on to say, "The men I want are not wanting me badly enough, not communing with, not communicating with me clearly enough, not devoting themselves to me." She's not a goddess. Like, this narcissism is so palpable, you could just like cut it with a knife. She thinks like she is the center of the tension, God's gift to the earth, and that men should just be obsessing over her. And again, she offers nothing. She brings nothing to the table. Um, exactly. What is there was there to want? Like there's Nothing here. I there's no there there.

Uh, okay. So, then again, we have the feminist tropes here. So she talks about like pessimism and why um women are becoming so pessimistic about heterosexual relationships. So she talks about domestic pessimism. So women still do or men do less of the housework and child care, which I have videos on that if you want to learn more about why that is. I think that's a whole so stupid. Um, men do work too. Men do chores. Men take care of kids. They just do it in a different way. And the fact that women aren't acknowledging it doesn't mean it's not happening. Um, partner violence, pessimism, femicide is still gruesomely routine. And then erotic pessimism. Um, "The clitoris and its properties still elude many of them." Like just this expectation that you should have 100% of your needs met. 100% of the time is just it's not realistic. Like you you know, again, like compare a business or like a employer to this like instead of a romantic relationship like a work relationship. Uh, you wouldn't get all your needs met in a business either. Like you're always going to have things you know, you you for example, the people who make a lot of money are typically the ones that work a lot of long hours. So, yeah, you can make more money, but you're probably going to be an investment banker working 100 hours a week. So, there's trade-offs. There's always trade-offs, and you just have to manage them.

Uh, okay. So, she goes back to again this this queer heterero paradigm. "Whatever Sarah's vision is, most of us can neither renounce our heterosexuality nor realize a significant renegotiation of its terms." Like, she's talking here about rewiring biology. And the obsession with this on the left is really alarming. You see this with the transhumanism um, you know, ideology. You see this with transism and and gender fluidity. You're seeing this here with the desire to stop being attracted to men simply because they're not meeting your expectations. Um, biology isn't something you can renounce or renegotiate. It just kind of is what it is. Um, you know, just deal with it and figure out how you can be a better person. Like, it's really not that hard.

Uh, okay. She talks here, um, "Maybe we should force ourselves to swallow like the bitter pill of heteropatalism and put it on a carefree smile. 'Nice to meet you, good guy. I'm woman who expects nothing.'" Yeah, I think that's perfectly right. Like, I stopped expecting things a long time ago and I'm much more happier for it. Just don't expect anything and be pleasantly surprised when good things happen. Um, there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Just go into things with an open mind. Again, friendships, relationships, um, business deals, you know, employment opportunities, just have an open mind. Go into things, you know, don't expect anything. The moment you put expectations up and those expectations go up unmet, like you're setting yourself up for dissatisfaction. So eliminate the dissatisfaction uh and you know, expect nothing. Um, read some Stoic philosophy. You know, Marcus Aurelius talks about this. Um, it's a lot it's a lot more manageable when you have nothing expected and you just live a very simple life and you know, you you do good to improve yourself. Um, you you can't really control what the world does out around you, but you can control you and your inner world. So try to be a better person. Um, and then, you know, when things go well, you know, celebrate it and find gratitude in it. You know, a novel thought.

Okay. Yeah. "When my friend complained about the lawyer, I expressed outrage at his behavior and worked my way quite naturally and along a well-worn groove to a condemnation of all, okay, most men as incapable of upholding basic standards of communication and care." No, women fail to hold up basic standards of communication and care. I mean, sure, there are some men who um, you know, probably don't communicate well, but there's a lot of women who don't either. Like, I struggle with communication. I think a lot of women do. Um, you know, women who don't have a good sense of how they exist in the world, the women who put themselves on a pedestal and they're highly narcissistic and they think the world revolves around them. Um, of course they're going to see men as uncaring because their expectations are so high. Um, so you just can't like bucket people like that.

Uh, okay. Let's see. Oh, she talks. Yeah, it's like this is such a weird piece. She's like conflating all of these different things together. So like the heterero queer paradigm, her, you know, unmet desires in her relationship. Like she splices in stories from her friends. She's talking here about emotional labor. It's just weird how she splices all the stuff together, but um she talks about emotional labor as something that's paid work that involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job. I have no idea what that means. Um, no one is forcing you to do that. Like, no one is making you do that. I don't understand. Um, but she she sets that up to explain there's unequal divisions of labor in our love lives. So, these same women who are complaining that men don't help out around the home, they don't help out with taking care of children, uh, she's now complaining that there's unequal division of labor in our love lives. So, they're not coming to the bedroom with an equal on an equal footing. And like, how many more ways can you tear down men? Like, how how many more ways are women going to going to do this? Um, you know, women don't bring equal division. Like, of course, there's an unequal division. Like, women aren't bringing anything to the table. Um, so if you're a man in a relationship and you feel like you dread coming home because your your significant other is going to nag you or be mean to you or belittle you, like of of course there's going to be an unequal division of labor. Like, how can you be romantic towards that? I for those of you who are like, godspeed, but you know, no human wants to be treated like that. So, of course, of course, it's going to be one-sided and asymmetrical, especially like she was saying in the above, how all this is about power. It's it's a power dynamic, and the woman is trying to hold power over the man.

Um, so she talks about the micropolitics of dating. She calls the work women do to interpret mystifying male cues her hermeneutic, hermeneutic labor, and she posits it as a form of gendered exploitation in intimate relationships. Are we any different? Like women are often la land. Like I do this all the time too, like, you know, kind of holding feelings in, not expressing, not being clear, not communicating perfectly. Um, women do this too. So it's not just like women who are bearing the burden of this. It goes both ways.

Uh, okay. So she talks about how her friend was working two jobs. One to earn her living, the other as a sole manager of an emotional entanglement that was also his. "Heteroatalism is partly just burnout." Like again, this is women trying to like shoulder the burden that they shoulder a burden that they've invented for themselves to perpetuate their own self-victimization and justify their frustration. Like no one is forcing this woman to be the sole manager of an emotional entanglement. Like clearly she's projecting expectations that aren't realistic onto someone else and then there's some emotional imbalance within that relationship and then she is taking it upon herself to shoulder the responsibility of managing that. Like I don't understand. I don't understand why this is so difficult for women to understand. Um, we're all free people. We have choices. Uh, you know, I believe in free will and you have a choice to how you respond to things. And no one is forcing you to be the emotional manager of another person. Like if you choose that, that's on that's on you. That's on you.

Okay. So now they dive into um the one. So they dude in the beginning. So again, like I said, this is really poorly written, but we're back to that. So So she opened this up with a guy, the guy she wanted to run her hair her fingers through, and who she objectified. So this is all being framed within a date with a guy. And so she talks to him, and she calls him a sex nerd, cuz this is really what it's all about. Like this is a very transactional, hedonistic exchange. She just wants she just wants something out of him. Um, and her like this this guy um doesn't he's not monogamous and and argues like, "Why would you play with just one toy when you can take turns with all the toys while at the same time vaguely subverting something. Capitalism." Like I have no idea what capitalism has to do with any of this. Like capitalism has nothing to do with your hedonistic pleasures and desires. Um, but you know, this is the way certain people view the world that you're you don't have responsibility that life is all about you, life is all about your pleasures and meeting your needs. Um, there's no accountability, there's no responsibility, and this is in relationship, no responsibility to another person. So you don't have to be faithful, you don't have to, you know, uphold any sort of virtue or value, you can just do as you please. And I think there's a tyranny of choice here when you have too much and you want so many different things, you can't focus your energy. You have to choose something and just go for it. Um, and this person had something. She was married and she decided that that wasn't sufficient for her. So, she's now in this world that she's created for herself pretty much.

Uh, okay. So, she talks about um how this guy is an "evolved, transparent, and enlightened creature of our new romantic age." Um, this is a really subtle nuance here, but I think it's important to pay attention to. So people who writers who write like this, they think of themselves as above the rest of us. They think of themselves as enlightened or intellectually superior. They've seen something that the rest of us can't have. And so by by framing it this way, she's saying basically anyone who's traditional is inferior. Anyone who is in a happy monogamous, not even happy, just like a content monogamous relationship, married um, like doing the the man-woman things um, all of that is inferior. That she has elevated herself, that she's gone above that, she's better than that. And so there's this whole subculture within elitist like coastal circles, coastal elites, that believe that they're superior to the rest of us. And that superiority might manifest um financially, right? Uh, it can be like your job, your job title, um club, social clubs you're part of, right? It manifests in physical possessions, so the things you own. Um, where you send your kids to school, but it also manifests in relationships, too, like how you interact with your relationships and how you see things. And it's clear here like if this is what enlightenment looks like, pursuing hedonistic pleasure. Um, at the expense of other people with no personal accountability, then the rest of us pursuing traditional relationships, we're clearly inferior. We're less than. Um, so so it's important to to pay attention to that because, you know, every I think generation that has come prior and with the sexual revolution, all that stuff, there is this dichotomy between what has always existed and what has been normalized and what is new and better. And the assumption is it's it's good. Whatever is new is good. And it's an advancement and it's progress, and that's not always the case. Um, you know, feminism, polyamory, you know, hedonism, like that's not necessarily I don't know that any of this has turned out to be good. I don't know that, you know, destruction of, you know, the family um, and especially, you know, ways here, but also, you know, within the feminist narrative as well. I don't I don't know that's a good thing. I don't know that we can chalk that up as a win for for human civilization.

Uh, okay. So, she talks about how looks like they had like a back and forth for a couple weeks and she became annoyed that he was withholding something from me, though I couldn't say what exactly and he became anxious about annoying me and I accused him of coldness and he accused me of being unfair and so on. "The familiar female ma demand male withdrawal pattern descended over us." No, she made up a problem. She concocted a problem. She let her emotions run a muck and she became annoyed for something that she literally cannot. She says, "I um though I couldn't say what exactly." She doesn't even know why she became annoyed. She just became annoyed for the sake of becoming annoyed. And of course, he responded. I any human would respond to that. Like if you know, if someone was annoyed at me, I would, you know, if one of my friends was like, you know, annoyed, but they couldn't tell me why, I would withdraw too. I'm like, "Okay, what did I do? I don't want to, you know, rock the boat any further. I value this friendship. I don't, you know," so of course when you add, you know, a romantic relationship onto it, the stakes are higher. Um, and of course, of course, like she's he's going to pull pull back and then she goes on to accuse him of being cold. Um, and so you can see in real time here like the deterioration of the quality of this relationship. No wonder why. like men are fleeing this woman like the plague. Um, who wants to be part part of that? All right.

So, she says, "I toppled the whole structure of my life for a man who when I asked him, 'Do you want to be with me or not?' replied after a few seconds silence, 'I want to be with you and I want everything everywhere all at once.'" Uh, yeah, she I think this is happening a lot and you can see this on TikTok, you know, YouTube, all sorts of things. You have women who are just bored. They're for whatever reason, they're bored in their relationships. They're not growing, right? Because if you're into this feminist narrative, you don't take personal responsibility for yourself. So, you have no opportunities to grow. And because you're set in your ways and you're really stuck on what you believe in, you're not making mistakes. You don't think that you're wrong. And if you're not wrong and you're not you're not doing anything that's incorrect, you can't grow. Learning. Learning comes from doing things incorrectly. That's how you evolve as a human. It's not that you believe certain things. It's not evolution. It's it's doing and learning and growing and getting up again and and continuing and trying. And so, she's not doing any of this. And a lot of women aren't. They're just bored because they're staying static. And that is boring. Who wants to be static for several decades? No one. Um, you have to grow. And the point is growing together and and figuring that out. Um, and so she found this other dude and was like, "Okay, the grass looks greener." Well, turns out the grass isn't greener because he doesn't want what she wants. And she projected an expectation of a relationship that didn't exist and was never going to exist on some other man. And she sacrificed her marriage for it, and a lot of women are doing this.

Um, okay. And then she

talks about, "It occurs to me that the multiverse mindset may also reflect the cognitive effects of dating apps that defeat us by design, project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines." I would agree with that. I think, um, the more choice, the tyranny of choice is real. The more choices you have, the harder it is to commit to something. And, and the harder it is to commit to something, the harder it is to grow, the harder it is to evolve, the harder it is to make a mistake. You're just paralyzed. There's, uh, analysis or paralysis by analysis. Like you have so many options, you're going to choose none. Um, and so it says here, uh, but at least you were spared the anxiety of of choice. So she's talking about, um, okay, relationship between his grandparents who barely spoke to each other before getting married as teenagers in Sicily. Um, so that they, you know, were married for a while. And it says, "But at least you were spared the anxiety of choice." So older generations, traditional folks are spared the anxiety of choice. And this is, I think this is evidence of a very infantile mindset. If you're not willing to commit to something, if you're not willing to try, and you're not willing to potentially make a mistake and take the risk, you're behaving like a child. That's how children behave. Um, so if you have anxiety of choice, you are mentally at the same level of a child. Um, so this, this came later and this is really disheartening. So she talks about her daughter and, and the guy that she tried to, that she'd left her husband for. Um, they were, you know, sat together on a blanket in a park with him. Uh, they talk about a group of teenagers playing volleyball and that they were keeping an eye on the the teenagers waiting for them to disband, urging her to be patient. So I get the sense from that that her daughter's not a teenager. So a young child, so you know, maybe anywhere from, you know, four or five years old up to like 10 or, you know, pre-teen. Um, and so kids are being taught this. This is why I think the protecting the family unit is is so important. This, you know, what you do, um, in your family is how you're creating the future citizens of tomorrow, right? So, so kids are being taught things in, in culture, they're being taught things in school, and they're being taught things at home. And I think home is the most important place where kids learn good, good values, good morality. They learn, you know, how to interact with other people. And if you have a home life where like this daughter has watched her mother destroy her marriage for some random dude that she thinks she loves. Like, this is what the daughter is learning. And so if you want to know why, you know, feminist culture is the way it is today, look at the generations that preceded it and how we got here. This didn't come out of a vacuum. This was learned. Um, and so this is why I think protecting the family is so important because that's how we course correct from this. So, you know, we can't undo per se what's been done, but if we commit to, you know, maybe restoring traditional roles and kind of going back to the family, maybe in a generation or two, we can get back some of it.

Uh, okay. So, they talk about, you know, infinite timelines of what could be, um, and what might have been. It's just the writing of this is like a 20. She writes like she's a 20-year-old, but she's in fleeting middle age. Like, yeah. So, she's probably in maybe her early 40s, I would say. Uh, okay. And we're, we're diving back into this queer heterero bit. Uh, Sarah rightly pokes fun at the privileged ignorance of straits who, in moments of yearning to experience a desire that we imagine as more extricable from our own oppression, announce a wish to be queer. No relationship regardless of gender, orientation, number of people is immune from power dynamics. So, uh, two, two things here. Uh, this perception that being straight is is oppressive. Like the oppressor, oppression paradigm is just so bizarre. Um, but here this person is making the argument that being straight is somehow oppressive and that again, the grass is apparently greener on the other side. Um, and that if this person were queer, suddenly they would no longer be oppressed. Um, it's very, very strange that logic. Uh, but then she talks about no relationship regardless of gender, orientation, number of people is immune from power dynamics. Uh, so what this person is basically admitting that the oppression, oppressor narrative is a core part of a lot of the ideologies that underpins this behavior and this line of thinking. So, you know, feminist, Marxist, all the critical race stuff, all of this is underpinned by like an oppressor, oppression, uh, paradigm and it does come from Marxism. Um, but she talks about no relationship is immune from power dynamics. So, the thing that these people are trying to correct for in society seems to not be a flaw. It seems to be an innate part of the system. So, it's not social structures. It's not anything that we've been told. Um, there are power dynamics. There are always going to be power dynamics. You'll never get rid of those. Um, and so if you understand your role in a power dynamic, like you can derive power from that, like you can set yourself up for for success. But if you just blame the system, like all these, we're blaming capitalism for, you know, racial oppression and queer and hetereroppression and, um, female oppression, right? Everyone always blames the patriarchy. Um, we're, we're blaming all these structures in the system and it's, she's admitting openly, no relationship is immune from power dynamics. No relationships. So that applies to all relationships and we are human, so we are fundamentally in relationship with other people unless you live on a remote island and you don't communicate with anyone and you're by yourself. Um, there's always going to be power damaging. So, it's interesting how in trying to write about society and culture from a feminist, like critical of heteronormative culture perspective, this person is basically admitting the very thing that her ideology is built on, or, you know, admitting that it's flawed.

Uh, okay. So, it concludes by saying the old way of mating is dead and my friend at our colloqui of female complaint over dinner and the new one has yet to be born. Um, so here's the thing, the irony here. So if the old way of mating is dead, the whole point of mating is to reproduce. So the new one isn't going to be born cuz you people aren't reproducing. So this is just, I, I mean, I think this person is trying to be witty. Um, but this is complete delusion. Like, no, the old way of mating isn't dead. Um, women's perception of of mating is dead. And if they want, um, to go back to the old way, then they need to be women. And if they don't want to go back to the new way, they need to accept their options. So she's laid out a couple here. You can, um, be in a multitude of relationships simultaneously all at once. So you can go the polyamory route. Um, you can just withdraw and not participate at all and be, um, in, in, in a state of solitude. Um, or you can change your sexuality and just go for the same team. Like, you have options. Um, you can do whatever you want apparently. So you either go back to what worked before or you pick which one of the new options that are on the table and you just commit to it. The fact that throughout this whole piece, there's this o over, uh, underlying theme of being unwilling to commit, being unwilling to try, being unwilling to do. It's all about stasis. This person is stuck. This person can't get out of the rut they're in, and they're just spinning their wheels expecting the conditions to change. And that's the definition of insanity, right? Like doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Um, so it's, it's evidently clear here, um, that this person, like nothing's going to get better. This person threw away a marriage for whatever she thought was better. She brings nothing to the table. She outlines the whole reason why men are, you know, abstaining from relationships. No one wants to be, you know, abused and belittled, um, behind their backs. Um, yeah.

So, uh, this was interesting. This again, this person is a writer. Um, and then she's apparently won a prize for her writing. And I don't understand what is prizeworthy about this. Um, I don't know. I just want to close by saying this is a really long piece. Um, this took me quite a while to read. So, pieces like this, um, I'll give you some inside baseball for freelance writing. So, obviously, the New York Times is a highly esteemed publication. Not anyone, you can't just write for the New York Times, right? Like, you have to work your way in and, and pitch. And obviously it helps if you're an insider. So the ways you can be an insider. You're already a journalist. Maybe you work for a different publication or you did, but you already have established yourself in the journalism field. You've gone to the right school. So you've gone to Columbia. You've gone to Northwestern. You've established yourself through that. Uh, or in this person's case, they worked for a publishing house. They were an editor. So they were already within this world. So you have an echo chamber, a structural echo chamber that has been built that is perpetuating this. So something like this, um, for a publication like the New York Times, I would be shocked if they paid this woman less than $1,000 to write this. Probably $1,500, $2,000, maybe more. So this garbage, this, I mean, I, you know, I'm, I'm a writer and I'm not perfect, but like, I struggled to understand the point she was trying to make here. This is pure garbage. Um, this person was paid a few thousand dollars to write this. And so I, I wanted to share that with you because something that is lost in these conversations is how pieces like this are manifesting in culture and how they're shaping culture. So, I've, I've talked in previous videos about how academia and, and journals and pseudoscientific beliefs and half-baked ideas are being presented and taken as fact. Well, another way that stuff like this is getting promoted in the culture is because there's a market for it and it's not the end reader. The market isn't the end reader. The market for this piece isn't you or I. The market is the editing team and the editorial team at, um, the New York Times. So whatever New York Times magazine it looks like this was in. So whatever content vertical at the New York Times has commissioned this piece, that's the market. So, so long as you have editors at places like the New York Times and the New Yorker and the Atlantic that have budgets and they're willing to pay writers like this and they're soliciting work from members of their own team, their own tribe, their own community, you're going to keep getting garbage like this. And then when you see stuff like this patterns, we're humans, we look for patterns. I mean, LLMs and AI are built off of humans and that's all pattern recognition, right? Like we are wired to look for patterns. So if you're a woman and you read this and it confirms what you already believe, you're only going to go deeper in into that that hole and it's going to be harder for you to get out. And the same with men. You know, a lot of guys, um, watch my stuff and you're, you're, you're, you know, I read some of the comments and it's like, okay, well, this is why, this is why I'm, I've stopped dating. This is why I'm, you know, abstaining from women. This proves my point. This is why it's not worth it. We're going our own way. Um, but what you might not consider is that this is part of a structural echo chamber. This is the architecture of an echo chamber that has been artificially created by a niche market of people that have money and by writers who can meet the needs for that market. It's not for the benefit of you and I. So even though this is disseminated in culture, this has nothing to do with the real world. So they've created an artifice of what they think the world is based on a handful of experiences like this and then that shapes the broader narrative. This isn't how reality is.

So I appreciate you watching this. Um, you know, if, if you made it all the way to, to the end, thank you. Appreciate, uh, you sticking around to listen to my rambling. But just know this isn't indicative of all women. This isn't indicative of the, the real world. This isn't indicative of mainstream America. Um, this is a small group of angry feminist cultural elitists in cities like New York and LA and San Francisco who think the world should be one thing and it's they've been disappointed by it. Um, so, so don't, don't read this. Don't, you know, other videos I've put out, don't look at these and assume all women are bad. This is what is being put out based on the economics of it and if the economics change, then stuff like this will stop getting produced and we've already started seeing evidence of this, right? There's a reason why Joy Reed's show was canceled on MSNBC. There's a reason why Stephen Colbert's, um, the late show was canceled by CBS. Uh, those shows no longer have audiences, they're no longer profitable. It doesn't make sense to run them. So, so long as attention moves and diverts away from this, when, when the New York Times starts losing a lot of readers and the budgets for some of these editorial teams starts drying up, then they won't be able to run publications like this, right? Um, and writers like this will have to, you know, compete in the free market like the rest of us and hope the algorithms, you know, get, get their content to the right people. Um, and so, so that's something to keep in mind that what you see in the media and how it's being portrayed and even though I've just gone through this, you know, for the sake of of making this video, this isn't exact, this isn't quite indicative of what the real world is. It's just a match of who has money and who can write to the narratives that meet the expectations and, and desires of the editorial teams who are producing these pieces. So, something to keep in mind. Um, if you appreciated this take and, and enjoyed, uh, my thoughts on this horrible piece, uh, I would love it if you would like and subscribe. That will help me, uh, grow this channel. And if you want to check out, I have a whole playlist about feminist rants. Um, feel free to check that out, too. Uh, other than that, I will see you in the next video.