by Meghan Daum
That’s a sad story, I suppose. It’s a story that, when subjected to the expected interpretation, perfectly telegraphs the ingrained sexism and internalized misogyny that keeps women off the top rungs of the ladder. It hints at just how impossible Hillary Clinton’s task was when she ran for president; she had to win the nerd vote while also appeasing the football players. She had to convince people that it’s possible to be the leader of the free world without being threatening. But just as I think gender alone doesn’t account for Clinton’s downfall, I’ve never been able to blame the patriarchy for thwarting my eighth-grade presidential run. Nor could I have blamed internalized misogyny even if that term had been around back then. It was more like internalized stupidity. Or Suburbia Induced Mediocrity Syndrome. Whatever it was, the decision I made was mine alone. There were probably any number of other girls who, had they wanted to run for president, would have had the strength of character to swat away Steve’s henchmen as though they were common houseflies. (Not that these sorts of girls would have bothered to run for student council in the first place, since they would have probably lacked that need-to-be-liked gene that compels many people to run for any political office.)
Moreover, there were probably any number of eighth-grade girls who could have thrown me off my game by challenging me directly in a run for president. In all honesty, if some extremely popular girl had let it be known that she’d be my best friend if only I removed myself from the field of competitors, I may have taken her up on it. That’s because for all my moxie, I was still in the eighth grade. My chief aspiration was to fit in and be liked. There are many ways in which that is still my chief aspiration.
I carried that aspiration with me on both shoulders through high school and college and into early adulthood, where somewhere along the way it shifted over to only my left shoulder. On my right shoulder is the antipode of this aspiration, the impulse to say what I really think and do what I really want even if it gets me a little cast out or a little (or a lot) disliked. All of the things I’ve done right—my best writing, my best relationships, the best places I’ve lived—have come from leading with my right shoulder. Everything I’ve gotten wrong, including the times when it could be said that I’ve been done wrong by someone, have come from leading with the left shoulder. I naturally favor the right, but only slightly.
All this is to say that it’s difficult for me to think about grievance, especially toward men, in the way we’re now supposed to think about it. And that is to say the search for grievance has become a kind of political obligation, an activist gesture—or at least something that passes for one. I remember sitting at my computer one morning reading with fascination a couple of Facebook posts by the same woman. The first was a magazine article about a successful female television showrunner in Hollywood. The article emphasized the sexism the showrunner encountered in the early years of her career, and the Facebook poster took the opportunity to share her own brief experience as a writer’s assistant and the crude, bro-ish male behavior she endured from overwhelmingly male colleagues. Her comment was met instantly with the predictable cascade of affirmations and commiserations: I. Can’t. Even. Is this shit ever gonna get old? Bet they knew you were more talented and just couldn’t handle it.
Directly under this post was another from the same woman a few days earlier. This time it was a complaint about men not paying on dates. When the check comes, you slap your credit card down right away, she intoned, taking on the voice of a friendly if peeved advice giver to hapless single men. Don’t fuck it up and let the check sit there so she’s forced to ask, “Should we split it?” It’s the fastest way to emasculate yourself, turn us dry.
Staring at my screen, I was awash in thoughts, most of which caved in on themselves through sheer force of their contradictions. On the one hand, I was well aware that men in Hollywood writers’ rooms can be infantile, depraved pigs. I knew countless women who’d told me the same kinds of stories. I’d also been in enough Hollywood pitch meetings to see that many of the men who wind up in positions of power in that business are former teenage nerds attempting to make up for lost time by mistreating, rejecting, objectifying, or just generally being assholes to the kinds of women (in some cases all women) who wouldn’t give them the time of day in high school. On the other hand, I happened to have read the article in question. It seemed clear the television creator had an unusual, even sometimes puzzling, style of going about her job. She seemed like an exceptionally cool person but also a notably unusual one. This made me wonder how much of the derision she sometimes faced was the result of sexism and how much was the result of her just being kind of weird to deal with.
More than that, though, I wondered why the writer of the article, a seasoned pro who no doubt knew what she was doing, had chosen to underscore the sexism factor. Was this just part and parcel of any discussion of a woman who has achieved high levels of professional success in a field that hasn’t traditionally been dominated by women? Or was it in fact completely relevant because, weird and grating as this show creator’s personality might be, male show creators can be equally weird and grating, if not more so, and no one would reject them out of hand for being difficult to work with? As I thought about it, it seemed clear that both things were true at once. Yes, the television creator had been subject to judgment in ways her male peers probably had not. And, yes, in pursuit of the sexism angle, the writer of the article had indulged in a rather perfunctory and probably needless checking off of boxes.
But then again, was it needless? Maybe it was the best angle after all. As I got up from my desk and went to the kitchen for more coffee, I found myself stewing in my own interrogative juices. The sexism angle irritated me for some reason, but maybe I was wrong to be irritated. After all, how often do male creatives get thrown under the bus because they’re too difficult? Perhaps not that often. Was Francis Ford Coppola fired when the chaos of his set coincided with Martin Sheen suffering a heart attack during the filming of Apocalypse Now? Was David O. Russell’s career ruined after a video of him exploding on set and hurling expletives at actors—including the beloved Lily Tomlin, of all people!—went viral? A woman in Coppola’s shoes would have been deemed incompetent. A woman in Russell’s shoes would be declared mentally ill, too big of an insurance risk to put on a set. How was this not proof of sexism? And why shouldn’t the magazine writer have put it in the foreground of the article?
Overwhelmed by these questions, I moved on to the Facebooker’s second gripe, about men not paying the bill on dates. Until a few months earlier, that issue would have been of little interest to me, but as it happened I had recently found myself wandering into the postdivorce dating arena on errant occasions. When I say “wandering,” I mean it in the sense of accidentally deviating from my path into hostile territory, the way I sometimes nonsensically but also vividly imagine a tourist in South Korea might lean slightly in the wrong direction and wind up in North Korea and from there in a labor camp for life. I mean that I’d been on perhaps four dates with four different men at that point (I hadn’t liked any of them enough to go on a second date). Some of these dates had ended in a sort of cordially tacit agreement that we’d split the bill. In no cases had that lessened my attraction to the men in question, mostly because I was attracted to so few of them in the first place.
I thought about all of this as I read the comments responding to the Facebook post, an alarming number of which were from women referring to the men on dating apps as “garbage.” One woman bristled about how a man had made her pay for her drinks and then had the nerve to try to kiss her afterward. Another chimed in with a quip about the gender wage gap: Come talk to us when women aren’t earning $.79 for every dollar a man earns.
I wasn’t sure how old the original poster was—I wasn’t sure how I was even connected to her in the first place—but it was clear she was younger and in a different phase of life than I was. It was clear she was looking for a serious commitment, which meant her dating stakes were exponenti
ally higher than mine. While I was looking mostly to cleanse my palate after a complicated, loving, but also sadder-than-it-should-have-been marriage, she was looking for a life partner. While I was mostly delighted to be living alone again, leisurely grazing for meals rather than planning them, coming home to an empty apartment that didn’t resent me for being out late, she was probably exhausted by the same. While I had hard proof that good men are out there, since I’d managed to marry one, she probably had no reason to believe the world wasn’t populated by cheapskate “garbage” masquerading as eligible bachelors. I certainly hadn’t when I was on the tenterhook that is singledom in your mid- to late thirties.
I didn’t have to contend with dating apps, either. Or even regular online dating. (I actually met men in real-life situations like parties or the library, a feat I now look on with the same astonishment I feel about once being able to do a backflip.) I didn’t have the opportunity to lay my soul bare on social media in exchange for cheap solidarity. I didn’t have in my constant sight line a thousand web magazines and Tumblr sites reminding me what was wrong with the world in general and how I was getting screwed specifically. If these things had existed in my younger days, perhaps I would have been coming home from disappointing dates and letting my frustrations rip on Facebook. As it was, I phoned my friends late at night and vented my frustrations at them.
Was that really any different from what this Facebooker was doing? During the first few years of my postdivorce life, I spent a lot of time observing what had changed over the decade or so since I’d last been single. A decade isn’t so long in the big picture, but this particular decade—2005 to 2015—had brought enough changes to make it feel like three. Back in 2005, most polling showed less than a quarter of women identifying as feminists. Hence that familiar refrain “I’m not a feminist, but ____.”
By 2015, feminism, at least the word “feminism,” was a mass-market brand. Ever since Beyoncé stepped out in front of that giant lit-up “FEMINIST” sign at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2014, the word—along with its partner word, badass—had become ubiquitous.
Badass feminism had broken off into tributaries like #KillAllMen and internet-driven “awareness campaigns” around societal afflictions like catcalling women on the streets. There was, of course, the perennial topic of office thermostats being set too low for women. “Air conditioning is another big, sexist plot” declared a much-discussed Washington Post article in 2015 with funny-not-funny impudence. The best way to be fashion-forward, it seemed, was to declare men the enemy.
Here’s the problem with that sort of sentiment: It may purport to diminish male power, but in my view it only bolsters it. It hands men power they simply don’t have, or at least don’t deserve. It follows the logic of “punching up” in comedy, which says that it’s okay to make fun of someone as long as that person intrinsically holds more power than you. It’s why it’s culturally acceptable to skewer a celebrity or a politician or even a random rich person but not a normal private citizen. (I guess unless that citizen has a lot of Twitter followers.) But here’s what I think: When women apply this logic to men, bathing in their tears and shooing off their every utterance as mansplaining, they actually achieve the opposite of what they intended. They effectively put those men on pedestals they might not have been on to begin with. They lift them up in order to knock them down. They literally hand men their own power. It’s like doing a jujitsu move against yourself.
Of course, fourth-wave feminism is forever armed with countless examples of how men have power over women: physically, economically, legislatively (that one is changing, albeit slowly). What many of its adherents don’t seem to see, however, are the countless ways that women frequently have power over men: in the use of sex as a tool for manipulation, in parenting dynamics, in the ability nowadays to shut down a conversation by citing male privilege and dramatically dropping the mic. What they seem unwilling to confront are the ways that power dynamics shift among all kinds of people all the time. For all their thinking about theories of intersectionality among oppressed groups, too many women seem to have difficulty understanding why a homeless man who whistles at a young woman as she’s off to her fancy internship every morning is not exactly a foot soldier for the patriarchy.
Yes, it sucks to be a woman sometimes. Until very recently, it usually sucked a whole lot more often than just sometimes. But there have always been ways in which it can suck to be a man, too. It can suck to be a person walking the earth in your own sensitive, sunburned, sweating, sagging skin. As George Carlin said, “Men are from earth; women are from earth. Deal with it.”
But we don’t deal with it. That’s because, in some circles, dealing with it implies accepting it, and accepting it means being complicit in structural misogyny and so on. And the funny thing about it is that in assigning men undue power by seeing sexist injustices where there aren’t any, it’s all too easy to overlook other, very real injustices. One night I was riding the subway home to upper Manhattan, the train rattling through the Upper West Side and Harlem toward the Bronx. It was probably around eleven thirty or close to midnight, that hour when New York City starts to burble with a kind of tired, tipsy energy that, depending on where you are in life, tells you it’s either time to go to bed or time to move on to phase two of the evening. The subway car wasn’t empty, but it was hardly full. Two young men, probably in their twenties, sat across from me talking animatedly about something related to the arts, maybe theater or classical music. A gaggle of drunk-seeming young women, probably also in their late teens or early twenties, sat across from me a little farther down. Their skirts were short and their makeup was streaked and they were laughing and talking in that several-decibels-too-loud way that young women can be particularly good at. Something about their level of enthusiasm suggested they were not from the city but perhaps tourists or, more likely, suburbanites in town for someone’s birthday or bridal shower.
At one point a man who was clearly intoxicated, mentally ill, or both (I’d bet my savings on both) got on the train and commenced with those flailing-around maneuvers that you often see in intoxicated, mentally ill people on the subway. He approached riders randomly, asking for money but also trying to engage them in conversation. When he got to me he began complimenting me, telling me I was pretty and remarking on my blonde hair. I did the thing I usually do with this sort of person, which is to acknowledge them in a good-humored sort of way to break the tension but not engage them any further. The man seemed angry that I wouldn’t talk to him, so he set upon the group of girls, who, unlike me, seemed amused by him and invited him to sit down.
For several stops, the girls playfully teased the man, and he teased them back. I couldn’t help but pick up on a certain voyeurism on their part. They were white and appeared to be middle class, and the man was black and probably homeless. I got the sense they were taking delight in what they perceived as his exoticism as well as pride in their willingness to let him sit with them. Other riders looked up from time to time, some rolling their eyes and some registering mild amusement. When the man finally got up to exit the train, he made a big show of telling the girls to have a great and beautiful night, and the girls, in turn, waved their arms and blew kisses at him.
I was sitting near the door, reading a magazine article on my iPhone (an article about poverty and mental illness, coincidentally). As he passed me, the man stopped, leaned down right in my face, and shouted, “Now, you have a fucked up night!”
I raised both of my hands as if to surrender. “Okay, okay,” I said. “I hear you.”
“Bitch!” he shouted as he got off the train.
I was actually laughing a little. The phrase “have a fucked-up night” struck me as funny. The man had startled me, but not frightened me. I hadn’t felt threatened at all. He was wiry and unsteady on his feet. If he’d attacked me, there were plenty of people around who could have—and surely would have—come to my rescue.
The young men directly across from me sat there
looking horrified.
“I am so sorry,” one of them said.
When I lived in New York decades earlier, when this sort of thing happened all the time, the passengers would have just shaken their heads and immediately forgotten about it. These men, however, were visibly upset.
“I’m just so sorry you had to go through that,” the other one said.
“Well, what are you gonna do?” I said, turning back to my iPhone article.
“No, I’m really sorry,” he said again.
“It’s just so wrong,” said the other man.
I realized then that this wasn’t a display of concern but of self-flagellation. I looked at the men again. They had scruffy beards, longish hair, palish complexions. They spoke with that finely articulated cadence you often hear in people in the performing arts, especially theater people. I knew nothing about them, of course (they could have been computer programmers, for all I knew), but a quick flash of my imagination projected onto them recent liberal arts degrees with the full complement of intersectional doctrine. Despite looking like the kind of guys who might have been picked on in high school, they had grown into men who believed themselves to be oppressors. They had grown into men whose response to a mentally ill homeless guy calling a woman a bitch and telling her to have a fucked-up night was to apologize on behalf of the entire patriarchy.
