Why men have it harder than women
Dear H,
This week several stories about feminists caught my attention, one of them being America Ferrera’s speech in the Barbie movie. It went like this,
It is literally impossible to be a woman [emphasis mine]. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.
But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line.
It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you!
The main thing Ferrera is complaining about here is called “The Golden Mean” — the idea (coined by Aristotle) that life is a balance, and that whether you’re a man or a woman, to fall too far on either side is to wreck yourself. It’s also found in Buddhism as The Middle Path, in Confucianism as Zhongyong, in the fable of Icarus, and the Roman/Catholic cardinal virtue of temperance. In other words, absolutely everywhere.
I don’t mean to say that men and women are dealing with all the same things; but whether you’re dealing with man things or woman things, you still have to walk that tightrope. If you don't have courage you’re a coward, and if you have too much you’re reckless. Too much sex appeal and you’re a menace; too little sex appeal and you die alone, or worse — you get married to a boob. And the same goes for everything else. Don’t be too much of anything or you’ll end up ruining everything. Solomon says,
Let your eyes look straight ahead,
And your eyelids look right before you.
Ponder the path of your feet,
And let all your ways be established.
Do not turn to the right or the left;
Remove your foot from evil.
What’s worth mentioning here is that Ferrera imagined all women in her shoes and forgot that men wear shoes too. Bigger ones (I hope), and usually uglier; but men find ourselves on this tightrope every day, and when we fall off, it hurts. The big difference is, when men get it right we’re happy about it. When a great man sees the tightrope, you get Kipling's If*. When a feminist tries the tightrope, you get It's too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you!
How about you grow a pair.
What stupid women miss is that God says thank you. He says it through peace, joy, and the overwhelming feeling that you’re on the way up — in life, not just a random company. He tops it off with a happy spouse and healthy children, proud parents, thriving coworkers, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. Not to be substituted with cats, flings, booze, being a doctor, or going to the doctor for Prozac. Like beauty, health, and gravity, there's no speech in Barbie that can make losing go away. There's no amount of drugs you can take to offset a failure to balance. You either man up or you get wrecked.
What this speech also proves is that, despite women’s reputation as carers and nurturers, feminists lack the basic empathy required to understand men — and that so far from being their oppressors, we’re under greater pressures than they’re even capable of imagining***. We're dealing with all the normal stuff of life, and then, on top of this, we have a whole slew of women who refuse to believe we’re dealing with it.
According to the third paragraph in the speech, it's implied we’re allowed to be rude and selfish, that we’re never held accountable, that we can step out of line, and look scared, and can just continually be ungrateful and get away with it. “And it turns out in fact,” she says, “that not only are you [women] doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.” She forgot to mention that according to USA Today, in 2021, men accounted for 80% of all suicides.
Yours,
-J
P.S. The second story I saw this week has to do with Ivory Man — an achaeological find they just found out was a woman. This forced them to “rethink everything we knew about the site.”
They had originally assumed she was a man; but new developments in “molecular methods” allowed them to find out the true sex and theorize accordingly. They say she was buried with more fancy stuff than anybody else they found in the whole region. They say eight generations were buried around her tomb, over 200 years, and that this means she was highly revered over time. They said she “probably” got to where she was on her own merits, and that she was "probably” engaged in long-distance relations. They now believe she upends all our ideas about gender roles in pre-historical societies, and that the ancient past was much more “diverse” and “complex” than anything we’d previously imagined.
I admit all this may be true. Just as likely as her being the wife of the most powerful leader in the region — and that he was so in love with her, that he gave her the best of his stuff. And maybe the other guys took note and did the same thing. Maybe this was the first great act of chivalry, and putting your woman above yourself was an act of worship, like opening her car door, or buying her a diamond ring. Maybe the other men caught on, and that’s why the other women are buried around her too. Maybe if they didn’t do it, the other women would think he's a cad — like some Indians think about women who don’t jump into the funeral pyre. Maybe the men all died in the field and got buried on the battle-site. Maybe they’re just buried somewhere else for fun. Maybe we haven't found the burial site yet because there's a Walmart over it. Maybe the women ate them.
Either way, if we can’t prove much about the women back then, these stories prove a lot about the feminists we know now. The first is that feminists can’t imagine obvious things about the men right in front of them. The second proves that feminists will imagine anything about the women too far in back of them.
*If, by Rudyard Kipling.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!
***My own personal experience is that men have it harder than women in many ways. One of these ways is, if women complain about the unavoidable struggles of existence, they still get pity, like a toddler that falls down; and they still can be attractive, like a damsel in distress. If men complain about the unavoidable struggles of existence, we get told that's just how it is and shut up. As we should be.
I worked with a guy a while back who whined all the time about everything. He was a scrawny, curly-headed twenty-something with an affinity for getting high and a love of “good vibes.” As usual with these people, the talking about good vibes was accompanied by bad vibes. He loved to complain constantly, and he was a pretty lousy worker. He loved to play video games. He was raised by two women. We’ll call him Alex.
One day I was leaving work and my boss came up to me. He said, “Hey, I wanted to let you know that Alex died yesterday. It looks like he killed himself. If you need to talk to anybody, we’re here for you.”
I didn't talk to anybody because I didn't need to. I was caught off guard but not too shaken. And the next day I went to work and found out he’d hanged himself in his closet. His mom found him. The girls at work — who never gave a shit about him while he was alive — were all in tears. The boys were cracking jokes about him.
What this proves to me is simple. Women encourage you to talk about how life hurts. But they won't lay you if you whine****, and they won’t help you. And they can't help you. Once they've encouraged you to be weak nobody can help you except people who hurt you. And when you do whine about the life you've been trained to not handle, men will dance on your grave.
I have yet to hear a woman say she deals with this.
****As Sam Halpern put it in Shit My Dad Says, “No one wants to lay the guy who wouldn’t lay himself.”