Where Have All The Good Women Gone?
Wherever it is, I'm not so sure it's down the aisle.
Music today is the majority of this recording of the Carmen Suite Nos. 1-2, but of course the entire thing is just splendid:
Below (from a novel set largely in 1999), all emphases mine:
Young girls today were more sensible, more sophisticated. Nowadays they worried more about their exam results and did their best to ensure they would have a decent career. For them, going out with boys was simply a game, a distraction motivated as much by narcissism as by sexual pleasure. They later would try to make a good marriage, basing their decision on a range of social and professional criteria, as well as on shared interests and tastes. Of course, in doing this they cut themselves off from any possibility of happiness—a condition indissociable from the outdated, intensely close bonds so incompatible with the exercise of reason—but this was their attempt to escape the moral and emotional suffering which had so tortured their forebears. This hope was, unfortunately, rapidly disappointed; the passing of love's torments simply left the field clear for boredom, emptiness and an anguished wait for old age and death.
Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles [aka Les Particules élémentaires] (1998, trans. 2000).
For the entirety of my adult life—and for a couple decades before that—there has been much ink spilled and many voices spent to hoarseness over the subject of men and their manifold failings, particularly young men’s failings. Failure to take “responsibility” (an impending WOTD), failure to commit, failure to sacrifice sufficiently, failure to be “adult,” failure in using porn and abusing drugs and alcohol; failure to be sufficiently masculine, failure to be sufficiently emotionally available (i.e. sufficiently feminine, in a sense); failure to be physically strong enough, failure to be meek and gentle enough; failure to care enough about politics, failure to hold the “correct” politics; failure to be rugged and work with their hands, failure to pull down six figures in a white collar job; and on and on and on. (If I am bored writing this litany, you the reader are surely both bored and offended.)
Very well. Let us consign three (and counting) generations of men to the dustbin of history. They’re failures of the most abject variety. Sure, there are outliers of excellence, worthy of mate selection—and perhaps they’ll find wives—and perhaps a few of those couples will then, against all “reason,” elect family formation. But the rest of those men? Well, they had best contribute to the GDP as best they can and then die quiet, convenient, and inexpensive deaths. Their bloodlines should be expunged from the Earth. I am somewhat bordering on exaggeration, but not particularly. I take words at their face, and just as a person’s eyes are a window to the soul, the faces of words tell you what their logical conclusion, end, telos, is. And, quite frankly, the splattered array of accusatory failures I laid out above? The telos of all that is telling men that their worth is in their practical, not social or familial, utility; and that, when said practical utility has been fully realized, they had then best clear out of the way for—for whom?
Before I continue: while much of my language is in the universal sense, I am speaking in the universality of my experience and the experiences of dozens of other friends and acquaintances I’ve talked to about this subject over the years. Should you wish to rejoin, “But Paul, everyone I know—”; great! I am so happy, truly, for you and your communion. I am reporting what I see. I am just a witness. You may not think that there is a trial afoot, or that we are all amidst a great courthouse, but we are. I have watched as three generations of men are tossed in the dock, over and over and over and over again, cross-referenced until they are cross-eyed, and—well, why don’t we try for a change of pace?
It takes two to tango. Every equation has two sides. Perhaps we might go about balancing the equation, if only a little?
Don’t fret: I’ve not the slightest interest in leveling accusations, in extracting rhetorical pounds of flesh from opponents. Remember: I am a witness. I am not a prosecutor or a defendant. I just sit and say what I see.
There was a time when asking someone out on a date was not a declaration of preexisting affection, not an exhibition of a deep, tacit (but mutual—you are to have divined the mutuality through haruspicy, or augury) romance blazing just beneath the surface of polite social manners; no, asking someone out on a date was, in large part, a precursor to realizing if a romance were a possibility. It was an exploratory step, similar to qualifying leads in a sales pipeline. Can we keep a conversation going for five, if not fifty, minutes without killing each other?; Do we enjoy and delight in one another’s company?; Did our ninety minutes together feel like ninety hours or ninety seconds?; Do we actually, truly like one another as people, and not merely as catalysts for hormonal fireworks?
In my experience, and the experience of dozens of others I’ve known over the years, the Mate Selection Prospects Pipeline simply does not happen anymore. If there is not already a mystical, tacitly mutual magnetism, or even mutual lusting (I’ll return to this), in a sense—well, the asking out is fruitless. Let me bring in Houellebecq:
For them, going out with boys was simply a game, a distraction motivated as much by narcissism as by sexual pleasure.
I suspect that, upon reading those words, you either think that perhaps the Germans should have kept France after all, if only to keep ol’ Michel from writing, or you think, “Wow, what an elegant way of describing so many in the world.”
In my undergrad years, that duet of narcissism and sexual pleasure was the rule. I watched college girls rejoice in the dizzying narcissistic—and sexual—pleasure of going out with boys, collecting their amorous attention like stamps, and then throwing them away for new thrills. (Few of these girls married, of course.) Or, there were the girls who dressed in such a way as little was left to the imagination, and they delighted in rejoining, “Oh, no, I’m not looking for a relationship right now.” And then they’d drink hard and visit their fraternity paramours; why have one boyfriend when you could have six? Now, I also happened to attend a college which called itself Christian, and hereon, let us discuss religion’s role in all this.
It is an unoriginal thing to say that women are the gatekeepers of sex, and men, of devoted relationships. Anthropologically, that dichotomy has played out for millennia, all over the world. In the past half-century or so, however, the American Church (I have not read or researched other geographies’ churches, so I daren’t speak of them) has elected to mutate the dichotomy:
Women are the gatekeepers of sex and of devoted relationships.
Hmm. Where’d the men go?
The women are taught (I assume to this day) that they must wait for men to pursue them, that they ought not have sex before marriage, that (any, possibly all[?]) men will seek to extract sexual pleasure from/through them in perverse and unfair fashions at any and every opportunity, and that at all times and in all ways, any man who is not treating them as befits their(!) own definition of “a sister [in Christ]” is not to be trusted, as he is attempting to wheedle her into a kiss (or a bed, or whatever else).
There is, in the post-Pill world, vanishingly little Church teaching, seemingly, on the inexorable connection between sex and family formation. And so much of the latter teachings are not in the light of, The baby-making thing ought to be reserved for when you are in a marriage and committed to making babies in the formation of a family, but rather, You are a Queen/Princess of Creation and you mustn’t allow your sacred purity to be defiled by a roving miscreant man.
The devil, as ever, is in the details. The sacredness and holiness (set-apartness) of family-formation-by-sex has been completely ejected in favor of an elevation of the female. It’s no longer that sex itself is a precious goodness to preserve—it’s that the woman is a precious goodness to be preserved. That women ought to be protected and preserved is obvious—my protestation is not that point. Rather, it’s that a single participant in a sacrament-of-sorts (procreation and childbearing) has been elevated to be of higher importance than the sacrament-of-sorts itself. [Note that I am not capitalizing the ‘s’ in sacrament, because I am not saying that sex is itself a Sacrament.] What’s more, by divorcing the actual, real telos of sex (children and family formation) from sex, all the arguments against premarital sex grow weak to the rebutting allure of sexual delight. She might be a Queen/Princess of Creation… etc., but what if she doesn’t think it’s defilement? What if she really, really wants that man—right now—and she cannot conceive of him “defiling her,” when it’s just “natural” to do what they’re doing, because they’re in love, and they’re going to get married soon anyway? What if they want to get married, but they don’t have money yet? (What that has to do with anything is another matter.) What if they consider themselves “already married,” but there just hasn’t been the time to formally—etc. If sex is just the mutual pleasuring of two people in an especially neurologically turbocharged fashion—if childbearing and family formation are out of the picture—then any prohibitions against premarital sex tend to, unswervingly, transmogrify into imperatives for the preservation of the woman’s purity. If that’s what people wish for the rhetoric to be, so be it (and so it is), but it is rather unconvincing rhetoric at that, as evidenced by the cohabitation and premarital sex rates among the American Church: which are roughly equivalent to those of the greater American cultural landscape. But I digress.
So women are to wait to be pursued. They have all the power, but it is solely a responsive power, not one of initiative (or is it?). Okay. So then a man asks the question: go out with me? He risks mockery, social stigma (as if women don’t gossip amongst friends about the men who ask them out!), and the flat pain of rejection, just for the chance—the prospect!—of embarking on the ol’ Mate Selection Prospects Pipeline. Just for the chance of finding out if there’s a chance. Maybe she and I could lead a good life together, he reasons—and in any sane age, he would probably be right.
But he’s not in a sane age.
Well, he’s pretty tall. But Jeff in my lit crit class, though; ugggh. Now he’s tall. And this guy is fine I guess but why does he think I want to go out with him? We’ve never even talked before. I never gave him any looks. Is it because of the dress I’m wearing today? Goddddd, why can’t boys just—“my eyes are up here,” am I right? I mean, I’d look too, don’t get me wrong; and I guess I could go out with him—it could be fun—but wait what if I ran into Jeff? Oh god then Jeff might never ask me out!!! And besides, Jessica mocked me the last time I went out with a guy who wasn’t hot; wow yeah haha there’s no way…
Is this a deeply stereotyped and offensive imagined monologue? Possibly—although almost all of it is quotes from a West Coast girl who once complained to me about her peers at a (Christian) college asking her out, so there’s that.
So let’s call our girl Jennifer. Jennifer shuts down the Man Who Wants A Chance At A Chance and goes along. Jennifer eventually does get together with Jeff at a party, and it’s all pretty amazing, and then she asks him out, cheek to cheek, on his lap—because who has the time to wait around?—and life is grand. Jenn and Jeff lead an amazing, albeit childless for six years of marriage, life, and then they have two kids, two years apart, and then that’s that. They send their kids off to college to repeat the cycle anew.
Even though Jeff never asked her out, Jennifer got what she wanted. Because in the end, she was the gatekeeper of the sex and of the relationship. Before she could get what she wanted, though, how’d she deal with that poor unnamed guy searching out the Chance Of A Chance? Well, if she’s Christian, probably either, “I’m not looking for a relationship right now,” or “I feel like I’m called to singleness right now.” Because remember: Christianity is about being nice above all else (or so people say), and flatly saying, “I don’t find you initially attractive enough [despite knowing roughly nothing about you] to waste my precious time on discovering if we could be happy together” is far too un-nice a thing to say. So white lies are proffered instead. She very, very much is looking for a relationship right now, and in absolutely no way is she emulating St. Paul’s call to singleness. It’s just that she’s exclusively wanting Jeff, and in the interim, there’s no way she’s going to emulate St. Paul’s call to singleness, because that might spook Jeff. She has to maintain an air of availability, but not desperation. It’s a delicate dance.
If a man asks out a woman—say, Jenn’s friend, Jessica—who is his friend (let us ignore here what C.S. Lewis says about such friendships in The Four Loves), chances are, she is already insane about him, or she’s about to deploy the I See You As My Brother in Christ rebuttal.
Let’s take a moment to consider this: Jenn found the man with whom she didn’t already have a friendship to be off-putting, because she didn’t know anything about him. Yet Jessica is put off by the one she already knows about by means of the friendship. There’s no tension of mystery, no allure of the unknown. It’s just Bill, who is funny sometimes but he has a weird sister who comes to visit him sometimes and, I dunno, sometimes he looks maybe sad for some reason? Maybe there’s a family thing going on his life? It’s kinda weird, and besides, Jenn introduced me to Jeff’s younger brother and—”
Jennifer didn’t want to go on a date because she didn’t know enough about the guy (or at least, she thinks that was part of it; Jeff played an important role as well).
Jessica didn’t want to go on a date because she already knew about Bill and she didn’t really find him attractive so she didn’t care to learn more. Not even common human curiosity was enough to impel her to acquiescence.
Thus: one can be unattractive for being too much of a mystery, or for being too little of a mystery. The Pipeline is not realized because there is no interest in, or acknowledgement of, the fact that the woman actually knows much less about the man than she thinks. Her disinterest in learning more says it all.
Now, am I condemning all of this as, what, evil? Not particularly. But it creates family formation logjams, to disgorge a substantial euphemism. Some women write books, handwringing about, “Where have all the best men gone,” etc.; yet, when push comes to shove, they can simply ask out the man they always wanted anyway and move along with life. (And certainly without any risk of being accused as sexual harassers!—but that is a subject for another day [and honestly, I’ll probably never open that can of worms].) And if the Jeff of her life has since been taken, she can take one of those relationships she long ago classed as One I See As My Brother In Christ, grit her teeth, and decide that maybe the romantic is possible after all. Again, note that the woman is acting as the gatekeeper of both sex and committed relationship.
An aside: one might say, “Paul, you’re acting like men can’t just decline women’s sexual and relational overtures!” Well, I’m not necessarily, but there is something to that, at times. It’s a very different thing for a man to decline than for a woman to decline, who might flatly say, “Oh, you’re like a brother in Christ to me, and God is calling me to singleness, besides”; which leaves the man literally unable to say or do anything without appearing to cross God. Story time: I know a guy who, while attending a Christian college (whose name you’d likely recognize), ended up in a rather foolish position. Alone with a girl at a party—alone in a room—and she wanted him terribly. She found him deeply attractive. He refused to give her what she wanted and left. The next morning, he was met by college staff who were coming to deal with him because she had accused him of raping her the night before. When he produced evidence that she had been stalking him for some time and sending him unwanted romantic overtures over texting etc.—much less the material medical evidence which showed she had not been raped, much less had intercourse, that night—what did the school do? Well, she was demanding, because he “had raped her,” that he be expelled. The school admin came to him and said, “Well, we see now that you didn’t rape her, and that in fact you are the victim here. So we won’t expel you. But you need to leave, because we don’t want to get sued.” Could anyone argue that that girl did not hold the gatekeeping power? Her exerted power extended even over the guy’s undergrad status.
Entire libraries could be constructed out of all the rhetoric and blogposts and whatever else, all which excitedly claims: “Ladies, it’s not about getting the hottest man; it’s about getting the man with the best heart,” etc. etc., but come on now. Everyone knows that physical attractiveness is a huge part of mate selection. In the age of online dating (a subject for another day, but a day which is coming soon), physical attractiveness is more heavily weighted than ever as a factor in mate selection. And online dating is enjoying something of what one might call an ascendency, to put it mildly:
American Christianity has, within its domain, rather successfully, evidently, stripped away realistic thoughts about—much less candid acknowledgement of—the physicality, sexuality, and sheer biological processes of mate selection. Of Romance. But this is silly. Marriage is not some platonic business, some exercise in divining someone’s Coefficient of Sanctification and deciding if you can tolerate life in the presence of such a person. Ridiculous! Obviously nobody wants to marry somebody she finds physically repulsive. Obviously, if she could get a Jeff, a sister’s gonna wanna get a Jeff.
I mentioned a “mutual lusting” earlier, and this is what I meant: that there is that dragging force of physical attraction, like a rip current. But now, seemingly, nobody can be honest about wanting another person—even though of course that is what people do. We have sanitized to the point of absurdity all talk of sexual love, all realistic and measured discussion about the role of attraction in romance.
But.
What appears to have been forgotten (I hope anyone who is angry with my reasoning thus far reads this far) is this simple fact: most of us don’t actually know, at first blush, who we find most attractive. Most people, in fact, will say, “Gosh, yeah, when I first started going out with her, I thought she was fine I guess, but after a few months—like wow she is gorgeous. I can’t believe she’s my wife.” Because how a person looks, besides being a product in large part of the heart (physiognomy), is not a static thing in the beholder’s mind. As our time in another’s presence increases, our senses (with their limited throughput) discover more and more idiosyncrasies.
Isn’t that what love letters are so often composed of? “I miss the way that curl in your hair on the left side jolts up and down when you shake your head”; “When you smile, your cheekbone rises on your right side a little before your left, and it can look like a wink, almost, and I thought you were winking when you smiled at me over your boyfriend’s shoulder at the reception”; “When you bend your arm, that little scar from when we were in the car crash disappears into your forearm as it fills the crook of your elbow, and it reminds me of how all my fears disappear when I’m with you”; etc. Love is in the details—physical details, emotional details, narrative details.
When old friends get together, they tell stories about the past. It’s only natural: for love is in the details, and details more densely populate the past than the present, at least as we experience life. (Remember that the senses have limited throughput, but that memory has an almost infinite breadth and depth. And a tendency to fill in details that we don’t strictly remember, too.)
Dating, as a social mechanism, was intended to be an engine for the revelation of details. It was to buy time for the human psyche to do its thing; to buy time for the human spirit to figure out, “Oh, wow; he’s actually really hot. Just not in the way that I was looking for. But… but in a way that means a lot to me, that is better than I ever imagined I could have”; or, “Good heavens he’s an animal on the tennis court and I blush thinking about him but goodness he’s a moron and this is just embarrassing.” It was to create stories which might serve as the foundation for much grander stories. Dating was to be a selection mechanism, a filter.
But now, dating is itself subject to another whole array of selection mechanisms and social filters—ones which seemingly vary by the year, and which certainly vary by the person.
Marriage rates, across the entire West (but my interest chiefly lies with my land, America), are a joke. Fertility rates are a bad joke, at that. Sure, many may now ask, Where have all the good men gone? As near as I can tell, the answer is: not down the aisle. Some of the very best men I’ve ever met remain unmarried, and not nearly by choice or for lack of effort. What about all the good women? Where’d they go?
Maybe all the good women did go down the aisle. Maybe, over the last few decades, as a society, we so comically disproportionately invested in the rising generations that we raised small crops of exceptionally “excellent” women [which, arguably, we did], watched them all marry off, and then, what, absentmindedly realized we’re stuck with a couple generations of unmarriageable, predominantly male, blockheads?
I doubt it. I think there’s an enormous number of deeply, profoundly lonely and miserable (if they were honest with themselves!—and who can be?) young adults of both sexes. They’re not blockheads. They were just never in the right place at the right time: they never ran into that other person who found them so deeply, innately physically attractive that all the stars aligned and a simple date could be gone on, much less any adventure of substance embarked upon beyond that simple first date. And they were born too late for when dates were within reach of random, ordinary people, rather than those who clear half a dozen social filters based on physical appearance, “first impressions,” and whether they won the genetic lottery for being photogenic (in the case of those resorting to online dating).
Many may not even wish for the aisle, but its absence is the vacuum in their lives. For it is not good for man to be alone—and if someone has made a compelling argument as to why that Divine proclamation is now somehow null and void—I’ve yet to see it.
Good read, deeply important subject on how the modern Christian church has failed its members.