https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/comments/zl3j42/slate_published_enough_with_the_sad_putupon_woman/
created by TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK on 13/12/2022 at 18:51 UTC
686 upvotes, 53 top-level comments (showing 25)
If you comment and it looks to me like you didn’t read the article, I will reply to your comment with a picture of a cat’s butthole. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
Here is the article:
#The Toxic Dynamic Fueling Our Love for the Sad Put-Upon Woman Essay
This article[1] posted here this weekend caught a lot of attention. I think it’s because there is a quality to it that reflects men’s frustration about how these articles are framed.
I have several thoughts in no particular order, and I’d like to hear yours, **after you read the article**.
1:
In a patriarchal society, female abjection is a highly prized commodity. Submissiveness is assumed to be the true core of what it means to be a woman. I suspect that these stories are popular because they present themselves as progressive and challenging, while reaffirming this comfortable stereotype. There is a fashion, currently, for easy narratives that call themselves bold.
Since this is a men’s space, it’s important to reaffirm a basic fact for our mostly-male reader and contributor base: the feelings expressed in these essays are real feelings that real women really feel about the real lives they live in a society that *really isn’t* designed for women or femininity. If you feel like handwaving away those feelings, that’s your right, but it’s worth doing the work to understand the context.
2:
There is a tendency to talk about these essays in shadowy and suggestive terms that imply that criticism of the form of this writing is like siding with an abuser, so it is useful to be explicit about certain points here. At no point in her essay does Kaplan allege that her relationship was an abusive one. She also does not describe actions that suggest physical or emotional abuse. These essays[2] tend not to[3]. The boyfriend in question is simply made to sound a bit crap (or sometimes, unintentionally, the real injured party[4]). This does not make it impossible that a pattern of abuse existed, but it does mean we shouldn’t assume it likely did, both out of respect for the narrative presented by the woman and to avoid groundlessly smearing her former partner.
2: https://www.insider.com/boyfriend-gave-list-of-things-he-didnt-like-about-me-2022-7
3: https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/situationship-relationship-painful-breakup
I read a lot of articles and posts and social media blah blah whatever that traffic in *insinuation* instead of outright *statements* about relationships gone bad. The insinuation is not as much “men bad amirite?” but *obviously this Man was Being A Man, like The Rest Of The Men*.
I want to trip over myself to say that women should be and are allowed to write whatever they want, but the richness of human diversity of experience makes me wonder how an honest two-sided perspective on some of these articles would look.
3: my main beef with these essays is how they prime people. Especially women, especially young women. They prime these young women to believe that dating men is shitty all the time, *but also* that Acting Bad In Relationships is a Man Thing. It’s not hard to find stories from men in this sub about being treated poorly in relationships, even up to and including abuse from the women they love; a woman with poor boundaries (or maybe still trying to define those boundaries!) can easily get a sense from a given Sad Put-Upon Woman Essay that her choices are Punching Up and his are Abuse.
(flashbacks to that time on facebook when I saw my friend, a serial cheater, define cheating as a male thing because We Live In A Patriarchy. She’s not my friend anymore.)
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE ARTICLE. After you do, please drop thoughts below.
Comment by The-Magic-Sword at 13/12/2022 at 20:36 UTC
331 upvotes, 8 direct replies
It was an interesting read, largely I agree with your discussion of how these essays prime women to have a certain framing of how conflict in their relationships work-- there's a superb book, written by a feminist, that I'm always recommending that gets into the way narratives concerning abuser and victim can themselves be abused when it comes to conflict in relationships *Conflict is Not Abuse* by Sarah Schulmann.
One reason I recommend is that it delves into the way victim/perpetrator narratives can be leveraged in personal relationships as tools of punishment and of exerting control, as well as being a queer informed, woman's perspective on a (seeming, DARVO is acknowledged in feminist circles obviously) reversal that is often cast as being a fiction created by oppressors who 'really are almost always that bad.'
These essays contain a lot of the narrative juice that holds up some of those conflict situations-- the performance of dutiful abjection via long-suffering silence in the face of mistreatment, concentrated as a kind of resentful rocket fuel for socially-sanctioned comeuppance. This is of course something performed by men as well (one can see shades of it in a lot of incel storytelling, where a man describes himself patiently performing 'provider' for a woman emotionally or otherwise, and then turns nasty when the relationship doesn't work out.) What they tend to have in common is that the participant fulfills what they see as their gender role, doesn't receive what they see as their due, and then that becomes a perceived justification for punitive social, physical, or emotional violence.
They rely on profiling the other person, and on sweeping generalization (recast as systemic) to lower the resolution on the shape of the situation until it is consistent with a narrative that provides them with power via social sympathy (whether that's an incel forum, or within spaces where essays like these fill social media feeds) I almost see it as a strategy of social currency, where participants attempt to salvage the value of failed relationships.
Comment by omnic_monk at 13/12/2022 at 20:32 UTC
141 upvotes, 11 direct replies
I had many thoughts reading the article, but the one I want to bring up is very much tangential to its point and that of the sub - apologies if it gets too off-topic.
It can feel embarrassing to admit how attached we are to situations and people that we know are not serving us well. Mortifying to admit the extent of our agency in desire, and how much of ourselves we willingly give in the hope of getting something that is valuable to us back in return.
Something I've often wondered, but have never found a good, concrete answer to (in discussions with therapists, in religious and spiritual sources, in conversations with friends and family, in reading smartypants books by people like Aristotle and Hobbes and Hegel and Kant) is what exactly is "the extent of our agency in desire". Can one choose to want something?
From the masculinity angle, one might ask if lonely, aimless men (a common topic on this sub) can choose an aim, and thereby no longer be aimless. It sounds terribly simple, and therefore improbable, but there is certainly some role for agency in desire: exercise sucks, but one might "choose to want" to exercise because of health benefits, or self-image, or whatever. You could say that heteronormativity induces gay people to "choose to want" to perform heterosexuality. A new college student might "choose to want" a degree seen as more lucrative, or more practical, or to please their parents.
Basically, it's the difference between eating your vegetables and eating dessert: you "choose to want" the veggies because you know you should, but you want the dessert without choosing to want it, in the way that Aristotle would call "animal". (I guess Freud might call "choosing to want" the action of the superego, and "just wanting" the action of the id, the "pleasure principle".)
People with depression might recognize this as pervading their life: when you don't really want anything, you have to "choose to want" everything, even things you believe you should enjoy. Everything from getting out of bed in the morning to your whole life path must be chosen-to-want.
Can we choose to want things? Can lonely, aimless men choose to find fulfillment? Can women in relationships like Isabel Kaplan's choose *not* to want a boyfriend who is just "a bit crap"?
(I think, as well, that agency and desire can get tangled up, both in the darkness of inadequate self-knowledge and in the natural murkiness of language. Maybe all I'm asking are malformed questions that come down to semantics, I don't know.)
Comment by Ellie_Lalonde at 13/12/2022 at 21:38 UTC
87 upvotes, 3 direct replies
1st thought: why is there a non-zero amount of people so enthusiastic about cat butts lol
2nd thought: OH MY GOD, SOMEONE FINALLY FUCKING SAID IT. I won't expound upon this too much because it's not relevant to the sub but I haaaate this genre of essay/fiction/social media post. It reminds me of that tweet that's like "men be like this, women be like that, can you just tell us what annoying thing your ex did". In this case I suppose it would be "can you tell us what people-pleasing thing you did". It's entirely possible to write about one's personal experience with womanhood without making it to be the totality of womanhood and without taking away women's agency, but that requires a nuance and self-awareness, the two traits least likely to generate clicks.
To bring this back to topic, these essays are downstream of the bigger issue: society sees women as non-agentic and men as hyperagentic*; men act, women are acted upon. In conservative circles this shows up as a demand for women to submit to men with a presumed (and enforced) limited or completely lacking ability to make their own choices, while men are pushed to be the head of the household, the lead in any situation, even if it means having to compete with other men over this or never having to ask for help. In progressive circles, it shows up as making endless excuses for why women do things that are at best sub-optimal, while men are never victims of their circumstances but instead enforcers of whatever bad thing we're mad about; think 2010s tumblr teen feminism. I'm exaggerating a bit here and there are other forms this can take (e. g. TERFs' treatment of trans men vs trans women), but I think there's plenty of examples to pull from. I think most people here would agree, this is not how either men or women work, this is not how anything works. But it's a very easy to digest worldview and can be deployed to excuse various actions from the mildly annoying to the heinous, so it keeps being a meme.
This is all to say, I don't think it's affecting men more than already existing systemic issues. Certainly, it's not something that should be perpetuated, especially not amongst progressives, but it's not the root issue here. I think it's more likely that these essays reinforce people's pre-existing biases, whether that's about how men suck and women are sad victims or about how, if I may be catty for a second, professional writers suck as intellectuals and as peoplw. A random woman, even if she is young, is not going to be swayed by these articles into thinking men are all bad and that makes it ok for her to treat her boyfriend like shit, unless she's REALLY impressionable. Instead, the most likely case is that she may have already been convinced of this through other means, such as the aforementioned common framing of agency, as well as people in her personal life like family and friends. Or she may have had life experiences that lead her to reject these notions outright. Or she has some crazy in-between worldview. As Ms. Connolly here says, women are endlessly complex and varied.
TL;DR These essays suck for a multitude of reasons, but they're not a huge social ill in and of themselves.
Comment by [deleted] at 13/12/2022 at 19:28 UTC
206 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I agree with the article, tentatively.
I think it’s true that this kind of media does prime people to automatically blame men but I think it’s a little more ephemeral than this article implies.
I don’t think women who have positive romantic relationships with men and positive male romantic role models in childhood (ie fathers, grandfathers, stepfathers) are likely to engage in this kind of social conversation than women who are seeing their personal experiences with men or their mother/grandmother/female childhood role model’s experiences with men.
I think there are a lot of women who have only had bad experiences with men engaging romantically with women. Children emulate the relationships they see the adults around them model.[1] If a girl grows up watching her mother work long hours, say as a nurse, then come home and provide childcare, do all of the housework and cleaning, and provide elderly care while her father comes home at 5 from his beat and expects that his work for the day is done, she may, as an adult, recreate that same scenario and it *feels inevitable* because she’s never seen a different way to do it.
1: https://psychcentral.com/news/2018/05/27/modeling-behavior-for-children-has-long-lasting-effects
I think a lot of men make the mistake of trying to confront this directly with “No all men!” This may be correct, but for those women, it has been 100% of their experiences with men in romantic relationships. This is quite literally my experience.
I have experienced with modeling rather than confronting. I am gay so I won’t date a woman but my femme friends get to watch how I interact with my male romantic partners.
I have had friends who are pleased when they see us splitting romantic wooing or domestic chores or whatever but the jaw drop usually comes when I explain (with my partners’ permissions) that we can also achieve equal satisfaction in the bedroom. As soon as my female friends, some of whom are lesbians and bi women who had Very Bad experiences with men when they were younger, hear that, they’re usually more open to the idea that men aren’t just all social troglodytes.
I also found a lot of succor in finding male friends who oppose this kind of thing but try to understand why it’s such a common experience.
Comment by spudmix at 13/12/2022 at 21:03 UTC*
197 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I have a peculiar relationship with the kind of "Ugh, men, right ladies?" dialogue that I'm commonly confronted with, and this article really digs into the core of many of the issues I have.
I think if I had to summarise my main thoughts it would be that ultimately, these conversations (and I will reiterate /u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK's point that these are *real experiences people actually have,* I am not advocating for shutting down or delegitimising the real experience here) are ultimately a push towards gender essentialism. If men are *just like that* and you should simply expect bad experiences, what impetus is there to change? If women are, to borrow the language of this article, encouraged to overvalue their abjection then what impetus is there to give that up?
It feels good to be the victim in a narrative. It feels good to garner sympathy when relaying how the world has not been fair to you. If I fail or am unhappy *it feels good* to be a victim of circumstance; I am validated, secured in my position and worth by the fact that I had it rough and my unhappiness or failure are the expected consequence, not a reflection of my self. If I succeed and am happy *it feels good* to claim that success having prevailed against an adversarial world.
Those positions are largely denied to me as an AMAB/masc-presenting person, even in the cases where they might be justified. I agree with the author that those positions of abjection are encouraged among women, even in many cases where they are not justified (at least in magnitude, if not outright).
So how do we proceed then? I don't know. I feel trapped by the social discourse - shoehorned into my role as, at best, "one of the good ones". This position is either one of gender essentialism or fatalism - doomed by either biology or futility - and neither of those conclusions are acceptable to me.
My best solution right now is simply to disengage. That, too, is demonised in its own way, but at least the ones doing the demonising are further away from me. It's been a disturbingly regular occurrence that my supposedly-progressive friends will use my apparent gender to apply pressure to reengage and resume this essentialist, fatalist commiseration - as a man, of course, it is my role to shoulder the emotional burdens of the women around me stoically and without complaint, even among those women who vocally oppose the ideas of gender roles.
Comment by fencerman at 13/12/2022 at 21:17 UTC*
43 upvotes, 0 direct replies
An lot of writing these days tends to make me think of Victorian pornography. Especially in newspapers.
Hear me out here:
Victorian porn was CONSTANTLY framed as being either "true crime", or "morality tales about fallen women" or "warnings about social ills" - but the purpose behind it was still porn. It's the classic example of trying to "have it both ways".
That framing lets the author and the audience pretend that its morally righteous and educational, when the real purpose was to revel in the sex, crime and violence being described. It also helped it get past the censors and obscenity laws at the time.
The authors and audience got to feel respectable, while at the same time indulging any fantasies they could imagine - not just feeling outwardly respectable, but also inwardly overcoming their guilt too.
(You still see almost the exact same thing these days, especially with right-wingers - whether it's Qanon conspiracy stories about sex and orgies, hedonistic fantasies about whatever they imagine gay people are doing, the weird fixation on "cuckolds", etc... - it's more than just paranoia, it's also an excuse to dwell on their wildest sexual fantasies while projecting the guilt and responsibility onto other people. And if you think that's not the case, try and come up with another explanation for all the lurid details they throw into beliefs that have no solid evidence behind them to begin with.)
In the case of essays being described by the author you link, it's a case of trying to "have it both ways" in terms of gender relations - a bit less overtly sexual but still the same idea of both the thrill of something that's condemned while also adopting the outward image of respectable conduct.
The "thrill" is giving the audience a chance to indulge in gossip and voyeurism about other people's petty personal drama, gossip and spying on their personal lives. For the author it gives them the chance to adopt stereotyped roles like "damsel in distress" while casting others as stereotyped "villains", that people love to read about because it's comforting and familiar.
Meanwhile, the "respectable face" is the pretense of talking about "gender relations" or "modern society" in a publicly acceptable way, so that people feel morally righteous reading it, when really they're just doing it for the petty personal fights and the voyeuristic thrill of digging through someone else's dirty laundry.
It's definitely not the only offender out there, or even the worst by a wide margin, but it makes honest conversations about needs and desires a lot more difficult when the actual purpose is hidden behind obfuscating language.
Comment by theflamingheads at 13/12/2022 at 19:04 UTC
120 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I want to see this cat's anus now that you've talked it up so much.
Comment by [deleted] at 13/12/2022 at 20:44 UTC
159 upvotes, 3 direct replies
[removed]
Comment by [deleted] at 13/12/2022 at 22:13 UTC
86 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I left r/twoxchromosomes because it was causing me to doubt myself painfully and assume that all women see me only as the sum of the most sexist and awful decisions I have ever made in my life. It was really getting me down.
I stayed in r/WitchesVsPatriarchy because the one time I posted in there about how I am a man who wants to be a good feminist and is also starved for emotional support on the internet, it got 7500 likes and hundreds of women responding with supportive messages and comments (and only one nasty person telling me to take my privilege and fuck off).
There is definitely a middle ground between rejecting feminism because it makes you feel targeted, on the one hand, and on the other hand completely wallowing in the miserable idea that you are a born oppressor and there is no hope for redemption.
My take: if you are a man, try not to oppress women, and when you hear women complaining about being oppressed, try not to put all the blame on your own shoulders.
Comment by Chance-Day323 at 13/12/2022 at 22:16 UTC
35 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Thanks for sharing that article because it does open up the question of what men lose in the narrative Connolly discusses (independent of how it affects women).
It can leave men playing the role of the "bad guy" in a relationship without much of a reason. Maybe the man makes some basic mistake, maybe he's inexperienced or just misses some relationship detail and disappoints or hurts his partner. In relationships that follow this narrative, he may never hear about it, unless the woman has a particularly talkative confidant who spoils the beans. I wouldn't call that situation unfair exactly because love isn't fair but it's sad to see friends in relationships that they're never given the chance to improve or grow in.
There's a lack of emotional honesty and authenticity in a relationship where you aren't confronted about behavior that makes your partner view you as unreliable or entitled. Still given all the ways that women are encouraged to buy into that narrative, it can be really difficult to get your partner to believe that you value a relationship enough to want more honest communication... and many men are never taught the emotional skills to handle that honesty which is a common failure in how boys are raised.
Comment by Brawl501 at 13/12/2022 at 23:08 UTC
35 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The article honestly made me consider what I would argue is the male side of this narrative, the boomer-esque „hah women, amirite?“ relationship concept. It struck me because it centers around the same idea that heterosexual relationships necessarily kind of suck because „women/men are just inherently not made for each other“, ignoring what the article’s author stressed: men and women (and those of all other genders too, of course) are complex, complete, flawed human beings.
But men can have this same tendency of resting on an assumed state of „well, I’ll always have to deal with women’s bullshit“ as it is sometimes stated, unknowing that by perpetuating this, men are robbing **themselves** of fulfilling relationships. Of course, however, these narratives are criticized more openly, and rightly so.
I do believe however, that men and women could and should approach relationships differently if they stopped assuming a general necessary evil that comes with a heterosexual relationship because „you know how it is with men/women“, and that both could achieve better and happier relationships through it by changing how they value different positive and negative aspects of their relationships.
Comment by [deleted] at 14/12/2022 at 01:18 UTC
48 upvotes, 2 direct replies
"Submissiveness is assumed to be the true core of what it means to be a woman. I suspect that these stories are popular because they present themselves as progressive and challenging, while reaffirming this comfortable stereotype. There is a fashion, currently, for easy narratives that call themselves bold."
Goddamn. I was already relating to both sides of the coin on this perspective, but this quote is the one that finally put to words something that's been eating at me for a long time. This article is very interesting having read it from the perspective of someone who transitioned from female to male, because I did start to realize that I had been subliminally 'taught' to continuously justify myself by positioning myself as weak or helpless as a default response to conflict. And part of that came from being imbued with an almost survivalist mindset from an extraordinarily young age about the dangers for a young woman in the world. But my fear of men at the time wasn't something that any man's actions had actually traumatized me into having. What induced it was simply being taught by my loving parents, and society at large, that men are dangerous, inherently untrustworthy, and will prey on you if given the chance.
When I started passing as an adult male, I was basically forced to abandon that mindset because this tendency was suddenly being taken in an entirely different way. Submissiveness and vulnerability used to warrant serious concern from others, but suddenly it was being viewed as pathetic, irresponsible, manipulative -- And it was really only after I had the mental distance from that semi-constant anxiety that exists under the surface when you were taught to move like a prey animal in public... That I started to wonder whether the sheer extent to which I was taught to fear men was actually warranted, or whether it went way too far, to the point of it actually being *detrimental* to my ability to advocate for myself in the moment.
It's like watching a jack-in-the-box slowly being wound up. You're always watching, always looking, always waiting, and -- *boom*, some guy disrespects you, you're startled, the adrenaline hits, you don't know what to say or do -- And you feel *so stupid* in the moment for not being able to do anything. And you continue feel stupid afterwards because you feel like it shouldn't bother you this much. You should have a snappy comeback prepped or something, but you don't. But it's a big feeling for what it is, and you need to justify that feeling to yourself somehow, and you start to build it into a larger, cathartic narrative... That ultimately highlights your delicateness and powerlessness. And, God -- take that already elevated anxious mindset and imagine surviving an abusive relationship or an assault. You'd never want to leave the house again.
I have sympathy for women who write these narratives because I've been there. That said, I absolutely salute the author for being a woman willing to take this topic on with other women, cause I know for sure there was a point in time where I would have read something like this and come out of it *hopping mad.*
But she's right. It's much easier for Patriarchy to keep you fearful so that you convince yourself not to leave the house then it is to try and force someone who's confident and resilient to stay in.
Comment by Teeshirtandshortsguy at 13/12/2022 at 20:17 UTC
66 upvotes, 3 direct replies
That's an interesting article. I thought it meandered a bit at times but I think it wrapped up nicely.
I think about this a lot. I'm a cishet white male, but I also try to be an ally to women, queer people, and POCs.
But at a certain point, within our own community of progressives, we have to acknowledge that people are fallible. Like, I know a lot of white guys who think they were fucked over because someone was jealous of them, or they "weren't afraid to tell the truth," or that someone had it out for them for no reason.
And you get to know them, and it becomes very clear that they were actually an asshole, or they just weren't so bright, or they were disruptive, or whatever.
So people are *clearly* capable of misreading the situation. They think highly of themselves and don't like confronting their flaws. That isn't exclusive to cishet white guys. And I would imagine that a social minority could be attracted to the idea that they were discriminated against in some way, even if that isn't necessarily true.
But what do we do about it? Because I also don't think it's worth interrogating every single claim of injustice.
As a side note, it's surprising to me that the cat's anus threat actually worked on me. I wonder how it affects engagement. Like, the quality of comments will be better on this post, but you'll almost certainly have turned away many would-be commenters, and perhaps they could have gleaned enough meaning from the comments to say something valuable, or generated valuable discussion just based on the headline.
Comment by Brenner- at 13/12/2022 at 20:39 UTC
35 upvotes, 0 direct replies
A lot of those words were a little big for me so I might not have a good grasp but I think I get the gist.
I personally think that by framing regular relationship issues as gender based, for sure it will incline folks to consider other non gender based issues as gender based. In a similar way that comparing any success by a woman as a smashing of the glass ceiling, you essentially place women under the glass ceiling you expect them to break for you to consider them successful, either outcompete all the men around you or take last. And for sure, it makes me tired and sad to know that for a lot of folks consider conflict resolution between a man and a woman as a “victory for women” in a way and therefore at the same time a defeat of the toxic masculinity they think the man represents in the situation. I hope my peers don’t think that my shortcomings are because of my gender.
But at the same time, perhaps after a little reframe, these stories should be told. Hey it might not be abuse, but small issues are issues, and every time you let a small issue stay on your tongue, it quickly becomes a mouthful of problems. As lame of a reason as it seems, breaking up with your partner because they don’t support your career as much as you need is a perfectly valid reason to seek someone else, and a lot of women are unaware that it’s okay for them to hold their partners to that standard, because a lot of them in the past have been in situations where voicing that “small problems aren’t okay, they’re still problems no matter the size” they get called nit-picky and overbearing.
Comment by boogers19 at 13/12/2022 at 23:33 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I like the part with the interview with the astronauts on the moon.
(I'll take those buttholes promptly, thank you very much.)
Comment by [deleted] at 13/12/2022 at 19:56 UTC
52 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by ChalanaWrites at 13/12/2022 at 21:50 UTC
49 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I saw a joke where the speaker said “I’m a feminist. When I write books, my female characters are only in 87% of the scenes to show how terrible the reality of the paygap is.” The article’s discussion of *Blonde* and that it chose to depict Marilyn Monroe consistently in a position of emotional weakness and vulnerability made me think of that. The false belief that a genuine depiction of women also requires genuine suffering.
While it’s certainly important not to whitewash the actual hardships women face, I think it’s just as silly—if not more skeezy—for media to be unable to tell stories about women who face hardship *beyond* their femininity. Just look at the controversy about *House of the Dragon.* Wizards and dragons are believable, but it’s ridiculous for women to not face sexism.
We need more stories of female triumph. Just not over the ‘weakness’ of femininity in a patriarch society. This is problematic because it shows that trumping patriarchy is a woman’s job, and that a woman’s successes can only be defined by her relations to men.
On another note, this article made me think about how the internet and the pathologization of relationships.
Does a guy do ‘X’ in a relationship? It’s because he’s a guy.
That kind of thing isn’t productive and says that whatever is causing strife between partners is innate and can’t be changed *and* it inherently privileges one party depending who’s reading the debate.
Comment by MrPrinceps at 13/12/2022 at 22:00 UTC*
22 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The article touches on thoughts I've been turning over for the past while, about the narratives we (sometimes unintentionally) tell about What It Means To Be [X], about the expectations that repeated stories create. The [X] I filled in was different, but the underlying concept remains -- her point especially about how these stories of women quietly suffering in stifling relationships serve to reinforce patriarchal notions of womanhood despite superficially seeming to challenge them.
Everyone deserves to tell the stories that are meaningful to them, of course they do, but there is a massive social apparatus for what stories get picked up and passed around and made much of.
"Woman suffers virtuously" isn't a new story. I'm an opera buff, not exactly the most modern of storytelling vehicles, and that describes a whole hell of a lot of the genre. Even "Man causes woman to suffer through no fault of her own" isn't new. That story has been told and told and told.
On the one hand, it's a testament to how far we still have to go as a society, that that basic story still resonates. We haven't got that shit sorted out yet. On the other hand, these stories of suffering don't provide a road map *out* of suffering when they wallow in it. And the stories we tell as a society really do impact the possibilities that people can see for themselves.
Comment by goldkear at 14/12/2022 at 00:16 UTC
18 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As a gay man, I don't really feel like I need to be part of this conversation, but one thing I've noticed about these articles is they are *anecdotes.* One woman having a bad experience with one man doesn't really mean anything other than those two weren't compatible. However, the readers will often take it as proof that "(dating) men = bad." I think the bigger issue is media literacy and being able to separate information given from one's own baggage.
Comment by Chinaroos at 13/12/2022 at 23:08 UTC
30 upvotes, 0 direct replies
suffering is not necessarily a moral good
Say it louder for all the people in the back. Just because a person is suffering does not make them a good person. Conflating conflict with abuse helps nobody and stifles the communication that all people (and relationships) need to thrive.
On the other hand, the anecdote about the writers splitting up made me pause. I'm a writer. That bit got a reaction out of me for a few reasons.
Writers dating, firstly, is generally a terrible idea.
Secondly, all writers have the right to their own memories and feelings. Period. If those memories are unpleasant, biased or tinged with emotion, that's what fiction is for. Navigating those lines is part of a writer's craft and if the man identifies as a writer, he in should have known this.
If he doesn't like it, go write.
That said, I hope that more people (especially writers) recognize the Sad Put Upon Woman Essay for what it is. Normal, human relationship conflict does not make men into monsters, nor women into martyrs.
Comment by kuronova1 at 14/12/2022 at 00:46 UTC
16 upvotes, 0 direct replies
On the idea of priming I think it also can build a belief that women and feminism hates men. I feel like within my media bubble or maybe it's my bias but I regularly find insinuations that a woman's bad experience is reflective of all men. It's one of the reasons that I left women's spaces and came here instead. Before that I found myself knee jerking towards a belief that women are unreasonable. It is unreasonable for anywhere to commonly have insinuations that a class of people is bad and I couldn't help but constantly see that in women's spaces. It's something that I actively struggle with.
Comment by [deleted] at 13/12/2022 at 20:34 UTC
46 upvotes, 2 direct replies
It certainly served as a good diss track article against another article. I also certainly think we need fewer articles where people talk their relationship failures up to a huge social statement. Sometimes relationships just end and it doesn't mean something Larger About Society.
But I'm also not familiar with the same world the Slate writer is, clearly, because I'm not seeing a verifiable bevy of Men Bad Because Bad Relationship articles, and certainly not ones that describe women as simply powerless against the face of patriarchy as personified by some Jerkass slob they dated. I DO see plenty of articles that point too patriarchal problem that still exist in hetero relationships, or think pieces about how some toxic traits are informed by patriarchy.
Comment by [deleted] at 14/12/2022 at 12:23 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This article articulates things I've had floating around in my head. I'm familiar with the genre it's criticising, but I think it misses the main issue with tragedy-porn articles is that while they technically discuss the issue, they don't discuss it in a productive, solution-oriented way. The key problem is the lack of nuance and self-awareness, rather than issues around social roles of men and women in general. The problem is far more basic than what the author is suggesting, and I feel it's to do with the genre itself.
Comment by unclenipple at 13/12/2022 at 20:50 UTC
18 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I’m struggling to see the main argument of the article, is it that the author doesn’t like the “suffering in silence, put upon woman” genre of essays because they reinforce stereotypes the author finds limiting?
Comment by iluminatiNYC at 13/12/2022 at 20:26 UTC
56 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This paragraph stuck out to me:
I take exception to this on a personal level; I greatly resent the indignity of having the complexity of my emotional landscape and character reduced to a clumsy metaphor involving a pretzel. That may sound vain and self-aggrandizing. But women can be vain and self-aggrandizing. And manipulative, aggressive, bossy, spiteful, jealous, demanding, spoiled, proud, unreliable, selfish, and controlling. In the same way that men can be meek, self-effacing, vulnerable, emotional, hysterical, irrational, overtly submissive, self-deprecating, and martyrish. We are all capable of experiencing and performing the full range of human emotion.
I get why these articles are written, and they strike me as slightly more agreeable versions of Men Are Trash™. If you believe that, it's liberating in a way as a women who sleeps with men. You don't have to engage with a man and who he is with a person. All you have to do is find the one who looks like what you want, and then sit there, blameless to whatever happens.
The rich part is that it's a mirror image of what a lot of PUA stuff teaches. They fundamentally believe that All Women Are Like That, so you don't have to engage with the person underneath and can do as you wish.
I get why those sorts of articles the OP speaks of are so popular. Who doesn't want to be told that a crappy relationship isn't your fault? Much of the weirdness in dating comes from the desire for absolution of any problems. But it's also not healthy.