Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  To save courtship, women had to cover up the fact that changes in the economy were changing gender roles and relations. To the extent that their work and their new mobility did empower them, they had to hide it. Otherwise they risked a fate that women had long been taught to fear: growing old without finding a husband.

  * * *

  Elinor Glyn, the writer who coined the term “It Girl,” published a popular manual of romantic advice in 1923. The Philosophy of Love included chapters aimed at both men and women. Glyn warned female readers that with the men they truly desired, they should make every effort not to show it. While the Lady from Philadelphia had told readers of Ladies’ Home Journal how they should behave with men, Glyn emphasized all the things that a woman must not do.

  “She cannot be altogether irresponsibly natural.”

  She must not be “affected at all.”

  “She must never show her eagerness.”

  “She must never try to keep him one instant when he suggests leaving.”

  “She must never show that she desires to hold him in any way.”

  “She must not be vague.”

  She “must not become peevish and complaining, selfish and demagnetised, and indifferent to her appearance…”

  She must not be “wearing ‘any old thing’” when he comes over.

  Glyn said that the point of all these prohibitions was to sustain the fiction that men were in control of courtship. “She must always make him feel that he must make the advance, and that she is something to be schemed for,” she concluded.

  Doris Langley Moore agreed. The British socialite and fashion icon won the admiration of her friends by managing to keep men falling all over her, even after World War I wiped out a generation of eligible bachelors. In 1928, Moore anonymously published a dating advice manual that divulged the secrets of her romantic success, The Technique of the Love Affair. “A woman has not made a conquest until she finds herself pursued,” Moore advised.

  When Dorothy Parker reviewed the book for The New Yorker, she expressed dismay at her own ignorance about the laws of dating. “From this book I have learned that not once have I been right,” she wrote. “Not one little time.”

  The short stories that Parker was publishing around 1930 suggested otherwise. Again and again, Parker chronicled how hard ordinary women tried to win love from men by keeping them in pursuit.

  “A Telephone Call” consists of a two-thousand-word prayer. A Shopgirl begs God for strength as she waits to hear from a man she has been seeing.

  “Dear God, let him call me now,” the narrator begins. “I won’t ask anything else of You, truly I won’t.”

  So she claims. But she soon switches to pleading for help controlling herself.

  “Please, God, keep me from telephoning him.”

  In a rush of short, staccato sentences, Parker captures all the urges and orders fighting with one another in this young woman’s head. “I’ll think about something else. I’ll just sit quietly. If I could sit still. If I could sit still. Maybe I could read. Oh, all the books are about people who love each other.”

  This woman knows that restraining herself is crucially important. Expressing her desire would be more than a turnoff. It would inspire hatred.

  “I know you shouldn’t keep telephoning them,” she says. “I know they don’t like that. When you do that, they know you are thinking about them and wanting them, and that makes them hate you.”

  She keeps repeating that men hate female feelings.

  “They hate sad people.”

  “They don’t like you to tell them they’ve made you cry.”

  “They hate you whenever you say anything you really think.”

  Another story that Parker published in the same collection hints at why that might be. In “Advice to the Little Peyton Girl,” a Shopgirl named Sylvie despairs when her boyfriend, Bunny Barclay, grows distant.

  “You showed him how much you cared for him, Sylvie,” her older and wiser friend explains. “[You] showed him he was all-important to you. Men do not like that.”

  Sylvie learns the hard way that Bunny took her love for him as a kind of demand—a threat to his autonomy.

  “You must be light and you must be easy,” her friend continues, as Sylvie’s heart breaks. “Ease is the desire of all men.”

  * * *

  Parker saw that making things easy for men could be hard work. Moreover, a woman’s desire to “seem easy” with a love interest could produce the opposite effect. It could make her completely neurotic. By the end of “A Telephone Call,” the narrator has shut her clock in the bathroom and is trying to distract herself by counting to five hundred by fives.

  Nonetheless, virtually all of the most popular romantic self-help books aimed at women today still offer some version of the same advice that Glyn and Moore gave, and Parker parodied, in the 1920s. They address their readers in a scolding tone. If you browse bestselling career advice in a bookstore or on Amazon, you will find titles that burst with affirmation. Brag! their titles cheer. Ask for It! Lean In! By contrast, the books about dating seem calculated to discourage any acts of self-expression. He’s Just Not That Into You, they say.

  It’s Not Him, It’s You begins berating its reader before she has even made it past the table of contents. Each chapter is named for one of the “fundamental mistakes” that the book says women make.

  “Your Attitude Sucks,” one chapter declares.

  “You Think Men Have a Clue.”

  In this context, a book like Ignore the Guy, Get the Guy starts to sound optimistic.

  The Rules, which came out in 1995, probably remains the best-known dating advice franchise in America. The authors, Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, elevated the kinds of prohibitions that Elinor Glyn and Dorothy Langley Moore offered into a philosophy of life.

  The Rules instructs you in how to become a “Rules Girl”—the type of woman who effortlessly attracts and keeps men—by elaborating all the things you must not do: “Don’t talk to a man first.” “Don’t ask him to dance.” “Don’t stare at men or talk too much.” “Don’t call him, and rarely return his calls.” “Don’t accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday.” “Don’t see him more than once or twice a week.” “Don’t rush into sex.” “Don’t open up too fast.” “Don’t tell him what to do.”

  The farther you continue down this list, the more the book starts to sound like the founding scripture of a cult of self-hatred. “Don’t talk to your therapist about The Rules,” the authors warn more than once. And for anyone who feels herself wavering, there is Rule #32: “Don’t break The Rules.”

  Restraining and repressing every instinct you have is hard work, and the Rules Girls are the first to admit it. “We know we’re asking you to go against your feelings here,” Fein and Schneider concede in their introduction. “But you want to get married, don’t you?” The supermodel Kate Moss famously quipped that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. The Rules offers a kind of emotional equivalent for Single Girls. Nothing could feel worse than being alone.

  * * *

  In this genre of advice, love serves as a kind of disciplinary instrument. The prospect of a long-term partnership is dangled in front of women as the prize of a lifetime of self-denial. Should a single woman think of straying, the authors remind her of the possibility of future loneliness to put her back on track. The possibility that any woman might be interested in anything other than getting married to a man never comes up.

  Meanwhile, however, another danger goes entirely unmentioned. This is that a Rules Girl becomes so expert at ignoring her feelings that she forgets what she wanted from dating in the first place. The surest way to make it seem like you do not care is to actually not care. The surest way to cover up that you are feeling the first stirrings of love is to try to actually not feel them. Ironically, dating advice sometimes seems to be training its reader how to steel herself against the very emotions that she says she hopes to experience.

  Wh
en the sociologist Arlie Hochschild wrote her pioneering study of service workers in the 1980s, she observed that the kind of “emotional labor” that their jobs required could be exploited, just as physical labor can be exploited. More than a century earlier, Karl Marx had described in detail how workers who perform repetitive, exhausting tasks for too little money gradually develop sensations of being estranged from their own bodies. For Marx, the essence of what makes us human lies in our labor—in the ways that we purposefully shape the world around us. So when a worker finds himself compelled to perform too much work for too little, the process not only exhausts him but in fact dehumanizes him. It deforms his spirit. The parts of his body with which he works become like tools, mere instruments, and it is his employers who profit from them, rather than himself.

  Hochschild studied a group of female flight attendants who worked for Delta Airlines throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s. The most strenuous exertions that their jobs required were not physical. They were emotional. Flight attendants had to maintain an attractive appearance and adhere to strict codes regarding body shape and dress. But most important, they had to express warmth toward passengers, calming them when they were disruptive or comforting them if they were scared. Delta training materials instructed attendants to treat their smiles as their “greatest assets.”

  The women, Hochschild reported, could become deranged with grinning. Some found that after returning home from a transatlantic flight, they were literally incapable of laughing with their children. This is the extreme to which the kinds of emotional labor that are meant to seem natural and effortless can lead. Take it too far and you have too much taken from you. You realize that your emotions themselves are no longer your own.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the most cunning men have gotten wise to the ruses of the Rules Girl. They see that beneath her cool exterior, she is highly vulnerable. If you have been conditioned to believe that your life derives value only from male attention and affection, you will presumably go to great lengths to get it. If you are used to thinking that the only way you can pursue your desires is by making yourself into an object of desire for someone else, being ignored can quickly make you feel desperate.

  The Pickup Artist (PUA) tries to manipulate women by stealing a page from the Rules playbook. In the early 2000s, the New York Times reporter Neil Strauss spent two years immersed in a PUA subculture centered around Los Angeles. The guru who initiated him was a Toronto native who went by the name of Mystery. For the purposes of his PUA education, Strauss also gets a nickname: “Style.” Recounting his story, Style offers a secondhand seduction guide for men who are as lonely and desperate as he once was. The PUAs call them AFCs—“average frustrated chumps.”

  The central principle of PUA “game theory” boils down to this: In order to attract attractive women, men must first destroy their self-esteem by feigning indifference to them. To sleep with an HB (a hot babe, anywhere from a 7 to a 10, on their scale), a PUA simply follows a sequence that Mystery calls FMAC: find, meet, attract, close.

  PUAs like acronyms. They like jargon in general. A lot of the fun of reading Strauss’s The Game lies in mastering its vocabulary. For instance, a night out chasing HBs is called “sarging.” One of the best “approaches” is the “neg.”

  “Neither compliment nor insult, the neg is something in between—an accidental insult or backhanded compliment. The purpose of a neg is to lower a woman’s self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her—by telling her that she has lipstick on her teeth, for example, or offering her a piece of gum after she speaks.”

  I love a woman who can eat.

  Aren’t you cold in that?

  You get the idea.

  * * *

  On the surface, The Game seems like the antithesis of The Rules. The Rules are prissy and self-consciously retro; they appeal to old-fashioned ideas of chivalry and chaperonage. The Game is frankly ruthless in its pursuit of no-commitment sex. Yet these books share a worldview. The system of beliefs regarding heterosexual relationships that they espouse are almost identical.

  Both The Rules and The Game present the battle of the sexes as a kind of market competition, where women barter sex for love and men do the opposite. In this exchange, not only is dating work for women and recreation for men. Desire is a liability. If a seller knows you want to buy, he knows he can get more.

  Strauss presents the game as a way to fulfill a male fantasy of having an easy time getting women into bed. In the opening chapter, he describes how pitiful and helpless he was before his PUA education. He stresses that he is physically unattractive.

  “My nose is too large for my face … to say that my hair is thinning would be an understatement … my eyes are small and beady … I am shorter than I’d like to be and so skinny that I look malnourished to most people.” He spills all this in the first few paragraphs.

  “So for me, meeting girls takes work.”

  In addition to advertising the effectiveness of his methods, even for the balding and beady-eyed, Straus is apologizing in advance, using self-deprecation to encourage readers to feel sorry enough for pre-PUA Neil to go easy on him for all the bad behavior that follows. He explains that because his appearance did not inspire lust, he often felt overwhelmed by his own emotions and sense of neediness.

  “I can’t seem to evolve to the next state of being because I spend far too much time thinking about women,” Style laments. “I’d turn a one-night stand into a two-year stand because I didn’t know when it was going to happen again.”

  It was dealing with emotions like uncertainty that he found unmanning. In order to help an AFC get out of his state of vulnerability and desperation, the PUAs recommend that he pretend that his feelings are unreal.

  “Think of tonight as a video game,” Mystery admonishes his protégés. It works.

  “The bars and clubs became … just different levels on a video game I had to get through,” Style recalls later.

  “All your emotions are there to try to fuck you up,” Mystery eggs him on. “Know that they cannot be trusted at all.”

  * * *

  This kind of Revenge of the Nerds story has been around for a long time. Such stories often revolve around how men feel about how women make them feel. More specifically, they offer male readers a fantasy of being able to refuse to feel anything—and, thus, become invulnerable to the anxiety that can paralyze an average frustrated chump during an “approach.”

  Already in 1933, Nathanael West had connected the dots between the male rage he felt seething all around him in New York City and what political economists now call the “feminization of labor.” During the Great Depression, the entrance of women into formerly male workplaces put new pressure and competition on their colleagues. In addition, the nasty hero of Miss Lonelyhearts is asked to perform a female kind of work—attending to the feelings, and assuaging the anxieties, of others.

  Miss Lonelyhearts is a nameless writer who once had literary aspirations. Instead, in the midst of the Depression, he finds himself eking out a living by ghostwriting a romantic advice column in the voice of a middle-aged matron. The resentment that Miss Lonelyhearts expresses toward real women cannot be separated from his sense of being emasculated by his job.

  When one day, early on, Miss Lonelyhearts heads to a speakeasy to meet his friends after work, he finds his colleagues complaining about female competitors like Dorothy Parker.

  “Someone started a train of stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape.”

  He tells about a girl who was “regular” until she “went literary.” “The guys on the block got sore and took her into the lots one night. About eight of them. They ganged her proper…”

  Someone else talks about an ambitious female novelist who tried to go undercover to do research in a speakeasy. “They got her into the back room to teach her a new word and put the boots to her. They didn’t let her out for three days. On the last day they sold tickets to ni
ggers.”

  Miss Lonelyhearts is so accustomed to these conversations that he hardly notices. In case we doubt that this is a numbing strategy these sad men use to protect themselves against their sense of impotence, Nathanael West tells us: “They would go on telling these stories until they were too drunk to talk.”

  The practice of holding up this kind of hateful language as proof of immunity to feeling has not gone away. Every decade may get the American Psycho that no decade deserves. Since the beginning of the Great Recession, the bestselling author, public speaker, and professional misogynist Tucker Max has earned millions of readers by dishing out stories of his frat-boyish sexual escapades. Every day his website offers tweetable swipes that he has taken at women he has slept with. When I visit his website, this is the most recent:

  “I know this really sexy move you can do with your mouth. It’s called ‘shutting the fuck up.’”

  * * *

  The rudeness of these men is part of the revenge fantasy that they offer. It plays a key role in their refusal to perform the emotional labor that the women in their lives expect.

  Men more polite than Miss Lonelyhearts and Tucker Max also reject women who do not manage to “seem easy.” How many times have you heard a man explain why he left a woman by saying that, in some way, she demanded too much emotional labor of him? How many female exes became unbearable because they were “too much work,” “not worth the effort,” “difficult,” “oversensitive,” “intense,” or “tiresome”? Still more criticisms imply that women fail to manage their own emotions properly; they are “hysterical,” “illogical,” “shrill,” “unreasonable,” “overwhelmed,” “all over the place,” “confused.” At some point every woman seems to become “crazy.”

  Ease may still be the desire of every man.

  For almost a century, dating self-help books have warned women that they must repress their emotions in order to avoid making their partners think that they expect something. This clearly places a burden on women who want to be involved with men. It is not good for men either. For one thing, it frankly infantilizes them.