by Stella Grey
I stared at the screen, my mouth twitching. “What do you mean by ‘femininity is important to me’?” I asked him.
“We can discuss this over dinner,” he said. “It will make for a lively ninety minutes over steak and chips, though chicken for me as I don’t eat red meat anymore.” Good to know. “Let me just say this, in case you misunderstand me,” he added. “I’m a feminist, modern man who loves women. But I am not attracted to women who exhibit male traits. Perhaps I should also mention that I’m turned off by women who are dominant in bed.”
At this point, I was sure I didn’t want to meet Lee more than once. (I mean, would you, honestly? Perhaps you would, if you think being reminded to be a feminine woman by your boyfriend is perfectly fine.) But I was curious and bored, and mildly freaked out by recent events, so I agreed to dinner. Shortly afterwards I received an email from Miles, apologizing for the withdrawal of the invitation to lunch at his house. “This will sound shallow,” he wrote, “but I have a certain physical type, and I just wasn’t attracted to you. I hope we can be friends.”
I messaged Lee. “Let’s play Q and A before we meet,” I wrote, trying again. “I’ll go first and we’ll alternate with random questions. Here’s my first. How do you feel about IKEA?”
His reply said: “Why are you doing this? I don’t want to answer your questions.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “It’s just fun. If you don’t have the time or don’t feel like it, just say so, but there’s no need to be cross about it.”
“This is some pretty weird shit,” he said in his reply.
I was beginning to imagine what dinner with Lee would be like: it might involve a slide show of his world travels, and a lot of me-me-me. Weird shit was the clincher. When I said that we should probably cancel our dinner arrangement, he said it was already done. Now I was irritated, and couldn’t let it go without a bit more of a fight. I wrote asking if a question about IKEA was interpreted as some sort of an assumption that I was preparing to go house-hunting with him. He replied saying that the subconscious was a powerful thing. I couldn’t believe it. “So,” I said, “the first Q and A I attempted with you—the question about Scrabble: was that my subconscious wanting to rush ahead and buy our first marital boardgame?”
“You see,” he said. “You’re thinking about marriage. You used the word.”
I frowned at the screen. “Are we joking?” I asked him. “I think we’re joking with one another, but I’m just not sure. Either we’re joking or you’re deeply strange.”
“It isn’t me who’s strange,” he said. “You’re the one who wants to dominate a total stranger with your demands for information.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see—was that unfeminine of me?”
“This conversation is over,” he replied. “Please don’t email me again.”
When I logged on to a different dating site, the following day, the first thing I was confronted with was Miles’s smiling face. It was a site he’d freshly joined (LOOK! NEW MEMBERS!), perhaps in the belief that he was getting away from me there and could continue his woman-hunt in privacy. I sent him a message via their system, just saying hello. He’d said he wanted to be friends. He didn’t, though.
Back came the reply: “I’m sorry again that I disappeared on you. I felt overwhelmed. To be honest all that stuff about wanting to be stitched into someone else’s life was kind of claustrophobic.” But that had been a conversation about seriousness; it was a conversation about dating culture. More to the point, this fresh excuse was a straightforward lie. It hadn’t been anything to do with stitching. It had been about my body, as he’d confessed—more truthfully—before this. But Miles had regretted being so frank, and had come up with a more gender-politically correct form of rejection. I asked what was wrong with wanting to be stitched into someone else’s life, if the stitching was mutual and contented. He said that living alone had taught him that he needs to be fundamentally independent. Shared meals, evenings, nights, should be a matter of choice: surely that was a truly liberated way of life? When I argued with this, he interpreted my skepticism as a proposition. “I can’t offer you what you want,” he wrote. “And nice though it is to hear from you, I can’t offer you a date, either.”
I wasn’t looking for a date. “I’m not looking for a date, but thanks,” I told him. “Just saw your face pop up here and thought I’d say hello. All the best to you. Good luck.”
Then there was an email from Lee, saying that he regretted that we hadn’t met, in the end, and that we should have had the conversation about femininity face to face, because if we had it might have turned out differently. We would have smiled while we argued. We would have enjoyed the debate. Good relationships need friction, after all, he said. How about a drink? Okay, I said. A drink. Why not? When, where? He didn’t reply. I wrote again. “Just name the day. Let’s name the date.” Then laughed a lot at my own marriage joke.
The culmination of this series of blasts from the past was a dating site message from Peter. It was as if I’d conjured him up by thinking about him. Peter had my email address and mobile number, but opted for the formality of the site email system. “Hello again, how’s it going for you?” he asked blandly.
I told him it was going fine. He launched into an account of his life since he’d kissed my head and got on a train and had backtracked. He’d had a few short-term relationships. He’d thought he’d found the One, and then it’d turned out she wasn’t. They’d got on each other’s nerves. He’d realized that he needed to stop chasing the pretty girls and think about the intellectual fit.
“And so—why are you contacting me again, Peter?” I asked him. “Have I been held in reserve until the wind changed?”
There was no answer to that.
Fundamental Ironies of the Game
SPRING, YEAR TWO
I turned fifty-one before spring came. I’d been doing this online dating experiment for a year, a whole year, and how much happiness had I squeezed out of it? Not a lot. The credits and debits in the ledger of love were not encouraging. There was a lot of red ink involved and my heart . . . not to push the point excessively, but it was severely overdrawn.
“I need something!” I told the universe. The universe waited. It’s a good listener, I find, but doesn’t say much back.
I made a list in the dating diary of the qualities I’d really like in a boyfriend. I wanted someone cheerful, open, loving, friendly, curious, loyal, trustworthy, talkative. It flashed into my head that what I might need was an American.
I’d encountered a couple of Americans. There had been Trevor, who wasn’t a great ambassador for his nation. And Jonathan, who was in some ways worse. Americans online, though: there were some fantastically nice Americans online. I knew this. And I wanted one.
Unfortunately I got talking to Todd, who said he could see he wasn’t tickling my gina. “My what? I’d be surprised if you could tickle my gina from that distance,” I replied. Then I realized I’d heard the phrase before. It was something to do with provoking sexual interest via projecting status. Todd had been projecting status all over the place, since we started chatting, but I’d missed the whole gina-tickle objective, and had misinterpreted it completely; I just thought he was an arrogant, self-absorbed git.
The year before this, and because of a throwaway comment by an American man on a dating site, I’d found myself in what’s sometimes called the manosphere, a sub-section of the internet where men talk about being men. (It’s an international conversation, and not just an American one, but it had been Americans around whom the subject arose.) I don’t know if the quadrant I wandered into was typical, but the disdain for women there was startling and vicious, and the label “feminist” was used as a deadly slur. I started at a blog that had a lively comments section, then went off on a trail, traveling sideways into other blogs, following links into forums. There men complained that women are biologically determined to be illogical, dim-witted, spendthrift, prone to doing the oppo
site of what they say and are in need of male control. I saw men advise that a woman should be denied things and told “No” on principle, because it was vital not to let her keep getting her own way. Some men thought there were still women in the world who were redeemable if they were caught early and trained right; young women had more instinctive respect for male authority, they said, and could be more easily molded to serve. Some others thought we were all a lost cause. As for middle age, the midlife female had no place or meaning, they asserted. The general view was that women over fifty were finished, made redundant by fresh young pussy (I quote), and should cast themselves out on an ice floe to die.
Some of these ideas were talked about in relation to marriage; in other cases, in the context of getting and managing a girlfriend. Many men complained that they couldn’t get laid, entirely because (and they were confident in this diagnosis) womankind in general had become too entitled. There was a whole list of reasons why women were shunning them so very unjustly. It didn’t seem to have occurred to any of them that their ugly shrunken souls were to blame.
This all started because the American, who was called Jason, accused me of shit testing him. I had no idea what he meant so I went to Google and looked it up, and spent an afternoon in silent wonder. A shit test is a provocation, vocalized by a woman in order to test the mettle of a possible or actual partner. The theory is that all women shit test (whether they know it or not) in order to determine the status of a male. I had an on-screen conversation with Jason. “I’ve just looked that up. Shit tester. It seems to mean, a woman who disagrees with you.”
“Not at all. Your understanding is very superficial. All women shit test. It’s hard-wired. You are programmed to want to identify the best mate, and in identifying him you throw up obstacles we are meant to overcome.”
“Do you have personal experience of this process, or is it something you’ve been told is true?”
“All men have personal experience of it.”
“Can I ask you something: if I had approached you, rather than letting you approach me, here on the site—would you have replied to me?”
“Absolutely not. Good women don’t chase men.”
“What’s a good woman?”
“You know what a good woman is.”
“Am I shit testing you now, by having this conversation?”
“Yes you are.”
“See, I would just characterize this as debate. Is debate not allowed? If I disagree with you about something, that’s shit testing, is it?”
“Not always but we are in a specific environment here, in which we are trying to determine whether the other person is the highest status mate we can get for ourselves.”
“I’m not interested in status.”
“Yes you are. You just don’t know you are.”
“That’s the kind of comment that shuts down all debate, though, isn’t it, if you are the only one in the conversation who knows what each of us thinks.”
“Well, it ought to.”
“You don’t think I know my own mind?”
“In my experience women don’t, in general. The exceptions tend to be masculinized to the extent that men aren’t attracted to them.”
“Am I masculinized?”
“It’s hard to say. You have masculine attributes, yes. But it’s all about a balance. You may have sufficient qualities to balance that out. I don’t know you. I’d have to meet you and see how you are in real-world conversation.”
“I don’t have any interest in doing that, however.”
“Ah. I failed your shit test then.”
“No. You’re just a weirdo.”
“I’m not interested in you, either. I’m looking for a feminine woman, but there are very few left.”
It’s interesting, incidentally, that Neil Strauss, whose book The Game led to a widespread dissemination of these woman-wrangling techniques, recounting his own life as a PUA (pickup artist), has married and become a dad and believes in everlasting love and has recanted. He makes the point now that he approached the community as a reporter, while admitting freely that he got sucked in. He came to detest his seducer persona and rejected the ideas he appeared to endorse, but the online community didn’t really get this message; they continue to see the book as a manual. It’s also interesting that the latest cult misogynist superstar, who often goes by the name Roosh V, has disciples who demonstrate a telling irony, namely that they much prefer to socialize together and have man-conferences than to talk to actual women in the actual world. Lots of these men seem to be caught up in a contradictory vortex of yearning and hatred.
For months I’d been coming across men who bought into the idea of negging. That’s when a man makes negative remarks, supposedly designed to prompt banter, to a woman perceived as high status (and thus used to being lavished with praise) in order to project his own greater status. Men were even using it on low-status women like me, because they’d been promised it was a shortcut to sex. The projecting of status is a key topic among men who think talking to women and having relationships demands technique. They don’t seem to understand what a relationship is. They don’t, in general, want relationships at all, it seems to me: the way they talk about gaining sexual access suggests getting something for free that would otherwise have to be paid for. The idea behind the concept of game is that men use a catnip-like combination of power and charm, triggering interest in the female target. Sometimes, and apparently without irony, the word charisma is used to define this.
One day I got a message that said: “I’m not intimidated by you, but I can see that you’re a waste of my time.” I hope he didn’t pay a lot and go on a residential course, or anything, because I just ignored him. Another wrote: “In general I avoid one-itis but you might be the one.” I looked up one-itis. Apparently it’s to do with fixation on a particular woman and the belief that only she will do, when “the truth” is that many women are all equally suitable.
I heard from a man in Ireland, who illustrated the general trend. “Can I just say how much I like your shoes; they go with your eyes.” I’d seen “Nice shoes, they go with your eyes” advised as a pickup line. My shoes were silvery gray, in the picture he was referring to, and my eyes are dark brown. The compliment was supposed to intrigue me. I was supposed to write back, bemused, to point out that my shoes weren’t remotely like my eyes. And I did. We were having a conversation now, which was the point. His next gambit was this: “I like the way you wear your hair, but you’d look even better if it was long.” Thanks, I said. “I notice you say you like modern art,” he continued. “This doesn’t reflect well on you because it’s all celebrity and basically shit, and contradictory because you also say you hate celebrity culture.”
“Modern art is like modern anything else,” I wrote back. “It needs to be judged case by case. It can’t be written off simply because it’s modern.”
“You’re a very attractive woman, on the outside, and I knew you’d be as interesting on the inside,” he wrote.
“I think I read that line on a website somewhere,” I told him. “A PUA website. Women read them too, you know. They don’t have hormonally activated locks, or anything.” He was silent. “Why do you feel the need to use somebody else’s words?” I asked him. “It’s none of my business I know, but I’m sure you’d be far more successful if you were yourself.” There was no response. “Okay, you don’t want to talk about it and that’s fine, but on saying farewell here’s a piece of advice: in general women can sense when they are being fed lines, or being managed, and we don’t like it, and so it’s counter-productive. Bye.” (Can you just imagine the masculinist hoo-hah if women started writing manuals about managing men?)
Two days later he replied: “You women should stay out of the manosphere. It’s not for you.”
“I don’t understand why you’d use these lame set approaches, when you say on your profile that you’re Looking for the One.”
“Women like to hear that.”
“So it’s just another line.”
“Look, you’re talking to me, aren’t you? If I’d written ‘Hi, fancy a cup of coffee?’ like I used to, you would have said no.”
“How do you know that? You don’t know that.”
“Women here are a nightmare; they think that just because there are search fields, they can get princessy about only having a prince.”
Another man was open about saying he was a practitioner of charisma. “Charisma—are you a PUA type?” I asked.
“Whoa. You’re very well informed,” he replied, with three kisses and two smileys.
“So why do you do it?”
“It’s a way of getting badly behaved women to go to bed with me.”
“Badly behaved how?”
“Women who can be charmed into bed by a stranger.”
“Who are they, these women?”
“I meet them on Twitter. Twitter’s a player’s paradise. Using charisma means I get to date women out of my league. Usually I only get to date the fat ones.”
The manosphere is notably unkind to the female-and-overweight (in fact I notice that midlife women are assumed to be overweight; it’s a part of our general inexplicable failure to arrest time and to put men’s needs before our own). It would be interesting to read the weights in kilos of the men who frequent these discussions, and the belly-girth measurements. It’s widely advised that fat women should be invisible to men, because men need to have more self-esteem than that. (They might also need bodyguards. If I see anyone wearing one of those No Fat Chicks T-shirts—the ones available in a size TRIPLE XL—I might push him under a bus.)
It was when I first encountered the men of the manosphere becoming enraged about women refusing to settle that my ears pricked up. The signs were there that these were men of “low social value” and “low sexual prestige” (to bounce their own cod-sociological terminology back at them). Women, they said, must stop refusing to settle and learn to take what is on offer. Them, in other words.