Men Comparing Women

I went on a Tinder date the other day. It was nothing earth-shattering, just an anodyne lunch meetup. The following day, my date texted me; he immediately informed me that he’d gone on a similar date with another woman, but reassured me that I was “much cooler.”

Roxane Gay has said that a feminist is just a woman who is tired of being treated like shit. I thought about this sentiment as I mulled over such otherwise irrelevant—even inappropriate—information to tell a recent first date. While this guy’s comment could be interpreted as the harmless data-sharing of his life’s minutiae, it’s also a possibility that he was pulling the all-too-common trick of trying to build me up by breaking down another woman. It got me to thinking about a flood of memories, in which the men I have considered as (actual or potential) mates pitted me against other women for emotional or psychological gain. This also led me to reconsider how these actions made me feel, and how the feelings that were teased out of me served these men’s specific aims.

Now, before a bevy of fragile, cishet dudes and their obedient, cishet, Stockholm Syndrome-suffering female supporters start flooding my inbox with, “HASHTAG NOT ALL MEN!” or “You’re just bitter and need to get over it,” I’d like to make some things clear. This is my experience in romantic relationships. It may not be the same for others. I understand that my family upbringing and cultural conditioning have provided messages—both subtly, and in crashingly overt ways—that hurting, even torturing, women is an acceptable commonplace, and that women should simply put up with it (or risk a variety of social, psychological, and economic punishments if they do not). Finally, I tend to write with the hope that sharing my stories will help someone who needs help. When writing, I tend to care less about how I can protect and appease the sensibilities of abusers, and their supporters who are generally unwilling to listen to me.

Coming back to my memories, a flood of examples of insecure men pitting women against one another emerge. There were the countless two-timers, who for months in our relationships—even years—would seek out other women, and forge halfhearted attempts to conceal their philandering. I can’t feign total innocence here. I’ve cheated, too, but my infidelities always grew out of revenge responses to my partners’ indiscretions, or as a means of leaving people who had all but made me an invisible servant in our relationships. I usually kept my cheating under wraps; never did I stray so as to send the message that greener pastures lay elsewhere. It was typically a covert way of fulfilling some deep-seated longing in me that the relationships did not. My partners, on the other hand, always found ways to remind me that I was inadequate. The women they chose were more traditionally physically attractive, more sexually forthcoming, more maternal, more complacent, quiet and obedient, less scathingly humorous, less intelligent. In other words, they found women who possessed all of the socially desirable feminine traits that I lacked, and boy, did they make me aware of the contrast. As I mentioned, at best, they were halfhearted in their methods of hiding such conquests. At worst, they cavalierly flaunted their affairs. Either way, they made quite clear that: 1) I was to compete with these women for their affections, 2) whatever I was, was undesirable, and 3) that, if only I could be more like my counterparts, I could be successful in the relationship. How do I know this? Well, when these men would eventually circle back (and they always did), they would ultimately profess all the ways in whichthese women were lacking, traits that I conveniently possessed in spades. When they came back, I was funnier, I was sexier, I understood the men better than these contenders ever could. How could my partners—or I—have ever thought otherwise?

Of course, the cheating done on me is too obvious a transgression to sit on its own. There was my ex-husband, who never strayed during the relationship, but (during the divorce) moved straight from our home into an apartment with a woman for whom the kindest words he reserved throughout our six-year marriage ran along the lines of, “She is a trashy, alcoholic wannabe.” There was what I liked to call the “Living, Breathing, Walking, Cliché of a Relationship”: the guy who was first “going through a divorce,” which became “in the process of leaving his wife,” which became “We’re still living together for the kids,” which became him psychologically abusing—and regularly fucking—both of us, which became (of course) him going back to her. That one, thankfully, inspired me to get back into therapy. There was the coworker I dated, who ghosted me after a year and a half of friendship-then-dating, and who after two weeks showed up to the next work meeting slobbering all over a woman who was thinner, nicer, and traditionally more his physical type than I could ever be, all in my field of vision. There was the boyfriend who wished I could be more like his quiet, nonconfrontational ex, and less like his “crazy” one who held him accountable for his fuckboyery. There was the guy with the texts he shouldn’t have gotten, who handed me his phone to use while said texts were incoming. There was the guy who hung out with a woman thirteen years his junior (with whom he was having an emotional affair) and lied about it, all while I was going through the painful decision to end our unexpected pregnancy. There were the exes who said, “We should hang out sometime,” and never mentioned their long-term girlfriends. There were the countless acquaintances, with their “totally harmless flirting” comments like, “I wish my girlfriend were as [insert arbitrary personality trait here] as you.” There were the coworkers who would offer me a terse “hello” because I was much more outspoken than the female coworkers they were quick to praise, the ones who listened to all their blowhardery and blew endless smoke rings up their asses. 

Oh, am I being “too extra,” fragile cishet bros for whom this is all hitting a bit too close to home? My apologies. History has simply taught me that I must provide a Bible’s length of examples, lest you otherwise accuse me of overexaggerating isolated incidents (as so many of you are wont to do). 

My point is threefold. One, these incidents have made me feel awful, inadequate, insecure, strange, crazy, lacking, unwomanly, and so many other terrible feelings. Two, they’ve taught me that, in order to navigate the world in a way that ensures survival—let alone success!—women have to cater to heterosexual men’s insecurities by complying with a game in which we are pitted against other women in a variety of ways. Yes, these men are deeply flawed, but they possess cultural cachet and cultural capital that allow them the privilege to get away with such behavior. Finally, it makes me realize the great extent to which women have to disentangle ourselves from these ingrained, toxic, cultural practices. We need to stop agreeing to compete with one another, and instead critique the ways in which cishet men perpetuate and are served by these practices. I’ll start: To all the women with whom I have desperately competed for men’s approval over my lifetime—I am sorry. Even though I was locked in a toxic paradigm in which I couldn’t see my behavior for what it was, you did not deserve that. I hope we may heal. You and I, sister, deserve better. Let’s work together to get it.