Help the Men: We Took Their Gender Roles

It feels quaint, almost archaic, to talk about gender roles these days. That’s at least three feminist microwaves ago. But in my ongoing considerations for How The Gender Landscape Got Here and What We Might Be Able To Do About It, they come up a lot.

A few things seem broadly true:

• Masculinity must be proven according to a set of semi-legible cultural and social rules while femininity is more likely to be assumed and challenged much less often

• Gender roles appear to accrue to men’s benefit in some ways

• Men are struggling to find archetypes that satisfy their own aspirations while appealing to the women they date and the society they inhabit, more than they have in the past

Taken together, I have two new connected theories around the above:

• Men are more dependent on gender roles for life scripts than women are

• Feminism has dismantled male scripts and in so doing destabilized men, in a manner distinct from both its positive and negative effects on the lives of individual women

Having shared my thesis, I’m just gonna post a bunch of quotes from a group chat I’m in.

blah blah blah "what are gender roles if not a set of rules around what men have to do in order to get specific rewards and what women have to do in order to be the reward, no wonder women don't like them and men feel pretty confused without them"

******

i'm curious tho his tweet seems like an accurate assessment of what it looks like when the median hetero relationship goes well?

hmmm I think I put his tweet in the category of complementarian that is prescriptive in a way that limits both people

the most boring true criticism of gender roles is that they're insufficiently individual, and that to stuff yourself into them is to cut off parts of yourself, even as a normal person

the other thing about gender roles is that they have a nasty habit of focusing on compensating for each other's weakness, even this one which claims to be about strengths - too much frontloading on who is chaotic rather than building strength (not just the more ambiguous *freedom* or *peace*) in both parties

i badly want to draw a connection to some of my other bullshit on how gender roles are fundamentally more for men than for women here and I think the one I have is weak

but I do tend to think masculine notions of compensating for feminine weaknesses loom much larger in their minds than do feminine notions of compensating for masculine ones, for perhaps obvious reasons, which ends up making this vibe "masculine fantasy"

obviously feminine notions of compensating for men are quite extant tho

men seem to yearn to compensate for female limitations and needs while women are kind of repulsed at the idea of doing the opposite

yeah hmm i wonder if it's bc women are just sort of expected to do this by default to some degree

but also my hot take i guess is that women do these things primarily for themselves bc they'd (actually i'll count myself in this, estrogen is a helluvadrug) go completely fucking insane if they didnt

men's ability to tolerate shitty conditions is just rly high they dont actually need anyone to provide them with clean laundry for the most part

It's partially that, and partially women having a sort of immature white knight fantasy about men

but it's also honestly that women value strength in their partners more than men do

and optimizing for *strength* in both parties is actually a better aim than this "we compensate for each other's failings" model

and leaves the relationship better off when people manage to go that direction together

there's a sneaky way that men can become dependent on the weaknesses existing in order to feel like they have something to do

when quite frankly pregnancy is more than enough neediness generating on its own lmao

I'm always quoting the same podcast but she'll frequently return to the idea that women lean more "needy" and men lean more "needy in that they demand neediness"

I'm overly schnarch-pilled so I'm all about differentiation and modeling the couple as two distinct individuals who want different things, just as a priors disclosure

his model would go on to say that needing both players to agree on something like "we compensate for each others weaknesses" is immature because it can't tolerate the idea that two people don't always have exactly matching weaknesses, it tries to assert a sort of Borg-couple reality that isn't necessarily the truth

and that each individual assessing their weaknesses and trying to *move past them* makes for a relationship where you actually grow and improve, and you do so together because if you love your partner and you see them dealing with something obnoxious about themselves, you also want to deal with what's obnoxious about yourself

two individuals taking stock of their limitations and actively taking the initiative to fix it

as opposed to both sides of a couple insisting that the other person's weakness is their reason for being there

*********

*Complementarianism pretends to be equitable because it’s neat, chiral, mirrored, but it presents a relationship model that appeals to men more than women, because it is men more than women who want their partner’s limitations to be something they are obligated to compensate for*