Men, central

Jasmine Browley’s “Modern Love” essay, “I Decentered Men. Decentering Desire for Men Is Harder,” is going ASAP onto the syllabus for Straight Woman Studies 101, and is already a Feminine Chaos episode topic. In the piece, Browley describes being revolted by weddings and passivity, but also being wired in the way most women are, which is to say, hot men register. She doesn’t want to fall in love with a man, she wants to have transcended such things, but goes and does just that… only to be ghosted.

The headline made me think, I will hate this, this will be yet another example of a straight woman who thinks she’s not like the others. (The famous ‘I got married but my dress wasn’t from a wedding gown shop therefore I am unconventional and disrupting gender norms’ phenomenon. Someone should write about that.) But for reasons that come through in the tone, and details she shares (like being single for a long time), Browley reads more as a Diana Trent-esque honest-to-goodness pairing of heterosexuality with shuddering at the thought of being some man’s wife.

The whole point of the essay is that Browley gets where she is, in fact, like the other girls, and where she isn’t. She genuinely wants to lead the kind of independent life you can’t if coupled off. Good thing to know about yourself! But this doesn’t make her any less a (cis, she spells out; as if any of this discourse remotely relates to anyone else) woman, or any less into men.

She aligns her man-decentering with the zeitgeist, finding various decenterers of men on TikTok, and enjoying the sense of community (even via lurking) that can exist online, without much real-world referent. The onlineness of it all just reifies her identity as a man-dencenterer. There is a term for her identity category. She can be cishet but transcend the ‘het’ part. Or can she?!

She has decentered men. She will never decenter men.

The “Modern Love” is about the duality of need-a-man. There’s the thing where women think, perhaps accurately, that they need men to get by in life. For social approval, so people think you’re normal or desirable, so someone with (maybe) a higher income and (maybe) the ability to get things down from higher shelves can make your life easier.

There is also the thing where if this is your wiring, you need men. Need them in much the same way men need women when a man speaks of needing a woman.

You can decenter all you like in the first way, but the second one isn’t going anywhere. And because of how human relationships work, neediness itself can arise even if you’re not needy for men generally, just for whichever one it is at the moment.

Melissa Febos’s year-long celibacy project (volcel; the implication is that if she wanted, she could get) isn’t about male partners, specifically, but oh, it’s about women who date men, regardless of the gender(s) of Febos’s alluded to pre- and post-experiment partners. Remarks like, “I began­­ wearing sneakers instead of heels, and watched only TV shows featuring surly female detectives,” I mean, this is about man-pleasing on a meta level. (Also? Man-centerer here, and I New Balance and Scott & Bailey with the best of ‘em.)

Women, you see, make themselves lesser, or something. Again, Febos:

“There were a myriad of micro-adjustments I made to accommodate the desires (sometimes only imagined!) of my partners. Little facts about myself or my days that I elided. Creative or social time that I cut short because I worried they’d feel neglected. Foods that I ate or did not according to my partners’ preferences. Subtle calibrations of my style or speech to appeal to their tastes.”

And you know who is also doing all this, in relationships? Men. Non-binary people, presumably, as well, unless they have some sort of magical powers to transcend this. (No one has such powers.) Relationships involve compromise and consideration which means taking another person’s needs into account. Useful practice for if you wind up having kids and have to confront people who don’t just have food preferences but might literally burst into tears when you serve farmers market bok choy and Japanese salted salmon using a Just One Cookbook recipe on supermarket salmon that was on sale but was (I think; I can only be so sure, but it’s not as if kids ended up touching it) still fine.

(This was the effort-and-expense dinner! Lesson learned, back to pasta.)

What were we discussing here? Oh right. Unless you’re someone who’s only after sex, interdependence happens. Even if all you want is sex! Could be that the woman wants to meet up to hook up and the man does not and she’s disappointed. Clingy, needy, needs a man.

A part of me rolls my eyes at any and all attempts at man-decentering. You should not and cannot wish away your sexual orientation. The same reason conversion therapy doesn’t work on gay people, the I-don’t-need-a-man mantra fails to lessen men’s appeal to the straight women who recite it. You may not need a prom date, but a man? Well. Not this man over here but maybe that man over there, and there’s not much to do about it.

Perhaps man-decentering adds the excitement of a taboo! Without ban men feminism I suppose there weren’t so many opportunities for women to rebel simply by wanting boyfriends, husbands, or guy-friends-with-benefits.

It’s not that there aren’t straight women without male partners, of course there are. You can be celibate, voluntarily or otherwise, and still have a sexual orientation. But what tends to happen is, opportunity, or the hope of opportunity, presents itself. And then what?

But I think the youth may be onto something with this man-decentering nonsense. Centering men can go wrong in two ways. One is to prioritize how men generally see you. This is a mistake because what woman (apart from Blanche Devereaux) wants men, generally? Yes, there are benefits to being a woman all men like, but it’s by no means necessary for finding a man or even a bunch of them. I’m not part of whichever feminist wave thinks it’s empowering to be hot. I’m not reclaiming the bimbo. The ideal is to be exactly as pleasing-to-men as necessary to get what you want on the man front and no more. You don’t owe it to men to be appealing to them!

The other is to treat your boyfriend or husband as an infallible entity, as the assumed head-of-household, as the only man you could plausibly be attracted to, even if (insert whichever heartthrob actor—yes, intentional—walked by), as god’s gift, etc. This is a tricky one because yes, you should prioritize your partner. But there’s prioritizing your partner, and there’s subservience. These are not the same, and no matter how many rebrandings subservience gets, it’s bad news and best avoided. I don’t mean role-playing subservience, like in the very best Midsomer Murders,* which I just rewatched most of before falling asleep. Do what does it for you! I mean that the line between subservience as a bit and the real thing is not always a meaningful one.

But if you’re a straight woman, man-centering is your fate. If you’re a lesbian or a straight man, it’s women, if you’re a gay man, men. Such is life for the monosexuals.

*Sexual deviancy, anti-supermarket NIMBYism, up-to-no-good teens, equestrian looks, and Victoria sponge.