The new female contempt

and the democratisation of disregard

Illustration by Ohni Lisle for The New Yorker

Jia Tolentino has a good piece in The New Yorker. It’s about looksmaxxing, and plastic surgery, and men and women. It is perhaps not as good as it could be and much better than what others have produced on the topic. It would make a really good introduction for a book.

I was particularly impressed with this moment:

In the age of social media, women have been able to assert new norms for men, both deep and superficial: for one, men should no longer commit sexual assault in the workplace, and, for another, it would be great if men were expected to be really hot, too. Women have gained the bravado and the platforms to speak publicly about men in the way that men have traditionally often spoken about women—with contempt.

Only Nixon can go to China, as they say. I suspect “contempt” raised more eyebrows than nodded heads, and yet anyone with the right vantage point knows it’s the case. If you aren’t subject to that contempt, claims of its sudden existence might well be hard to accept. My own insight comes, I think, from being male and single: I encounter a lot of female dating app profiles. Others have no way of seeing any of it. That disjunct in experience causes an odd rupture: parallel worlds start to emerge, and it takes a Nixon/Tolentino to say the thing out loud, bringing the worlds back together. Tired of my own friends not believing me these last years, I took to screenshotting the examples from my own life; dramatically, and pathetically, sliding my phone across the table.

There was no satisfaction in that. No one receiving contempt wants to admit that it has gotten to them, especially when the contempt itself is said not to exist. And frankly it would demean you and me both to squabble over the evidence right now: no one not willing to trust Jia Tolentino on this, let alone me, will be convinced by my arguing. But now she has said it, I’ll do the same: online, especially on dating apps, women increasingly talk with hostility, cruelty, disregard about the men they view as physically beneath them. With — there is no better word for it — contempt.

Some of it really is objectionable. Height, weight, penis size, age, race — none is untouched. Much of it betrays a commitment to a profoundly retrograde politics; a revealed zealotry for gender roles. And all of it, of course, is an utter abandonment of the feminist, liberatory, body-positive politics of yesteryear.

“Many men,” says Jia, “now subjected to heterosexual contempt as a culturally significant collective force for the first time, have proved less equipped to process it within the bounds of a basic social contract. It has been overwhelming for them: the tweets, the merchandise,… and, most of all, the dating apps, which have allowed women of a certain inclination to treat men like commodities.”

Quite right—it has been overwhelming. You’d be well within your rights to fear some reactive turn coming from me. And it’d be dishonest to tell you that the derision I have felt directed towards me, and my body, in recent years hasn’t been painful, returning to me insecurities I thought I’d escaped years ago. It’d be cowardly, too, to not tell you where my mind goes when I’m told “6 foot is the minimum” for the third time in a day: that of course this contempt is accelerating male reaction; that of course it is fodder to the worst impulses of the New Misogyny; that of course this spiral of mutual contempt can only have antifeminist ends. I start sliding towards resentment.

None of that thinking is wrong on the facts, either. It just leaves behind the one point that matters, the point that is somehow both too-trite to observe and still too-necessary to say: contempt is just what women have always experienced from men. They learned it from us.

It’s not just the platforms, of course. The more bitter irony here is that the new contempt is downstream from the material successes of gender equality. With increasing economic standing, women are less reliant on men and more free to self-create the relationships they hope for themselves. They are free to hold their romantic prospects to new standards, aesthetic as well as moral. Good. That some now choose to turn the cruel logic of hierarchical beauty back onto men, rather than take such contempt to be forever beneath them, shouldn’t surprise us. It would be too much to hope that some women, when given the power to belittle, would not embrace the logic of the times.

Instead we should be grateful that despite this new trend, even now women remain far kinder to the male body than men do to theirs. And many do quietly carry the torch of the politics of yesteryear—politics which, for all their associated silliness, were our best path away from all this cruelty. Like dark age monks keeping the Enlightenment alive, it’s women, largely, who preserve that kinder mode as we return to a brutish political culture.

Those of us who object to that culture tend to see it through the lens that affects us most. Depending on your zone of interest, your own lens might be “patriarchy”, or “heteronormativity”, or “white supremacy”, or “class” or “militarism” or “capitalism”. The observation that these all tend to collide gets people talking, rightly, about “intersectionality”. But these are all just children of the one parent, really, which is the ethos of domination.

It is the ethos of our time. It has been the ruling mode for most of human culture. With effort, we can diminish its force, and replace it with higher virtues. But it does have its own gravitational field, pulling us down just as we think we’ve reached orbit. Its loudest proponents, observing the human tendency towards domination, use that as their reason to indulge. This ethos insists on hierarchy, and having insisted on it, goes searching for ways to justify it. The new female contempt is just this old logic finding a new market.