“Men are afraid women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid men will kill them.” – Margaret Atwood
A young woman, alias Grace, recently shared a story about her bad night with the comedian Aziz Ansari.
Why didn’t she kick him in the balls? Why didn’t she slap him? Why didn’t she… break his finger, a thing we’re supposed to do now, maybe?
Because by the time women reach sexual maturity, pretty much every woman has learned that you don’t want to make men angry. Ever.
We learn to pacify men whenever possible. We tell them that we have a boyfriend rather than saying we’re just not attracted to them. We avert all eye contact with people catcalling us from their cars so as not to encourage them. We certainly don’t yell that they’re being inappropriate back at them. We laugh at men’s jokes, even when they aren’t that funny. We sit politely while they explain things to us we already know, indeed, topics we might be experts in.
Partly, that’s because it is kind. Partly we try to let people down gently and humor others because of a feeling that, as human beings, we are all waging this battle called life together. But partly, we are very gentle with men, because, to a great many women, male anger is very frightening.
We are polite in part because we know that if we make men mad, things might get very violent, very fast.
It’s tempting to say that’s sheer paranoia, and most men are wonderful. Most men are wonderful. Except, of course, for the ones that aren’t. One in three women are victims of domestic violence, and in 55 percent of cases where women are murdered, domestic violence is involved. In 93 percent of those cases, the perpetrator is their husband or boyfriend or an intimate partner. Or, as the Huffington Post puts it “Who Is Killing American Women? Their Husbands And Boyfriends, CDC Confirms.” And before someone says “but women kill their male partners, too!”—yes, they do, two percent of the time. Ninety-eight percent of homicidal partners are male.
Some of those men doing the killing get described as being “nice guys.” It is unfortunate that men do not clearly describe themselves as having the kind of temper that might end in their attacking you before you go out with them.
Periodically, after men kill women they explain it was because the woman “made me mad.” Rest assured, if anything happens to you that you do not regard as fun, and you are a woman, you will be blamed for not, somehow, making it not happen.
So, yes, the threat of male violence is real. It’s a consequence women realize can follow men getting mad.
While hopefully we never experience the more extreme ends of the spectrum of that anger, most women have moments in their lives where they feel that if the situation had escalated farther, if they had not made it home and shut the door just when they did, if the man had one more drink, if…well.
Ask a man to tell you about his worst date and he’ll tell you a funny story about a lady who showed up dressed as a cat. Ask a woman to tell you about her worst date and she’ll tell you about a man who followed her home shouting that she was a whore.
The threat of violence is something that women consider when we walk home alone at night. It’s also something we consider when we walk home with a man on a first date.
We know that, as much as if we hesitate to go home with someone we’ll be called paranoid, if something bad does happen to us, we’ll be called reckless. Or we’ll be told something bad happened because we “made him mad.”
But still, we do go home with people. We do so because the yearning for love, or connection, or sex, outweighs those fears.
It’s an act of trust.
So, it does not seem outrageous to hope that men might respect that trust.
Now, when you go home, everyone might have different ideas about what they hope is going to happen. If both parties want to have a tremendous amount of sex, magnificent. How great for everyone. What fun. Go to it.
It’s when the parties are not in alignment in their desires that there’s an issue. For anyone who says, “why would a woman go to a man’s apartment if she didn’t want to have sex?” well, because she wants to talk more and the restaurant is closing down. Because she wants to kiss on the couch, in private, rather than on a street corner, and then go home. Because she would like to have some kind of oral sex, but no more. Because she would like to play a round of Scrabble while watching Black Mirror with someone. There are a wide variety of different pleasant outcomes a person might be looking for when they go home with someone.
It is worth it for men to figure out which one a woman might be looking for.
Because the alternative is a woman who goes home sobbing and—if this is what will cause you to actually consider a human’s feelings, fine, so be it—she may ultimately write a piece about how you did not treat her very kindly.
But, oh, god, how difficult this is for men. I see that The New York Times thinks it requires nearly clairvoyant skill.
I don’t think it does, really. I would hazard, instead, that it simply requires listening to women.
And realizing that if a woman does not seem to be having fun—if she tells you to slow down, if she moves away from you, if she suggests you should wait until next time, if she does not seem to express enthusiasm about having sex with you—that means stop. That does not mean “try harder.”
Because as a woman, once you realize that a man is ignoring your discomfort, the situation immediately becomes more fraught. What resonated most about Grace’s story with me is how hard she keeps trying to be polite.
A lot of women in similar situations try to be similarly polite.
If a man has made it clear that he sees sex, not a connection with you, a human, as a goal, then standing between him and that goal might make him mad. And if he gets mad, who knows what will happen. Will he yell at you? Maybe. Will he slap you and accuse you of being a tease? It happens, I can assure you that one happens. Will he pin you down and have sex with you anyway? Women generally have at least one friend this has happened to and thinking about how hollowed out that friend looks describing that incident is enough to make anyone think, “Oh, god, don’t let it come to that. If I’m just nice, I can diffuse the situation and it won’t ever come to that.”
Cue a man saying: that’s why all women should learn self-defense. Okay. Sure. That’s a thing we can do. When we sense a threat, any threat, we will, after two glasses of wine and clad in whatever dress we picked out for this, just immediately turn on our dates with the untested ju-jitsu skills we learned at the YMCA. Sure. That’ll go great. It definitely won’t just make him madder.
I continue to be baffled by why some people think it would be easier for all women to turn themselves into a member of Charlie’s Angels than it would be for men to listen to, and respect the words coming out of women’s mouths.
Impracticality aside, I don’t want to live in a world where women are beating up men. I just want to live in a world where everyone is being respected on a basic level and sex is fun for the people having it.
Let me pre-empt the “what about me” men. Could a woman also pester and pressure a man into sex? Yes. But in most cases, that woman isn’t going to have six inches and 50 pounds of muscle on that man.
The stakes are different.
And so we try to be polite. If a man is relentless, a woman might give in because she knows that if she does not, the alternative might be worse. If she gives in, at least she can tell herself that it was just an awkward night. That it wasn’t really that bad.
That doesn’t make it fun.
Trust me, if a woman wants to have sex with you, she’ll be enthusiastic about having sex with you.
If you are confused, you can ask how she’s feeling. For all the Men's Rights Activists who seem to feel it is a horrible move that means you will be friendzoned until the end of time and you will never be granted your own handmaid, I have never met a woman who has been totally turned off by a man saying, “how are you feeling? Is this good?” to her during a sexual encounter. Give women a chance to say no in a context where it is clear you will not be mad if they say, “I think I need to slow this down.” Or, "Whoa, let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill."
Ah, but this would require men changing, slightly. This would require them taking time to insure that a woman was not simply reluctantly consenting, but actually having a good time.
That’s fine. Sexual norms change and evolve all the time. That’s a good thing. That scene in Sixteen Candles where Anthony Michael Hall has sex in a car with a girl when she’s blackout drunk and unable to recognize him? That scene was played for laughs at the time. Now that scene makes him seem like a villain. Likewise, the scene in From Russia With Love where James Bond slaps a woman for being too emotional. That scene now makes people pause and think “Wait, I thought that guy was supposed to be a hero?”
The world, as Tony Kushner puts it, only spins forward.
I for one would like to see a world where women are treated kindly. I do not think it's an unreasonable world to hope for. It is one I am always hoping for. I read articles about how afraid men are, right now. Women who write about their experiences are referred to as “hit squads” who are “angry and temporarily powerful.” Though I think that the fear in this case is a bit misplaced. (Ansari’s career will continue uninterrupted and plenty of fans have already leapt to his defense.) If men are afraid, they are afraid. Perhaps some good will come of that. After all, fear has been a motivating factor in making women be kind to men for all of history.
Jennifer Wright is BAZAAR.com's Political Editor at Large. She is also the author of 'Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes That Fought Them' and 'It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Break-Ups In History.'
