I Lived The Feminist Dream. I Want My Money Back.

I never thought I’d be here. I hate the idea of injecting a foreign toxin into my body. I don’t even wear makeup. But here I am seriously considering getting four different cosmetic procedures, none of which I really want… but unfortunately feel like now I need. And I’m resentful about it. I was never a model, sure, but that’s never bothered me. I’m pretty enough, but have so many other things like my above average intellect, which can keep up deep conversation like no 16-step-skincare-routine Instagram scarecrow could ever. Add to that my humor that seems to make most people remember me often when I don’t remember them, my ability to listen well, cook a perfect steak, and roll a perfect spliff. I felt confident that all of this evened the playing field so I’d still have as good a shot as any in the dating market. But wow was I wrong. There’s a new price of admission, and it ain’t cheap… or completely without risk of facial paralysis apparently, as the warning agreement stated. I don’t want any of this stuff. I actually like how I look naturally, but I'm torn because I also now recognize the reality of the current dating market, and to pretend like the game doesn’t exist only does me a disservice. So in order to participate, I’m forced, like a pouting child being shoved into a raincoat, to wear the uniform, i.e., what physical attributes men find attractive, evolutionarily, at a glance: fuller lips, perfect teeth, narrow jaw, protruding cheekbones, and zero signs of wrinkles. The face I once made fun of in the Venice Erewhon parking lot, I’m now about to surgically augment onto my own in this weird sci-fi scheme we’ve fashioned for ourselves through…. I bet you can’t guess it… feminism. What a curveball, right? The marketplace is made up only of your options. It’s a comparison, like grading on a curve. Just twenty years ago, your options (the market) was limited to those in your geographic vicinity, plus the occasional setup from a relative or camp friend. Now, the options have widened considerably due to dating apps and we're competing across hundreds, even thousands of options. On top of that, Instagram has widened the option pool even further, even though none of the men around me could realistically date any of these women, they exist constantly in their field of view, and thus are part of the sample size. Now stack on top of that that we're no longer competing within our age group; it has widened to include girls 10-20 years younger than us—and this is where feminism really screwed us. We are our own worst enemy, and the architects of our own demise. We were sold the lie to go after our careers, make money, and make our mark on the world first, and then go find a partner once we've accomplished A through C. We used to have a backstop against some of this—our biological clock ticking louder around our mid-thirties—but we did an end run around that too, with egg freezing. And the worst part of it is that we, women , did this to ourselves. Not a single man told us to do any of this. In fact, historically, they’ve been pretty petulant about the whole thing, but we pushed right through that sentiment by calling them all “toxic” and threatening them with cancellation if they didn’t comply. We are our own worst enemy, and the architects of our own demise. While we were busy climbing the corporate ladder, raising unheard of amounts of money, and optimizing ourselves in every possible way, the men in our cohort weren’t just waiting around for us to feel "ready" to settle down. They were dating, and as we aged up, still too busy self-actualizing for them, they continued to date twenty-year-olds (women in their fertile prime, because that’s what men are biologically programmed to find attractive). So we freeze our eggs, maybe buying us some additional time. Ten years go by. Surely, the men left in their forties are still single because they're looking for something real, something mature; a woman of substance. Wrong. They're still dating twenty-year-olds, just now with a hair transplant and an eye-rolling age gap. And it’s not really their fault; it’s mostly biology. Men have about the same fertility as they age until well into their sixties. Up until that point, they will be pursuing women in their fertile prime, as their biological directive is telling them to procreate, and with a mate with the highest likelihood of success to carry on the gene pool. Feminism forces us to reject biology, both on the male and female side. Feminism sold us the lie that being a well-rounded, articulate, and successful woman would up the value of our stock; the investment in ourselves was worth it. In reality, it does absolutely nothing to our market value and, actually in some cases, lowers it, as many men prefer to be more successful and smarter than their partners. Women date laterally and up, men date laterally (sometimes), but mostly down. Most men couldn’t care less if you're successful or incredible intelligent, or have any amount of self-knowledge you might have gleaned on your therapy journey. Sure, those things are “nice-to-haves,” but often they don’t even come into their assessments until after you’ve already been dating for a while. They have the ability to make a marginal difference, at best. Men, even when they say they want someone they can ‘talk to on their level,’ are kind of kidding themselves—they look mostly for biological markers of fertility and high estrogen (waist-to-hip ratio, full lips, heart-shaped face), and as far as talking goes… they just want someone to listen. It’s women who want someone to talk to on their level—another gross mis-assessment of feminism. Just to get to the point where other non-physical attributes come into consideration, you have to pass the first gate, which I’ll call the ‘visual fertility assessment.’ Imagine trying to compete in a track and field meet, but there’s a 6-foot height requirement just to sign up. Sure, once you’re in, you could collect points from various different events and still beat someone who won in other categories, but if you can’t meet the initial height requirement, you aren’t even on the field. Now, onto the topic of the ‘sexual revolution.’ "Explore your sexuality" they said, "women can also have satisfying sex lives." A noble quest for sure. This point is the hardest for me to make, because I do believe that a lot of good came out of this. I do think women were, for many years (and often still are), short-changed in the bedroom, mostly because they don’t take the time to learn what they like, or feel confident enough to ask for it, and much of that knowledge comes unfortunately only from experimentation. But, feminism’s call to “f*ck like men” was the wrong message. Its call for sexual freedom wasn’t ill-intentioned so much as ignorant of biology. "Do away with the archaic notions of the religious past, rooted in oppression, that chastity is a virtue. You do you girl, a real man won’t care.” Wrong again. Whether men know it or not, they are pre-disposed to prefer women with fewer partners. Back in cavemen times, a man’s biggest threat to the tribe survival was spending limited resources (food, energy, protection) on someone else’s child. So, to ensure likelihood of paternity, they’d mate with a woman with the fewest partners. Thousands of years of this hardwired it in, and no amount of pussy-hat marches is gonna re-wire those circuit boards. Most men I know aren’t even aware that they're screening for it. You can re-write culture in an instant, but biology takes millennia. I don't regret my sexual past. I'm lovingly referred to by my friends as “an orgasm waiting to happen.” Some of that is maybe due to a hormonal imbalance, but it mostly comes from knowing my body very well, and I probably have the sexual revolution to thank for that. But, I am also aware of how it negatively impacts me in the dating market. It happens constantly, and every time it makes me a little more sad, even hopeless, because I cannot change my past. It is what it is. The dating market doesn’t care that you’re brilliant—it only cares that you look fertile. Feminism told women to delay marriage and the dating market moved on without us. Feminism told women to delay marriage and the dating market moved on without us. Yes, there are some other factors at play: the advent of all-access porn taking a large amount of men out of the dating pool entirely. The creation of dating apps that widened the market of available women and shrunk the number of men feeling any need for commitment. The popularization of polyamory, which we’ve seen from the data has really just shaken out to be old fashioned polygamy: multiple women sharing 1 man. All of these factors though, compound toward the same conclusion: there are exponentially less available men. But those are things we didn’t really have control of. Listening to the well-intentioned but biologically illiterate third-wave feminists, however, was our choice. We chugged that Kool-Aid and took photos of our sloppy red stained faces with catchy hashtags like #thefutureisfemale. Is it really, though? It's not if we missed out on reproducing. Did anyone ever think of that? Perhaps, if we had started dating seriously for marriage in our early twenties, we might have had a fighting chance to adapt to the changing landscape, or at least pass that first gate without the help of a board certified plastic surgeon. Now, me and all my girlfriends in their thirties, each one more amazing and accomplished than the next, are all playing this game of high stakes musical chairs when we could have been lampin’ in the suburbs, getting the 7-year itch by now. So here we are, trying to trick the subconscious brain of men into registering us as a viable breeding option, or at least as viable as our twenty-year-old counterparts are—just to participate in a fundamental part of life. I can’t change my sexual history, or get back any of the years I lost girl-bossing away, so the only lever I have left is to increase my waist-to-hip ratio, and create a halloween mask out of my face. Now don’t get me wrong, feminism got a lot right: the right to vote, equal pay, the ability to have a job, and not be sexually harassed at that job, bodily autonomy, ability to open a bank account or just exist without a husband. It gave us options. But maybe, just maybe, it got this one thing wrong. I did everything feminism told me to do: I worked my ass off, made a shitload of money, and became one of the youngest female directors in my field. I broke the “glass ceiling.” But now I’m just lying here, covered in broken glass. Originally published on Substack.