Women Are Not The Prize, But Neither Are Men. This Is A Relationship, Not A Carnival.

Before you get in a ‘debate me bro’ match with some random guy on the internet, I need you to stop, drop, and roll. You do not need to prove that women are the prize in a relationship. It’s okay to accept his premise. Sure, women are not the prize. Neither are men. This is not a carnival, so why do you need to be some man’s cheap teddy bear—the consolation prize awarded to a child who hits a mediocre score in skee ball? A goldfish, plopped in a plastic bag with some water, shaken up by the seven-year-old hands grasping it, only to last 24 hours? Male birds may perform elaborate dances, their plumage adorned with striking colors, and emit vocalizations from their beaks, all designed to woo a female partner, a great effort in pursuit of reproduction. But we are not birds. If you’ve ever tried getting a guy on Tinder to give you the bare minimum, you’ve probably discovered that by now. Damaged Advice From Damaged People Where does this notion of “being the prize” in a relationship come from? Most often, from people transparently seething over bad experiences with the opposite sex or whose put-upon faux confidence is seeping out of their pores. Certain corners of the internet are treasure troves for this kind of person and content, the yin and yang of relational cringe known as the manosphere and femosphere, respectively. There is a bustling cottage industry of terrible relationship advice, intense insecurity parading as hyperconfidence, and content that demonizes the opposite sex to artificially inflate an insecure or broken person’s ego. Red pill and manosphere influencers are on a mission to humble women, largely because they’ve been convinced by their social media feeds that every woman enjoys the luxury of a lavish lifestyle paid for by billionaires who invite them on their private yachts and give them a free ride into high society. There is a bustling cottage industry of terrible relationship advice, intense insecurity parading as hyperconfidence, and content that demonizes the opposite sex to artificially inflate an insecure or broken person’s ego. This is, of course, far removed from the reality of the average woman. Nevertheless, even men who grant that most women don’t get free rides through life via ultra-wealthy men tend to believe that women have overinflated egos due to constant social media attention and the gender skewed ratio on dating apps, which favor women. This insecurity that women have undue confidence is a particular pain point for Dark Triad types with malevolent personality traits like narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, as having any semblance of self-worth makes you more difficult to manipulate. The Eyerolling Prize Discourse From Socially Maladjusted Gurus The propagators of this slop content have different justifications, but the discourse always devolves into some version of “I know you are, but what am I?” Women having a lot of options, being picky, and being the gatekeepers of sex, having “feminine energy” can be used to explain why she both is and isn’t the prize . Likewise, with men being historical protectors and providers, the one who has to win over the woman by standing out, and supposedly only ages like a fine wine. Even credentialed (though curiously manosphere signaling) clinical psychologists like Dr. Orion Taraban make crude analogies between women’s value and diamonds. He deconstructs the supposedly commonplace assumption that women are the prize by likening them to the economic value of a diamond in the sexual marketplace. Sure, he grants, a “top-shelf woman,” a woman who is beautiful, rare, and expensive, can be understood as the prize compared to the average man, who isn’t much to look at. The problem, he argues, is this would be a false comparison. “Apples to oranges,” he says, because a top-shelf woman must surely be compared not to the average Joe, but to a top-shelf man. When comparing top-shelf men and women, he argues, it becomes apparent that men are the true prize. “If a woman is a diamond, then a man is a diamond mine,” he says, smirking behind the truth bomb, evidently pleased with himself. The propagators of this slop content have different justifications, but the discourse always devolves into some version of “I know you are, but what am I?” This is supported by his pseudointellectual economic theory in which things are conveniently symbolic of exactly what he would like them to be. "Irrespective of how costly that diamond is, the man who buys it already commands more value than the value he procures, which of course, is what allowed him to buy the diamond in the first place.” Men, he claims, are diamond mines, because they are the “disproportionate producers of value.” Through labor, effort, and ingenuity, they "produce far more than their fair share of global GDP," as evidenced by the top twenty richest men having accumulated their wealth by "building something," whereas their female counterparts accumulated it through divorce or inheritance. He further simplifies his assessment of men and women in his disturbingly inhuman marketplace, placing men as producers and women as consumers, despite the fact that women literally produce human life. And yes, he does assign women a numeric value according to the Perceived Sexual Market Value scale, in which he determines that the ideal woman is a “ useful eight .” To drive the point home, he arrives at the elephant in the room: a diamond’s luster fades, whereas a mine is likely to produce more value over time, referring to women as commodities that depreciate over time (a liability), and men as commodities which generate value over time (an asset). “No one is going to prefer a single diamond, no matter how lovely, to a diamond mine.” Incredibly elucidating and objective stuff, definitely not the musings of a poorly concealed revenge fantasy which completely erases women’s contributions to society. What are we even doing here, guys? Dr. Taraban’s perspective here isn’t a lone one. It’s become common for men ranting on podcasts, usually accompanied by scantily clad women with OnlyFans accounts and, it must be said, a suspected humiliation kink, to argue about locks and keys, high and low value, precious jewels and mines, job interviewers and applicants. They often devolve into highly abstracted, regressive theories based on evolutionary psychology with little curiosity about whether those theories are even accurate and a tendency to collapse the is-ought distinction. If you think I’m exaggerating, here’s one such example on a podcast called Toxic Love Network, a poor imitation of the Fresh & Fit model. The host challenges a woman’s claim that the woman is the prize, supporting her claim with the observation that men need sex. The host responds, “The man don’t need sex, but the woman needs protection. The man wants sex to procreate, but the woman needs protection and providing. If not, the woman will be eaten by the lions, tigers, and bears, and she wouldn’t have the ability to go out there and gather enough calories for her to survive as the man can.” A total and complete shutdown on all podcasts until we can figure out what is going on. Lost on them is the irony that, sitting in an air-conditioned room with microphones positioned just so at their fake influencer jobs, they revert to such animalistic representations of male and female roles based on hunter-gatherer times. Adding another layer of amusement to this clown show was the fact I had just watched the polar inversion of this rationale from a woman's perspective, minutes earlier. The Feminine Fairy argues that it’s this very fact—that men are valued for protection and provision—that proves women are the prize. “As women, we can make our own money, we can provide our own sense of safety and security in our homes with Ring cameras, weapons, whatever it may be,” she says. What women provide to men, by contrast, is something internal: feminine energy. By “pouring our energy into them,” women supposedly offer something that cannot be purchased or replicated at will, not for fear of trying (via sex workers, nightclubs, and entertainment). Nothing is said of women’s desire for masculine energy. After all, some of the most popular songs of the modern era contain lyrics like, “I don’t cook, I don’t clean, but let me tell you how I got this ring,” suggesting that traditional gender roles are evolving for both sexes. Women may have means of protecting and providing for themselves, but men have means of cooking and cleaning for themselves, too. It’s almost as if, once we are no longer reliant on the opposite sex for survival, we become free to prioritize other desirable qualities. Uno Reverse Card Just as concerning, however, is the female countermovement to the manosphere, which has been referred to as “the femosphere,” not to be conflated with right-wing trad types, though they are often used interchangeably to refer to different reactionary subsets of women. I’m referring to the acolytes of SheraSeven, The Wizard Liz, the Female Dating Strategy, and the pink pill to the manosphere’s red pill. Back in 2023 , Dazed referred to this ecosystem of harsh reality self-help gurus as “Andrew Tate for girls,” while The Guardian referred to the femosphere in 2024 as “the dark, toxic corner of the internet… for women.” These women encourage other women to embrace gender essentialist roles, but in a subversive reclaiming of female power that is achieved through “dark feminine psychology.” This usually involves weaponizing femininity against men and holding them to rigid standards of masculinity which feel less like a personal preference and more like a form of gendered score settling. The Female Dating Strategy , which began as a subreddit in 2019, is a “collective of women committed to developing, creating, and implementing strategies to take control of our lives and narratives and live a life of true empowerment." They define their methodology as "simple, maximum female benefit" and say they center their methods in brutal realism about men and our current cultural climate, not aspirational (but often impractical) ideology. It consists of six core principles: be a high-value woman; let men chase you; most men are not of value to you; ruthlessly evaluate men; make him invest before sex; and generous men are non-negotiable. One such content creator from this ecosystem, Kanika Batra, in her video Dating Advice From a Sociopath , advises women to take on the “positive characteristics of ASPD or sociopathy and psychopathy without the negative aspects.” Call me skeptical, but I think we’re about to see a bunch of negative aspects smuggled in a trench coat. Sure enough, Batra advises women to take back their power by dangling the carrot of sexual availability and using Pavlovian conditioning to control his behavior. "Your mission is to be morphine, addictive and hard to live without," she says, suggesting you regularly mention your other suitors. “If you want to use actual sociopathic manipulation, it's time to find out his insecurities and keep them nearby for when you want to exert control,” she barks with a straight face. The way to do this, she advises, is to love bomb him and share your own fake insecurities to lull him into a false sense of security and vulnerability. She suggests women keep men on the hook by teasing and withholding affection, vanishing for “as long as you need to fire up his anxiety.” Women must see multiple men at any given time, she says, so they don’t make the mistake of “humanizing them and getting attached.” For this, she says, false promises will come in handy. This behavior is justified by reminding women that “men do this to us all the time” before encouraging her followers to “dull their sensitivity to guilt and remorse over time.” It’s probably not great that we’ve reached the point where overt abuse tactics are being sold as seduction courses. They reduce relationships to power struggles, transactions, and mind games, and operate under an implicitly fatalist worldview. Leticia Padua, better known online as SheraSeven, has a signature jingle, “ sprinkle sprinkle .” The exact meaning is somewhat open to interpretation, but it generally serves as a reminder to women to embrace their natural hypergamous nature by being strategic and dating up. Her general advice is for women to extract value (mostly financially) from a relationship or walk away, and to remember the woman is the prize —someone to be chased, spoiled, and kept happy because the man should be significantly more invested in you (about ten times, she suggests) than you are in him. Lize Dzjabrailova, also known on her socials as “The Wizard Liz,” is another creator who popularized a tough-love approach to self-help, confidence, and relationship mastery by teaching women to LARP as goddesses, demand princess treatment, and bring their dream life into reality through manifestation. Her delivery is confrontational, self-assured, and filled with a false sense of experience and wisdom that she clearly had not actually accumulated when she first started her channel at 22. Nevertheless, people were drawn to her delivery, presentation, and her zero-filter attitude, making her one of the most popular female self-improvement channels in the 2020s. However, her reputation was threatened amid a cheating scandal last year when it was revealed her fiancé had cheated on her while she was four months pregnant. The internet blew up with video essays and think pieces trying to deduce exactly how this could happen to her, of all people. It was revealed that the two had a rushed engagement just two months after dating, and many argued that she ignored red flags like alleged stalking and love bombing. TheWizardLiz faced a crisis. She would have to choose between her public reputation as a queen who doesn’t tolerate men’s nonsense and the father of her child. She chose her brand, and their public split has been incredibly messy socially and legally ever since. It brings up some big questions, though. Why are we taking relationship advice from people who can’t spot obvious red flags because they have left everything up to “manifestation” and who use these experiences not as a learning experience but to double down on why you need to use men before they use you? The people who advertise their seeking out of overtly transactional relationships are shocked to find out they’re not the only ones playing a game. You know the saying: play stupid games, win stupid prizes. A 2024 paper published in the journal Feminist Media Studies rightfully points out that the femosphere presents itself as an antidote to the manosphere, but they do so by consuming the same poison. They reduce relationships to power struggles, transactions, and mind games, and operate under an implicitly fatalist worldview. These communities are depressing because they offer no hope for anything to be different. Instead, you’re told to swallow “brutal truths” or remain a useful idiot. This is just the way things are. It’s how it always has been and how it always will be. We are natural enemies feigning courtship, attempting to gain leverage through Nietzschean morality. I mean, as Laura Dern once said, “Not in my world. Not in the world I’m living in.” Prize of What? What Did You Win? On one of these fruitless debate videos, a user’s comment stole the words right out of my mouth. “Prize of what? What did you win?” A seven-word comment more insightful than all of the countless hours of gender war slop on the internet combined. Let’s take this comment seriously enough to give it some thought. Beyond crowning a “winner” in the perennial debate, what does being the prize really mean, and is it even so desirable an outcome? I have my suspicions it isn’t, and not just because the men and women who perpetuate these talking points seem extremely insecure and unfulfilled. Not only is reducing people's "value" to a numeric scale or to allusions to commodities incredibly crass, but the debate itself reeks of a casual evil. We can try to deduce the motivations of these slop peddlers. The men, I assume, are trying to make up for lost time, or cash in on a revenge fantasy involving the girl who never paid attention to them in high school, who has now been "humbled" by her own gendered life circumstances. Some even say the quiet part out loud . The women, boasting about competing in male-dominated fields (those fields being Machiavellianism), are desperate to make men pay for the sins of misogyny or of the perceived circumstances stacked against them, in a bizarre role-reversal LARP that is as forced as their relationships. Clinical psychologist and content creator Dr. Ana Yudin made a video deconstructing Dr. Taraban’s arguments, rightfully pointing out his misogynistic biases, but more importantly, offered some much-needed sanity in the arena of prize discourse. "No one is the prize in a relationship. A relationship consists of two human beings who should both feel valued and value the other person. If only one person feels like the prize and they do not prize their partner, that's an uneven dynamic that's not likely to last long or to be very happy,” she said. She also referenced a long-term 2025 German study that found that scorekeeping, in other words, viewing relationships transactionally, was corrosive to relationship satisfaction. Keeping score, as in expecting things in return for what you do in a relationship and being overly attuned to perceived imbalances, is predictive of relationship dissatisfaction, and not the other way around. It was scorekeeping itself that led to the dissatisfaction. The study found that happy couples stop keeping score, whereas those who continue to do so become less satisfied. The reverse relationship (dissatisfaction leading to scorekeeping) was not found, and the reduction in relationship quality was not alleviated by both partners having equally transactional attitudes. The study that found that scorekeeping, in other words, viewing relationships transactionally, was corrosive to relationship satisfaction. If you’re wondering what The Wizard Liz is up to these days, well, between fighting for custody of her child with an ex she claims is toxic, she’s coping by livestreaming , or should I say ragestreaming, with her sister Sabina on Instagram. On these streams, they run through all the misogynistic talking points of the manosphere with the genders reversed. It’s all very original and compelling to claim men are property, belong in the kitchen, that they need to cover up, even joking about beating men and acting relieved that the father is trying to take her child from her, as if she has better things to do than look after a one-year-old. It’s genuinely upsetting to watch someone become so consumed by anger, resentment, and betrayal that the only coping mechanism they can resort to is bitter rage. It’s apparent Liz does not actually believe any of these cold misandrist clapbacks. Feigned callousness is the only weapon she has at her disposal, because she has treated relationships as a battlefield and cannot stand to lose. The Wizard Liz’s philosophy was supposed to insulate her from heartbreak, from being "used and abused” like these “other women,” but in the end, it didn’t make a difference. Fyodor Dostoevsky once said, “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” When you lead with your heart, with authenticity, at the same time as you refuse to compromise on your boundaries, values, and self-worth, you can deal with things not working out, getting your heart broken, even being unfairly betrayed, because you know you have not betrayed yourself in pursuit of those things. The Soft Horror of Being Prized Being a “prize” might sound flattering, but that flattery quickly gives way to disillusionment, once you realize what it truly means: an idealized fantasy that collapses when you’re recognized as a full person, or precludes your personhood from ever being realized. This cautionary tale has been played out in cinema so many times it's remarkable it bears repeating. Gone Girl teaches us that keeping up false appearances is a toxic recipe for resentment and self-erasure. In fact, we see that feeling like they’re giving more to the relationship than their partner does leads them to feel contempt for their partner. Amy resents the false version of her that Nick fell for, the “cool girl,” because she can’t actually be her in perpetuity. She is a fantasy. Nick resents her for not actually being the woman he fell in love with. Amy justifies her murderous rage by insisting Nick is as much of a murderer as she is. “Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That's murder. Let the punishment fit the crime.” Likewise, Curry Barker’s recent horror sensation, Obsession , revolves around a cowardly man too scared to tell his friend Nikki he has a crush on her. He resorts to frustratedly making a wish on a One Wish Willow that she would love him more than anyone in the world. The film takes on a “be careful what you wish for” message, not least because the film’s internal logic suggests it’s entirely possible for a wish to pay off without consequence, so long as the wish itself is not problematic. Barker himself has said the problem isn’t that the One Wish Willow is cursed; it’s that Bear’s wish is cursed . The plausible deniability of Bear’s wish, the innocent naivety of it all, quickly wears off as the film progresses and he is confronted by the reality his wish has created. He has stripped the woman he supposedly loves of her bodily and psychological autonomy, supplanting all of her hopes, desires, and life trajectory with complete devotion to him. By wishing for Nikki to do something that is neither organic nor of her own free will, he has erased the version of her he loves. She has been replaced by something that feels demonic. The consequences of this wish result in deception, sexual assault, public humiliation, self-harm, murder, and all sorts of grotesqueries that feel inhuman. Kimbaland has an excellent video analysis of the film. In “Why Every Character in Obsession Failed Nikki,” she observes how the very qualities Bear admires in her—the fact she is warm and generous—are stripped away by the wish because she no longer has her own inner life, desires, or priorities. “Everything has been consumed by Bear.” Despite his initial enjoyment of her complete devotion, the relationship montage reveals a pretty quickly induced exhaustion by the singular attention. “What we see is Bear getting what he thinks he wanted; his fantasy, ideal woman completely obsessed with him. Yet, he loses all that he would have or should have actually wanted, which is a deeper understanding of who Nikki truly is. Her full person, not just the parts of her that Bear finds initially appealing.” The film takes this corrupted wish to its logical, grotesque conclusion, and the message feels on par with what it really means to be a “prize” in a relationship: “The love he hoped for has curdled into something demonic because love without freedom, individuality, or mutual humanity doesn't become romance, it becomes desecration.” A relationship is built on mutual give-and-take, not a one-sided contest where the winner takes it all. No one can ever really be the “prize” in a healthy relationship, because a relationship is not a carnival, a sweepstakes, or a country fair. A relationship is built on mutual give-and-take, not a one-sided contest where the winner takes it all. This give-and-take does not need to be 50-50 100% of the time, and a real relationship isn't. Sometimes you are giving 40 while the other is giving 60, and vice versa. When people passionately argue back and forth over who is the prize, I think what they're really responding to is a gender war which spends so much time devaluing the other, leaving people desperate to proclaim they have more value. But do we really need to have more value, or do we just need to be valued, period? We shouldn't confuse being prized with being valued. To be a prize is to be idealized as a fantasy and not recognized as a multifaceted human woman, complete with flaws and disappointments, embarrassing moments, and times we come up short. It's exactly the sort of dynamic that erases a woman's personhood just like Bear did in Obsession.