A few weeks back, I had a friend over and was complaining about the dishes piling up in my sink. At the time, I was living with 4 boys and another girl, and I generally took care of most/all of the housework. As I grumbled, I made a passing joke to my friend, saying that having male roommates was like “microdosing motherhood”.
“That’s really good,” he’d said, “You should write something about that.”
I’d brushed it off at the time, but since then my wheels have been turning in the background, noticing all the little ways in which my relationships to the men in my life often appear somewhat parental, whereas the standards I hold other women to can be much harsher. When my male roommates left dishes in the sink, I’d think ‘Of course they’re messy, they’re boys.” But when my female roommate did the same thing? Or worse, when she’d wash her own dishes, but neglect to wash all the others that the boys had left? I’d seethe at her lack of consideration, her slovenliness, her failure to live up to my internalized standards of womanhood.
You don’t have to tell me that I’m grappling with internalized misogyny! I know it! And as I’ve started to unravel this hefty thread of backwards thinking, only more double standards have been revealed. Let’s dive in.
On the first note, let’s discuss how I view my role as a woman. You may be familiar with the impossible standard of the “cool girl”, described best in Gillian Flynn’s incredible thriller, Gone Girl:
“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”
Yes, yes, I am guilty of the aspiration to be a hollow caricature of a woman — to exist in a place beyond want and complaint, to be, above all, very, very easy to love, and very, very cool. It’s not without embarrassment that I admit this to you. Living with a bunch of boys, I was very happy to be ‘one of them.’ I gamed with them, watched the shows that they liked, cleaned up their messes, baked communal goods weekly, sometimes daily. I laughed when they burped, I drank (when I drank) beer after beer, and then I made sure all the cans got recycled. On top of all this, I still had to be hot, btw. Cool Girl is just like a boy, but she’s hot, and she cleans. She puts you to bed when you’re too drunk. She listens to you talk about women like they’re meat and she never dares to make more than a imperceptible grimace. Cool Girl is no comment. Cool Girl is all giggles!
Since I’ve stopped drinking, I’ve gotten a bit better about speaking my mind, but there’s still lots of leftover Cool Girl shit. Cool Jomé is a therapist. Cool Jomé is a chef. Cool Jomé is a maid. Cool Jomé treats boys with kid gloves because she genuinely views them as fragile, or perhaps — slightly more genuinely — because she thinks this will make them love her. Perhaps it’s a mixture of both.
Beyond cooking and cleaning, I think of the standards of emotional intelligence that I hold the men in my life to (they’re subterranean, fyi.) I allow the men and boys in my life to behave in ways that I’d never allow a woman friend to engage me with, not because I hate women, but because I expect more from them, because I’ve deluded myself into thinking that men are incapable of behaving to the same standard. We know the old adage, that girls mature more quickly than boys, but is there any truth to that? Is it true that boys mature at a slower rate, or do we place far more expectations on girls to be mature in a way that we do not with boys? Do we teach young girls that it is their job to fill in boy’s emotional MadLibs, to read between the lines, to accept less effort, less kindness, and less consideration than what we offer in return, simply because we’re dealing with our opposite sexed counterparts?
I recently blocked the friend whom I was with when I thought of this title. We’d had a somewhat awkward hookup which he proceeded to handle incredibly poorly, and I found myself, as I often do with the men in my life, doing absolutely all the work to rectify the situation, while he did…..nothing? As I found myself filling in the blanks for his behaviors, writing a narrative of his complicated emotions and unwillingness to confront them, I had a brief moment of clarity in which I recognized that I was incredibly tired. I was tired of creating excuses, filling in the blanks, cutting boys slack as they refused to be held (and I refused to hold them) accountable for their own behavior. It would be exhausting to carry the bulk of the responsibility for not only my own, but also the other’s emotional state in any given relationship, but it’s clear that the relationships in which this pattern emerges are most always co-ed.
I thought of the women in my life, and the usual ease with which we resolve our interpersonal disputes because we are mutually motivated and capable of speaking honestly and directly. I thought of how infrequently those disputes even occur in comparison to their frequency in my relationships to men, and recognized that as being directly attributed to women’s capacity to be honest and vulnerable. I wondered, are the men in my life truly incapable of performing that same honesty, or am I simply allowing them to avoid it out of some internalized desire to walk them through every little thing, even as I ask them to perform the most basic forms of emotional courtesy? I realized that it is far more likely that the reason that men in my life do not carry their weight is because no one has ever made them. Being shepherded from their mothers’ homes into some girlfriends’ arms, many of the boys that I know have simply bounced from one female caretaker to another, forever having their behavior excused or downplayed, when really it just fucking sucks.
I am in no way trying to place all the blame for this dynamic onto the boys and men in the world, nor in my life. I know that it is my responsibility to set the precedent for how I will allow myself to be treated, and I also know that it is silly to expect boys to take it upon themselves to learn things that no one in their lives expects them to know. The fear that I had, when realizing the ways in which I excuse the men in my life, was that one day I may have a son, and I might raise him with these same kid gloves, and some years down the line, someone else’s daughter might be writing a very similar article to the one I am now, simply because I did not raise a whole person, I raised an emotionally stunted, messy testosterone machine. Will I have raised him this way because I wanted that for him? No, I will have raised him that way because I’ll have loved him, and somewhere down the line, I learned that to love a boy is to expect little from him, and then to make excuses for him when he fails to achieve even that.
Even writing this piece feels harsh. If there’s one thing I’m avoidant of, it’s hurting men’s feelings. I don’t want to appear as though I hate men, because I don’t, and I don’t like how frequently that sentiment is expressed. In truth, I love men, and I love the boys in my life, yet I worry that I haven’t been loving them properly. When you love someone, you don’t lie to them. However, by shrinking my needs, by pretending that I don’t have needs in the first place, that’s exactly what I’m doing — lying. By refusing to set standards of care that can offer me a real experience of intimacy and happiness within a connection, I am denying the boys in my life the opportunity to meet those standards, I am believing the lie that tells me that they are too young and too immature to be trusted with simple adult tasks or the truth of my feelings. That’s not love, baby. That’s motherhood.
Now, I don’t expect that I’ll root out all of my childcare adjacent behaviors overnight. These habits have been years in the making, and will likely take leagues of time to fully unravel. But by recognizing the imbalanced standards that I carry within, I am slowly becoming a person who may hold equalized standards of care for anyone who enters my life. And then, when the time comes, I hope to raise boys (if I have boys) who have the tools to be as capable of holding as they are of being held, as prone to being understanding as they are of expressing themselves to be understood, and as eager to love as they long to be loved. These are the standards I strive to achieve within myself, so why would I expect any less from them?
Until the true motherhood, however, I think I’ll be taking break from its microdosing. I hope to hold many forms of relationships with the men who enter my life moving forward — friends, collaborators, lovers, coworkers, etc, etc…But mother? That’ll be reserved for a select few, and they’re not on this Earth yet :-)
Lots of love,
jomé
PS: Long time no write! I hope you’re doing well <3 Thanks for sticking around :) I wish I could say that my posts will be less sporadic from here on out, but I don’t like making promises I’m not sure I’ll keep. Still, regardless of how long I’m away, I hope you know that this space is on my mind frequently, and I’ll always come back to it when I have something to say. Much, much love to you, and thank you for being a reader of this little tender! ♡
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾!!!