model c
how would you act if you really loved women?
There are two Brooklynites getting divorced. Both are writers and I can only classify my relationship to them as parasocial: familiar with one’s articles and her newsletter and books published by her small independent press, the other’s novel and now his book about their firstborn son. It’s this book that makes me think about how even good men, feminist men, can fail women in their lives badly.
It’s called Raising Raffi, and it’s about their firstborn son. The author, Keith Gessen, writes in one chapter about how his wife (Emily Gould) knew so much, had downloaded an app during pregnancy to update her about the size of the growing baby: “ ‘Our baby is the size of a pea,’ she would tell me. [...] He was in good hands with Emily. The weak link was me.”
I got angry reading this line. Because it’s one thing not to know, but it’s another to know you don’t know and rest in that ignorance, rest in the inequity of it. Download the app yourself, man! I wanted to shake him by the shoulders. If you’re the weak link become less of a weak link, damn it!
I’ve been stewing for some time. (Brandi Carlile’s line from “Raise Hell” comes to mind: “I’ve been down with a broken heart / since the day I learned to speak.”) It’s not only Raffi but a raft of sociology papers and some of my other reading, for research on inequality in heterosexual intimate life and my current project on “heteropessimism” and contemporary literary fiction. Many of the novels I’m reading for that project have the same kind of protagonists in the same kinds of relationships: young, creative twentysomething who’s educated and thoughtful and oh-so-tortured about her relationship with a man. A man who is older, attractive, possibly rich, possibly into BDSM or at the very least sexual gratification through power dynamics, but not necessarily. Alyssa Songsiridej’s protagonist in Little Rabbit, seeing a choreographer who leaves bruises on her during sex: “How could I want a man to hurt me?”
A friend I saw at the gender studies department holiday party commented she’d heard an English professor at another Ivy wanted to teach Raven Leilani’s Luster to his undergrads, but the graduate student teaching assistants refused: they could not condone teaching a book in which a woman asks a man to hit her and he agrees, they said.
I was surprised to hear about this particular demurral by the graduate students. I’d assumed the grad students would have more liberal sexual mores, that they would espouse the kind of feminism that sanctifies a woman’s choices, celebrates consent as the moral magic that “turns a trespass into a dinner party…a theft into a gift” per Heidi Hurd.
I’m coming to believe that the magic of choices is perhaps overstated. I was thinking about this because of being frustrated with the question “What do you want to do?” Someone had asked this of me, in a mundane context like where to meet. I felt it would be selfish of me to answer this truthfully; my answer would be a place far away and less convenient to him, and I prioritized my own comfort less than his.
Here’s the problem with “What do you want to do?” When you hand choice to someone who’s been relentlessly socialized to read other people’s wants and needs and to think of herself an awful person if she doesn’t prioritize other people, you guarantee the advantageous outcome for yourself and put the person who’s done something sacrificial in the position of not being able to complain or ask for redress. After all, aren’t they an agentive subject, captain of their ship? I chose it. That haunting MacKinnon line in “Pleasure Under Patriarchy,” “The mind fuck of all of this makes the complicitous collapse into ‘I chose it’ feel like a strategy for sanity. It certainly makes a woman at one with the world.”
Researchers who study marital bargaining power — that is, how much power someone has to sway the decision of their partner to match their own preference (e.g., to quit their job to stay at home and take care of young children, or move to a new city so for the other partner’s career) — have found that gender is an extremely important factor. In “Markets, Marriages, and Other Mates,” England and Kilbourne find that men generally have more power than women in relationships. They link this to several factors, including women’s “subcultural value system emphasizing connection and mutual altruism” — which “is not inherently subordinating, except if one’s partner is more narrowly selfish.” England and Kilbourne suggest that women don’t bargain as hard as they can because of this.
They introduce “Model S” and “Model C” as dispositions: S for “separative” is the self-interested individual who takes advantage of power dynamics to further personal preferences, while those who are Model C — for “connective” — care about emotional connection, and weigh a “connected other’s” utility as equal to their own. (Economic models fit Model S people better; they’re those much-ballyhooed “rational actors.”) If you’re a Model C in a relationship with someone who’s Model S, tough luck. You could abandon Model C, but that would be painful; you would be selling out values you feel are important, perhaps values that give you a sense of self or make you feel like you’re fitting in, carrying on expected gender performance.
These are not perfect proxies for men and women. For one thing, few people are perfectly separative or perfectly connective. For another, I know women — though not many — who are hardcore Model S, and men — though also not many — who exhibit more Model C traits. But the framework England and Kilbourne introduce makes sense for me for thinking through the limits of a question like “What do you want to do?” for liberatory goals.
Another academic, Jaclyn Wong, wrote a paper about heterosexual couples dealing with the “two-body problem” — when one person had gotten a job that required moving, and the other person might have to sacrifice in order to move with them. This is an affliction for many kinds of jobs; it’s especially rife within academia. She writes men approached the problem in many different ways, including “deferring to one’s partner’s desires” — saying things like “It’s up to her.” What she found was not, by and large, that women acted in self-interested ways; instead, they were exhibiting Model C behavior. So the men’s deferring just “left the responsibility of coordinating two careers and maintaining the relationship to [the women],” who ended up negotiating “their careers in ways that complemented men’s careers, with some choosing long-distance relationships to ‘have it all’ [...] Men’s withdrawal from decision making inadvertently shifted the practical and emotional labor of juggling two careers and the couple’s future onto the women, thus reproducing a gendered division of labor.” Fuck!!!!
Wong: “advocating women’s freedom of choice appears egalitarian, but [...] ‘choice feminism’ reproduces a gendered division of labor by shifting the work of planning two careers and maintaining a relationship to women [...] the work of achieving desires falls to women.”
One of the loneliest parts of heterosexual relationships can be the feeling that only you, as the woman, are responsible for fixing things. In this office of two you’re the DEI manager and the janitor and you’re sending the invites for the holiday party, and why should that be the case?
Maybe you’re a feminist man. You think women are human. You think people of all gender identities should be treated equally. You retweeted #MeToo posts and you believe survivors and maybe you even tell other guys not to say dumb shit when the “locker room talk” starts. You cite women’s work. You notice when your female classmate raises her hand repeatedly and doesn’t get called on and when the professor sees you, you nod at her and say “Did you want to go first?” (Thanks, bud!) Some of your dearest friends are women, and they would trust you with their life. You celebrate their successes, buy their art, watch their presentations, applaud their concerts, read their poems.
And you ask that damned, beautiful question, “What do you want to do?”
When I was in college I thought of men’s feminism as such a bare, moth-eaten thing: as their ability to respect my right not to be harmed. The friend who paused, kissing me, “Consent?” The boy I fell asleep cuddling on my first night at school: we’d met in the dorms earlier that day, and on our way to the dining hall I asked him why he was a feminist and he said, “Because I’m not a fan of rape.” In a British accent! Irresistible.
I’d heard school would be a hunting ground. It felt that way sometimes with the notices printed out taped near our dorm entrance: a sexual assault reported one night and the next. When I passed out on a couch and no one harmed me I felt a gratitude that, in retrospect, was excessive for a right so basic.
And yet there was always the looming counterfactual. I knew men like this: the ones who wheedle their way into someone’s bed and then their body by breaking down resistance, making them so weary it’s easier to say “OK fine” and be used for five minutes than to keep protesting. The ones who don’t want to wear a condom. The ones who didn’t say anything at all.
There’s a paper about “strategic silence” and college-age men: how during sexual encounters they would simply not bring protection up and rely on the women they were having sex with to either provide condoms or be on birth control. Many of the men said they simply assumed — on the basis of little information other than assumptions about racial and socioeconomic characteristics — that the women were “safe.” All without saying anything. When I read this shit I want to punch a wall, because I knew about this before I had any words for it, there was a reason, during my dissolute pre-grad school summer, that I always had a condom in my backpack.
(How many feminist men are in the “strategic silence” camp too, feeling like they’re not hurting anybody?)
I mourn the silence: the silence about protection, the silence about planning, the silence about all these pieces on the ground that the other person then has to pick up alone. A line from Raising Raffi: “I had always assumed that I would have kids, but I had spent zero minutes thinking about them.” And later: “I hadn’t thought about actual birth, or what sort of clothes a baby wears, or about the practicalities of early infancy. [Rachel Cusk, in her memoir, writes about how] she feared its pain and its violence and what would happen on the other side. To this, truly, I had given zero thought.” My advisor’s work in her excellent book on the missing science of men’s reproductive health points out men do not receive cultural messages that put them in a state of anticipatory parenthood, in the way that anticipatory maternity (term from Miranda Waggoner’s book; mentioned in a previous post) is thrust upon women.
Look: if you are never in a state of anticipation, someone else is carrying your water.
So anticipate. And talk about your anticipation. So much of the discourse about how to be a good man, a feminist man, involves the instruction to be quiet and step out of the way. It’s warranted in some spaces, but in others you need to talk more. Once a friend I was hooking up with suggested we take a quiz together to see what things we might both want to try, be open to, or not be into. I was touched by this, though also surprised: we weren’t dating, and there was something that felt intimate about both the volubility and sober forethought of this exercise. In retrospect, it allowed me a certain burdenlessness. I didn’t have to play choreographer, because he was a planner, and I didn’t have to worry about protecting myself, at least in some basic ways, because he expressed proactive curiosity both about my boundaries and my desires. I learned I had insufficient self-knowledge about both. But I felt relatively safe, in a way that exceeded encounters I’d had that were both much more vanilla and much less carefully verbalized.
Sex is a domain of intimate life where the stakes of asymmetries in partners’ power and dispositions towards beloveds — connective or separative — feel especially high. There is so much cultural messaging about assault and trauma, the dissatisfying outcomes of hookup culture and the shortcomings of consent. Against this backdrop a message like Christine Emba’s WashPost exhortation to develop a new sexual ethic that heeds Aquinas, to “will the good of the other,” seems uncontroversial. But I would challenge the reader to extend this standard beyond the domain of the bedroom.
Imagine resisting the lure of strategic silence; imagine anticipating and planning collaboratively in all spheres of intimate life. For a man with a woman to consider, if he would like to have children with her, how they might equitably ensure a division of labor, including of the connective social and emotional work to ensure membership in a family/chosen community that would provide essential support? To ponder, if job opportunities come up, how they would undertake a decision-making process that prioritized both people’s capabilities and somehow accounted for the role of gender socialization in altruistic decision-making?
Perhaps it comes down to negative and positive liberties. What would your relationships with women look like if instead of asking how you could avoid infringing on her rights, speaking over her or getting in her way, you asked how you could help her seize the fullness of her desires, and saw them as knotted with your own? What do we want to do?
image credit: Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window, Vermeer.
This painting was recently restored such that a painting within the painting, of Cupid, is visible behind the girl’s head.
