WOMEN TO MEN: STOP BEING JERKS
There is, apparently, a cultural backlash againt ‘emo’, which I had thought was a genre of music but, if you are a hip New-Yorker, is actually a personality disorder. Symptoms include crying, petulance and writing pitiful, shallow poetry about oneself (cf. LiveJournal, Conor Oberst). The New York Observer has had enough: “Stuff It, Emo Boy!”
In an article so sassy that it took three people to write it, Rachel, Sheela and Anna declare the whole “guys who are total pussies” fad to be like totally five-minutes-ago. It’s like reading gender-essentialist cultural criticism from bizarro-world where, instead of men complaining about how those bossy feminists should realize that they’ll never land a good husband if they don’t shut up and make with the dinner, women are complaining about how men should shut up about their feelings and be more stoic.
“He’ll sound sensitive. He is sensitive—but often more sensitive to his own emotions than to those of the woman sitting across from him at dinner.”
So in other words he’ll act like a woman.
One popular explanation for the phenomenon of male emotional accoutrement is that it’s an adaptation to feminism, or its “collateral damage”, as Constance Wyndham (!), a 24-year-old “art critic”, calls it. Constance continues:
“The emo archetype is actually a French man—ambiguously sexual, creative intellectual types, tortured poets, they might say, who are actually deeply misogynistic and harbor the most archaic notions of femininity or male-female interaction. They have a terrible penchant for public displays of affection, listening to Robbie Williams, but also for anal sex—which is more or less the only way men see they can dominate women fully and aggressively.”
The ambiguously-sexual, assfucking Frenchmen archetype! Biggity-burn! This reminds me of that Audrey Hepburn movie Funny Face . There’s a scene at a cafe in Paris where this French couple is having an argument and the woman is talking non-stop in this shrill nagging tone. The guy sitting across from her just hauls off and slaps her across the face. She looks shocked, then says “Je t’aime!” and then they make out. The lesson here is that even the French know that there are more ways for men to dominate women “fully and aggressively”, (which is, of course, what women want), than just buttsex. It’s just that anal penetration is the only exercise of male-on-female power acceptable in the modern urban post-feminist culture. Outstanding!
I really do sympathize with the authors. It must be emotionally draining to want so desperately to date fashionable hipsters and yet be completely turned off by their personalities. It’s an awkward situation for everyone, I’m sure.
Mad props to Dong Resin for the link.