Confessions from an unpleasant woman

When society takes away unpleasant norms, the obligation to be unpleasant is often just shuffled at individuals

A while ago someone called Joseph wrote a comment on my post Picky women are not the (sole) cause of the failures of the dating market. Joseph insisted that women on the present-day dating market are actually very picky, and that they are showing it outright. 

“Women these days seem to see themselves as a prize and often act like dating is 'for them'. They expect the guy to make the moves, make the plans, put in most if not all the effort in an attempt to 'win them over'.”

Joseph reasoned that this is a relatively recent phenomenon that has developed during the last few decades. All in all, he argued like someone who was difficult to ignore. 

So I started to investigate the issue as scientifically thoroughly as possible: By watching high school movies with my family. First I watched some high school movies from the 1990s and then a couple of brand new ones for comparison. The movies I saw supported Joseph's claim. The girls depicted in the late 1990s movies were clearly more agreeable than those in the modern movies. In the high school movies from the late 1990s, high school was a universe of its own, centered around friendship and romantic love. The girls did their best to be nice and attractive, sometimes to the degree that they became stereotypically stupid bimbo girls. 

By contrast, in the present-day high school movies (which are, by the way, not called high school movies any more, but teen movies) I watched, high school was a bleak place the protagonists aimed at going through in order to get to college. During the course of the movie, the female protagonists learned that there actually is something more to life than studying and getting to college: There can be some friendship and love in high school too.¹ 

25 years ago, being an angry, feminist young woman was actually considered abnormal. Poster for 1999 movie Ten Things I Hate about You. Wikimedia Commons.

Not pleased to meet you

Beside my very scientific comparison of movies, I have another reason to believe that young women have become more unpleasant as dating partners: Not a very long time ago, I was a young woman myself. And in that role, I learned a few important things:

1. In every situation, young women need to exhibit a certain dose of unpleasantness. 

2. The appropriate dose of unpleasantness is highly dependent on the situation. 

3. Situations where casual sex is common require the most unpleasantness. More or less, there is a sliding scale where the appropriate dose of unpleasantness is proportional to the possibility of casual sex to happen. For a young woman, some situations require a tough, unpleasant surface, while other situations allow naive openness.

For that reason, I find it entirely plausible that the dating market of today requires more unpleasantness than the dating market of a few decades ago. If the possibility of casual sex has increased, the perceived necessity for pleasantness is likely to have changed too. 

I guess that most young women don't even notice how they are fine-tuning their variable levels of unpleasantness. The only reason why I noticed that thing when I was a young woman is that I sometimes failed spectacularly in putting in the right dose of unpleasantness on the right occasion. Only that way it became evident to me that young women need to be more unpleasant in some situations compared to others. 

When I was young, I was in a slightly unusual situation compared to most young women. I spent most of my time looking unavailable to men, accompanied by husband and children or visibly pregnant. And then, occasionally, I would get out into the world all alone, looking like any woman of my age. At such occasions I had a tendency to act naively and to be over-friendly. I was so used to being protected by my matronly status, that I was unable to adapt when I temporarily went out of it. 

For example, once when I was 22 years old I left Anders and our baby son in order to travel to Berlin to find an apartment for us. I boarded a budget flight all alone. A man was sitting on one row of the airplane. He was about 35 years old, blond with an Eastern European look and a hard, serious face. He wore a t-shirt with a cross symbol on it (some Polish right wing symbol, he would explain). He made eye contact with me and signaled for me to take the seat next to his. 

I complied. Not because I liked anything about him; just because I had forgotten how to say no to people. With a baby by my side, I didn't need to say no to people. Instead, I needed people to help me lift a pram over staircases and on and off buses and trains. The year with a baby had brought me out of synch with the task of rebuffing sexual advances. I wasn't reflexively unpleasant anymore. Not even a little. So when a man made eye-contact with me, I just approached him. 

When I realized my mistake, it was difficult to get out. We tried to make conversation, but Right Wing Man From Poland apparently wasn't a man of words. He bought us ridiculously expensive icecream, without asking me if I wanted it, and I felt obliged to eat it. I was trapped like an animal and I was being fed like an animal. It certainly wasn't my life's most socially graceful moment. 

With time, and after a few more mistakes of the kind above, I learned that suddenly regaining my shape after pregnancy and leaving home without a baby left me unprotected. After every pregnancy, I had to gradually build up my levels of unpleasantness again. On the occasions that I just threw myself out into the world, I was initially too defenseless. 

Personally I don't like to be unpleasant. So with time I learned tricks to avoid that obligation. Most of all, avoiding socializing during night time was an important rule to follow. Curiously, in Western societies there is a strong, invisible norm that flirtation should be done in the evening. Like if evenings and nights are “sexy time”, as Borat says in his eponymous film. In the Muslim world (the limit line is at the Bosporus, in my experience) there is no important difference - all time is sexy time there. But in Europe, most men restrain themselves during daytime. Just avoiding social settings during evenings and nights did the trick to a remarkable degree. 

Rules no more

In the casual sex market, men have the role of beggars. A few are robbers, a few are entertainers, but most fall into the beggar category. Basically, men who try to obtain casual sex use the same tactics as beggars tend to use: They use their targets’ instincts for friendliness to catch their attention. Then, when they have got the target’s attention, they steer the topic into casual sex/money for nothing. For that reason, young women need to learn to be unfriendly to men for the same reason that people in general learn to be unfriendly to beggars. 

When group A wants something from group B that most members of group B do not want to give, someone needs to be unpleasant. Either there needs to be unpleasant rules saying that members of group A are not allowed to ask members of group B for what they want. Or the individuals of group B need to act unpleasantly themselves. 

Laws against begging are a case in point. Banning people from asking for money they might desperately need is unpleasant. It also prevents the minority that feel good from giving money to beggars from doing what they like. Laws against begging moves the obligation to be unpleasant from individuals to society as a whole. 

I think the same principle applies to the casual sex question. Either society makes unpleasant rules and norms that protect young women from requests for casual sex. One obvious price for such rules is that a minority of women who actually want casual sex will miss out on opportunities. The upside is that young women will not have to be unpleasant themselves. The rules will be unpleasant in their place.

What happens when rules for relationships are abolished one by one? What happens when everything is allowed, as long as it is consensual? Then the burden to say “I consent” or “I do not consent” lies squarely with the individual. Individual women need to radiate “I do not consent”.

In the absence of explicit rules from above, people tend to make their own rules. A man who has tried to obtain casual sex n times in a certain situation will learn what doesn't work. Rumors say that nowadays, flirting outside of dating apps or night clubs is seen as creepy. Like if in the absence of traditional rules, people make up spontaneous social rules. 

The informal no-flirting rule should allow young women to be less unpleasant in everyday life. But it does not help women who nonetheless choose to date. If they choose to date, only their own unpleasantness is there to protect them from bad deals. There is absolutely no rule that says that ordinary men should not propose shitty deals to women, like “let's meet and have sex when we both feel like it”. So it is up to women themselves to negotiate. They have to radiate that they take no shit. Otherwise they might be mistaken for some masochist who actually does.

20 years ago, when I was on the dating market myself, there were still rules of fair play. A young woman who naively dated a handsome man only to discover that he dated several other women simultaneously would be justified to blame him for being dishonest. Today, she would need to feel stupid because she didn't discuss the terms with him.

In the dating environment from 20 years ago it was also considered entirely normal for women to be naive and even a bit stupid. People knew that such an attitude could pay off. There was even a stereotype for that, called the bimbo. The bimbo only cared for her looks. And she was pleasant. That way, she hoped to be taken good care of. 

Where have all the bimbos gone now? The bimbo look has gone so mainstream that the word became obsolete. Fake nails, thick layers of make-up, hair extensions and platinum bleached hair was considered conspicuously superficial two decades ago. Now it is normal. But the credulous personality that was supposed to follow that look is completely out of fashion. Feminism did not only give ordinary women the right to stand up for themselves. It obliges them to. Because no one is doing it for them.

Being unpleasant is probably not the best strategy for a young woman to signal that she stands up for her own value. Thinking hard about what she is looking for and searching out where to find that sounds like a more sympathetic strategy. 

Needless to say, all people are not good at thinking hard. Especially not around emotionally charged issues like romantic love and sex. In a situation where people are asking for too much, unpleasantness is the instinctual reaction. And when the elaborate cultural conventions for how to build relationships have been abandoned, instinct kicks in. 

When one group wants more than another group wants to give, someone needs to be unpleasant. In civilizations, society tends to take on more and more of that role: It collects taxes so local strongmen won't have to. It removes criminals from the scene so ordinary people don't have to lynch them. And, for long times, it also upheld norms for how expensive sex should be, so ordinary women did not have to signal how awfully expensive they were. 

Those of us who ask for a more pleasant society should be careful what we wish for. Many times, we only get more unpleasant individuals instead. 

1. The following movies were included in my comparison: 1990s movies: 10 things I hate about you and American Pie. 2020s movies: Booksmart (technically from 2019) and Honor society