male yearning is the bare minimum btw

on the implications of worship and what bothers me about the “pathetic man”

it seems that everyone and their mothers are drenching their panties over the “male yearner” and, whether he manifests himself as a twink tennis player or a suitor with a smizing problem, he always

1. loves his muse, ardently

2. ends up on his knees

3. becomes the subject of tiktok velocity edits for no less than 14 days post content-release

according to the hot girls of the summer,

social media brought feminist discourse to the digital forefront and what once was relegated to archival media is now viral. whether lamenting about the “ick,” praising/condemning bimbo-ism, ridiculing trad-wifery, or choosing a bear over a random man in the woods, femmes across the world add to evolving commentary through their tiktok and twitter beefs. through these discussions, we tow the line with incels, apologists, and leftist men alike. it’s beautiful.

however, when it comes to the “pathetic man,” i’ve yet to see analysis on the subject other than explaining why they make us so horny. i feel no one contests the male yearning phenomena because to do so would be to relegate oneself to the same category of people who enjoy watching old people cry; no one wants to be a romance-genre scrooge. also, as opposed to being foot fetishized (i’m looking at you tarantino), i suppose it’s refreshing to be adored in film.

but, i can’t help it. between the lines of sans-serif that declare:

there is something insidious. for this reason, i will take one for the team by martyring myself to hater-dom— to become the scrooge i was always meant to be.

a few years ago, i found myself sitting on the bed of a man’s silverlake apartment. we’ll call him “jacob”. jacob was not the first older man i’ve ever dated, but he was my first experience with what many might call a “man written by a woman.” jacob was sweet, relatively handsome, and his curls reached to the sky. his eyes were deep brown, and he never quite grew out of the lisp he developed from childhood braces. he wasn’t like the other vinyl-collecting transplant boys with the baggy jeans, although he did collect vinyl.

jacob used to work in palo alto, clean-cut and college educated. he knew how to code. he ate food from pr boxes. everything in his house held a faint scent of dog-food. he decorated the room with various plaques and a keyboard he never touched. he was also much more well off than me. it felt cool to be so grown-up at just 21– to be dating an older man who had the money to fly me to a big city.

throughout the trip, i found myself succumbing to consistent and thorough anxiety attacks (perhaps because i went to visit a stranger 3000 miles away from my mom). on one particular night, my meltdown was particularly bad. jacob’s paradoxical dog— a large pitbull with the yap of a crusty maltese— underscored my hyperventilating. the walls turned a putrid, yellow mush, suffocating me as they collapsed. jacob leaned over to touch my thigh.

“i'm in love with you”

pause.

although my thoughts on 2.28.22 seemed fond of the experience, i can now see the glaring overcompensation behind my “it doesn’t feel bad at all”. i felt irked that, underneath his well-intentioned sincerity, jacob felt that his declaration of love would be a grand gesture that could could save me from myself. why wasn’t his first line of action helping me with a medical emergency? why did he take this moment as a sign to initiate what would be our future “i love you” story— the one we would tell our non-existent babies and annoying in-law-cousin-whatever’s?

his “choosing me,” provided no antidote to a mental health issue existing outside of our dynamic, but i sensed that he felt charitable in his affections. when i left LA, jacob asked me to slow things down, his valiant act completed.

jacob was a pathetic man, alright. he sent me voice notes, peed while sitting, and serenaded me over voice memo. he yearned for me in the truest sense of the word and yet, there was still something awry. he found desire in his proximity to my smallness and, when that smallness was no longer available, he retreated. my “male yearner” let me down.

although i support male yearning’s right to exist and women’s right to want this yearning, we are romanticizing their desire into an uncanny valley. we need to be cognizant of the implications of romanticizing this desire. the “pathetic man,” much like any archetype, renders itself a one-dimensional fantasy, and these homogenized perceptions have the capacity to create harm.

now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: colin bridgerton.

this season of bridgerton follows the love story of lady whistedown herself– penelope featherington. penelope, in hopes to become independent, must marry. she calls on her dear friend, colin bridgerton, to aid her in developing a sort of regency-era rizz. the arc is a traditional and predictable friends to lovers— fun, sexy, and dramatic.

although i will be releasing this essay before i watch the second half of the season, the first half is rife with scenes where penelope needs saving– from her lack of social graces to being bullied by her peers— and colin is always there to catch her when she falls. the pair share a kiss through the third episode, launching him into a frenzy. he drinks to exhaustion, he dreams of her, and worst of all: he finds himself unable to have sex with two skinny prostitutes, opting to watch instead.

at the climax of the first four episodes, colin fingers penelope in the back of a carriage. he follows in the footsteps of previous bridgerton men who have a passion for professing their love through tension-filled monologues and making their girlfriends cum. he proposes. the screen cuts to black. the crowd goes wild.

i’m sure you might be able to sense my sarcasm and hesitancy. don’t get me wrong, poetic affections and desire throughout the 1800s aren’t completely manufactured by modern media. in the 1819 selected letters of john keats, he writes of his lover, fanny:

“my love has made me selfish. i cannot exist without you — i am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again — my life seems to stop there — i see no further. you have absorb’d me”

regardless, while bridgerton doesn’t over-exaggerate colin’s poetic affections, we seem to forget that he (much like our modern day counterparts) is a misogynist. colin bridgerton, at worst, is a product of his time as he participates in run-of-the-mill old-english patriarchy and, at best, *simply* chooses penelope. we are fascinated with a behavior that should take little to no effort.

as each generation of men form in reaction to a respective era of feminism, people label their bare-minimum behavior as counter-cultural. a few years ago, we saw a rise in the tumblrfication of consent with “consent is sexy.” we are now baring witness to women who worship characters who merely love their girlfriends, joining the ranks of those who headcanon certain men as those who wouldn’t commit a hate-crime 😍

men can be nothing— men can be everything. they can live at home or drive a motorcycle or ride a fucking trike. they can sleep with prostitutes and eat pussy, or they can do neither of those things and still get a girlfriend to cook for and clean up after them. men can be anything at all and, in return, women will yearn for them again and again with no congratulations.

through their desire and “love” of women, men also feel exempt from their role in patriarchy.

but what is this “love” really? although women’s rights have never been more accessible, if i really analyze the state of patriarchy today, i am not convinced the version of male yearning women want is achievable. robbing men of their ability to experience eroticism and forcing them into a one-dimensional expression of masculinity, patriarchy arrests men from expression as a whole. it is a tragedy as old as time.

“to indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings”- bell hooks

and, while i suppose the rarity of male expression adds to the allure of the trope itself, i see a cyclical loop forming: men create the standard of our treatment with a bar stuck to the floor and they are widely celebrated by their dating prospects for meeting these standards. all of this is labeled as progress, but it is only the illusion of such. this “progress” is the reason that men treating their girlfriends with reciprocal romance is labeled “pathetic,” in the first place. regardless, through their subjugation at the hands of the patriarchy they built, they are always the consistent winners.

i do not say all of this to shame women for wanting to be loved or to shame men for their loving. this is in our nature— in our socialization— in every movie we’ve watched since we were burping breast milk milk onto our mother’s bibs. i mean, when i dated men, i did so in hopes to feel yearning from them. however, i found that even if they weren’t an inhumane porn addict, romantic men would opt into objectification by idealizing their partner as key to their own character development.

if we are viewed as tools for their story, how are they to engage with us besides admiration and fetishization? if our experiences and our pain are shiny and interesting plot points to them, how can we find true peace in their yearning and their love? how can men feel fulfilled, held, and met by their partners? how is any of this a goalpost?

thinking back to my short stint with silverlake jacob two years post-mortem, there’s a newfound clarity that shines in my mind like a star.

i remember that jacob would cry at night. i was always big spoon and would, sometimes, wake to hear him stifling his sobs into a pillow. when i asked him what was wrong, he told me about the guilt he felt for his youth. he dumped his aggressive, misogynistic past onto me, detailing a time he groped a woman at a concert when he was 18, or when he would ask girls to flash him on omegle to keep their tits in a hard drive. i would hold this man— a man on the cusp of thirty— through these fits of guilt, forced to say: “its okay. you were young. you know better now. you surely love women.”

even the kindest most poetic man might get a boner when you cry.

jacob’s sensitivity and remorse is something refreshing, but i long for a world where a man’s sensitivity, remorse, love, and/or basic respect is neither labeled pathetic or groundbreaking. to “bring back male yearning” means we bring back a slew of baggage that none of us need or want.

i guess you could say i am yearning, too— for a world where we can see each other for who we truly are, lean into a future that we have never seen, and exalt things that actually matter (like this little substack talking shit about something everyone seems to like).