The One Who Cares the Least, Wins.

On masculinity influencers, competitive indifference and "He's Just Not That Into You"

Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash

It’s rare for an academic text to pinpoint an emotional experience with such precision that reading it brings the same heady clarity as a good therapy insight.  A recent paper by philosophy professor Ellie Anderson finally gave recognition to the collective toil of women across the globe in trying to decode the thoughts and intentions of the men they are dating, naming this work “hermeneutic labor.”  I’ve been married a long time now, but I still remember the hours my friends and I might put in at the hermeneutic coalface, attempting to parse a single text message from someone’s boyfriend.  We ended up calling this type of text a “subtext,”  as in, “I just got a subtext from Josh. He says ‘see ya later,’ but’ I think it means he’s secretly in love with Lisa?”

All this of course relies on the basic premise that there is actually something to figure out, and that men do have fully developed interiority, something that for various reasons,  I only half- jokingly believe to be an open question.  Either way-it didn’t actually matter what conclusions we drew about Josh’s inner life.  Our course of action was always the same.  Pretend not to Care.

Back when I was single in the late 90s and early 2000s, the general received wisdom for women when it came to dating was that any admission of actual human emotion was evidence of repulsive neediness, and that we should not be bothering men with our pesky feelings and demands.  An extensive range of relationship self-help literature backed this idea up.  

“Don’t call him.” “Never  chase him.” “Play hard to get,”  “Don’t  follow him into his cave”   “Stick to The Rules.”  He’s Just Not That Into You.  (Even though it might have prevented a few #Metoos, there has never been a She’s Just Not That Into You.) 

The evidence supplied to justify this value-system was a strange combination of evolutionary psychology (“men are biologically programmed to be the pursuers, so don’t fight nature”) and a version of market economics (“increase demand by reducing supply.”)  Or, as my friends and I used to say at the peak of our dating nihilism, “the one who cares the least, wins.”  

Whatever the actual emotional dynamics of any given relationship,  if you were  female and heterosexual, at that time you were of course positioned as the one who cared the most.  So as a woman you had to work extra hard to maintain the required emotional indifference.  For the most part this was a painful and exhausting exercise, requiring a significant amount of discipline.

In my young dating years, my friends and I  spent many hours trying to game this system, working tirelessly to transform ourselves into the ones who cared the least. This was often a communal effort.  We would cheer each other on in our emotional detachment, devoting many hours to aggressively not calling or texting boys. And our efforts worked. The less we appeared to care, the more they actually did.  But the tiniest slip-up, the slightest display of emotional investment and the jig was up.

I remember one friend who was locked into a particularly exhausting battle of this nature deciding to take matters into her own hands.  “I’m just going to text him,” she declared recklessly.  “It’s my relationship too!”  What an idea, we thought. It’s her relationship too?  It sounded so seductive, so deceptively empowering.  It’s your relationship too!” we cheered.  “Just text him!”   She did.  It soon wasn’t.

Self-help in general has always been a heavily female-skewed industry- when I wrote my first book, AMERICA THE ANXIOUS  back in 2016, all about the American pursuit of happiness and the consumer forces driving it,  around 80% of self help across the board was consumed by women.  The scolding tone chimed well with our appetite for self flagellation, our willingness to perceive most of the world’s problems as our fault.  “Women who Love too Much”, “Women Who think Too Much”, “Women who Worry Too Much.”  (There was no Men Who Don’t Love Enough;  Men Who Don’t Think Enough; Men Who Don’t Worry Enough. ) And relationship self-help in particular was a female-only domain.  Men were assumed to be rational actors, calmly going about their business with little need for advice or intervention. They were the choosers, the pursuers,  the emotional deciders.  Our best hope as women was to scheme from the sidelines with our friends, desperately hoping to leverage our own scarcity into some semblance of soft power.  

The layers of misogyny in this whole framing are clearer now.   Young women were told that our worth depended on securing this one defining relationship- heterosexual marriage- but that showing any outward sign of investment in that outcome turned us into figures of ridicule or pity.  

And of course the substance of it was nonsense. The push and pull of power dynamics within relationships have little to do with gender.  For every man that we loved and had to sit on our hands not to call, there were plenty where the situation was reversed.  No one is “biologically programmed” to be the pursuer.   We are all biologically programmed to be self sabotaging idiots, to love people because they don’t love us back. This is clearly an evolutionary design flaw in humans’ emotional makeup - that the more we want someone, the less attractive we generally become to them.  What could possibly be the evolutionary advantage of our species’ collective lack of self respect is anyone’s guess. Perhaps, like many sexist ideas that are pitched as evolution, this belief system is brought to us not by biology, but by patriarchy.

As it turns out, the self-help industry missed a major customer-base by assuming that men aren’t interested in masochistic relationship advice.  Because of course boys and men were always just as lost and confused as we were when it came to the self-defeating drives of the human heart.  And now, an influx of so-called “masculinity influencers” has eagerly stepped into that gap.  

In recent years, an entire masculinity quasi-self-help industry has emerged online.  Drawing on a strange mashup of evolutionary psychology, oddly manipulative dating advice, body-building tips and right-wing politicking, these influencers trade in an action-hero reverie of manly self-improvement. In this online universe, the phrase “alpha male” has taken on a new scope and power, and these influencers offer directionless adolescent boys a twisted promise that with the right amount of hard work, they too might achieve that coveted status (sometimes with a side order of horrifying misogyny.) For something that is supposed to be so innate, masculinity sure seems to take a lot of hard work

Clearly the boys who consume this kind of content are not “biologically programmed” to be tough masculine pursuers.   They are generally lost, insecure teenage boys, desperate for validation and guidance. As a rule, boys are given shockingly little education in relationships in general.

There’s a lot to say about the wounded, furious, tending-towards-absurd corner of the internet that constitutes the ‘masculinity space,’ and much of it is repellent and frightening. I have written extensively about these influencers- their dangers and their appeal in BOYMOM. 

But one minor irony sticks out.  As I was slogging out the hours looking at this kind of “content” as research for my book, I was struck by just how closely the ‘how to get women to sleep with you’ advice of the manosphere influencers echoes the ‘play hard to get’ logic of my own dating years.  These masculinity gurus are now recycling a version of the same tedious advice in reverse, encouraging young guys pretend to be equally emotionally uninvested as a way of manipulating women into sleeping with them.   These influencers  use the same scarcity logic (decrease supply and demand will increase), the same dubious evo-psych (men are biologically programmed to be the pursuers) and the same “never chase her” advice,  apparently unaware that women have been doing the same to them behind the scenes for generations.  

Spend any time in the manosphere and it’s easy to start to hate men and boys. But after watching a fair amount of this garbage, my heart breaks for them too.  I remember just how exhausting, how emotionally debilitating it was to have to pretend not to care in order to be loved.  How hard and exhausting and painful it was to perform indifference.  And the more I think about it, the more I realize that this whole performance is the  teensiest taste of what it actually must be like to be a boy or man more generally.

 For the most part, outside of dating self-help world, girls and women generally have social permission to have emotions and to explore them and show them and discuss them.  But the same is not true for boys and men. For them, the “Pretend you don’t care” mandate, doesn’t just apply to dating. Studied indifference is the cultural norm that boys and men are expected to aspire to across the board, and emotional stoicism is the baseline expectation of masculinity itself.  Through history and across cultures, masculinity norms consistently demand that boys hide their feelings and refrain from showing vulnerability or weakness- not just with romantic partners, but with the world at large, including, or perhaps especially with their friends. And the costs of straying are high. 

And for the most part, boys have little support in this. There is generally no sympathetic friend group cheering boys on in the background, helping them decipher the subtexts, propping them up in their pursuit of detachment.  The performance of masculinity is a solo endeavor. They have to go it alone.  

I could barely keep this level of emotional stoicism going in this one single context, with a crew of friends providing hermeneutic labor and ice cream in the background. I can only imagine what it must be like to have this as a full time cultural demand. Masculinity may be where the power lies, but that power comes at a cost.  The whole thing is like some kind of soul compromising bargain from a Greek myth.  The gods bestow great systemic power on boys at birth by virtue of their maleness, but at the cost of their humanity, their ability to access or admit to human emotion.  I think I know which one I would pick.