I never thought I'd be here. I hate the idea of injecting a foreign toxin into my body. I don't even wear makeup, for Christ's sake. But here I am, seriously considering getting four different cosmetic procedures, none of which I really want… but unfortunately feel like now I have to. And I'm resentful about it.
I was never a model, sure, but that's never bothered me. I'm pretty enough, but had so many other things going for me — my above-average intellect, which can keep deep conversation like no sixteen-step-skincare-routine Instagram scarecrow could ever; my humor, that seems to make most people remember me often when I don't remember them; my ability to listen well, cook a perfect steak, and roll a perfect spliff. I felt confident that all this evened it out so I'd still have as good a shot as any in the dating market.
But holy hell, was I wrong.
There's a new price of admission, and it ain't cheap… or completely without risk of facial paralysis, apparently, as the warning agreement stated.
I don't want any of this stuff. I actually like how I am naturally, but I'm torn because I also recognize the reality of the current dating market. To pretend like the game doesn't exist only does ME a disservice. So in order to participate, I'm forced, like a pouting child being shoved into a raincoat, to wear the uniform: i.e., what physical attributes men find attractive, evolutionarily, at a glance: fuller lips, perfect teeth, narrow jaw, protruding cheekbones, and zero signs of wrinkles. The face I once made fun of in the Venice Erewhon parking lot, I'm now about to surgically augment onto my own. How did we get here? Through the very ideology that was supposed to free us from beauty standards: feminism. Curveball, right?
The marketplace is made up only of your options. It's a comparison, like grading on a curve. Just twenty years ago, your options (the market) were limited maybe to those in your geographic vicinity plus the occasional setup from a relative or camp friend. Now, the options have widened considerably due to dating apps, and we are competing across hundreds, maybe thousands of options. On top of that, Instagram has widened the option pool even farther. Even though none of the men around me could ever get with any of these women, they exist constantly in their field of view, and thus are part of the sample size. Now stack on top of that, we are no longer competing within our age group, but rather widened to include girls ten to twenty years younger than us.
And this is where feminism really fucked us. We were sold the lie to go after our careers, make money, make your mark on the world first, be the best you you can be, and then go find a partner once you've done A through C. We used to have a backstop against some of this: our biological clock starting to go wonky around mid thirties. But nope, we did an end run around that too with egg freezing. And the worst part of it, we, WOMEN, did this to ourselves. Not a single man told us to do any of this. We are our own worst enemy, and the architects of our own demise.
So while we were busy climbing the corporate ladder, raising unheard of amounts of money, and making ourselves amazing, the men in our cohort weren't waiting around with their dicks in their hands. No sir, they were dating. And as we aged up, still too busy self actualizing for them, they continued to date, well, twenty something year olds (women in their fertile prime: that's what men are biologically programmed to find attractive). So you freeze your eggs, maybe buying you some time. Ten years go by. Surely the men left in their forties are still single because they are looking for something real, something mature, a woman of substance. Ehhhhh, WRONG. They are still dating twenty something year olds, just now with a hair transplant and an eye rolling age gap. And it's not really their fault, it's mostly biology. Men have about the same fertility as they age until well into their sixties. Up until that point, they will be pursuing women in their fertile prime, as their biological directive is telling them to procreate, and with a mate with the highest likelihood of success to carry on the gene pool.
Feminism sold us the lie that being a well rounded, smart, articulate, and successful woman would up the value of our stock: the investment in ourselves was worth it. In reality, it does absolutely nothing to our market value and actually, in some cases, lowers it, as many men prefer to be more successful and smarter than their partners. Women date laterally and up, men date laterally (sometimes) but mostly down. Men couldn't give a flying fuck if you are successful or smart or any amount of self knowledge you might have gleaned on your therapy journey. Sure, those things are "nice to haves," but often don't even come into their assessments until after you've already been dating for a while, and make a marginal difference at best. Men, even when they say they want someone they can "talk to on their level," are kind of kidding themselves: they look mostly for biological markers of fertility and high estrogen (hip to waist ratio, full lips, heart shaped face), and as far as talking goes… they just want someone to listen. It's women who want someone to talk to on their level: another gross misassessment of feminism.
So just to get to the point where other non physical attributes come into consideration, you have to pass the first gate, which I'll call the "visual fertility assessment."
Imagine trying to compete in a track and field meet, but there's a six foot height requirement just to sign up. Sure, once you're in, you could collect points from various different events and still beat someone who won in other categories, but if you can't meet the initial height requirement, you aren't even on the field.
"Explore your sexuality," they said. "Women can also have satisfying sex lives." A noble quest for sure. I do think women have been shortchanged in the bedroom, mostly because they don't take the time to learn what they like, or feel confident enough to ask for it. But feminism's call to 'fuck like men' was maybe the wrong message. Well intentioned, but ignorant of biology.
Do away with the archaic notions of the religious past, rooted in oppression, that chastity is a virtue. "You do you, girl, a real man won't care." Wrong again. Whether men know it or not, they are predisposed to prefer women with fewer partners: that pesky evolution shit again getting in the way of utopia. Back in cavemen times, a man's biggest threat to the tribe's survival was spending limited resources (food, energy, protection) on someone else's child. So to ensure likelihood of paternity, you'd mate with a woman with the fewest partners. Thousands of years of this unfortunately hardwired it in, and no amount of pussy hat marches is gonna rewire those circuit boards. You can rewrite culture in an instant, but biology takes millennia. I don't regret my sexual past, but I am also aware how it negatively impacts me in the dating market. It happens to me constantly, and every time it just makes me a little more sad, even hopeless, because I cannot change my past. It is what it is.
We seem to ignore biology like Netflix ignores pedophilia charges — official company policy: "If you ignore it long enough, they might just disappear. Let's give Chris D'Elia another special."
Yes, there are some other factors at play — the advent of all-access porn taking a large number of men out of the dating pool. The creation of dating apps that widened the market of available women and shrunk the number of men feeling any need for commitment. The popularization of polyamory, which we've seen from the data has really just shaken out to be old-fashioned polygamy: multiple women sharing one man. All of these factors, though, compound toward the same conclusion — there are exponentially fewer available men. But those are things we didn't really have control of. Listening to the well-intentioned but biologically illiterate third-wave feminists, however, was OUR choice. We chugged that fuckin' Kool-Aid and took photos of our sloppy red-stained faces with catchy hashtags like #thefutureisfemale — No, the fuck, it's not. Not if we missed out on reproducing. Anyone ever think of that? Perhaps, if we had started dating seriously for marriage in our early twenties, we might have had a fighting chance to adapt to the changing landscape, or at least pass that first gate without the help of a board-certified plastic surgeon. Now me and all my girlfriends in our thirties, each one more amazing and accomplished than the next, are all playing this game of high-stakes musical chairs when we could have been lampin' in the suburbs, getting the seven-year itch by now.
So now here we are, trying to trick the subconscious brain of men into registering us as a viable breeding option — or at least as viable as our twenty-year-old counterparts — just to participate in a fundamental part of life. I can't change my sexual history, or get back any of the years I lost girl-bossing away, so the only lever I have left is to increase my waist-to-hip ratio and create a Halloween mask out of my face.
Now don't get me wrong, feminism got a lot right — the right to vote, equal pay, the ability to have a job and not be sexually harassed at that job, bodily autonomy, the ability to open a bank account or just exist without a husband. It gave us options. But maybe, just maybe, it got this one thing wrong. I did everything feminism told me to do: I worked my ass off, made a shitload of money, became one of the youngest female directors in my field, I broke the "glass ceiling." But now I'm just lying here, covered in broken glass.