Why men pretend they don't like sexy, fun girls
Let this grandma explain it to you plain: Men want to claim babes for themselves and deny other, potentially better men a shot
If you spend any time online, you have come across this video in the past week.
Some of my favorite online people have commented on it—by definition, my favorite people online are pretty cool so it’s no surprise that I like their takes on it. Ranging from “give it a rest” to “these are just cute girls dancing” (my opinion), I thought we would have seen the end of this discussion by now. But it’s not over yet.
So I guess it’s my turn to add one more take. But let my take be from my vantage point as a grandma, a matriarch, a Goodwife, here to tell you that nothing in life is an unalloyed good (even joyous dancing), and only a few things in life are unalloyed evil.
One close to unalloyed evil is this claim:
Nearly everything he says in this post is wrong.
The women upset about the video are upset because they see their sisters, daughters, and friends being mocked and shamed by (dumb) men. That is not about accepting that men don’t want a woman with a loud and crazy spirits, because…
Men LOVE them some women with loud and crazy spirits! (more on that below).
Superficial beauty is fleeting, and manipulative charm is deceptive. But closing in on 60, I’m still beautiful, and my husband charms the pants off me (literally) all the time.
And guess what: We fear the Lord and don’t care about your praise.
Sigh. There is a long history among religious types (my people, I am a believing, practicing Christian woman) deciding that sex, female sexual joy in particular, is a dangerous commodity. Throughout middle ages Christian thought it was believed that women were more susceptible to the devil’s influence (thanks, Eve!) and that this included their tendency to get carried away in sexual joy. As a result, the “supply” of female sexuality had to be constrained so that they couldn’t tempt men with their devilish wiles.
So much projection, so little time. I have not yet published my essay on why I call my Substack The Goodwifery, but when I do you will read about what a Goodwife is and how the term was used in the 1600 to 1700s by Puritan New Englanders to mean a full woman. Including women who had their own souls—yes, that was a doctrinal novelty at the time!—and who should expect to have joy in their marital beds. New England Puritan women, unlike Quaker women to their south and west and definitely not the Anglican women far to the south, were taught to believe that sex was a positive thing when expressed between a man and a woman who were married to each other and willing to care for their offspring.
(Sidenote: the sad joke among the Anglican Virginians at this time was that a virgin was just a girl who could run faster than her uncles. Ick.)
I am a Goodwife by this definition. And I come not to simply praise these young girls but to bury the idea that men don’t want them. They very much do, their loud spirits included.
They just want them for themselves.
Unlike some of my fellow devout Christians on this site, I have no problem understanding that God created us through an inspiring, powerful, natural process that we are finally starting to understand. And that that process puts us squarely in the animal kingdom, with traces of DNA that suggest when our human bodies were pulled out of the rest of animalia—did you know we only recently learned which mutations made it so that primates including us don’t have tails? I love that God is allowing us to see his mighty hand in the blueprints he used to create us.
That’s a preface to this point about men and something called mate guarding. Not only do men want those girls, they want to hoard them for themselves. That is the natural state of many organisms in the natural world. Some male bees, beetles, and moths literally mask their mates by releasing a male scent that overwhelms the female’s scent. In other insect species, concealment is even more direct: Among some butterflies, when a male successfully courts a female, he flies away with her. Not as in, they fly off together, but he literally carries her away from other potential mates. Even more direct is the action of some insects like the veliid water-strider, whose males ride on the backs of the females even when they are not copulating for periods ranging from hours up to several days just to prevent intrusion from a competitor.
If there were time I could add the stories of the giant Australian cuttlefish, the red deer on the UK’s Isle of Rum, or the silverback mountain gorilla. Most males are insecure maters, they work as hard as they can to secure access to the most fertile females possible, then they work extra hard to ensure that their sperm successfully implant and reproduce. That’s us humans and that’s what’s at the root of this whole discourse: Men want to secure access to these sexy young girls by dissuading other men from looking in the first place and by also signaling to vulnerable women that to earn their mating interest, they should hide their healthy bodies from view.
Welcome to all of Christian modesty discourse in a nutshell. It’s a discourse I know well and one I actually support: I raised my daughters to be very protective of when they showed what and to whom. For their own safety. And out of respect for the man whose love and interest they were ultimately trying to attract. Many, many women hate that idea and actively teach their daughters to expose their flesh in ways that make them vulnerable to predation, I don’t support that even as I tell girls to resist letting random Twitter tradmasc men from dictating dress standards to them.
Though we are animals and prone to act like it, in our human case, we have an extra thing called language and culture that no other animal has. This marvelous adaptation lets us evolve faster than by biology alone because we can acquire knowledge and social skills that are as effective as genetic mutations in spreading successful adaption strategies (as well as stupid ones, like going on Twitter and claiming that men hate beautiful, young women).
Women also engage in mate guarding, and in human culture the primary ways we do this is through various manifestations of intrasexual competition. Here are some classic examples expressed through the subtlety of language:
“Girl, you’re totally pretty to go out tonight, no need to put on makeup and get out your heels!”
“What? Miss my husband? No way, I’m so glad I have a night away from him and can just hang out with my besties!”
“Stay away from Shirley, she’s a total slut.”
Volumes of research have been written about these things in academic literature as well as in popular discourse. Only the latter is preoccupied with how bad men are, forcing women into these bad behaviors because of the pressure women feel to meet unrealistic beauty standards, lose their identity to a man, and slut-shame other women because it supports the patriarchy. But the academic literature, supported by experimental data and animal models, makes it very clear: These are very smart strategies for women to pursue.
In the first, you constantly tell your peers that they are pretty enough so that they don’t outshine you at the club by putting in that extra effort. You downtalk your husband behind his back not only because it creates solidarity among the very women you might need to turn to if you lose your husband but mostly because it ensures that these women don’t try to poach him—that’s a technical term, I’m not kidding, and if you guessed that your husband is more likely to be seduced by a friend of yours rather than a stranger, you are correct; thank you for having vetted him and made it clear that he’s a desirable mate. You slut-shame women precisely to discourage women from giving more of the milk away for free since you want to ensure the man in your life is happy to have bought your cow—sorry, the metaphor, though it works, is a bit unflattering.
Men do the inverse of some of these things, including:
“Nobody wants to marry a girl with a loud and crazy spirit! Beauty is fleeting and charm is deceptive.”
Okay, that was a bit of a cheap, if valid, shot, how about:
“Girls have cooties” the 3rd grade version.
“Bros before hoes” the high school version.
“Marriage is for suckers” the tradmasc version.
These things are ostensibly about women. But they are really an attempt by men to suppress competition for the women they most want. Maybe in 3rd grade the fear of cooties was real, but by high school, being all bros before hoes is really about sending a confident signal to your peers about your own devastating insecurity, “Don’t you be offering to the girls around us that thing we all know they want because if you give it to them, I may have to compete with you to give it to them, and that might mean I have to learn to love and respect a woman, communicate with her openly, and become a better man than I really want to be or fear that I am unable to be.”
That’s what “marriage is for suckers” is at its root and it betrays the same mate-guarding weakness that women feel when they call other girls sluts (“don’t give the men that thing they all know we want”) and when they tell their BFFs not to put on makeup to go out–which, ironically, always makes them go put on makeup because even if they don’t know what’s happening, they’re in mate competition mode biologically speaking and they need to compete or lose out on the best pickings.
Though mate guarding is a near-universal and most humans feel it and most cultures direct that feeling in specific ways, note that our particularly American mode of culture basically leaves us with a paradox: women’s mate guarding is ultimately healthy for the women and society in general because it protects them from exploitation and promotes pairing up and preserving relationships. Men’s mate guarding, if left unchecked, can actually inhibit relationship formation and introduce a long-term imbalance in some relationships where the male constantly feels the need to mask her scent, ride along on her backside to prevent intrusion, or buck antlers with challengers to the female under his “protection.”
Women who hate men often focus on the behaviors of these jealous and mate-guarding men to show how bad men are and to try to dissuade women from pairing up—in this way, these women ape the “marriage is for suckers” mantra of the tradmasc crowd. But women who love men should see these behaviors as symptoms of a natural urge and can, with time, teach their husbands, their sons, and the men around them, that it’s okay to allow women to be fun, loud, and have a “crazy spirit,” and to admit that they find such women fascinating and even desirable. They then need to teach them to tightly control that desire because that urge to sexually desire young women who move their bodies in joyful display is even stronger than the mate guarding urge.
It’s a lot to ask of a man, but good men do this already: They don’t hate these young girls for their exuberance, they delight in it. They admit to themselves that watching these young, healthy bodies is a risky thing, so they look a little bit away when the breasts are moving and the bums are shaking. And they cope with it by reframing these girls as their sisters, their daughters, and their wives in an earlier age.
Truth is, this grandma was never that wild and crazy, but that’s a personality thing not a godfearing-shame thing. But I absolutely love my Zumba classes, and even the synchronized movement of my fellow spin-class friends from over a decade ago still brings me joy to think about. Moving together in harmony with other people is a type of bliss and, for this Christian woman who has secured a loving, harmonious relationship with a godfearing man who still finds her beautiful all these years later, is even slightly sacred. Harmony is what God models for us, not merciless, preemptive mate guarding. And I believe a real godfearing man knows and respects this.