When I wrote “Are Men Necessary?” two decades ago, the book’s title was meant to be mischievous.
Sure, men and women seemed in a muddle at the dawn of the millennium. As women climbed up, poking their heads into spaces long dominated by men, the shift in power affected romance.
There was an assumption that courtship rituals, where women “trapped,” “landed” and “bagged” a man, waiting to be chased and expecting to have their restaurant tab picked up, would fade as equality grew.
No more games, like the ones recommended by “The Rules,” the 1995 bible that told women to play hard to get. (“Always end phone calls first.” “Let him take the lead.” Don’t stare at men or talk too much.)
When I wrote my book, women were in a tangle of independence and dependence. But I figured we’d get through it and the battle of the sexes would simmer down.
Boy, was I wrong.
I joked in the book that men were evolving slowly, if at all. But now many men do seem rudderless in an era when they are doing worse than women, by many metrics. More women are enrolled in college than men. And a worrying number of men say they have no close friends. Some women still want men to take care of them. And some men are anxious about being a provider if they can’t even afford a starter home.
Social media and media are bristling with women — and sometimes men — expressing resentment, irritation, frustration and exhaustion about the opposite sex.
As one post circulating on Instagram grumbled, “The fact that men think they can spend all their good years whoring about & can come back to you in the sunset of their life with their erectile dysfunction, Michael Jordan jeans, & receding hairlines is really just crazy to me.”
Literature is filled with women’s keening about the less voluble and less emotional way that men communicate — and their tendency to pull back.
Dorothy Parker expressed it best in her story about a woman staring at the phone, waiting for her promised call from “him.”
“Dear God, let him call me now. … He couldn’t have minded my calling him up. I know you shouldn’t keep telephoning them — I know they don’t like that. When you do that they know you are thinking about them and wanting them, and that makes them hate you. … Couldn’t you ring?”
Now the tension rages in a digital derecho, with oh so many ways beyond a rotary phone to make and drop connections. To excite interest and to dismiss interest. Dating apps, once a godsend, now bedevil people. And all complicated by the fact that younger generations have less and less in-person communication. Social media, hailed as an innovation that would knit us together, is driving us apart once more.
A whole vocabulary has sprung up around digital trysting — and a whole cottage industry of “experts” including ChatGPT — willing to help you fathom the mind of a love interest.
The lexicon includes situationships and ghosting, of course. And “submarining,” which is ghosting, then returning, then ghosting again. “Breadcrumbing,” sending sporadic messages of interest that keep you on the hook. Limerence, a romantic obsession that develops when you’re “love-bombed.” The response, many say, to “Impulsive Dumpers” should be “No contact.”
It’s uncomfortably close to “The Rules.”
Sometimes, it’s men complaining about being ghosted, and of women deciding they don’t need a man. But usually, women are the ones on Instagram obsessing on men who are “Dismissive Avoidants” skittering away from “Anxious Attachers.”
Women get frustrated at men when they grow absent. Women are advised to absent themselves in response to men’s absence to lure the men into being more present. It’s a vicious cycle.
As Rachel Drucker wrote in a Modern Love piece for The Times, many younger men have been rewired to prefer “frictionless” stimulation. The more time they spend online, she contended, the more men drift away from intimacy and vulnerability toward indifference.
“They weren’t sitting across from someone on a Saturday night, trying to connect,” Drucker wrote. “They were scrolling. Dabbling. Disappearing behind firewalls, filters and curated personas.”
And, God help us, uncannily beautiful A.I. girlfriends who are never too much.
In The Times Magazine, Jean Garnett explored “heterofatalism,” lamenting men’s growing anxiety about desire. Garnett said she has been bruised by “the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want.”
At a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan, she and her girlfriends wondered: “Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?”
Both sexes seem trapped. There are still reverberations from the #MeToo quake. Men are more tentative about approaching women in public and chary that their texts will be circulated. In a look at dating in New York magazine, E.J. Dickson found that many single men think that “women inherently believe all men want to hurt and embarrass them.”
Women are ever more equal, but are advised to adhere to hoary dating “Rules” that are older than they are: Don’t chase. Don’t text or DM if he doesn’t. Don’t smother him. Lean into the feminine.
Corinne Low, a Wharton professor of gender economics who wrote a book called “Having It All,” told New York magazine that she realized that having it all would be easier if she started dating a woman.
Women are becoming more like men but men are not becoming more like women. And humans are becoming less human.
Men are necessary and so are women. But they need to get it together.
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Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd • Facebook
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