Quick favor before we start: These are the last two weeks for filling in my survey on waiting in relationships. I’d love your input and after I analyze all responses I will publish the results in an article here. You can fill it in here. Thank you!
I will start today’s topic with a story I previously shared in a note:
Yesterday I had to sit in an Uber ride of over 20 minutes while the driver bragged to me about what a great guy he is for not cheating on his wife. I kid you not.
This was all packaged in softer, kinder language: he complained that most of his work colleagues are openly cheating on their wives and no one in the work environment is even trying to hide it (like bringing affair partners to work outings etc) and that he is personally saddened to see how little respect and consideration these men have for their wives.
He also talked about how fatherhood changed his perception of his wife because he now sees how patient and caring she is with their baby and what tremendous strength it must take. (This part about complimenting his wife sounded super-rehearsed by the way).
Next, he said that he also has had opportunities to cheat because ‘women throw themselves at him’ but he declined because he sees what a strong and dedicated woman his wife is and he couldn’t do that to her. I thought ‘Sure, buddy, I bet you don’t encourage all those women at all, if they even exist’.
Also notice how his faithfulness is apparently some prize earned by the wife for her dedication and strength and patience, aka for doing the parenting work for him as well.
So I said casually ‘Yeah, but that’s just normal behavior in a marriage, right? Even if so many of your colleagues are behaving badly’ and I swear his face changed and he was disappointed and angry for the entire remainder of the ride. I denied him the medal and praise he was expecting. :))
I wonder, if I had acted as if I’m more impressed and admirative that he’s such a good boy for not cheating, would I have ended up as a story about one of those ‘women who throw themselves at him’? I mean, he has to compensate with something for comparing himself to his colleagues, right?
There is something very revealing about this interaction, beyond the fact that I apparently spent twenty minutes trapped in a moving vehicle with a man campaigning for the title of Most Faithful Husband in a workplace where the competition was apparently nonexistent.
He wasn’t telling me that he was a particularly loving husband or that he did half the childcare, that he carried an equal share of the domestic workload, that he supported his wife’s career, that he communicated well during conflict, or that he made an effort to maintain intimacy and companionship in his marriage. He was telling me that he did not cheat, and he expected this to establish that he was an exceptionally good man.
This is a surprisingly common feature of heterosexual culture: men are often evaluated against the worst men in the room, rather than against any meaningful standard of equality. A man doesn’t beat his wife, so he is a good husband. He doesn’t cheat, so he is loyal. He doesn’t scream at his girlfriend, so he is emotionally mature. He doesn’t expect his wife to quit her job, so he is progressive. He occasionally cooks dinner, so he is an equal partner. He changes a diaper without being asked, so apparently we should alert the newspapers to come interview him. The worse the surrounding men behave, the easier this becomes.
And this is how bad men benefit the less bad men.
There is a very simple psychological mechanism at work here: comparison. Human beings rarely evaluate themselves in an absolute vacuum. We compare ourselves with the people around us. Our income, appearance, intelligence, success, morality and social status all acquire meaning partly through comparison. This can be perfectly harmless, but it can also become a fantastic way of laundering mediocrity.
If the man standing next to you is cheating on his wife, the man who isn’t cheating suddenly looks like a saint. If another man is openly misogynistic, the man who merely remains silent can congratulate himself for being respectful. If another man is abusive, the man who is emotionally neglectful can look positively enlightened. The moral standard quietly shifts from ‘What should a decent person do?’ to ‘Am I better than that guy?’ The first question requires an actual standard; the second one just requires a sufficiently terrible comparison point.
This is why the existence of spectacularly bad men can be socially useful to mediocre men. They provide a bottom of the scale against which everybody else gets to look better. There is a whole category of male virtue that consists almost entirely of not being the worst guy you know. And because the worst guy you know can always be made worse, this is an extraordinarily forgiving system.
This also helps explain one of the most persistent complaints in heterosexual culture: women allegedly expect too much from men. Women want men who are emotionally available, who contribute equally to housework and childcare, who are faithful, sexually considerate, respectful of boundaries, capable of communicating without turning every disagreement into a referendum on their masculinity, and who do not expect to be mothered. Apparently, this is an outrageous list.
And one reason it can seem outrageous is that the comparison pool is so terrible.
When the alternative is a man who hits his wife, the man who ‘just’ ignores her becomes a pretty good partner by comparison.
When the alternative is a man who cheats, the man who remains technically faithful starts looking exceptionally devoted.
When the alternative is a man who expects his wife to do every domestic task, the man who occasionally vacuums starts receiving nominations for Husband of the Year.
The standard becomes relative. This is one of the great tricks of patriarchy: make the baseline bad enough and equality starts looking like female entitlement. A woman says, ‘I want an equal partner,’ and she is told she’s too demanding. A woman says, ‘I don’t want to raise an adult man,’ and she is told she’s unrealistic. A woman says, ‘I expect my husband to do his share of childcare without being praised for it,’ and she is told she’s ungrateful.
But compared with what? Compared with the men who do even less? That isn’t an argument for lowering women’s standards. It’s an argument for questioning the standard being used to evaluate men in the first place.
There is another particularly convenient maneuver available to men: defining their goodness by negation. I’m not an abuser. I’m not a rapist. I’m not an incel. I’m not a misogynist. I’m not one of those men who thinks women belong in the kitchen. I’m not like those guys. Fine. But what are you? What do you actually contribute to the lives of the women around you?
Is being a self-labeled nice guy your entire personality?
Do you make your relationships more equal?
Do you take responsibility without being managed?
Do you do care work?
Do you listen when a woman tells you something is hurting her?
Do you change your behavior when you discover that something you’ve been doing is harmful?
Do you support women’s autonomy when it inconveniences you?
Do you challenge other men when they behave badly?
Do you understand that women are not required to reward you for meeting the basic conditions of human decency?
‘I don’t do terrible things’ and ‘I actively practice equality’ are not the same statement. One describes a minimum moral obligation, while the other describes a set of choices. And yet men are very often permitted to collapse the distinction, particularly when there are sufficiently awful men nearby to make their restraint look like a moral achievement.
There is a particularly obvious cultural tendency to treat ‘good man’ as an identity that can be established through contrast rather than conduct. A man doesn’t necessarily have to demonstrate what he contributes to a relationship or to women’s lives; he can simply demonstrate that he is unlike someone worse. Once again, the existence of the Bad Man does much of the work for him.
This is where the phenomenon becomes bigger than individual relationships. Whenever misogyny becomes impossible to ignore, there is an enormous cultural appetite for finding the Bad Man: the rapist, the serial abuser, the violent incel, the misogynist influencer, the man who murders his wife, the man who posts something so grotesquely sexist that everyone can agree he is beyond the pale. And once we’ve found him, there is a strange collective relief. There he is. That’s the problem. Look at him. He’s obviously a monster. Most men aren’t like that. Problem solved.
The Bad Man performs an extremely useful ideological function because he allows misogyny to be imagined as an individual pathology rather than a system of relationships, expectations and entitlements.
The worse the individual offender is, the easier it becomes to imagine that the problem exists exclusively inside him. He was uniquely sick, violent, and misogynistic. Uniquely radicalized. Therefore the rest of us can return to normality.
This is particularly obvious in discussions of sexual violence. Extreme offenders are treated as aberrations, even though the cultural assumptions surrounding male entitlement to women’s bodies exist on a much broader continuum. That’s why stories about how common it is for women to be abused in their sleep by their partners are so shocking: they challenge the cultural assumption that most men who look good on paper are actually good.
The point is not that every ordinary man is an incel, obviously. The point is that the existence of the spectacularly misogynistic man makes it incredibly easy for everyone else to define misogyny as his problem. He is the monster. Everyone else is ‘normal’. And normality gets mistaken for innocence.
There is also a surprisingly lucrative little economy built around being one of the good ones. Men can distinguish themselves through feminism, therapy speak (often weaponized), emotional intelligence, progressive politics, domestic competence or simply the ability to say the right things at the right time.
Again, some of this is sometimes genuine. There are plenty of men who actually ‘do the work’, as they say. But patriarchy creates an extraordinarily favorable market for male virtue because the supply of basic decency is apparently low enough that the man who provides it can make a very impressive product out of himself.
He listens.
He knows what emotional labor is.
He changes diapers.
He says he supports women’s careers.
He has read at least one feminist book.
He doesn’t watch porn every day, just maybe weekly.
He knows the word ‘boundaries’.
He doesn’t call women sluts.
He is a feminist ally.
And sometimes the achievement underneath the branding is simply: he behaves like an adult.
The issue is not that these qualities are worthless. They are obviously preferable to their opposites. The issue is the cultural context in which they become distinguishing features of a man’s character rather than ordinary expectations of adulthood and partnership. A woman who doesn’t abuse her partner is not generally celebrated as a particularly virtuous woman. She is simply expected to be a decent human being. A man does the same thing and suddenly this is worthy of an award and a podcast.
This is why I am suspicious of the cultural fascination with the ‘good man’ as a special category. A genuinely good man is perfectly possible, and there is nothing wrong with recognizing genuinely good behavior, of course.
But there is a substantial difference between being good and being better than the men around you. The former requires an ethical standard. The latter requires a sufficiently low baseline.
The darker version of this is the way women are encouraged to experience male self-restraint as a gift. He could control you, but he doesn’t. He could hit you, but he doesn’t. He could cheat, but he chooses not to. He could abandon you with the children, but he stays. He could be sexually coercive, but he respects your no. These things are good, of course. But they’re also supposed to be normal.
There is something deeply strange and unsettling about constructing male morality around the idea that men are inherently capable of doing terrible things to women and should therefore receive credit whenever they voluntarily refrain. A man does not deserve a medal for not hitting his wife, for not raping his girlfriend or for not cheating on his wife. Yet the comparison with worse men can make precisely these things feel like evidence of extraordinary qualities.
And this is precisely why my Uber driver’s disappointment was so revealing. He had built a moral story in which his colleagues were the bad men, their wives were the victims, and he was the good man because he had exercised restraint. I interrupted his self-congratulatory story by asking the most boring question imaginable: Isn’t that just what you’re supposed to do?
Apparently, no. Apparently, I had failed to appreciate the heroism involved in not betraying your spouse, LOL. And notice how easily the woman disappears from this story. His wife was patient. His wife was strong. His wife was dedicated. His wife was a wonderful mother. His wife had apparently earned his fidelity through her admirable self-sacrificial qualities. Meanwhile, he was the one expecting recognition for choosing not to cheat.
This is the peculiar accounting system of patriarchy: women perform enormous amounts of labor and men can sometimes receive praise simply for not making their lives even worse.
There is another benefit here. Bad men provide ordinary men with an extremely convenient response to feminist criticism: I’m not that guy.
A feminist talks about male violence. I’m not violent. She talks about sexual harassment. I’ve never harassed anyone. She talks about coercive control. I’d never control my girlfriend. She talks about misogyny. I don’t hate women. And suddenly the conversation is no longer about structures, patterns or social expectations. It is about whether this individual man is secretly a monster.
This is a remarkable rhetorical trick because it changes the question. The feminist question is: What social arrangements systematically disadvantage women? The response becomes: But am I personally a bad person? Now the man is defending his moral character instead of examining the system from which he benefits.
And because most ordinary men are not cartoon villains, they can win this argument indefinitely. No, you are probably not a serial killer. Congratulations. That doesn’t tell us anything particularly interesting about patriarchy. The existence of more extreme men gives everyone below that threshold an endless supply of moral reassurance.
This is one reason feminist criticism can be so frustratingly easy to derail. The minute women discuss patterns, some individual man arrives with a personal alibi. I don’t do that. I would never do that. My wife is happy. I respect women. And perhaps all of those statements are true. They still don’t answer the structural question.
You don’t have to deny that some men are terrible. You simply have to define the terrible men as sufficiently different from yourself that their behavior tells you nothing about your own social position.
This is where the whole system becomes ridiculously circular. Bad men demonstrate that men can be terrible. Less-bad men point to those terrible men as evidence that they themselves are good. Women are told to be grateful that their particular man is one of the good ones. And then the existence of those grateful women becomes evidence that the good men are, indeed, good. Fucking hell.
The comparison reproduces itself ad infinitum afterwards.
This is why I think we need to be more suspicious of the language of the ‘good man’. Good compared with whom? Good according to what standard? And good for doing what?
A man who does not abuse women is certainly preferable to a man who does. A man who does not cheat is preferable to a man who does. A man who respects women’s autonomy is preferable to one who doesn’t. But ‘better than a terrible man’ is an extremely low bar. We can acknowledge the difference without pretending that the higher position on the scale is automatically an impressive one.
If the choice is between drowning and being mildly damp, being mildly damp is obviously preferable. It doesn’t mean you have arrived at the beach.
What patriarchy gives us, then, is a hierarchy of male behavior:
At the bottom, there are men who rape, beat, murder, terrorize and openly dehumanize women.
Above them are the men who control, intimidate, cheat, sexually coerce, exploit and demean women.
Above them are the men who are selfish, emotionally neglectful, domestically useless or chronically entitled.
Above them are the men who perform the minimum requirements of partnership.
And somewhere near the top, apparently, is the man who does his share of the laundry without needing a standing ovation.
The exact hierarchy varies, but the underlying mechanism is remarkably stable: there is always someone worse.
This is what makes comparative virtue such a useful system for preserving inequality. A man doesn’t have to become exceptional. He only has to make sure there are men around him who are worse. The lower the floor, the higher he appears to stand.
And women are encouraged to participate in this ranking. Choose the nice guy. Choose the one who doesn’t drink too much or the one who isn’t controlling. Choose the one who doesn’t cheat or the one who will ‘help’ with the children as if it’s not also his job. Choose the one who isn’t like your friend’s husband. Choose the one who at least seems better than the last one.
At no point do we necessarily ask the more interesting question: Why are women being asked to choose between different grades of male inadequacy?
Why isn’t the standard simply equality and fairness, along whatever lines we can define them in practice? Why isn’t the question whether this man is a genuinely good partner, rather than whether he is less bad than the alternatives?
My Uber driver wanted me to admire him because other men cheat. But other men’s infidelity does not make his fidelity extraordinary. It just makes their infidelity terrible. Those are and should remain two separate judgments.
The same principle applies everywhere else. A man who doesn’t hit women is preferable to one who does. A man who doesn’t cheat is preferable to one who does. A man who doesn’t control his partner is preferable to one who does. A man who contributes to his household is preferable to one who contributes nothing. But none of these things should require women to become grateful spectators of male self-restraint.
The existence of terrible men should make us more horrified by terrible men. It should not make mediocre men look heroic.
And perhaps this is one of patriarchy’s most effective tricks: it keeps the bar low by digging a hole underneath it. That’s why some women are openly fantasizing about non-human males, because the bar is just so low for actual men.
The spectacularly bad man stands at the bottom of the hole. The mediocre man stands on the surface. And suddenly everyone is impressed by how tall he looks. He gets to call himself a good man. His partner gets told she is lucky. And if she asks for more, she is accused of having unrealistic standards.
But the standard was never supposed to be “better than the worst man available.”
The standard was supposed to be equality.
And once you stop grading men on a curve, an uncomfortable number of ‘good men’ start looking like what they actually are: Men who are doing reasonably normal things and would very much like a medal for it.
Thanks for reading Bad Woman's Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Egalitarian Men Have Happier Relationships: What the Research Says
·
Jun 30
For decades, feminism has been accused by misogynistic men of making relationships more difficult. Depending on the corner of the internet you frequent, some media often paints feminist women as demanding, feminist men as less attractive, and egalitarian relationships as somehow less romantic or happy than “
'Meet Men Where They’re At' Holds Women Back
·
Jun 2
I have written before about the ways in which therapeutic culture, when it seeps into the mainstream culture unfiltered and especially when it transforms into therapy speak, harms women. Therapy is often recommended as an avenue of becoming better at relationships or better at protecting yourself from harm or better at being happy. It’s also often recom…
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.