'The wall' is a sexist myth designed to get you to lower your standards

I am 42 years old. I regularly go out in sweats, hair undone, makeup undone, paying no attention at all to my appearance. I am inundated with attention from men, including much younger men, every time I leave my house. It doesn’t feel like a compliment. It never has. It feels like a threat. Because as every woman knows, every man who approaches you is a potential attacker. And every hookup request or compliment on our appearance can quickly turn violent if we respond incorrectly.

I watched my grandmother be sexually harassed well into her seventies. My mother, dying of dementia and unable to talk, still got men’s attention. In fact, I have never met a woman of any age lamenting that she doesn’t get enough male attention. Instead, I’m surrounded by women who want men to leave them alone so badly that they construct male repellent outfits, wear fake wedding rings, and develop combat-inspired strategies for going to Home Depot.

Meanwhile, every misogynist man I know is completely obsessed with a wall they’ve imagined. They assert that women hit this wall around 30, or 25, or 20, or at puberty, and that’s when we become bitter, or are willing to lower our standards and settle down. They believe in this nonexistent entity with a religious fervor. Their belief belies the fact that they don’t actually talk to, or maybe even know, any real human women who could disabuse them of their assumptions.

So intense is this belief that they will doubtless comment on this post (before I ban them, comments unread, that is) to assert that I’m just mad because I’ve hit the wall, and that’s why I’m pretending the all doesn’t exist. A world in which women remain attractive to men throughout the lifespan is completely destabilizing to them. They can’t and won’t accept it. This belief shows a lot of parallels with their aggressive hatred of single mothers.

So what purpose does this myth serve in patriarchy?

Patriarchy needs a story to justify itself. It’s built a complex mythology that many of us believe, often without even knowing we do. That’s why beliefs about the innate and extreme biological differences between the sexes are so integral to patriarchy. It’s why misogynists tend to aggressively enforce gender roles. And it’s why we believe objectively false things, like that men—the gender doing the majority of emotionally influenced violence—are more rational and less emotional than women.

These myths are the water we swim in and the air we breathe, and may remain invisible to us for our entire lives. But once you see them, you can’t unsee them. This is the latest installment in my series about the patriarchal myths we believe, how they influence our behavior, and how to avoid falling victim to the noise and the nonsense. Read the rest of the series here.