Getty Images"Aging... is not a paramount male fear. But being seen as a loser is."The relationship between men’s sites like this one, and women’s sites like Jezebel or XOJane, is somewhat less than ideal. That’s because they think we are enormous douches.
From our perspective, though, we are simply speaking the way that men speak to each other in person, online. That’s the mandate that informs everything that we do. The missions of sites like AskMen and sites like Jezebel are near-identical; it’s just that men (and not just “the bad sort of men,” but men in general) and women are not.
There is no shortage of men’s sites willing to call out their female counterparts as harshly as they do us. We are sure that a lot of our readers are aware, for instance, of names like “Chateau Heartiste” or “RooshV.” As satisfying as this can be, though, it doesn’t do anything for the culture as a whole.
For a million reasons relating to fragmentation of media ownership, political expediency and sheer human biliousness, we are constantly being manipulated into fiercely oppositional camps: liberals vs. conservatives, red vs. blue, urban vs. rural. There is a culture war going on, or being made to go on, and it is killing our ability to speak to each other.
This, in part, is why we’re ignoring the epiphenomena of man-site vs. woman-site hostility in order to look at the discussion surrounding Elizabeth Wurtzel’s recent piece for The Atlantic on aging.
Let’s sum it up, if we can: Elizabeth Wurtzel goes to cool Brooklyn parties where men express disbelief that she has been alive for 45 years. Her secret, she feels, has something to do with being childless, politically liberal and defiant in a very general sense.
In response, Jezebel writer Tracy Moore notes that while it’s fun when Wurtzel acts so Wurtzely, denial may not be a universally satisfying solution to the fact that we all grow older and die. In passing, Moore also states that “it’s harder for women to age.” Is it?
We suspect that it is. For a pretty broad array of reasons (some ?cultural, more ?evolutionary), women are judged by their youthfulness, for which beauty is a proxy, more than men are, with the closest analogue on our side being wealth or prominence.
One of the things that distinguishes (we’re being general here because there are about three billion of us) the male dialogue from its female counterpart is its (sometimes blinkered) pragmatism. For whatever reason, we tend to speak about injustice- or imbalance-containing problems in a way that ignores the moral question in favor of directives on how to make it work. This is the reason, for example, that a site like AskMen’s “Power & Money” section is full of articles like “10 Ways To Think Like A CEO” and “How To Stay Out Of Debt,” rather than things like “It Happened To Me: She Judged Me For My Money.”
It’s not that we don’t experience life in the negative -- we do, and very acutely. It’s just that our taboo-structure, or our internal culture, contains this strong sense that to dwell on a bad feeling is to create the conditions for its re-occurrence. Out of this grows a generalized preference for advice over confession, and also something that can appear to women as shallowness.
It isn’t likely that a man would derive the same pleasure (and the same discursive ability) from an age-related compliment as Elizabeth Wurtzel has. Aging, or more directly, being seen by potential sex partners as “old,” is not a paramount male fear. But being seen as a loser is. Next Page >>
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