Men Don’t Want Submissive Women. They Want to Be Respected.

The psychological fragility behind the fantasy of female submission.

(Audio version here)

Cartoons Hate Her commented on the Elijah Schaffer implosion today. That was a very public example of what happens when ideological fantasies about “female submissiveness” collide with real human psychology. CHH wrote,

I fell into this trap multiple times myself, as a young woman in a secular setting who wanted something more valuable than meaningless hookups (a problem among my generation, not so much the youth of today) or long-term dead-end relationships that wasted my prime childbearing years. I believed that to evade bad men and find good men, the key was to lean into my natural inclination to be submissive and compliant. This was what men liked right? But the men around me didn’t actually like this. When I expressed my desire to be a homemaker, thinking it would earn me brownie points, men bristled and told me they wanted to marry women with some degree of ambition. I had boyfriends complain that I never argued with them or disagreed with them, and requested that I “call them on their shit.” As young as thirteen, my boyfriend complained to my mother that I was “too agreeable.” (Not sure why he thought she was the ideal audience for this—he also proposed she help him get me drunk.) When I made myself too available and unchallenging, men lost interest. I found myself repeatedly passed over for girls who were aggressive, overtly sexual, brash, if not a tad masculine in their attitude and behavior, who were not clearly more physically attractive than I was. Granted, I have a pretty small sample size here, but even my now-husband, who arguably likes a more submissive woman than your average guy, found this schtick extremely tiresome and told me to grow a backbone early on in our relationship.

This has been my experience too. I’ve never personally had any natural inclination to be remotely submissive or compliant, but the idea that this is naturally what men want seems totally bizarre to those of us who have actually met and talked to a reasonable sample of them. My thoughts on this are informed by my layperson’s interest in evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and social psychology in the area of sex differences. However, they mostly come from my own observations as a woman of 51 who was born into a family of psychologically-healthy (mostly conservative) men, dated several specimens of the sex of varying degrees of psychological healthiness, spent half her life with a particularly excellent specimen and has been fortunate to always have a number of male, heterosexual friends who talk to me about these things.

Men do not typically want women to be submissive to them. They want them to respect, value and need them for their own individual qualities, but also for the typically masculine traits they bring to the relationship. The good news is that women generally do value masculine traits and find them attractive. We did, after all, play a significant role in selecting them. You’re welcome.

Much has been written about the current ultra-conservative “tradwife” discourse, with its advocacy of women being modestly covered, quiet, submissive, not voting (or perhaps even driving), avoiding higher education, avoiding careers, and ideally producing several babies by the age of 25. Contrary to the movement’s own directives that women should be silent and allow men to lead, many of the largest and most influential accounts are female. At the core of this Taliban-style ideology is the belief that everything has gone wrong because women have stepped out of their “natural place.” Instead of serving as helpmeets who submit and defer to men, they have been allowed to have a voice in the public sphere leading to their own unhappiness, social dysfunction, and the emasculation and “emiseration” of men. The proposed solution is for women to retreat to the domestic sphere and submit themselves utterly to male authority.

It is so deeply misogynistic, and so profoundly divorced from the reality of most people’s lives, that it is tempting to dismiss the whole thing as the unhinged rantings of irrelevant extremists. But that would be a mistake. Like all extremist movements gaining traction in this era of polarisation, this one contains a kernel of truth. This is typically the case with extreme ideologies. The beliefs of extreme queer theorists and trans activists that the biological categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ are oppressive social constructs is the kernel “Oppressive gender roles exist and have compelled men and women to present in specific ways.” The beliefs of extreme Critical theorists of race and Black Nationalists (different categories) that there is something like a ‘psychosis of whiteness’ is the kernel “Truly horrific racist practices have been regarded as normal and natural.”

Ideologues of every stripe take a kernel of truth and inflate it far beyond what it can reasonably sustain, spinning it out of the realm of reality and into an absolutist dogma that makes everyone miserable and helps no one except activists who revel in cruelty behind a façade of moralistic outrage. The answer is not to dismiss these movements as insane or immoral. That convinces no one who has already been drawn in. The answer is always to return to the kernel of truth and address that and more reality-based and ethical ways of approaching it.

The kernel of truth in this case is that men have a particular primary need to be respected and needed in relationships with women. Other needs, wants and preferences in a relationship vary by individual, but, as a general rule, a man is very unlikely to be happy if he does not feel he has a respected & essential role that his wife or girlfriend depends upon and that she values his judgement and listens to him & that she just fundamentally respects him.

The word ‘leadership’ keeps coming up in this discourse & crashes up against the concept of ‘partnership,’ seeming to be mutually exclusive, but a healthy concept of leadership in relationships is not dominance, but being regarded as competent, steady and trustworthy and someone worth turning to and leaning on. Being perceived in this way is, in my observation, particularly important to men’s sense of being valued and loved. And leadership in this sense always includes the capacity to listen, to defer, and to follow when her judgement is better suited to the situation. This version of “leadership” is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It refers to how men often feel valued (and to what women often naturally value in men) not to a hierarchy of authority.

But when this perfectly normal dynamic passes through the distorting lens of ideological extremism, it becomes grotesque. Men and women who are psychologically fragile, insecure, or poor at forming healthy attachments mutate the kernel into a set of pathological demands:

• Respecting a man requires disrespecting the woman and for her to have no self-respect.

• For a man to be needed, the woman must be needy, without personality and entirely incompetent at functioning in the world.

• Enabling a man to lead requires enabling him to be domineering and submitting to everything he says, even if he is unreasonable, unethical or factually wrong.

When men and women take on this stance & justify it with religion or politics or sometimes, entirely wrongly, with biology, they generally have a very shaky and negative views of themselves. People who do not believe they are worthy of love or respect, and who don’t feel capable of earning it through their own strengths, goodwill and virtues, end up entering a twisted co-dependent dynamic of mutual psychological abuse. We see men trying to convince themselves they are “men worthy of respect” by demanding submission and declaring the problem to be women’s non-compliance, rather than trying to behave in ways that inspire women to see them as worthy of respect. And we see women internalising the same ideology, declaring women to be amoral, vice-ridden incompetents because they believe themselves to be so and find it easier to frame this as a sex-trait than confront the painful idea that it might be a personal failing or, ideally, that they are actually valuable human beings.

The reason psychologically healthy, well-adjusted men don’t typically find ultra-submissive, compliant women desirable is because that behaviour so often signals poor mental health, a shaky sense of self, and significant self-esteem problems. Likewise, psychologically healthy, well-adjusted women do not mistake male demands for female ultra-submission as signs of strength or suitability. They recognise them as expressions of the man’s own low self-esteem and his belief that he cannot earn respect through his own strengths and virtues, because he does not, at a fundamental level, believe he has any that merit respect.

CHH reports that when she had a phase of feeling she should “lean into” naturally agreeable qualities, men found it tiresome, uninspiring, lacking in any challenge, and they told her she was ‘too agreeable’ and ‘to grow a backbone.’ This matches what male friends have told me when talking about their dating goals and experiences. When a woman behaves in such a passive, characterless way, they think, “But who are you really? What do you want in life? What do you want from me? What are your beliefs and values? I need to know that if I am going to have a relationship with you.” Ultra-agreeableness feels empty and false. Perhaps it feels a bit like trying to have a relationship with an AI that tells you everything you think is correct and important and profound?

I’ve been following this ultra-conservative, misogynistic tradwife phenomenon quite closely on Twitter, and I feel a mixture of pity and contempt for the individuals involved in it. It can never work to fulfil the needs it claims to address, because those needs cannot be satisfied externally. Unless the actual cause of the problem is confronted honestly (which is usually painful), both partners will continue to feel fundamentally unlovable and unworthy of respect. In these dynamics it is common for the man to lash outwards and blame the woman for not being submissive or compliant enough, while the woman turns the failure inwards and takes it as confirmation of her deepest fears about herself. She’s still not good enough. And so a twisted co-dependent relationship of psychological abuse escalates.

This ideology is entirely unnecessary, and it certainly should not be accorded the legitimacy of a respectable moral framework for living. A wide variety of healthy and successful relationship dynamics become possible when we recognise the particular need many men have to feel respected and needed in a romantic partnership. This can include traditional gender-role arrangements in which both partners are genuinely valued and loved, two-career egalitarian households, or completely non-traditional relationship structures.

We can acknowledge real psychological sex differences and the ways they often shape relationships without going batshit insane and allowing psychologically damaged ideologues, whether they deny differences entirely or inflate them into rigid dogmas, to dominate the conversation. Healthy relationships recognise where common sex differences matter, understand that they do not always apply because individual variation exists, and attach no moral valence to either conforming with or diverging from typical patterns.

Above all, healthy relationships never require sacrificing the autonomy or dignity of either partner.

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