One of the most vile phrases I have ever heard is “high maintenance” in reference to a woman. Not just because it’s a term better suited to automobiles (something else hetero men like to climb into and control). Not just because it puts a value on the amount of work men have to do to gain sexual access to a piece of talking meat. And not just because it seems like a good 90% of men insist on having a “high maintenance” woman when they don’t have to, just so they have something to complain about. (More on some of this later.)

But mainly because you know who’s high maintenance? MEN. And you know why they don’t get called on it? Because our society has deemed the amount of maintenance hetero women expend on men and relationships with men to be “normal duty.”

An expensive piece of tail

The image I have of a “high maintenance” woman is a heterosexual woman who accepts that her sexuality is a commodity and attempts to “charge” men the highest prices possible for access to it. She makes them take her out to more dates before giving them sex, compared to other women. She waits for them to impress her with gifts and fancy dinners. Is she even attracted to men, or sexually alive? Who knows? It doesn’t matter to the men who complain about her. She can lie back and think of diamonds when she finally decides they’ve earned a throw.

This is a pure transaction, nothing more, nothing less. The man’s attitude is that of a shopper, looking at inanimate objects and trying to decide if it’s worth paying extra for the model that comes with the huge boobs.

The expense of a piece of male tail

But while men who buy into the idea of women as sex meat for sale to the highest bidder complain about having to work to earn tail, no one ever talks about the expense of hooking up with a man. Please note that not all of these “expenses” are the direct fault of the man in question: we have such a sick and twisted double standard that even in a relationship with a really progressive, feminist man, a woman can still carry a lot of extra, useless burdens.

• She’s supposed to make him feel good about himself; he’s supposed to make her feel pretty. We’ve all been programmed for who knows how many centuries to think that “Honey, you’re so smart” and “Honey, you look so pretty” are equivalent. They’re not. The sad fact is, neither boys nor girls are trained to expect men to dig deeper and express what really makes them care about a woman. And some men really aren’t looking for anything deeper than beauty. As a woman who would like to receive compliments on her impressive intellect, sense of humor or strength of character, I find it extremely disheartening to instead get fumbling reassurances about my not-so-impressive looks. And men seem to be deeply confused by me because when I honestly acknowledge I’m not the best-looking woman around, they interpret that as low self-esteem (what has a woman to esteem but her looks), and yet my frank talk about my intelligence is interpreted as obnoxiously arrogant (interesting, considering I pattern that talk after the talk of men who are not considered to be arrogant).
• Their needs come first. Now, there are a lot of men who don’t operate this way - who, for example, don’t think twice about relocating to where the wife or long-term girlfriend has gotten a great job offer… but their families and friends are almost sure to ring in with opinions of what a manipulative spell-casting witch she must be to make him relocate like that. Conversely, if he got a great job offer elsewhere but she wanted to stay near the grandparents so the family has trustworthy baby-sitters available, she is a selfish, demanding “high-maintenance” woman. While this is not the man’s fault (unless he buys into that double standard himself, of course), it is one of the stresses and therefore “costs” of being a woman who forms relationships with men.
• They don’t initiate relationship maintenance. This is a very, very “invisible” problem because we’ve all been trained from birth that women initiate communication and want to discuss problems while men avoid communication and hope for the best. We’ve all been taught this is innate monkey behavior - to be fair, I don’t think men even feel it’s permitted for them to initiate talks when they feel a relationship slipping away (and I’m not sure most women would react positively, either - that’s how skewed the whole mess is). If she doesn’t initiate talks, she must not really care. If he doesn’t, well, that’s just because he’s male. If you’re a woman like me who somehow missed all this programming and tends to wait for him to initiate the talks to prove he really cares, you’ll find you’re in for a shockingly long wait.

Those are just the costs of entering a relationship with a man who respects and values women. If the man has inherited any degree of the sexism of his culture - and let’s face it, most men and women have, and don’t even realize it - a woman has additional burdens:

• She’s expected to accede to his desires. When he wants to have sex, buy something or go out, she must accede to his demands or else he will receive sympathy from everyone around about her “henpecking” and encouragement to dump her ass or find a nice cozy piece on the side. If she wants to have sex, buy something or go out, there are no penalties for him to refuse her. In fact, if she’s always asking him for things he doesn’t want, that too gives him material to gain sympathy from friends and family.
• She’s expected to be more forgiving. Women are counseled to give second chances and overlook misdeeds more often than men are. We need to understand that men are inferior when it comes to being moral, sensible or sensitive, even though they are our superiors in all other ways and naturally better suited to running the world. (This is a neat bit of doublethink I never mastered.)
• She’s expected to make sacrifices and do more than half the housework/child rearing even while working full time. A lot of men still think they’re making a Great Noble Sacrifice if they “babysit” or do the dishes once a week. As Eames on L&O: Criminal Intent once said: “Newsflash: it’s not baby-sitting if they’re your kids.” Many men still receive accolades and sympathy for doing even a quarter of the tasks for the whole couple.
• Her requests/demands are seen as frivolous tests of the man’s love rather than genuine needs or wants. Whether she’s asking for a working dishwasher, help at home that would allow her to work overtime and earn more/get a promotion, or a ludicrous collection of diamonds, a man who’s inherited the culture’s sexism tends to interpret her desires as a test she’s made up just to annoy him. She’s not fully human like he is, and therefore can’t really have passions or dreams. She’s just faking it to see how high she can make him jump.

And so on, and so forth. Please: never, ever tolerate someone using the term “high maintenance” to describe a woman. Please at the very least look appalled (like you would if someone offered to tell you a good racist joke) and instruct them never to use that term around you again.

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Culture teaches us to look at the world with a skewed perspective. As an American kid, I was taught that this is the easiest country in the world and everyone, bar none, wants to immigrate here. I was also taught that white, heterosexual men like Ben Franklin were responsible for, oh, everything humanity had achieved or ever would achieve.

Somewhere around second grade, I realized the US wasn’t perfect and people in a lot of other countries thought their country was the best. I also realized that white straight men stood on the shoulders of everyone else, and from that vantage point achievement wasn’t remarkable. It was almost unavoidable. White Straight Man had a wife to look after all his mundane animal needs and comforts, a mistress to supplement that (the wife understood, of course), kids to extend his ego, the right to knock his family around when he was frustrated so he wouldn’t show that frustration to someone important, and the law on his side in everything.

Remember this was the 80’s. The idea that it could be rape if a woman went on a date with the guy was a new concept. A lot of significant strides were made in that decade to inch white women toward something like parity with white men, but that’s the atmosphere I grew up in.

It only got worse when we moved to the south. The white men and boys there were… something else. Whiny and weak, they fell into infantile rage at the first sign of adversity. They took pride in their inability to look after themselves, which caused them to require a woman to do it. They spoke in high, oxygen-thin pitches when they got excited or angry, yet expected everyone to be amazed at how butch they were (not that I care if a guy’s “butch” or not, but you’d think if it’s his central identity he’d at least learn to talk the talk?). And don’t forget the violence. Every once in a while, White Straight Man would beat up someone of color or a gay man. We all knew he was often abusive to his family, physically or emotionally - he often bragged in the 80’s about hiding assets so his ex-wife hag and no-longer-cute kids couldn’t get any support, which freed him up to spend all his money on his new hot wife and their new hot kids. (I marvel that my generation hasn’t produced a big crop of serial killers.)

“Sigh,” my girlfriends started saying in our teenage years. “Isn’t he awesome? He was even nice to me on our date!”

Ugh! They had to be kidding - only they weren’t. And if that’s what girls thought, then women were loathsome, too. That was the beginning of my misanthropy. But not the end. More on this in a minute.

I just couldn’t bring myself to be impressed by the accomplishments of creatures who, from birth, had an entire staff to cater to them. And when they did something nice or thoughtful… well, geez, who wouldn’t be nice if they didn’t have to do anything for themselves?

The only guys I counted as friends were either not white or white boys from “dysfunctional families” who didn’t have women catering to their every need. It wasn’t a conscious choice I made, but once I noticed the pattern the reasons were immediately apparent: I had overcome a fair amount of adversity in my life, coming from a long line of abusive freaks and relative poverty (and being female). How could I be impressed with someone who had overcome one or two other posh, spoiled little boys to achieve a position of authority? In an emergency situation, those were the very sort of boys and men who freaked out and deferred to me, instantly becoming my little army to order around.

Some women and girls who have that power are turned on by it. Not me. No, unfortunately, I wanted to date someone I could hope to respect someday. And what killed me was that I was supposed to respect these ones. The Emperor was naked, and everyone else was going on about his splendid new robes.

In my 20’s, I began to realize two important things. Remember the song “Airhead” by Thomas Dolby? No. Geez, you guys make me feel old (but smart). It’s about a woman who’s an airhead, and it’s all cute and funny and not as insulting as you might expect, and at the end it exhorts us to remember, “It was us made her that way.” Our culture advises people to conform to demographic stereotypes. We’re programmed from birth, and those of us (like me) who start to overcome that programming early only do so because something introduced us to the Wizard of Oz really early in life. White straight men were privileged, and because of that - sadly - very few of them would ever manage to impress me for reasons other than sex appeal. It wasn’t their fault they started out the race 30 yards from the finish line while everyone else had a 60 yard starting line and… not the best view in the pack. Just like it wasn’t women’s fault that life is so much easier if you can convince yourself to be a walking female stereotype.

It was everyone’s fault and no one’s. And now it’s everyone’s responsibility to fix. And no, we’re not there yet. We are still enthralled when our white boys find their toesies and start to count, and meanwhile our daughters and our little boys of color could build a functioning airplane in the backyard and a lot of parents and teachers just wouldn’t even notice. Or they’d order them to clean up that mess so we can get back to watching little Whitey try to master three letters of the alphabet, oh, isn’t he clever!

That’s the cultural lens I’m talking about - the one that makes us maximize the slightest accomplishment of white men and minimize the accomplishments of everyone else.

Why am I telling you this personal history that led to my current conclusions? Because some of you are more impressed by Warren Buffet or Bill Gates than you are by Martha Stewart or Oprah, and whether you like either of those women or not, I think you have to admit they accomplished more than either of those guys. I’m telling you because some of you think things are all equal now. And because some of you are white straight men who can’t understand why things are changing and why women are starting to expect “nice” rather than swoon in delirium when you dole a bit of it out.

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I talked about Spice Girls feminism a while ago; now I’ve decided to label another form of feminism that I disagree with. I’m calling it Narcissist Feminism.

Narcissist Feminists - let’s call them NF’s - are, so far in my experience, white heterosexual middle class women who experience feminism only as a friction occurring between themselves and white men. There are no other women on Planet NF. There are no people of color. No queer people. Just her - the woman the patriarchy pictures when it thinks “woman” - and the white men that stand between her and the top of the world.

As she scrambles to get to the top, she dislodges boulders that fall onto the heads of those who stand beneath her in the hierarchy.

Her only goal is to get to the top of the heap.

Let’s think about that for a minute. Because her feminism doesn’t involve anyone in the world but herself and her lot in life and her relationship to the men above her, she has internalized the methods and priorities of the patriarchy. She wants to have what men have, and she thinks that’s feminism. It’s not.

This is a standard phase for white western women on the path to feminism. We grow up in a culture that actively dissuades us from noticing what people “beneath” us in the hierarchy are going through. Naturally, our first beef with the world tends to be with those nasty white men that stand between us and the things we believe we can earn, given the opportunity to prove ourselves. So we know where the NF is coming from.

When I was 20, I was lucky enough to have an African-American friend who was double majoring in women’s studies and black studies. She introduced me to some fascinating thoughts on how there ought to be a black women’s studies course altogether, because you couldn’t just take some ideas from anti-racism and a few from feminism, mix them together in a binder and suddenly understand the fairly unique position African American women find themselves in.

Folks: I gave her ideas full and immediate credit, but it was a decade before I really began to understand what she meant. In the meantime she’d opened my eyes so I could look around and begin to see my own privilege better. And if black women needed something different from feminism than I did, that probably meant lesbians, poor women, and women of each other race out there had different needs. If I didn’t support them as well as myself, I was being a narcissist, not a feminist. I was making legitimate points about the meanness of white men, but I was only doing it to serve myself. Not women everywhere.

And certainly not men and women everywhere, and the improvement of the whole human race.

Here’s a checklist to know if you’re a real feminist (of any of the 15,000 legitimate different breeds), or just a white girl who’s noticed how her own life isn’t fair:

• When a lot of women Unlike You tell you you don’t get where they’re coming from, you say they’re all out to get you.
• …and you unquestionably think this attack on you is far more awful than anything they may have had to endure for, oh, ever.
• You just can’t figure it out what the problem is when people point out that the stuff you’re proposing only benefits white heterosexual girls of means.
• You get defensive when people suggest you aren’t as enlightened as Buddha, rather than welcoming the opportunity to learn and further your own deprogramming.
• You think you are Too Cool to be influenced by tons of childhood programming.
• When a lot of other feminists say something you disagree with, and you tell them how stupid they are, then they explain that, well, you’ve actually just framed it in an exclusively white, middle class, het scene and that’s not where they live, you refuse to back down from supporting your perspective as the only valid perspective for all women/feminists.
• You engage in counter-stereotyping of men whenever you feel like it (I’ve been guilty of this in the past myself).
• …without even explaining that your counter-stereotypes apply only to white men, because you keep forgetting men of color exist and experience a whole different intersection of privileges and anti-privileges than the men you want to be.

If this list sounds like you… you’ll probably need someone else to tell you, since you’re just Too Cool. But if someone tells you it sounds like you, take a deep breath and admit to yourself, “I can be wrong. I can be. It is possible.” And then listen.

Or stop calling yourself a feminist and admit you really just want the toys your brother had.

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