Play Dumb or Play Alone?

the drama of being a woman who knows too much

In honor of mother’s day, we’re posting this fabulous essay on dating, femininity, and maternity by the great

Bridget Ruffing

.

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Mana Afsari

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@revolvingstyle

My single friends and I often refer to our ongoing attempts to find love on the apps as being “in the trenches.”

“It’s rough out there,” we commiserate in light-hearted tones, laughing until we strike the cold metal lining of our frustration. The laughter soon gives way to unsettled silence as we ask ourselves, once again, what we are doing wrong, why it is all so difficult.

It is, indeed, rough out here. Dating in our age seems to be defined by Red Pill content that encourages men to view themselves as achievement machines and to view women as trophies to gather and defile; Trad Life propaganda that urges women to trade their own desires for a ‘gram-ready, cookie-cutter ideal of milkmaid dresses and sourdough; AI-generated revenge porn; extreme political polarization, and more. We’re all flooded with information and stimulation, which, respectively, work like magic at keeping women and men apart.

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The Woman’s drama of knowing too much

Women already know too much. We’re biologically and sociologically hardwired to lose our innocence earlier in life than boys. Once that happens, our paranoia doesn’t need encouragement, so having endless access to Instagram psychologists and algorithms that–if your swiping habits are like mine–favor “I choose the bear” posts and “run like a girl” montages, makes celibacy look more tempting all the time. The masculinity that filters through our screens often is quite toxic–it’s resentful, it’s obtuse, it’s cringe, but the kind of cringe you’re scared to laugh at and equally scared to pity, lest you become a victim of unprompted violence or undesired advances.

We see this kind of masculinity plastered everywhere, and we wonder if it’s all just algorithmic echo chambering, or if it has everything to do with this watershed moment in history, in which women anywhere, everywhere, can tell their stories and are encouraged to take words like trauma seriously, to take what has happened to themselves and their mothers seriously. This new frontier of knowledge is dizzying and often terrifying. Who should we trust? Only ‘good’ men? Only women? Perhaps only ourselves? While skepticism regarding the intentions of others can be necessary for a woman’s survival at times, it can also bar her from the freedom, support, love, and self-actualization that only occur in the context of deep relationships.

Men, on the other hand, find purpose in the act of coming to know. Civilizations rise and fall, art and literature and politics deepen in complexity and richness around the instinctual striving of men to learn, to build, to strike out into the unknown and conquer it. But, if millenia of collective myth and religion are to be believed, the journey of the soul does not stop at compartmentalizing, calculating, and conquering. There are interior rubicons to cross, just as there are relational ones. A man must make peace with himself, must learn to look beyond the limited perspective of his ego, must do the work required to accept what it means to be mortal, to be human, to be a touch divine, and to accept what is mortal and human and divine in women.

This is not a small task, and it cannot be broken down into a six-week coaching membership or an e-book. It’s arduous, confusing work, and it’s particularly easy in this day and age to be led away from the path and submerged in an ocean of searchable, customizable porn and podcasts. When so much pleasure and numbness are so readily available, why would any man want to go on such a journey? Why would any man bother risking his self-esteem by stretching and growing and acting the fool getting to know a woman who, his Red-Pill advisors tell him, only wants his money? Porn is easy, it’s comfortable, it’s risk-free. When he feels his soul crying out a bit too loudly, he can always hit the gym, hit a bong, or take a cold plunge.

This one facet of the intellectual and spiritual divide that has always existed between men and women has been cast as the lead actor in the current zeitgeist. Speaking from my own experience, it’s been hard to find a man I can have a genuine, challenging, intellectual conversation with. I find myself on dates with men who would rather watch Family Guy than pick up a book, who are so unsure of what they are doing that they hesitate when the check comes. I spend these dates talking about golf, guitars and cars, because that’s what they are interested in, even though I only know about these hobbies through proximity to my brothers and father. The entire time, I am picking up on red flags that I can’t ignore, or perfectly innocent behaviors that I worry are actually more red flags in disguise.

These dates send me into an existential spiral. What am I supposed to do? Should I wait—potentially forever—for a man who acknowledges and respects my intelligence and can also meet me on the same plane of contemplation? Or should I do what countless women have historically done, and marry someone who is not interested in me for my intelligence and strength? Should I play games of flattery and sexual politics to ensure a future of safety and comfort for myself and my future children? Should I play dumb? Or should I play alone?

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“The Man is the Head, the Woman is the Neck”

In the 2002 rom-com, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Tula’s mother Maria explains how women who choose to ‘play dumb’ find consolation in their marriages: “The man is the head, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn the head any way she wants.” By calling the man the “head,”, Maria means the head of the household, of course; an age-old family structure that went unquestioned by many women of her generation. This dynamic of man-as-head and woman-as-neck suggests that women who get their way in traditional marriages do so by means of a certain Machiavellian craftiness that lurks beneath a submissive facade. In this power structure, the woman possesses and wields a superior intelligence, yet, as the neck, she never rises above her place beneath the head. Granted that the man in such a marriage is just as content with his place as the less-intelligent but more-respected figurehead as the woman is with her role as the neck, both may carry on comfortably enough. But is it really in the best—i.e., eternal—interest of both man and wife to simply ‘carry on’?

Literature and art critic Camile Paglia might argue that it is, watching woman’s connection to nature’s cycles of birth and death with a wary eye. In Sexual Personae, Paglia writes: “Woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape from natural cycle, since she is that cycle. Her sexual maturity means marriage to the moon, waxing and waning in lunar phases. Moon, month, menses: same word, same world. The ancients knew that woman is bound to nature’s calendar, an appointment she cannot refuse. The Greek pattern of free will to hybris to tragedy is a male drama, since woman has never been deluded (until recently) by the mirage of free will. She knows there is no free will, since she is not free. She has no choice but acceptance. Whether she desires motherhood or not, nature yokes her into the brute inflexible rhythm of procreative law.”

Men, in Paglia’s view, are free to chase transcendence, to pursue power and pleasure as the egoic head of the household, city, state, or empire, while women are disillusioned from puberty, infused with the knowledge that everything begins and ends with babies and blood. Women inherit a distinct understanding of nature and mortality that gives them an intellectual advantage over their male counterparts. But this knowledge is a double-edged sword: Women’s nature guarantees that they will never be free from the ceaseless demands of male desire and nature’s rhythms. They bleed from the inside and are coveted and laid claim to from the outside.

This capacity for carrying and birthing human life, and the attendant, unsolicited physical transformations it demands of women, can make for a painful, fearful existence. To maintain their sanity, women quickly learn that they must make peace with their lack of control over their bodies and the whims of the universe in which they have been appointed life-givers. They learn, much sooner than men, that they cannot afford to be squeamish or naive.

Women inherit a wisdom that men must make the hero’s journey to gain, but that wisdom entails an awareness of the bars of our cage: When making decisions, we can never completely avoid taking our potential fertility into consideration. The choice to remain single as a woman is no less fraught than the decision to marry, even in our progressive age. Physical safety, material comforts, and social prestige are far more accessible to the married woman than the unmarried one. But if a woman chooses to pursue marriage to a man, she must wade through many untried heroes who do not and will not understand her, who will happily live under the delusion of being the ‘head’ while she resorts to the manipulative tactics of the more intelligent but unrecognized ‘neck.’

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An order too tall?

Paglia, enamoured with fiery power struggles and sexual games that keep men and women obsessed with each other and at wit’s end, admits a certain fear and revulsion at women’s earthliness, while she idolizes the ruthless, voyeuristic industry of men. She writes, “menstrual blood is the stain, the birthmark of original sin, the filth that transcendental religion must wash from man. Is this identification merely phobic, merely misogynistic? Or is it possible there is something uncanny about menstrual blood, justifying its attachment to taboo?” In Paglia’s view, egalitarianism is a fantasy, and, “at some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts.” She views archetypes like the resentful femme fatale with the same combination of fear and attraction that a man does, and she revels in the Machiavellian hijinks that play out in the woman-as-neck, man-as-head farce.

Other thinkers, like the mythologist Joseph Campbell, take a less earth-bound view of the individual dramas of men and women. Life, for Campbell, is not simply a matter of carrying on, and love is about more than ‘wrestling with ghosts.’ Taking cues from mythology and folklore, Campbell frames life as a hero’s journey. No hero can complete his or her journey without surviving an encounter with the divine. The male hero’s challenge is to meet the goddess who is “incarnate in every woman.” But the hero must do more than simply wed and bed the goddess; he must recognize that he is dealing with a creature of superior intelligence, and conduct himself accordingly. He must prove himself more than the ‘head’ resting upon the machinations of the ‘neck’: he must become a god himself.

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow imitation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.

Is this a tall order? A man willing to overcome transient desires, to face and move beyond his own ghosts, so that he may overcome his terror of chthonian woman? Yes. But this is more than the work of romance. It’s the work of the soul, the pursuit of a different kind of transcendence than ‘the Greek pattern of free will to hybris to tragedy.’ It’s a work akin to that of a girl making peace with becoming a woman, a work of acceptance, of reverence, of coming to know, of understanding what it truly means to love and to be mortal.

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Heroes need goddesses

Yes, things would be easier if women just accepted the place made up for them by untested men, but that requires concession to the idea that women have inferior souls, ones that do not need to speak the language of exploration, courage, love, and honesty. By barring women from speaking this language, we bar men from completing their own hero’s journey, from meeting with the goddess and undergoing her trials. If we are not allowed to be goddesses, men are not allowed to be heroes, and everyone suffers an isolating suffocation of the soul. So, the answer to the question of whether it’s better to play dumb or play alone is delightfully nuanced. It’s not one or the other; rather, when we force ourselves and others to play dumb, we rule out any other options but playing alone. That is why the hero’s journey is so perilous and so rewarding; it requires courage and patience, and it cannot be completed without some sort of companion.

Even as I conclude this essay, I feel myself bristle under this Q.E.D., tied-with-a-ribbon optimism. I know, consciously, that men and women are not going to simply stop wanting each other. I know that I am not going to stop wanting a relationship altogether, and that’s a good thing. Right now, however, the idea of meeting a man I don’t have to play dumb for, don’t have to shrink myself for, feels laughably inconceivable, down to my bones. But maybe everyone's bones ache this way at times. Maybe I’ve just made the mistake of noticing the strain. That’s the madness of it all: the more I notice my experience, the more I wonder if anyone will ever understand it, the better I comprehend that everyone wonders the same thing. We’re all so similar in our introspection, our discomfort, our distrust. So, whether or not I ever download another dating app again, I will hold onto that thought, and I’ll keep my head up, eyes peeled for a fellow traveler.