On the desperation of female neediness

a response to James Harris

James Harris from Stiff Upper Quip wrote a post about the helpless hornyness inherent in being a man, and I want to add my two cents on the female flipside of the coin. James and I have a lot in common on the surface. We both write about politics and culture and are based in London. He is an accomplished stand-up comedian. I have recently started dabbling in it. When I dig deeper into his writing, I often hear my own voice, my own complaints, served in a self-deprecating, vulnerable way that is very familiar to me. In his latest post, he describes the tribulations men go through in the pursuit of beautiful women:

Still, I think some women don’t really understand that, for men who are still out and about looking for women, it’s all rather a lot of work. There’s a slight Acme Corporation quality to being a single straight bloke, going out there, getting knocked back and then coming back again and again. I’d never reveal the number of women I went to bed with, but I would like to put on the record – and this is not, to be clear, to indicate that it was an enormous number – that it was an awful lot of effort.

Anyway, my work is now done. The beautiful women haven’t stopped though. Indeed, they seem to be making more and more of them. And what am I to do with this information? When I pass a beautiful woman on the street these days my attitude suddenly becomes almost parodically rabbinical, sort of crying ‘Oh God, why are you testing me?’ and ‘What am I to do with this knowledge, Yahweh!?’ It is difficult to communicate the deep frustrated powerlessness a married man feels in the presence of a beautiful woman as he recedes into a position of advanced harmlessness. As, to be clear, he should.

James describes a desire for female beauty that I am well acquainted with. It reminds me of a friend asking me once what it feels like to be female, young and pretty (for 7 more months when I will be turning 30 and hitting the wall). It feels like this: You slog for hours to get the bare minimum. I am offered the world just for showing up. Does that sound obnoxious? It shouldn’t be. The kindest thing good-looking people can do for the plain and the ugly is not to pretend they don’t experience pretty privilege. I have experienced both sides of the equation and can tell you the difference is hard to miss. So I accept there is power in being a beautiful woman.

James goes on to describe how men are now surrounded by women who become more and more beautiful in a culture that is highly sexualised but without any tangible flirting allowed. I agree with that too. Millennial men inundate my DMs and those of my female friends with lustful fantasies that will never materialise. I dated a 42-year-old man who, halfway through my political rant on our first date, grabbed me by the neck like a kitten and kissed me. I loved it, by the way.

The alternative reality to male hornyness, in my opinion, is female neediness. Where men want sex, women want romance. Men want adventure; women want commitment. It is all on a spectrum, and there are exceptions to the rule, but that’s not my experience, and neither is James’s.

Do you know what it’s like to be a woman who wants a relationship but can’t get one? It is incredibly common and yet hardly acknowledged. Most women I know are well-presented, successful, pleasant, if a little frigid, and looking for a relationship that never seems to arrive. Yet, we are being bombarded by articles written by 30-40-year-old women reassuring the world (themselves?) that being permanently single is fine, actually. For the last few years, the Times has taken it upon itself to be a megaphone for commitmentphobes who want to make singledom glamorous. Their latest attempt had the title: ‘We are the Perma-Singles- eligible, sexy and unattached’. They may well be sexy and unattached, but I am not sure they are eligible if they explicitly want to remain alone. I will dissect the trend in another piece, but for the sake of argument here, I believe there are women who are cool with being single, but they don’t write dating columns.

If I had an avocado toast for every time a female friend told me how much she loves dating around, I would be on the housing ladder by now! It’s a regular conversation, especially with women who are professionally successful and secure in other ways. They will tell me about their escapades with this or that man and will reassure me that all they want is fun, and they definitely don’t care if it leads to something. The other women in the group will nod in agreement and smile reassuringly. Not me. I was raised by an emotionally reactive mother, so when it comes to picking up on other people’s emotions, I am like a predator in the jungle. I can see the increased moisture in their eye socket and the exaggerated curve of their smiles. These women suffer from what I call ‘sexual revolution Stockholm syndrome’ where because they have no choice but to date casually, they have convinced themselves they are having sex without commitment by choice.

This is especially true for women with well-paid, high-flying careers because the ego-bruising of failing to achieve your personal life goals stings so much more when you have mastered control of all the other aspects of your life.

Some of the neediest women I know will repeatedly try to convince you they don’t need a man. On the other side of the coin, I would say horny men will say they want to get laid, but God forbid they move as much as a finger to do what it takes to achieve that (go on a date, get rejected and try again, get to know someone etc.).

On the other hand, I have no such problem. The vulnerability as a brand is a millennial fad I have swallowed hook, line, and sinker. I admit to my neediness openly. I love men. I would love to have a boyfriend. I hope I fall in love and get married to one man and stay with him till I die. God bless my romantic soul. I hope He is not reading this, laughing and dusting a shelf with my name on it.

I could have sex like a gay man if I wanted to. James picks up on that, which I often highlight, too. Gay men give us a glimpse into what the straight sexual market would be like if straight men had their way. Lots and lots of casual sex, commitment sometimes, but also liberal open relationships, orgies etc. But this is not what women want. Gay men go to places where they have sex with men they have never met before and will never meet again and name them ‘heaven’. That’s a straight woman’s hell.

Most women don’t want easier sex; they want romance. A night that ends with me in bed with a stranger, even if a gorgeous one, is universes less desirable than a night that ends with me alone, re-living a great chase in my head.

Like male hornyness, female neediness is also glossed over. All these articles advising women not to disregard their personal lives for their careers are fantasies that only 0.000001% of the global population lives in, and they are likely all in London and New York City. The vast majority of women I know will find the time to go for a date or text a man even if they are working at McKinsey by day, running their local soup kitchen by night, producing their own podcast during the weekend and taking care of a needy poodle in the breaths in between.

I wish this were a made-up scenario, but these women legit exist, and many of them would love to receive even the bare minimum of attention and affection from men who do 1/5 of what they do on the daily. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Men as a species are not used to competing with women - though I personally find it hot when a man either outsmarts me or is humble in the presence of my superior achievements in my professional field (which, to be fair, is well suited for such childish flirtations, I am a politico/policy wonk). I imagine for many men, the prospect of being sexually rejected by a woman whom they could one day meet on the other side of the interviewing table is terrifying.

Does it make me a LibFem to want a man to say this to me

But that sounds like a cope. These losers don’t want to date us because our paychecks are fatter!!! Hur hur !! It feels more realistic that men are as terrified of female emotionality as women are of male hornyness. The expectation that a woman’s needs will swallow you whole if you go on a date and sleep with her. Your phone will be buzzing with a stream of consciousness texts while your social circle is shaming you for being a fuckboy for lacking the emotional bandwidth to feel the need to text a girl good morning and goodnight and all the meals and snacks in between. The female equivalent is knowing not to find yourself alone with a guy because getting out of that is as messy as a man trying to wiggle his way out of commitment with a fuck buddy. In both cases, we are afraid of what we believe to be the opposite sex’s biological imperative. For the most part, we are frankly right. Men will want to have sex without attachment; women will want to attach after sex.

The real black pill is to realise that there are more women than men who are both suitable and willing to get married and have kids. Recently, while chatting to female friends, they claimed that it is men, in fact, who need women rather than the other way around because studies have shown that after divorce, most men are likely to remarry, unlike women, and that levels of happiness in single females in middle age are far higher than that of men. They also made the argument that men rely on their female partners as their sole emotional support, whereas women get emotional validation from multiple places, their friends and family first and foremost. Again, that may well be the case, but it does not rebut the easily observable reality that far more women are looking for stable long-term relationships than men are willing to provide them.

In a previous piece, James wrote about how it is more socially acceptable for women to express sexual desire publicly than it is for men. That’s true, but admitting to emotional neediness as a woman is still seen as pathetic. You are letting down the cause if you say you need a man. Perhaps we are wary of other people’s desires and needs, emotional, sexual or otherwise, because they remind us of our own inherent helplessness.

This is the crux of human experience: To want and to not get. We are horrified by the naive, the stupid, and the young, who openly express what we all feel but have learnt to repress, like the village fool who becomes hysterical when she realises what we’ve all long understood. Winter is coming, the crops are dead, we are slouching towards starvation, and no one will save us. No wonder they used to burn their witches. Now we cancel them.

James acknowledges that there is more to life than sex, of course, and I know there is more to life than love. But like a baby monkey, I’d rather starve and cling to the warm embrace of the cloth mother than survive by sucking on a barbed wire tit. James is now happily partnered up and has made his peace with being monogamous. He is done looking for sex. I will never tire of looking for love. If the years pass me by and my last egg dies along with my hopes of having my own family I won’t come to terms with that reality. I will take my bitterness to my grave and use my dying breath to call all the men who could have loved me but didn’t and tell them I hope I meet them in hell.

Damn you, I ll say.

You wanted to fuck me, I wanted you to love me.

As a barren old lady, I will carry a photo of my 29-year-old self with me everywhere I go. When people ask who I am spending Christmas with and why is it just my male cat, I will tell them look, this is what I looked like when I gave up. I read so many articles claiming my demographic has high standards and that any man would be lucky to have me I went mad. I swear, I offered to date them all; The poor, the short, the ugly; the fat; the dull; the left wing, the right wing, the wrong wing; the bisexuals; the asexuals; the polyamorous¹.

I have wanted many things, I will tell my former lovers when I meet them in hell, and got most of them because they were things I could work for or control; a fulfilling career, a hot body, loyal friends.

But it’s not in a woman’s gift to compel a man to love her, and so, I die alone, childless and now barren. I hope you are all happy. Taking the biological discrepancy to its logical end, men remain horny, and women remain alone.

1. I’d rather re-knit my own hymen without anesthetic than join a man’s harem, thanks.