Newsflash: Men and Women Suck at Equal Rates
And the messages we get from society make us all suck a little more
Do men suck?
Ask a woman who has been inappropriately propositioned by one too many men on dating apps, a woman who has been mansplained to one too many times in the conference room, a woman who has made one too many grocery lists for her husband, and you’ll likely get some vigorous nods.
Do women suck?
Ask a man who has been nagged at one too many times by his wife, a man who has been told one too many times that he’s not doing enough around the house or he’s not doing it right, a man who has been snubbed by one too many women for reasons he doesn’t understand, and you’ll likely get some vigorous nods.
Friends, I have some news for you — both claims are true, and neither claim is true. Men don’t universally suck. Women don’t universally suck. Men and women suck at equal rates.
I challenge you to write out a list of 50 people you know, or have ever known, and then circle every person on that list who really sucks. I’m willing to bet good money that the gender breakdown will be pretty even.
We don’t even have to write such an extensive list. All we really have to do is think about the various groups of people in our lives — classmates, coworkers, neighbors, or family members. I myself have done my share of complaining about male bosses, but when I think about the bosses I’ve had who really, truly sucked, it comes down to two women and two men.
Some of this suckiness is arguably innate. We all know people who were, perhaps, just born sucking. There’s the nurture angle, too — people who were raised to suck from an early age. Suckiness is also highly subjective. All of us have people in our lives we can’t stand, but whom other people can at least tolerate, if not befriend.
For all these reasons, you’d be hard-pressed to find scientific studies about suckiness rates, particularly suckiness rates broken down by gender. I wanted to research this, but I couldn’t even figure out what to ask Google.
I don’t really need a scientific study, though. When it comes to sucking, I’m quite confident that neither gender can claim superiority.
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When we claim that “men suck” or “women suck,” what we’re really reacting to are sucky socialized behaviors the patriarchy has taught us all.
I’ll admit, it took me a while to understand this. There was a time when I did believe in the biological superiority of women, but only in the context of certain tasks — tasks like opening the refrigerator and being able to figure out what to put on a grocery list, or arranging daycare tours, or understanding when children need new socks.
I convinced myself that the disproportionate amount of invisible and household labor I was taking on — that every other working mother I knew was taking on — was simply attributable to the fact that men innately sucked at it.
My intention was less to insult men than it was to feel better about the domestic imbalances that plague so many heterosexual marriages. It wasn’t so much a “fuck you” as a resigned “what can you do.”
Eventually, I came to realize that there is absolutely nothing biologically innate about a human being’s ability to manage sock purchases. That’s when my “what can you do” evolved into “fuck you.” That’s when I became the angry feminist. Men don’t suck by default, I came to believe; rather, they actively suck. They choose to be domestically incompetent. They suck not because they can’t help it, but because they can’t be bothered.
And yet, the more I told myself this story, the more I felt myself evolving into the female stereotypes so commonly portrayed by men — the emotionally volatile, obsessively detail-oriented, generally embittered nag. The woman who martyrs herself and then complains about it.
This is the wife that stand-up comedians love to imitate in that sing-song falsetto voice. The wife that so many men point to when they claim that women suck. The wife that every woman swears she won’t become, until one day she wakes up and realizes she checks all the boxes.
The realization often hits her this way: Holy shit. I’ve turned into my mother.
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Here’s the thing: men and women often do end up sucking in the ways that match the accusations lobbed by the other gender. But when it comes to gendered sucking, there is nothing inherently innate, hopelessly entrenched, or individually subjective about it.
Even in the 21st century, we still live in a system that tells us men are naturally better at running companies and women are naturally better at running homes. That men are naturally aggressive and women are naturally nurturing. That men are naturally logical and women are naturally emotional.
The system may not relay these messages in the same straightforward terms that it used to, but our power structures, media portrayals, and divisions of labor still send them loud and clear.
All this nonsense about what men and women “naturally” are or aren’t falls apart just as quickly as claims of men inherently sucking any more than women, or vice versa. We are all, to some extent, square pegs in round holes, convinced that we’re innately good (or bad) at things we’ve been socialized to be good (or bad) at.
For instance, I’m really good at strategic thinking. I really suck at execution. But for years, I told myself I was naturally better than men at managing details and multitasking.
When we tell ourselves these completely unfounded stories about what men and women are naturally good at — stories, of course, perpetuated over centuries to justify a social system that relegates women to the home — we set ourselves up for unproductive behaviors. While these behaviors manifest in a variety of settings, they are particularly salient in romantic heterosexual relationships.
At worst, such behaviors culminate in violence and abuse, which continues as long as men believe they are justified and women believe they can’t talk about it. At best, these behaviors lead to simmering resentments that nibble quietly away at foundations of love and trust.
Men don’t benefit from women sucking. Women don’t benefit from men sucking. Maybe it’s fun to complain or commiserate from time to time, but if we could all step back and see these behaviors for what they are, perhaps we could actually find some common ground.
All genders hail from the same planet, despite frequent claims to the contrary. Some of us really suck, some of us occasionally suck. And if we felt empowered to challenge gender norms and lean into our own unique strengths, all of us could suck a little less.
What I’m reading this week:
- — As a parent who speaks very negatively about screens, this interview challenged me to think (and talk) about screen time differently.
I’ll Share a Life But Not a Bed by Bethany Sarazen via
— A beautiful reminder that “conventional” marital arrangements don’t work for all of us. In fact, I’d venture to claim that they don’t work for most of us.Bodies by
— An eloquent reflection on how we connect, or fail to connect, with our bodies as we age.