Women want masculinity but can't admit it

How the gap between revealed and stated preferences created chaos in my life thanks to feminism in the cultural waters

Welcome, new readers. This is perhaps the most emotionally honest and controversial thing I’ve ever written on gender. I discuss what people are too afraid to say out loud, because living in alignment with reality is true freedom.

---

I. A marriage built on ideology

By thirty-three, I had been married and divorced. I met my ex-husband in college; some years passed before we started dating in 2012, and I was twenty-five. My psychological profile was that of a depressed, woke woman with low self-esteem and even lower career prospects. I don’t know that I consciously decided that pairing off would be the solution to all my problems, but it certainly felt like something I could control more than my job or social prospects in the aftermath of a global economic meltdown. Wokeism and mental illness go hand in hand, creating a feedback loop. The most miserable women you know are likely leftist.

Ethan (name changed) didn’t actually have better career prospects than I at the time. I’m not sure why I didn’t think I could get someone better; we both made $35k a year then. However, he came from wealthy parents: a social-climbing working-class mother who definitely coddled her three sons, and a corporate lawyer father who was enamored of Bernie Sanders, like Ethan and I were.

I got divorced in 2020, and it had been coming probably since the day we got married. I didn’t wait long enough before deciding to marry Ethan, though I was twenty-nine by the time we did. However, during that period, I had mistaken my political beliefs for values and saw myself and Ethan as roughly equal in ability and ambition.

We had both moved to Austin from Florida and doubled our respective incomes, but I still had more faith in him than in myself because he had landed a technical job, albeit a low-level one, while I was merely an engineering recruiter at Google. My recruiting software engineers made me acutely aware that, though I worked at a prestigious place, I was at the bottom of the totem pole.

I thought hypergamy was a made-up misogynistic concept. I was optimizing for equality of position at the time and didn’t recognize the ambition gap between Ethan and me. I was ambitious, but didn’t believe in myself. He wasn’t ambitious but had all the unearned confidence of a rich kid that life would work out for him. Not a white kid, but a rich kid.

Because my degree was in history (and a master’s to boot, making me look even worse), I figured I’d always have fewer career prospects than Ethan. Time, ambition, and distance proved that to be utterly false. By the way, women are aware of their position in the corporate hierarchy in white-collar America. The lower they are, the more likely they are to judge people based on moral capital, in addition to actual capital. They won’t ever admit that they’ll still try to find a higher-status man than themselves.

II. The decline: addiction, anxiety, and feminine entropy