Decentering men

The alleged glory days of a woman align with the tautness of her skin and the scrawniness of her frame. Forbidden aging strips her of civic value, rendering her a pitiful soul clinging tragically to memories of youthful femininity. Yet, in the age of her physical zenith, she was not secure in her body’s value until a man affirmed it. Even at the height of youth, she was not made whole until a man validated her existence with his attention.

The patriarchy has a vested interest in binding a woman’s self-perception to her relationship with men. Life is not fulfilling until a faceless future husband validates her ability to be loved. An undesired, unloved woman is a pitied creature among the world’s worst bottom-feeders, lamenting her unnatural existence until the bitter, lonely end. With the inability to obtain male approval, she is a lost cause and the punchline of Thanksgiving dinner. That’s cousin Becky — never could quite pin a man down, but we love her anyway. 

Yet, Becky has never considered, questioned or devalued her intrinsic worth for the sake of male approval. She has never hinged her prospective success on the acceptance of a nameless male hero. Becky is the real winner. 

Decentering men is an act of catastrophic uprooting. It is not merely memeable misandry online, driven by ghosting or disappointing romantic partners. Young women yearn for the one to alleviate their insecurities, reconciling their flawed being. A woman who manages to be wholly seen and loved by a man despite her deviations from perfection is hailed as lucky.

Male validation, although disposable and trivial, can quickly become a necessity in a young woman’s mind. They have been spoon fed the idea that they need a man to complete them. Without it, there is a vacancy in their life.

Older women may scoff at the extravagant nature of this argument, yet they would question their own mothering capabilities if their daughters lived a single life. Perpetual forces work against young women’s capacity to see themselves outside of a male-dominated universe. They rest a fraction of their life story on a man waiting in the wings. Feminist movements have long addressed this issue by exploring various methods of female reclamation. 

If we look back in history,  the most drastic normative theories are political lesbianism and absolute separatism. The 1960s marked the advent of Second Wave Feminism in America. Within this movement, there were two adverse camps: separatists and assimilationists. Assimilationist thinkers, such as Gloria Steinem, pushed women to adopt the harsh, militant rhetoric of their male counterparts to establish themselves in a capitalist nation. Radical feminists like Ti-Grace Atkinson, however, vied for an absolute untethering of women from the patriarchal sphere, arguing that collective political detachment was the sole theoretical means for female autonomy. 

Atkinson asserted that women’s interconnected domesticity with men romanticized a lifetime of subservience as true love. In order for women to achieve total liberation, they would need to take to lesbianism as a political stance. While women could maintain trivial male relationships for transactional purposes, Atkinson maintained that absolute separatism was the sole solution. However, she acknowledged that the plausibility of mass separatism was nonexistent.

The pillars of radical feminist separatism resurfaced in South Korea in the 2010s, where it has a wealth of tangible participants. The South Korean Feminist 4B Movement is at its present pinnacle. “B” is a shorthand for “no” in Korean, with the movement’s four pillars being no sex with men, no dating men, no marrying men and no children with men. Women are slackening their grip on corporeal rules by shaving their heads, throwing away their beauty products and sitting complacently in perceived ugliness. 

Often, when women shave their heads or neglect their physicality, people make accusations of mental disturbance. They cannot imagine a woman sanely and voluntarily opting out of the soulless female race for beauty queen. 

But many women still pluck, cinch and mold their bodies into inhuman renditions of the ideal sex object. Young women want to emit no smell, have no body hair and have no grays that may ward off their awaiting soulmate. Any signifier of personhood through natural odor, body hair or appetite is a husband repellent. Women are marketed to be sexy concepts, getting Brazilian waxings, hair extensions and plastic surgery. They wholeheartedly internalize the market pressures to emulate femininity, whittling their own self-perception down to a two-dimensional ideal. When young women see themselves as manic pixie dream girl concepts, rather than productive, nuanced members of society, absolute separatism starts to look utopian.

Decentering men to a 4B movement extent will never be a universal consensus —women in the world will not collectively shed their locks and stick it to the man. 

Too often, women mistake decentering men for sardonic misandry online, with viral TikToks of women claiming to “think like a man” or juggle multiple men at once. When a guy leaves them, they remain unaffected and wield their power. Women are declaring themselves absolutely unattached, foiling the male nightmare: an overly clingy girlfriend. Their broadcasted apathy is a ploy to appear nonchalant toward societally-embedded male dynamics. But an earnest, apathetic woman would not neurotically express their disregard towards men. Reiterating the same tired point magnifies their guttural fixation on men. Repetitively speaking poorly about men is recentering them. 

Some women are wary of decentering men; it strips them of fairy-tale naivety, forcing them to grasp the brutal internalized misogyny that plagues them and, in doing so, discover who they truly are. If they never considered the male gaze, who would they be? For those who are perceived as pretty girls and reap the jewels of male admiration, they would never sacrifice the dopamine of male validation for authentic liberation. But once their skin sags, the men may quit their fawning, and they will look down and loathe themselves. 

A woman’s energy is wasted in the pursuit of being an unattainable fantasy — a woman who can be wholly loved. Without the patriarchy’s constraints, women could create identities of their own independent of male approval.

Isabella Ehring is an Opinion Intern for the fall 2024 quarter. She can be reached at iehring@uci.edu.

Edited by Zahira Vasquez and Ben De Guzman

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