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What Ezra Klein said

When your whole romantic identity — when your gender identity, “the manhood thing” — is based on your ability to buy expensive dinners for the girlfriend you never see, something has gone terribly wrong. And it’s gone terribly wrong for you.

Read the quote in context here.

The topic was some erstwhile investment banker in the D.C. area who’s no longer high-rolling and therefore evidently no longer feels worthy and therefore no longer feels attractive.

He’s been seeing someone in New York City and where he once routinely flew up to visit her he now takes the legendary $5 Chinese bus up to visit her when he can afford it.

Klein says “the article is less funny than sad, and it gets to that line that those horrible, man-hating feminists always use: The patriarchy sucks for guys, too.”

And it’s written all over the guy himself — according to the WaPo article Klein quotes

“It’s definitely putting stress on our relationship,” he said recently, sitting in an Old Town cafe. “It comes back to this whole manhood thing. Like, can you be the provider, not just for yourself but for others?”

Source

You see that effect in a lot of guys: not just thinking that being “worthy” is the key to “getting” women but actually taking themselves out of consideration when they don’t see themselves as worthy enough to “deserve” a partner. Putting yourself in because you think money makes you attractive, and taking yourself out because you think not having it makes you unattractive, is kind of leaving, you know, actual women’s opinions about whether or not they think you’re attractive out of the equation. Which is pretty self-destructive but also awfully, well, patriarchal.

I don’t think there’s a patriarchy in the “Elders of Zion / Trilateral Commission” conspiracy sense where there are a bunch of guys all running a giant scam and if we could just get to them (and their minions, of course, all conspiracies have minions, right?) the whole thing would go away.

But I do think there’s large, interlinked set of behaviors and, especially, interpretations that amount to the same thing… only because there’s no central office it’s harder to subvert.

Klein’s subject certainly sounds caught up in all that. And yeah, to that extent patriarchy really is hurting him. It’s self-inflicted hurt but still hurt.

On the other hand consider his girlfriend who, since she’s still seeing him even though he rides the bus, must have, you know, loved him or something even though he thought he’d just bought her with all that money. And now that he doesn’t have money? They’re still together right? Sort of. Maybe. But because he feels all unmanned there’s all this stress on their relationship.

She’s doubly screwed in the sense that here this guy was pulling down what sounds like major bucks (or at least major for one’s mid-20s) and since he squandered it on show, now that flush times are over he not only won’t see her as often as perhaps either of them would like to see each other, he can’t.

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Semi-related aside: There’s a larger point to this, by the way, that I might need to wrestle with a bit. I’m… pretty sure most women don’t see men mostly as “walking wallets” but that’s how a lot of men are indoctrinated to think women see them. I’m similarly sure most men don’t see women mainly as “life support for pussies” but that’s how women are indoctrinated to think men see them. Not sure I have anything else to say about that right now but I think a lot of the resulting assumptions interfere with both inter-gender communication and personal decision making.