Hi, sexy guy. Hooray, you’re just as cute in person as you were on Mesh! We exchanged some fun messages, and now we’re finally meeting at that neighborhood bar you or I suggested.
Nice to meet you. I’m a feminist. I believe in wage equality, paid maternity leave, and Black Widow’s right to sleep with or not sleep with however many Avengers as she chooses. Being a feminist is a large part of how I identify. But I still want you to pay for my drink. I know, I know, it’s an outdated representation of a reinforced gender binary.
Here are some outdated representations of a reinforced gender binary I promise you in exchange!
The First Date Level
Here’s what you’re guaranteed. Before a first date, I
- Put chemicals all over my face. My “date face” consists of foundation, concealer, eye shadow, eye liner, mascara, and lipstick. I spend about $150 on these chemicals a year, a little more than half the average rate.
- Wash my body with products that cost more than yours do and dress up in clothes that cost more than yours do. Cool button-up shirt! Oh, you bought it back in college? Literally nothing I owned in college would be considered fashionable now. No, not even the socks.
- Shave or pluck almost every inch of my body that grows hair other than the top of my head. I just pondered with happiness that our culture does not require me to shave my arms. For now.
- Trust you with my personal safety. I recently went on a date with a very odd man whose response to my disinterest was to caress me and lean in for a kiss. I have friends who have been roofied, groped, and raped by dates. This is not to malign all men, but please don’t take this trust for granted.
- Am (probably) younger than you. The minute I hit 30, my inbox shrank. Men in their 40s message me and I see that they don’t have their age range set for their own age. I always take that as a red flag and ask why. Men’s responses range from “I want to have kids” (as if male fertility didn’t also drop off) to “I like to have sex with younger women.”
- Give you massive bonus points if you make me laugh even once (all of my beloved men have been funny) while accepting that my sense of humor probably does nothing for you.
I don’t resent you for these things, sexy guy. These are part of the culture we both inhabit. Oooh- I’ll have a wheat beer. Yum. Hey, let me bend your ear a bit about the benefits you’ll get once you’re in a relationship with me.
Relationship Level
At the exclusive dating level, I will
- Have orgasmless sex with you many times. This won’t be all your fault. Women are complex and I will still definitely want to have sex with you, it’s just that you’re probably not going to get me there for at least a few weeks of trying. Please keep trying!
- Put myself at a much higher risk from STIs than you from this sex we’ll be having.
- Pay to adjust the hormones in my body to ensure that we won’t have kids. Count yourself lucky that I’ve tried just about every kind on the market and I’ve finally found the one that fucks with my body the least.
- Deal with my period (since we’re briefly on the subject, I’m so sorry) without any interruption in our daily lives, even though it’s a literal monthly trauma. This costs me around $120 a year.
Alright, I can see that you’re interested. Let me spin this into a bit of the hypothetical, while we’re still having a nice time.
Marriage Level
I know, I know, like I said, hypothetical. Here’s what you can reasonably expect from me if we get married. I will
- Take your name. This one’s pretty much guaranteed, unless you have a name like Fartblatt or something.
- Keep our house clean and beautiful. Please help, but I’m not counting on it.
- Consider having your child, in which case I will utterly destroy my body in order to give you the miracle of life. I won’t even make you try on a pregnancy suit.
- Probably be the one taking care of our little sprog.
- Statistically, make you much happier than I will be. Who knows, maybe not, but in general men benefit significantly more than women from the institution of marriage.
Look, these are all choices. Plenty of women, better feminists than I, don’t do any of these things. I know I don’t need to wear makeup or sexy clothes or laugh at your jokes so earnestly or pluck the blond hairs that grow over my lips. But you contacted me because that’s the person I present on my dating profile, and here I am. If I have to pull out my wallet right now, it’s not a deal breaker. You’re educated, handsome and single. I ain’t running from that. I can afford to pay for this wheat beer. I will, if there’s a second date, and I’ll buy you one too! But if you don’t reach for the check tonight you will be telling me tacitly that you reject the paradigm we’re a part of and I’ve done a lot of work this evening to present the gendered romantic signals you expect from me.
So please, for this first date, just buy my drink.
Cheers!
9 Comments
Leave a commentNo, you can still buy your own drink. Unless you want me to go into a boring list of reasons as to why you owe me a blowjob after dinner.
Of course I can buy my own drink- and it wouldn’t be for dinner, because I don’t do dinner on a first date. You sound like a gem of a human being! Since I always insist upon paying when the date is clearly a nut job, I trust I wouldn’t need to hear your list.
Interesting article. I definitely understand what you’re saying but this only feeds into the PR problem that the word “feminism” has, no?
The idea behind feminism is about equality but this article is written in such a way that I’m supposed to assume that your struggle or process is greater than mine so, therefore, I should buy your “drink”. How is that fair? You assume too much about my shirt, my living situation, the amount of dates I’ve been on in the last week, my past experiences with women etc etc.
Everyone assumes too much about everyone else. We draw our own conclusions and just go from there. We’re often wrong and we’re often unfair to each other. But what you’re asking here is for men to consider the other side of the coin but you won’t do the same for us.
I don’t get that. We’ve become too binary in our debates for something like this to fly.
Hi Maurice,
Thanks for reading, and thanks for replying respectfully.
I totally get what you’re saying. Feminism does have a PR problem, and is a very loaded concept. That’s a part of what I struggle against as a feminist millennial. I really resonated with Norah Vincent’s comments in a recent interview in which she said that she feels alienated from the queer rights movement because those people can be very dogmatic. Being gay means you have to be X. I feel like the feminist movement can be like that, too. Being a feminist means you have to be like X. If you don’t buy into every single thing, you’re not a feminist. By that definition we cut off a lot of ourselves.
I see what you’re saying about assumptions. I do assume that the men I meet spend less time and money on their appearance and on the effort of going to a date than I do, but that’s an assumption based on fact (I mean, I spent hours gathering those links, not for nothing) and my own experience as someone who goes no many dates.
It’s not a matter of you or any man OWING me a drink, it’s a matter of the process of buying a drink as being a symbol and signal just like the makeup I put on, the dress I wear, and all of the other things I listed. I know it sucks to be told that it’s a lot more effort coming to a date as a woman, but it just is. Like I said here and elsewhere, there are women who don’t put the mountain of work into that preparation, but they aren’t me and that isn’t how I market myself on dating sites.
If you feel strongly about this, please consider writing a response post and I would be more than happy to link to it. I’m not claiming that my perspective is the only one or even the correct one, but I believe in it and, as I’ve seen from the vast majority of responses that I’ve gotten to this (on Facebook) it’s something that really resonates with a lot of women.
Thanks again for being polite.
A friend just sent me this link, because a “feminist” friend of him was trying to explain him why he should always pay for her things… (obviously is not what it is written here).
Anyways, what I read is that you are not a feminist, you only call yourself that… as you are accepting some machist conducts in the future in exchange of a free beer..
Imagine the situation, we are married 5 years… and I tell you! Time to clean the house lady!!! I already did the bed, so you can clean all the rest of the house! And don´t complain, remember I invited you to the first beer!!!! jajaja. For me it sounds really funny, but is what you are saying in your post… This is not feminism, this is machism.
Also if I were using your same way of thinking you would have to buy me at least 2 beer! You put your period as a con but you forget that you can have children and I don´t!!! Come on, you are a walking miracle that can create live inside your own body! The only thing that can go out of a man body are ugly dirty things!!!
That should cost as a +500pts for buying me a beer in your point system!
Another example! Imagine you date a man that drives you to the date in a Ferrari, uses expensive clothes, expensive cologne, a rolex… that means that according to your “point” system you should buy him the first drink right? Or that doesn´t work this way?
A lot of these are decisions. And I wish this focused on that instead of platforming off of feminism and bringing in all the in-group out-group polarizing bull that can. In short, I guess I wish this article was called “I’m an assertive woman and this is how i choose to respect myself but I’d still love it if you bought my drink!”
Fewer words’d be better, maybe, but the idea’s the same :-O
Buuuut I am a feminist – and I still want a dude to buy my drink! This isn’t platforming off of feminism, it’s reflective of the fact that I am a feminist. This doesn’t have anything to do with how assertive I am or am not.
Thank you for sharing, I am not interested in dating anyone like you, but wish you the best of luck, feminist. Personally it would never occur to me not to pay the bill, but then I expect a bit more from you than you are willing to give no matter what “relationship level” I am signing up for. (Is there are platinum plan?)
There is, but you can’t afford it.