Men and Women Still Don't Get Each Other. But Aren't We Supposed to Try?

Some notes on my new gig at Playboy.

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

photo by J.M. Kettle

Some of you may have heard that I have recently started a new dream gig: for the next six months, I’m working with Playboy as Senior Editor. We’re working toward publishing a massive print issue in the fall, as well as revitalizing our digital cadence. I’ll still continue writing here, too. But with this project, I’m constantly asking myself “what do people want?” And in particular, “what do men want?”

If you comb through Playboy’s of the past, this general quest of ascertaining what people want is never entirely fulfilled. It’s a perpetual process. That’s all part of the appeal — upholding the mystery of desire, getting us close to what we want but never quite handing it to us. That’s the tease.

The struggle of understanding what anyone wants, even our own selves, is something that’s long been on my mind. That’s one of the broader arcs of my work, of this newsletter. A few things as of late have brought me to think about it further. One was a before and after post of a man, already quite fit before who in the after photo is shredded. With the photos was a poll, asking men and women separately which physique they preferred. Women who responded overwhelmingly preferred the before, whereas men preferred the after. “Why are women lying about this? like what's the actual cause?” one person asked, and a viral conversation emerged. Some speculated that women prefer the less-fit man because they’re insecure, because they’re not fit themselves, because they want to lessen the psychological competition of attractiveness in the sexual marketplace. But the more likely answer is just this: the women who responded aren’t lying at all. You just don’t understand what they want.

I don’t know if it’s worth taking the time to drill down the specifics of why women prefer the former — to generalize from my own perspective, women prefer a man who is strong and in shape and looks like they’d offer physical protection but could still enjoy going out to a restaurant or having a lazy day at home without being neurotic about it. A muscle-y man with less than 10 percent body fat does not deliver that impression. But again, this is my own perspective. And while I can attempt to speak for women, or even begin to theorize upon the perspective of men, I am only ever truly taking a guess. I am riding on instinct. That is the best anyone can do.

This new job has me spending a lot of time revisiting old issues of the magazine. Here again is another reminder of the persistence of this struggle. Throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, Playboy featured a monthly column titled “Men” written by Asa Baber, who passed in 2003. Occasionally, it was also paired with a column titled “Women,” written by various women. Each column discussed the problems facing men and women respectively, taking on a Gender War bend. Much of Baber’s work today is now considered a cornerstone of the “Men’s liberation” movement and the Manosphere. Some of his columns are a bit overly dramatic, even if sarcastic, such as one from April 1991 where he suggests men should have all their dates recorded via satellite surveillance and hire fingerprint analysts in order to prevent false claims of sexual assault. “This is the nineties,” he says. Others, though, represent genuine problems of masculinity that we’ve yet to contend with, such as a July 1987 column on America’s cultural unwillingness to care about the crisis of male suicide. While I’ll continue to argue that there is something uniquely insidious about the Gender War of the present and its mainstream digital growth, Baber’s work and many of the “Women” columns paired with it are a reminder that the complaints presented by the Gender War are not all that unique, nor are they superfluous. Yes, much of Baber’s work was a little too “women are the real sexists!” at times for my taste, but it nevertheless reflected a divide that we’ve yet to escape. Men and women don’t understand each other, and most of us won’t even try.

Paired with Baber’s essay on suicide was a “Women” column from Cynthia Heimel wherein she laments the sexlessness of her social scene in the context of AIDS anxiety. “We can easily forget that sex is the life force, something that motivates as profoundly, God’s biological trick to keep the race flourishing and not simply a filthy, sneaky practice… Sex is good. AIDS is bad,” she writes bluntly. “In place of hysteria, we need compassion and dignity. We need to work incessantly to find a cure, a vaccine. We need to stop blaming the victims of AIDS and instead mourn their tragedy. It’s the only way to set the life force back on track.”

Isn’t this something we all still need to be reminded of, too? HIV and AIDS are now finally not a death sentence, but we have found new ills — physical, spiritual — to distance ourselves from the life force, just the same. And with that we need a similar reminder: Sex is good. Sex is good!

This remains true even in a time when we still do not understand each other. The body is good. Meeting people is good. Romance is good. Fun is good. Women are good. Men are good. Attempting to understand each other, even if we fail, is good.

I am sure there are those who would argue that the real problem of our time is that we’ve tried to understand each other too much, and in doing so we’ve lost some of the ambiguity that holds our bonds together. Maybe so. My sense is that there is a balance at play. We’re at our best when we strive to know and love and connect with the knowledge that some answers will never be reached, that distance is part of the game. That’s what desire really is: striving to bridge an unclosable gap. Some have viewed the impossibility of that gap and given up on it entirely. But desire is also a momentum: without it, how else do we move forward?