9. Where Does a Man End and a Woman Begin?

From emotional protectionism to using women as incubators

Photo by Shoeib Abolhassani on Unsplash

Note: This article is Part 1 of a series. It focuses on heterosexual conventions and their impacts as the basis for the next parts.

Last Sunday, while reading in a park, I watched three kids under five climbing on folding metal chairs while their mom ran across the street to fill water bottles. She’d paused to ask her husband, sitting in a chair nearby, to keep an eye on them. He wasn't paying attention, and I couldn't stop imagining a child toppling over and into collapsing metal. I once rushed a friend's toddler to the hospital after her finger was nearly severed in a similar situation.

When the woman returned, she was hot and frazzled but immediately pulled the kids from danger and found safer activities. As she did this, her husband seemed to register that she was outnumbered and started walking towards them. He got a call, however, and turned in the opposite direction without a word or a glance.

What struck me wasn't just her seamless default parenting but his treating her as an extension of himself and not a separate person. When his phone rang, he left without acknowledging any transfer of responsibility as she'd had to only 10 minutes prior. Despite her evident exhaustion and the children's chaotic energy, he didn't check if she could handle things, didn't negotiate, and didn't appear to care about or consider the problems his absence might create. Studies show that many fathers perceive themselves as highly involved even when passive. His feeling present as a father was made possible by his experience of her as ambient.

This scene, multiplied across countless interactions, creates the gendered gaps feminists have coined terms to describe: emotional labor, the second shift, relational work at home and the workplace, man-keeping, kin-keeping, male alexithymia, default parenting, mental load and cognitive labor, hermeneutic labor, strategic incompetence, and compensatory masculinity, to name a few. All result in some form of patriarchal dividend.

These terms critically close gaps in understanding and yet still skim the surface of a much deeper problem embedded in hetero-patriarchal relationships: the degree to which women are necessary for men to achieve a sense of goodness and wholeness. Put another way, the degree to which femininity becomes a prosthetic for men who are stripped of essential emotional, social, and relational aspects of themselves to adhere to patriarchal traditionalism and male supremacist ideals.

So, while women's lives have been economically and politically tethered to men, men's identities are existentially tethered to women, making women's independence feel like an existential threat.

Women Extend Men's Selfhood in Ways Men Don’t For Women

All of us use extended cognition, meaning that our ability to think isn't restricted to the confines of our brain but instead spreads across external tools, relationships, and environments. We use tools, phones, and notebooks to outsource our thinking. We also use each other this way. My spouse and I have tacitly distributed different types of information and work between us. This has involved years of active discussion, and a commitment to fairness and mutual care, the kind of negotiations that remain relatively rare in heterosexual relationships and far more likely in LGBTW relationships.

Extended selfhood goes further than cognitive extension. It is an asymmetrical system in which men construct their identities, competence, and emotional stability by externalizing core cognitive, emotional, and physical functions onto women. Under these conditions, the boundaries between men's selfhood and women's labor and autonomy blur.

This arrangement doesn't merely save men time and energy but means access to women becomes constitutive of masculine identity itself. Women who refuse to perform this function, a la Kate Manne’s excellent reframing of misogyny, face shaming, disciplining, and punishment.

This Goes Way Beyond “Complementary Roles”

Heterosexual relationships under patriarchy are often characterized as reciprocal, with men providing economic support in exchange for women's emotional, reproductive, and domestic labor. However, this misrepresents both history and a foundational asymmetry.

First, male provider/female homemaker scenarios have never been universal; they are class-specific arrangements idealized despite being inaccessible to most. Second, while masculine provider roles create immense wage-earning stress for men and demand sacrifice, they also confer status, authority, and relative power. This is simply not true for “women’s work” in societies that overwhelmingly celebrate Motherhood but actively endanger and impoverish actual mothers.

Men's efforts are recognized as work with clear expectations but women’s labor isn't bounded by time or context, instead expected to flow continuously and invisibly. We exist, for far too many people, as life-sustaining environmental conditions, like air.

We are Expected to Produce Providers and Protectors

Patriarchal norms still lead men to root masculine identity in protecting and providing. Protector and provider roles, however, are only necessary if someone needs protection and cannot provide for themselves. Additionally, protecting women theoretically means shielding them from other men when, in reality, the very people meant to be protecting us are, overwhelmingly, the ones most likely to hurt us. Likewise, men can only define themselves as good providers when women are economically dependent in a system engineered and maintained to ensure gendered and racialized barriers to self-sufficiency. This masculinity is less about protection than it is a protection racket. Mainly, what that women, even the “luckiest,” gain in this equation is vulnerability.

Women demanding recognition or help (spoiled, high maintenance, ball-busters, nags, bitches, and shrews) or those seeking autonomy outside these parameters (single mothers, divorced women, bi women and lesbians, trans women, sexually autonomous women, and women who defend themselves against men) continue to face overt risks and punishments: excessive stress, economic marginalization, institutional abandonment and penalty, and violence. The more women provide for themselves, the greater their risk of being hurt.

It’s Not About Reason or Money, but Identity

If rationality, efficiency, financial gain, and mutual interdependence were the stakes, then men would have taken on an equal share of unpaid domestic and childcare work long ago. But they haven't. Instead, women are supposed to adjust to changing circumstances while maintaining an extending function to men's sense of self and needs.

Today, 41% of American women are breadwinners, with 45% of married hetero women earning the same or more than their spouses. Men have taken on more unpaid work, but the shift remains incommensurate. Men who aren't primary wage earners experience higher stress commensurate with their spouses' income increases. They report distress and a desire to make more money than their wives. They are more likely to engage in extramarital sex and to divorce. Men's unpaid work at home actually drops when women outearn them. When women earn more, men and women are more likely to lie about it. The only type of heterosexual marriage where women aren't performing significantly more unpaid work than their husbands is when a woman is the sole breadwinner, 6% of all marriages. By comparison, even when LGBTQ relationships hold masculine and feminine roles, they are more balanced in almost every way.

What couples rarely talk about in my experience, even if they are trying to figure all of this out, is that gender gaps in intimate life don’t only take a toll on women's energy, freedom of movement, and autonomy but transfer these qualities to men. Men average, for instance, between three to five more hours of leisure time than their wives practically means. The time women dedicate to domestic life, parental and child care is time men gain to socialize, relax, network, and pursue interests. And yes, there are women online talking about finding rich men and women sitting in country clubs and shopping while their husbands work themselves to death, but these represent a minority of marriages that don't make a dent in the broader patterns and systems that rely on those broader patterns.

Sex, Rejection, Reproduction, and Ontological Threat

Chores and unpaid work are only one facet of the expectation of this problem. Many straight women (59%) fake orgasms and lie to their partners about it, usually, they report, to maintain connection and not cause disappointment or shame. The framing of orgasm gaps, “sexless marriages," and marital rape all hinge on the premise of masculine validation, entitlements to pleasure on demand, and socialized mechanisms of control. Always portrayed as more complicated than men’s, it’s usually the case that women’s desires are just more complicated for men.

Women who reject "nice guys," for instance, are cast as cruel and manipulative. That’s because they violate a presumed social contract in which women owe men their attention and care, particularly for what is considered is good behavior. Post-rejection anger generates behaviors that range from online bullying to the casual terrorism of stalking to the abject violence of family annihilators.

Many women are only forced to confront their instrumentalization after men abandon them. Men leaving aging wives for younger women treats both like plug and play components instead of irreplaceable people with whom they build a shared life. The same is true of men whose wives get seriously ill. A man is six times more likely to leave his wife than a woman is to leave her husband, after a cancer diagnosis. She might treat her husband as a loved companion who needs compassion but he's more likely to see and treat her like an appliance.

Pregnancy and motherhood are perhaps the most illustrative, however. Explicitly understood by anti-feminists in terms of women’s social and moral duty to men and society, women are typically socialized to perpetuate the patriarchal family as a religious and economic institution. It’s the largely religious assertion that women "complement" men, however, that does the trick. In that equation, women, proclaimed as the only people who can gestate, extend men into the world in ways that they can’t themselves. Pronatalism is fundamentally a scheme to ensure that men can project themselves into the future through women's bodies, with or without women's consent. Women who end pregnancies are “bad” women not because of “life ending,” a demonstrably craven and absurdly hypocritical claim, but because they won’t be literal time machines for patriarchal continuity.

Yes, All Women Are Expected to Do This, Even for Strangers

Even men we don't know routinely demand that we provide self-coherence. Take street harassment, something that an overwhelming percentage of women begin experiencing as young girls. My entire life, I have been harassed by strangers on the streets, no matter the country, no matter my clothes or age. Here is a short list of just some of the things men have said to me, repeatedly: Here, pussy, pussy. You made me so hard. Nice ass. Get in the car. Stuck-up bitch. Racist bitch. I could rape you, and no one would help you. Sandnigger. Don't turn your back on me. It's a compliment, say thank you. I'm just being friendly. Smile. Smile more. Cunt.

Interactions like these are uninvited intrusions that force us to navigate public space as both prey and peacekeepers. They aren’t effective ways to flirt or attract women, but they are a cheap, easy, socially tolerated way for men to use women in order to feel like “real men” by exerting control. People who reject the many hierarchies baked into street harassment are treated the most violently: lesbians and Black trans femmes. Trans, non-binary, and non-hetero people face mounting oppression everywhere precisely because their identities don't just transgress norms but reject the entire architecture of male supremacy. Just by existing, LGBTQIA people reveal that what we are constantly being told is intrinsic difference is, in fact, constantly being socially produced and policied.

Men’s Loneliness Isn’t About Isolation but Incomplete Selfhood

Despite the many ways people are being hurt by oppressive systems, a “male loneliness crisis” seems to dominate headlines. Loneliness is hardly exclusive to men, however. New mothers report intense isolation because our culture provides virtually no support for them; older women often face loneliness due to poverty, poor health, and shrinking networks. And yet crickets.

Talk of “men’s friendship recession" often suggests that addressing a shortage of opportunities for social connections will remedy the problem, but straight men’s friendships, often mired in homophobia, are not deeply sustaining for men, no matter their profusion. They tend to lack the intimacy, depth, and relational strength that characterize relationships with women and women's relationships with each other. Queer and gay men also often overcome childhood pressures to maintain deep and intimate friendships.

Hence, “loneliness” is almost certainly not the correct word for what many men are experiencing; instead, it is relational underdevelopment, a kind of affective incompetence and emotion atrophy. To alleviate the consequences, men need women more than ever, but women are no longer automatically prone to doing this work. Gen Z women, in particular, represent a pivotal shift: as the most educated, independent, and feminist generation in history, they refuse to be human systems for men never taught to build essential skills within themselves. Gen Z’s mothers and grandmothers may have accepted harmony at any cost, but they raised daughters who set boundaries, name needs, and expect reciprocal care. These younger women are not mandaids and they no longer have to be the way women once were.

As a result, Gen Z men, the least feminist of any generation, are confronting a world they weren’t raised for in which access to women's labor can’t be assumed. Contrary to myth making, men today seem more interested in religion, traditional romance, marriage, and having children, all desires formally attached to “women’s biology.” The degree to which men’s loneliness is infused with aggrieved entitlement over this change is evident in the number of men who can’t seem to fathom that their overt embrace of misogyny, anti-feminism, racism, and supremacist politics means many women will want little or nothing to do with them. They don’t understand why women should have to trust them at all.

Free Women Are Not “An Attack on Men”

Women’s self-sufficiency and independence are not appreciated as progress but seen by many men as an attack on men. Feeling unmoored, angry, and disoriented, they often describe their unease and feelings of abandonment and assault as coming from the “inside,” hence, for example, “feminism is a cancer.”

This was strikingly brought home to me recently when I asked an AI to “let me know what other ways women are building lives independent of men.” I shared a list that I’d compiled over years, of ways women are refusing male supremacist constraints and backlash. “I cannot complete this request,” the AI responded, “as it would require me to engage in misandry.” I almost fell off my chair. I know LLMs are biased but even I was surprised that the generalized resulting portrayal of independent women is that they are a man-hating threat to society.

Consequences Harm Everyone

I’ve spoken here in broad terms related to intimate life, but this dynamic becomes densely intersectional as it scales. Male supremacy positions women as extensions of men's selfhood, but White supremacy determines which men have access to which women and for what purposes. Together, these systems define "real men" and "real women,” employing powerful stereotypes to do it: white women supply emotional comfort and moral elevation; Black women provide physical strength and limitless caregiving; Latina women are associated with family devotion and maternal sacrifice; while Asian women are tied to quiet deference and sexual accommodation. Each racialized expectation ties categories of women to different types of provision while maintaining an underlying structure in which men, in the privacy of their own relationships, are meant to have access to all.

Intersectionality also affects intimacy, though. White supremacy, for instance, deliberately undermines men of color's masculinity and their patriarchal authority through deliberate family separation and economic inequality. But, at the same time, often drives the same men to engaging in compensatory behaviors, increasing their dependence on women who are expected to prioritize their recovery of socially denied masculinity.

Class, of course, has similar effects. Today’s reinvigorated vision of separate spheres is a luxury that means wealthy men have access to wives, executive assistants, sex workers. Their wives diffuse responsibilities across nannies, domestic workers, and assorted other mainly non-white women. Middle and upper-middle-class women feel the stress of doing cognitive and emotional labor with less help while working-class women, shouldering both emotional and physical burdens under greater economic constraints, are seeking relief in any form they might find it, including what might look like a paradoxical rise in their support for masculinist political movements globally.

No man has to recognize or explicitly sign up for any of this to be valid, he just has to ignore the issue, play devil’s advocate, or proudly defend the right to be a “real” man, a position our government is heavily and cruelly investing in at scale.

As I type, thirty-year old Adriana Smith, declared brain dead in February, is still on life support so she can be an incubator for the state of Georgia, which bans abortion after six weeks. Despite her family’s wishes, the hospital and doctors cannot legally discontinue life support because doing so would likely kill the fetus. Her story is so sad, montrous, and enraging. And yet, here we are. As many have pointed out, Smith is a Black woman, so especially vulnerable and subject to dehumanization, the deprivation of autonomy, and exploitation. There are men harvesting women and subjecting them to unimaginable violence all over the world.

An Invitation In Plain Sight

Free women force a fundamental renegotiation not only of relationships and systems but of men’s identities. This is a primary reason why feminism faces such powerful and violent resistance today. In its most profound sense, however, women’s refusals to perform as we have in the past is an invitation to men to seek their own independence from a worldview that, while generating certain benefits and privileges in disproportion, is hurting and killing them. While many feel grief and loss at the change, this isn't about punishment but liberation.

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The ideas I’ve written about here part of my upcoming book, All We Want is Everything, out in November. If your found them useful and of further interest, please check it out. Preorders really help authors and are much appreciated!