"I am not a Puzzle Box"
Today's brilliance, from Felicity at Faerye.net:
Some men see women as puzzle boxes.
As far as they’re concerned, inside every woman, there’s a tasty Sex Treat™, and there’s some way to get it out. Some combination of words, of behaviors on the man’s part, some situation will pop that box open and the treat will be his!
Like every belief, this one has implications and consequences. A puzzler may continue to try and try and try to get a woman to sleep with him, testing different approaches and permutations, sure that the perfect solution exists - when in fact, he’s just being terrifyingly persistent in hitting on someone who he’s already completely alienated. He may learn generalized techniques from pickup artist websites or books, which make perfect sense to him because they use the same sort of puzzle/treat logic - and then find that real women he interacts with don’t respond as he anticipated, or even get offended, when he tries out his new techniques. A frustrated puzzler may stay in a platonic relationship with a woman hoping to stumble onto a way to get the treat, when he isn’t interested in the friendship for its own sake.
. . .
Most puzzler-types would scoff at the idea that they’re treating women as interchangeable, but no, the fact that you value the sex treat or the victory more highly if the box has an attractive exterior, or if it hadn’t been opened before, or if it was particularly tricky, isn’t flattering. You are treating a sentient individual as an instance of a game. It’s disgusting.
. . .
When a woman senses a man sees her as a puzzle box, she does not know if he is a harmless guy with some stupid notions, or a self-taught pickup artist steeped in internet misogyny but who has a rudimentary ethical compass, or a guy who will rape her if he has plausible deniability but not otherwise, or that self-aware serial rapist who posted on Reddit. . . .
All she knows is that he sees her as an obstacle and her sex as an object. And why the fuck would she want to spend any time with him, even if he’s harmless, knowing that?
. . .
The idea of women as puzzle boxes - which is related to the ideas that women don’t actually want sex and just have to regulate men’s access to it, and to the idea of women as the sex class, the people whose bodies carry sex and mean sex - is embedded deep in our culture.
I really cannot improve upon this, so you should go read the whole thing. You really should. It's the best metaphor I've seen for this yet.
I will tack one thing on:
This is why Joe Douchebag gets so pissed off when a woman shows no interest in him, and then goes on to date, or even -- gasp! -- have sex with someone else.
Joe Douchebag, according to his mentality, was playing by the rules. He was using all his combo-breakers, he leveled up his skills exactly right, he tried different angles of approach, trying to find the way to the target. He was doing what you are supposed to do, the thing that is supposed to work: following the manual.
And here this woman just . . . decides she doesn't want him. But he was playing by the rules. He was being a Nice Guy. He was listening to her mouth-noises and buying her things and teaching her about his favorite stuff and not hitting her or anything, and she still rejected him. He's perfectly good, the rules say so, and she still rejected him. He treated her like a friend, and she treats him like a friend, and somehow, instead of being a good thing that means he has made successful emotional contact with a real-live human being, this is an insult.
To him, women are sex and sex is a prize. Prizes don't get to give themselves away. Period. They are there to be won, and the only way the performance of being male means anything in this context is if the man tries and competes to win. You don't prove anything by being given something that you did not earn. You prove your worth by fighting for and winning it. If you use a cheat code for unlimited health to finish a fighting game, well, you finished it, you got the cut scenes and everything, but it doesn't say anything about your ability to actually play the game. Proving your prowess is the important part.
Which is all terribly ironic, because game-mentality thinkers employ a variety of incredibly manipulative techniques to obtain this "prize," because they look for shortcuts around the part where they actually have to get along with the person, they are the ones cheating, but they don't see it that way. They can't. It's only cheating if you're looking at it from the Rubik's Cube's point of view, if you're the one who is being twisted and poked at and manipulated without your consent. Which is where the metaphor breaks down for some people. A Rubik's Cube can't object. It can't hate you, but it can't like you either. It can't give consent . . . but neither can it withhold it. The puzzle box's desires and opinions and feelings are meaningless except to the extent that they affect how pleasant the actual solving part is. Being "hard to get" doesn't mean that she's not interested, it means she's being "no fun."
Which makes the point pretty much exactly.
X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count:
Some men see women as puzzle boxes.
As far as they’re concerned, inside every woman, there’s a tasty Sex Treat™, and there’s some way to get it out. Some combination of words, of behaviors on the man’s part, some situation will pop that box open and the treat will be his!
Like every belief, this one has implications and consequences. A puzzler may continue to try and try and try to get a woman to sleep with him, testing different approaches and permutations, sure that the perfect solution exists - when in fact, he’s just being terrifyingly persistent in hitting on someone who he’s already completely alienated. He may learn generalized techniques from pickup artist websites or books, which make perfect sense to him because they use the same sort of puzzle/treat logic - and then find that real women he interacts with don’t respond as he anticipated, or even get offended, when he tries out his new techniques. A frustrated puzzler may stay in a platonic relationship with a woman hoping to stumble onto a way to get the treat, when he isn’t interested in the friendship for its own sake.
. . .
Most puzzler-types would scoff at the idea that they’re treating women as interchangeable, but no, the fact that you value the sex treat or the victory more highly if the box has an attractive exterior, or if it hadn’t been opened before, or if it was particularly tricky, isn’t flattering. You are treating a sentient individual as an instance of a game. It’s disgusting.
. . .
When a woman senses a man sees her as a puzzle box, she does not know if he is a harmless guy with some stupid notions, or a self-taught pickup artist steeped in internet misogyny but who has a rudimentary ethical compass, or a guy who will rape her if he has plausible deniability but not otherwise, or that self-aware serial rapist who posted on Reddit. . . .
All she knows is that he sees her as an obstacle and her sex as an object. And why the fuck would she want to spend any time with him, even if he’s harmless, knowing that?
. . .
The idea of women as puzzle boxes - which is related to the ideas that women don’t actually want sex and just have to regulate men’s access to it, and to the idea of women as the sex class, the people whose bodies carry sex and mean sex - is embedded deep in our culture.
I really cannot improve upon this, so you should go read the whole thing. You really should. It's the best metaphor I've seen for this yet.
I will tack one thing on:
This is why Joe Douchebag gets so pissed off when a woman shows no interest in him, and then goes on to date, or even -- gasp! -- have sex with someone else.
Joe Douchebag, according to his mentality, was playing by the rules. He was using all his combo-breakers, he leveled up his skills exactly right, he tried different angles of approach, trying to find the way to the target. He was doing what you are supposed to do, the thing that is supposed to work: following the manual.
And here this woman just . . . decides she doesn't want him. But he was playing by the rules. He was being a Nice Guy. He was listening to her mouth-noises and buying her things and teaching her about his favorite stuff and not hitting her or anything, and she still rejected him. He's perfectly good, the rules say so, and she still rejected him. He treated her like a friend, and she treats him like a friend, and somehow, instead of being a good thing that means he has made successful emotional contact with a real-live human being, this is an insult.
To him, women are sex and sex is a prize. Prizes don't get to give themselves away. Period. They are there to be won, and the only way the performance of being male means anything in this context is if the man tries and competes to win. You don't prove anything by being given something that you did not earn. You prove your worth by fighting for and winning it. If you use a cheat code for unlimited health to finish a fighting game, well, you finished it, you got the cut scenes and everything, but it doesn't say anything about your ability to actually play the game. Proving your prowess is the important part.
Which is all terribly ironic, because game-mentality thinkers employ a variety of incredibly manipulative techniques to obtain this "prize," because they look for shortcuts around the part where they actually have to get along with the person, they are the ones cheating, but they don't see it that way. They can't. It's only cheating if you're looking at it from the Rubik's Cube's point of view, if you're the one who is being twisted and poked at and manipulated without your consent. Which is where the metaphor breaks down for some people. A Rubik's Cube can't object. It can't hate you, but it can't like you either. It can't give consent . . . but neither can it withhold it. The puzzle box's desires and opinions and feelings are meaningless except to the extent that they affect how pleasant the actual solving part is. Being "hard to get" doesn't mean that she's not interested, it means she's being "no fun."
Which makes the point pretty much exactly.
X-posted from Dreamwidth. Comment count: