The ideal man and other unrealistic expectations

I often hear it said that skinny models in magazines create unrealistic standards for women, or that pornography makes young men have a distorted image of relationships. My response to that is that chick flicks and romance novels set unrealistic standards for men. Romance novels are essentially porn for women. I’m going to share the Fifty Shades of Grey wiki’s description of Christian Grey. If you think men have unrealistic expectations for women, you’ll be shocked when I show you women’s ideal of a man.

Christian was born in the city of Detroit. His biological mother, Ella, was addicted to drugs and worked as a prostitute. Her pimp was extremely abusive to both her and Christian, often beating Cristian with a belt, hitting and kicking him, or putting out his cigarettes on his skin, leaving terrible scars and burn marks. When he was four years old, his mother overdosed and died; he was alone with her corpse for four days before they were discovered by police.

Really ladies? A man with scars because his mom’s pimp put out cigarettes on him when he was a child? Not counting the acne scars on my back, I have one small scar concealed by my eyebrow, from when I fell face first onto the ground as a kid and my slow reaction speed kept me from sticking out my hands in time. If I had a happy childhood (don’t worry, I didn’t), would that make me unfuckable? Do you realize there are thousands of men around the world who feel insecure now, because they grew up in happy middle-class families with parents who took good care of them and made them swallow their cod liver oil?

Christian briefly attended Harvard University and studied for two years, but he eventually dropped out to start his own business.

Great, I attended just about every university in my country, before dropping out and trying to start a business. I now sell digital tulip bulbs for a living. I didn’t know that was sexy.

When he was 21, Elena loaned him $100,000 of her husband’s money to help him start, and Christian’s business eventually grew into the renowned Grey Enterprises Holdings, Inc. over the span of a few years.

Oh… I see. So how is his business working out?

At just 27 years of age, Christian Grey is worth billions.

What the hell did he set up, Facebook? I bought around 600 euro worth of Bitcoin in early 2013 and I thought I was a pretty good investor when I sold it four years later. This guy didn’t just beat the market, he turned 100,000 dollar into billions over a timespan of six years. Assuming he ended up with two billion, his investment had a 421.00% annual growth rate. Here’s a hint: You hubby is probably really proud of himself when he beats the SP 500, which grows at around 8% per year. I hope I’m not asking too much when I’m asking you to consider giving men who don’t have triple digit returns on their investment for six years in a row a chance.

Another thing worth noting is that if your dream guy has all sorts of traumas from his childhood, that generally tends to prohibit him from setting up a billion dollar company. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had comfortable childhoods, the most traumatic experience in Bill Gates’ life is probably when someone threw that pie in his face on camera. I think the Securities and Exchange Commission needs to investigate Mr Grey, because what I know about finance suggests to me that he’s probably running a Ponzi scheme.

Don’t worry though gentlemen, because if you fail at investing there are still ways you can make up for it.

In the second movie of the trilogy, Fifty Shades Darker, it is revealed that the women who Christian begins a BDSM relationship with must look like his mother. When explaining this, he refers to himself as a sadist, rather than a Dominant due to the fact that he likes to inflict pain on women who look like his mother as a way to cope with his past.

Inflicting pain on women who look like my mom. Now here’s a talent I never knew I had. I’ve inflicted emotional pain on my mom ever since the first year of kindergarten, when I refused to do second year puzzles in the teacher’s presence even though my mom had earlier insisted to the teacher I could easily solve them. When we legalize domestic violence, we will reverse the demographic death of Europe and usher in the erotic singularity!

As an adolescent, Christian had violent mood swings that often got him into fights, and he secretly drank and was addicted to alcohol. He hated all of the therapists that he was forced to meet with, because none of them were helping him. When he was fifteen years old, he took a landscaping job for his mother’s friend Elena Lincoln.

How about San Pedro cactuses and magic mushrooms ladies? Do those count? You know if a guy gets addicted to alcohol he’s damaging his endocrine system right? Does the thought of a guy spending his free time all by himself wandering in a drug-induced daze in his local forest get you all hot and bothered?

Now you might say that I’m picking out an extreme example. Just as few men are really vulgar enough to jack off to some blonde Pamela Anderson-clone with sillicon breasts, few women are really vulgar enough to entertain themselves by reading Fifty Shades of Grey. However, most of the literature that women read is not very different from this stuff. Consider costume dramas, another form of porn for women. The costume dramas tend to have the same narrative, of a cynical miserable alcoholic of aristocratic background, who finds an innocent young peasant girl and ends up marrying her in spite of social conventions. If you wonder why I like Wuthering Heights but don’t bother with Jane Eyre, it kind of helps that Heathcliff was born in poverty and simply becomes rich by fooling depressed alcoholics into playing gambling games with him. For someone who works in crypto, that’s all very familiar. Mr Rochester on the other hand, is a literal aristocrat who lives in a countryside mansion.

 

When I say that being exposed to this stuff makes men just as insecure as women get when they notice guys jacking off all the time to naked women on the Internet, you won’t take me seriously. The reason you don’t take me seriously, is because you implicitly accept the idea that men don’t want to be desired, they’re the ones who are supposed to go out and hunt down the ladies. And perhaps that’s true, but if I look around me I notice that this social arrangement is falling apart. A lot of guys genuinely believe they’re inadequate. The idea that they have to go out hunt, yet the women they end up conquering feel as if they “settled” for them while they secretly yearn for some cigarette-burn covered billionaire/miserable aristocrat is enough to turn a lot of men off the whole pursuit. Male desire is not entirely active, it is responsive, just like women’s desire. And because we now live in an era where the slightest miscalculation can lead to social ostracism, men don’t really feel like taking the risk of pushing on after an initial rejection anymore either.

On a personal level, my own self-esteem took a huge hit when I dated an Israeli girl years ago, who cut off all contact with me after asking me what my father does for a living. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took me a long time to mentally recover from that. It’s probably because my own working class background is the thing that bothers me the most, especially as I have no influence over it. I never took material wealth seriously, nor could I take social hierarchies in general seriously. What did always bother me however was growing up without the kind of cultural context that middle class people tend to inherit. I once knew a girl whose grandparents had played in an orchestra, while a friend of mine has a father who sings. That’s the kind of cultural capital I didn’t grow up with. If against my expectations I’d end up having a family of my own, I’d hope for the children to grow up with knowledge of art, literature, history and the world in general.

And as I’ve covered unrealistic expectations, I want to share my own unrealistic expectations, in the form of the ideal kind of woman I’d hope to raise children with. I don’t pretend these are socially approriate desires. Interpret these desires the way you interpret Fifty Shades of Grey: Innocent fantasies.

-She’d have a wide range of interests that I kind of like but regret never bothering to further delve into myself. Arthouse movies, opera, literature, postmodern philosophy, modern art, occultism, buddhism, that sort of stuff.

-Ideally she’d be slightly autistic (Asperger’s syndrome), but so subtle that she was never formally diagnosed. It would primarily express itself in the form of shyness and obsessive interests.

-Pale skin, to an almost unhealthy degree. Because she’d ideally be vegetarian (or at least pescetarian) too, that should not be too difficult.

-Probably aged between 20 and 25 now.

-Slightly shorter than me, about 5 centimeter.

-Dark brown hair and green, hazel or brown eyes.

-She’d dress charmingly. That can mean a lot of things, but at the bare minimum it means she never wears blue jeans.

-She’d be pear shaped and slightly chubby. Hey, there are some things hardwired into your brain that you can’t help.

-Parents who are culturally middle class, but economically destitute. This way her parents won’t disapprove of you unless you’re really vulgar.

-A father who isn’t so physically strong that you feel intimidated by him.

-Ideally she would have studied something completely useless, like Celtic languages and culture, so that she’s utterly economically dependent on me. Even better would be if she’s too socially incompetent to get a job.

-From time to time she’d have moods where she’s really bleak and then I’d be exposed to a girl who intuitively comprehends me at a level where most people can’t.

-She’d have a weak spot for people who are socially aloof and antagonistic. She could read about Ted Kaczynski or Adam Lanza with the same kind of morbid fascination I can.

-She would stay up late and struggle to get out of bed in the morning. And of course the main reason she would stay up late is because she spent her whole night talking to yours sincerely even though she knew she had to get up early.

-She would enjoy witch house and EBM and would want to go to the last surviving cybergoth parties in the Netherlands with me on a regular basis. She’d even be up for visiting some of the German festivals.

-She’d be into all the other weird stuff I’m into too. Some days she’d drink some chamomille-valerian tea at 1 AM and lay on the couch watching dead mall videos on youtube by herself.

-She’d gather weird stuff in vintage shops and fill her house with them. If we lived together she’d decorate the house and make it feel warm and cozy, yet modern. Guests would be impressed if they saw our interior.

-She likes good food. Sourdough rye bread, fresh Normandian oysters, Trappist beers, Natto, you name it. Whenever I’d cook a meal, she’d eat more than I expected.

-She’d realize that I don’t get implicit communication. Whenever there’s an issue she’d be up front and honest about it, rather than vaguely hinting at it or simply being cold and distant all of a sudden.

-Intuitively she’s right wing, because she doesn’t like humans but does like animals. Through reason she’s able to convince herself of mostly left wing ideas however.

That just about sums it up. If you know her be sure to let me know, so that when we fall in love and inevitably break up later on, I can spend years suffering heartache, replaying conversations in my head, closing my eyes when I pass by places I used to visit with her and constantly wondering if she still thinks of me.