Irresistible masculinity

Love Among the Ruins, Edward Burne-Jones, 1873

When I read laments online about toxic masculinity, I always wonder what these women are attracted to in men in the first place. What’s the initial pull, the wow factor? If you don’t like them strong, stoic, assertive, gallant and intriguingly different to you, what is it that draws you in? Does anyone seriously think, oh what a sexy knight of justice who respects me enough not to help me with my suitcase, how empowering that I can lug it around myself? Or is blown away by a running commentary of what he is about to do and requests of approval/permission? I’ve only seen such sentiment online, never in real life.

I am from a part of the world where we like the men to be masculine. From my friendships over the years with women from the Balkans, Belarus, Russia and the other countries in the area, it seems that ideas of what constitutes standard masculine behavior are quite similar across Eastern Europe. The male-female dynamic consists of a certain dance, which includes dating practices. On a date, men are generally expected to show up dressed like an adult, compliment you, give you flowers and help you with your coat (you never put your own coat on or pour your own wine). Women super-groom ahead of dates, arriving with freshly done hair and nails, carefully choosing their outfit and unboxing that special pair of heels. Both parties make an effort, this is the 101.

Even in a work context or group outings where there is no special connection between you and the man, he will help you into cars and let you walk in first, as social convention. When I first moved here, I was surprised that no one gets up on the subway even for pregnant women and women with children, something that is considered faux pas where I’m from.

Now single girlfriends actively dating in NYC fill me in on their adventures. Apparently, expectations here in NY are very different. Even in terms of a first, high stakes date, men suggest going “somewhere” without having a specific plan and sometimes don’t even get you home, a surprising level of immaturity. I am amazed at some of the dating practices I hear about, from being unable to name a relationship for what it is or “commit” – what are you, twelve? – to a general passivity and lack of assertiveness in the men. This is the peacock stage where you open your tail in front of her with all you’ve got, if it’s this tepid this early on, what happens later? Maybe this is specific to New York.

A couple of years ago, I remember laughing at the relatability when my friend told me the hottest thing one of her dates did was hang up some shelves in her apartment that he saw lying around (I’ve got a story of my own like this, to be continued). It’s a recurring theme I’ve heard from my Russian friends. One has an older handy man come in to fix things around the apartment, and every time he’s been, she sighs and tells me, maybe I need someone like him? Doesn’t talk much, knows everything, comes and gets things done, such a breath of fresh air. Makes me think of how handyman services in Moscow are called “husband for an hour”, the sell being rent a solid guy who’s got it together to fix your stuff and bask in the feeling of having one around.

I was baffled to learn that adults in their late thirties and even early forties have “relationship defining talks”. This seems oddly transactional and devoid of romance and passion, almost robotic. The Slavic thing is that if you’re romantically involved, you are automatically “his woman”, why would you talk about obvious things. If he wants you, he will let you know in no uncertain terms from the start. In the same vein, “multi-dating” is not legitimate behavior but just considered whoring around.

All the discourse about Caligular relationship configuration in popular culture and in real life is very odd. An idealist and romantic, I can’t respect or take seriously a man who wants to pass his woman around the room, where is the love? My friends have come across this sort of thing more than once and have been disgusted. This feels like a failure to launch in people who didn’t get the crazy out of their systems in their teens and are trapped in a loop of catching up on that period in their lives. The point of a relationship like this eludes me.

Village Love, Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1882

There was a memorable moment during my last long stay in Moscow in 2021. I got my pump stuck in the ventilation shaft walking into the metro station. A group of riot police in full gear were walking past and one stepped away, got on his knees in front of me, helmet under his arm, and worked on wriggling my shoe carefully from the grid, offering his shoulder to lean on as I stood there on one foot. Ten years ago, this same riot policeman could have broken my arm, shoving me into a police van during a protest, but it wouldn’t have been because of toxic masculinity, rather totally indiscriminate toxic totalitarianism. In everyday situations, his first instinct is this, because I am a woman with a problem, and he is a man with a solution. Nothing sleazy - I thanked him, we smiled and went our separate ways.

The husband and I met in my last year of high school. I spent my teenage years surrounded by rich boys who were nice kids but somehow prematurely bored with life, and the bigger social circle attached to the nepobaby nucleus was full of various characters leeching off this permanently partying group. Everyone did drugs, was fixated on porn and led a generic Western life from the movies we all watched.

I was into a certain underground music scene, where I met this older guy. Not only was he full of natural chivalry like throwing coats over my shoulders so I wouldn’t get cold, holding doors and the like, he was smart, funny and appeared completely unaware of how attractive he was. His beautiful nose had been broken more than once in fights and I felt like for the first time in my life I had met a man who knew how to handle himself. He had just done his mandatory two years of conscription service. His friends hung out in smoky pool rooms on the outskirts of the city, wore leather jackets and carried air pistols. Everyone was dirt poor and impossibly cool. These guys were gentlemen with the girls like I’d never seen before. He wrote me poetic letters for no reason. Needless to say, I was completely smitten.

My mother, the queen of spite, referred to him exclusively as “the Belmondo from Hood X” for months. Meaning Jean-Paul Belmondo, the hot French criminal from Godard’s “Breathless”, and the ghetto neighborhood my boyfriend lived in, where taxi drivers refused to go. He was not the first colorful paramour I’d brought home in my turbulent teens and she was increasingly unimpressed.

When we moved in together, into a bare-walled empty apartment, I bought wall lights on a whim. The same evening, he surveyed the clumps of wire sticking out of the walls at regular intervals and started to untangle them. I’d never met a man who could tell me about Heinrich Böll’s The Clown and do things around the house, undaunted by any tool, calm and kind. There were many romantic moments, but for some reason one of the milestones I remember is watching him connect the wires, the lights coming on one by one, and realizing that this is it.

When I later told him how amazed I had been at the chivalry and masculinity I saw in his social circle compared to mine, he said a lot of it had to do with socioeconomic status. Men with no financial arsenal at their disposal to wow the ladies had to be inventive and creative, really make an effort and go the extra mile. I think this might explain the broader Eastern European tendency as well, because most of these countries went through some extent of financial devastation and poverty, Russia particularly. Matt Taibbi has an excellent article on this inhumane experiment in the 1990s.

It should be noted that in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when most of the population fell into financial despair, at least half of the men in larger cities came from educated backgrounds and families, which played a significant role in relationship dynamics. Statically, educated men tend to exhibit lower rates of violent behavior and are less prone to domestic violence, taking most of the “toxicity” out of the masculinity. Neighborhoods weren’t segregated according to social class – when the state handed out apartments, university employees sometimes ended up living among factory workers, and when the 1990s tidal wave of criminality and chaos surged, transforming some neighborhoods into no-go zones, a significant portion of people in those neighborhoods still had university degrees and vastly different beliefs and lifestyles (here’s an interesting map of Moscow by neighborhoods, where even the worst neighborhoods in the city have over 30% of people with university degrees).

Ivan Tsarevich Riding the Grey Wolf, Viktor Vasnetsov, 1889

Growing up, every neighborhood in Moscow had some instance of “Masha, I love you!” written in white paint on the sidewalk in gigantic letters, so Masha could see it first thing in the morning, scrawled across the whole courtyard of the highrise. What else did a seventeen-year-old boy have at his disposal? Throwing pebbles at her window at night to get her to look out and other such Romeo-and-Julietry. When I was six years old, a boy the same age in my building shyly gave me a present – he’d painted the insides of his mother’s empty eyeshadow case all colors of the rainbow to make it look like it was full of iridescent make-up. It was very touching, and I kept it for a long time. It remained a lot more memorable and impressive than any saccharine, generic Valentines that came years later, before I fell in love for real. I think this also encapsulates the cultural coding of how you engage with a love interest. When someone approaches you on the street, of course there’s the occasional rudeness and inappropriateness, but also a lot of sweetness. Once I was getting off the bus and a guy gave me a pussywillow and told me he hoped I have a wonderful life (pussywillows are all the rage at the end of March, with grandmas selling them in the streets as signs of the coming spring). Most of my Russian girlfriends have shared similar memories growing up, and it does shape your attitude towards romantic interactions.

In nature, females’ preferences typically drive the evolution of certain traits in males. Hence the peacocks with the tails, the lions with the manes, the colorful ducks from Mallard to Mandarin and so on. In the animal kingdom, the female practically never has brighter colors than a male. Sexual dimorphism, when males and females of one species differ significantly with the male being bigger, brighter and stronger as a result of reproductive competition is prevalent among animals, birds, fish and insects. Amotz Zahavi’s Handicap Theory takes it a step further:

“Sexual selection can be so strong that it selects for traits that are actually detrimental to the individual’s survival, even though they maximize its reproductive success. For example, while the male peacock’s tail is beautiful and the male with the largest, most colorful tail will more probably win the female, it is not a practical appendage. In addition to being more visible to predators, it makes the males slower in their attempted escapes. There is some evidence that this risk, in fact, is why females like the big tails in the first place. Because large tails carry risk, only the best males survive that risk and therefore the bigger the tail, the more fit the male. This idea is known as the handicap principle.” Boundless Biology, a college-level introductory textbook

Maybe the difference in approach to traditional romance stems from the difference in historical trajectory – after the 1917 revolution in Russia women worked alongside men, with access to free nurseries and childcare. There were multiple workplace protections and benefits, like laws making it illegal to fire a pregnant woman, a woman with a child under 3 or a single mother with a child under 14, and long maternity leaves. These changes were implemented when my generation’s great-grandmothers were still young, and our grandmothers were born into equal rights for men and women, with no undercurrent of struggle in this area.

I was shocked when I read that American women couldn’t open a bank account on their own until the 1960s and UK women only got the right to open an account in their name in 1975. The Soviet Union was pretty egalitarian in this regard, and whatever meagre banking offerings were available, were available to all. The country had no strata like the 1950s American housewives in the suburbs, with an endless array of household appliances at their disposal, getting drunk out of boredom and frustration. There was no romanticized aura of, oh I want to outtoil him in the factory or the office, that’ll show him – everyone was already working side by side. If anything, generations of women could have grown tired of slaving away like this. Similarly, Russian Boomer aged couples met in more or less equal circumstances, women had educations and jobs and didn’t need the men for survival. They needed the men for romance and feeling like a woman, to be courted, wooed and cared for.

Bunin liked repeating an aphorism attributed to Lord Byron:

"It is easier to die for a woman than to live with her."

Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, Frederic William Burton, 1864

It is no doubt easier to make a grand first impression than to keep it up in ensuing years. At the same time, the first impression is the spark that sets the fire.

Life is short and hard as is, and when if not in courtship and interaction with the opposite sex can one rise above the mundane and the everyday, soar a little? The certain theatrics and formality of things marks it as a special occasion, makes it an event. I find it interesting that the very beginning, the fork in the road that determines if this will go anywhere, when each party would usually put their best possible self forward as if projecting a Batman logo of a dream into the sky, has become so sterilized and trimmed of frills and romance in some cultures. It seems very cynical, a strange mix of the immaturity of youth and disillusionment of older years, a lose-lose game.

My older friend who was dating in NYC in the 1990s and 2000s tells me it has always been pretty bleak if you didn’t venture into outer boroughs. There’s something surprisingly unsexy about the city, like the only fired up, perky men are the construction workers digging things up along the pavements.

There seems to be a perception in the Anglosphere that women have to compete with men and in essence become a man, adopting all the traits perceived as masculine, to succeed in life. Being masculine is perceived as having power, and feminity as weakness and submission. Then there is the automatic assumption that women who enjoy traditional male and female behaviors are compliant and oppressed. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe and Russia in particular, women hold 49% of leadership positions (data from 2017-2021). Russia and other Eastern European countries routinely top international rankings of countries with women in senior business roles. This doesn’t negate women still wanting and expecting the damsel treatment, because it’s fun and dreamy. There is a culturally embedded sense of seeing yourself as a woman first and foremost, rather than an ox in a yoke or a “partner” in a metaphorical joint venture. That is a big part of the attraction, that the man brings the manliness, like a big bear you can huddle into and relax.