Bad Advice Women Get: Let Guys Be Guys

Because I spent kindergarten through 8^th grade at a single-sex school, I didn’t have too many interactions with guys until I was about 14. That means that for much of my life, most of the stuff I “knew” about people with Y-chromosomes came from poring over the pages of mags like Seventeen and Glamour.

By Hillary

Maybe that’s why for nearly a decade and a half, I was under the impression that boys were an entirely different species that thought and acted in ways totally opposite from those of women. I had no idea how to talk to dudes because I figured that I could have absolutely nothing in common with any of them. They were from Mars, and I was from Venus; they got mini-Hotmobiles in their Happy Meals while I had to make due with miniature Barbie dolls. As far as I knew, that was just the way the world worked.

Since then, of course, I’ve learned that guys and girls really aren’t that dissimilar. Sure, maybe they’re more likely to enjoy movies that feature explosions and we’re more likely to watch anything starring Meryl Streep, but real people prove that even such widely agreed-upon stereotypes have plenty of exceptions—especially since those old clichés also assume that all men and women are hetero.

But even though dudes and chicks can’t actually be separated into two conflicting groups, magazines still insist on bifurcating men and women into opposing sides. Hell, the entire women’s magazine industry is predicated on the assumption that all men behave the same way—and that women can only understand men if they read publications that promise to decode their mystifying manners.

Take Cosmo’s “5 Things Women Don’t Know About Boyfriends,” for example. According to this article, “there are guy-unique love habits you’re not privy to.” Luckily, Cosmo offers to come to your rescue by interpreting those habits.

The takeaway point of this article is that in any relationship, the woman must unfailingly be sensitive and mature because guys just can’t help being juvenile and inconsiderate. Author Stephanie Booth tells women to accept that men stop acting romantically after a certain period of time (because “The more serious a relationship gets, the less a man will reassure you”), to be cool with the fact that men never act appreciative (“Stop waiting for a reaction, let alone a thank-you, and keep doing those little things that make you both feel so good”), and to coddle their guys incessantly because “He may act like a tough guy, but he secretly wants to be babied.”

There is something seriously wrong with that sentence—with all of those sentences. Shouldn’t an adult relationship be a partnership in which both parties are equally loving and supportive? An expert Booth quotes says that “it’s truly the woman’s responsibility to take the pulse of the relationship,” since guys “don’t spend a ton of man-hours pondering the state of your union or analyzing its ups and downs.” But why does Cosmo think that this is okay?

If there is a grain of truth in this article’s declarations about how men uniformly act, it’s only there because pieces like this one reinforce age-old ideas about masculine and feminine behaviors. Maybe men really do always take the little things their girlfriends do for them for granted—but just because our culture has indicated that that’s an acceptable way for a man to act. Nothing will change for the better until we start holding guys up to a higher standard, one that doesn’t sell dudes short by assuming they’re all nothing more than sex-obsessed, overgrown adolescents.

It’s 2010, for crying out loud; shouldn’t this sort of retro, gender-based BS be obsolete by now? You’re breaking my heart, Cosmo.