in defense of 'male-centered' women.

In recent years, a new foe has appeared: the ‘male centered woman.’ Maybe you’ve met her – cataloging her latest humdrum chronicles with a guy, that she swears that she can do better than, but also just can’t shut up about: “Why do I keep attracting these kinds of guys? Do you think it’s because of my…?” “So I texted him this morning and he just said…” “That actually reminds me of something he told me! He said…” 

You’ve tried, truly – you’ve popped on that makeshift therapist hat more times than you can count and doled out counsel that could make a stoic weep. She’s doted on your words, nodded her snotty-puffy face in agreement… all to run back to his arms the second he shouts sooey her way. Your leisure time, your sage advice, all flushed down the toilet to play shrink to a lost cause – you’re worn out. 

You surrender to the internet for some candor on your dilemma, and you’re relieved to find that it’s chock full of consolation for your spent soul, and imploring you to run, not walk, away from this toxic, male-centered friend.

The cult of internet pop-psych takes pity on our tired play-therapist friend, and wheedles her to believe she’s too much of a people pleaser, and that she needs to assert boundaries. The behavior of the emotional laborer is chalked up to being too selfless, and that of the boy-obsessed friend to being too selfish. 

And while of course you have carte blanche to mosey away from friends who leave you feeling wrung out, I worry that we don’t offer enough depth to the male-centered woman’s psychological profile. We simply assume she’s lacking in self-esteem and the ability to read a room. 

But I am going to propose, at the cost of sounding both coddling and curt, that ‘male-centered women’ are essentially mentally ill and should be treated as such –  with delicacy and a good amount of styrofoam peanuts. 

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First, consider the evergreen reality that women score higher on neuroticism than men do. She is more prone to a throng of mental disorders, including eating disorders, anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, etc. 

Her neuroticism is probably a cocktail of nature and nurture – perhaps partly a survival mechanism to remain extra vigilant of dangers, since she is smaller than her male counterpart. And perhaps centuries of gendered despotism have nursed her to be a bit on edge. 

Even if she doesn’t fit the bill for a full-fledged disorder, her higher neuroticism means a tendency towards inordinate emotional reactions to trivial events, replaying events ad nauseum, needing endless reassurance, saying ‘I’m sorry!’ too many times. 

Second, consider that men’s psychological profile includes scoring higher on all dark triad traits – psychopathy, machiavellianism, and narcissism. These traits are distinguished by a lack of empathy and remorse, and a tendency towards deception and manipulation to achieve one’s aims.

Now consider the dating marketplace and all the ways it privileges men’s psychological profile at the expense of women’s –  the way he’s issued clearance to bottle-feed all of his desires, and the way she’s compelled to smother all of hers.

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A friend from New York visited me last summer and he gushed about this brilliant girl he was seeing. “I like her. I think we are going to be exclusive soon.” He then dedicated a half hour a day to swiping on Hinge to line up dates for his week in Miami. I asked him, “If you plan on dating her, why even go out with women this week?” To which he said, “Well, we aren’t exclusive yet. I’m seeing where it goes.” 

I’ve noticed that guys will often wield this boy-colored idea of flow, waxing zen about how they are seeing how things play out. When what they often mean is they’re milking that grey area for as long as they can, so they can cite plausible deniability. 

I thought about the girl from Hinge who agreed to go out with him that weekend. She will sit beside him at some bar on Miami Beach, tipsy on her spritz and the thrill of meeting this cool guy, but not know that he’s just a few dates away from being in a relationship. She doesn’t know that this boy she was excited to meet – spent an hour dolling herself up for, asking her friends which skirt goes with this top – and then perhaps gushed to her friends about on the uber home before going to sleep giddy – is sending another woman a good night text or perhaps even received her nudes that morning. 

I brought this up to him, and he said, “Well if she asked, I would tell her!” But I find this rationale pathetic. The truth is, would a girl be keen to go on a date with a guy if she knew he was a week away from being exclusive with another woman? He said, “Not everyone goes on dating apps for something serious – some girls just are looking for some fun!” 

But as every study will show you, women largely go on dating apps to seek long-term relationships, while men are much more likely to download these apps for casual sex. Guys know this, but they inflate the tiny percentage of women who are on there for just maybe a rebound or something casual with the significant pool. And I find this inflation to be deceptive and self-serving. 

But he can get off scot-free by doing this inflated calculus and acting as if it’s practically a coin flip to whether the girl he’s using is interested in something more or just a quick bang – when in reality, it’s less of a coin toss, and more of a matter of whether the coin happens to land on its side.  

He may not tell a girl on the first date, or the second, and probably not before hooking up, that there’s not much of a chance of him pursuing her beyond sex. But he banks on the weight of certain modern faux pas – first, he banks that his Miami date won’t have the gall to say upfront what she’s looking for and instead play coy, and go along with conversation, drinks, and his advances. And he banks on the fact that his soon to be girlfriend won’t make the mistake of asking ‘So what are we?’ too soon and risking looking desperate, scaring him off, or feeling unfeminine, as it’s typically his role to escalate. 

How do you think it affects the mental health of the girls used as secondary plotlines while he sees what happens with another girl? For every man who adopts an attitude of levity and going with the flow, there is a woman feeling gutted after a promising date and possibly hooking up, unaware there was always a low ceiling on where things could have gone. 

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A friend from grade-school became exclusive with a girl at his college, and upon cutting things off with his friends with benefits, she cried.  He said in disbelief and a bit of amusement, “My FWB cried about it!” in shock that she’d be so devastated considering they were never properly dating. It’s almost as if just leaving out the label of ‘something serious,’ doesn’t act as an effective deterrent for girls nursing ‘serious’ feelings. 

Perhaps she thought that even though they aren’t serious yet, that they are en route to be, and that becoming intimate first without the label is the only track to get there. Or, she might stupidly think that even if he says he’s not ‘ready’ for a relationship, that by playing girlfriend anyway – texting all day and fucking him – she’ll be first in line once he finally is ‘ready.’ I mean, what are the odds he’ll lock it down with someone else if he’s sleeping with me and spending so much time with me? 

She may think by hooking up with him without the label that she’s putting herself on the top of the waitlist. So when he does eventually commit to someone else, it can be devastating – the ultimate betrayal to someone working a job for free, hoping one day they’re paid, but to realize her employer hired someone else and with a bonus to boot. 

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Last year, a pair of my friends hooked up in Miami. He pursued her after spotting her doing yoga out by the pool, and after sleeping together twice, he told her he’s just not horny lately when she would try to initiate. This was a lie – he continued to pick up women almost daily to sleep with, and even admitted to his friends that he’s just lost interest, and even nauseatingly said ‘Behind every beautiful woman, is a man that is sick of sleeping with her.’ 

She confessed feelings for him and her desire to be his girlfriend, to which he said he’s just not looking for a relationship right now. A few weeks later, she told him she wanted to disband the friendship for a while and that she felt used. He said, “How did I use her? I still hang out with her everyday.” I assume she felt used in the sense that it seemed his pursuit of sleeping with her was just for conquest. 

Sure, he’s not obligated to date her or even keep sleeping with her, but there’s still something suspect about showing a woman a heap of attention before having sex, to only pull the rug out from under her, right after she’s done the utmost vulnerable act with you, to say, “I’m not looking for a relationship right now.” 

I asked him (yes, I’m annoying and ask people nosy questions all the time), “If you knew you never wanted a relationship, why not just say that upfront?” 

He said, “There was a chance I could’ve been open to a relationship with her. Technically, there’s always that chance!”

Baked into the dating contract, is the idea that you might be compatible with someone, you might not – you might know after one date or five or ten – and that dating is the track towards finding out. But guys often strategically conflate the idea of getting to know each other to see if it works out, with being 99% certain it won’t be going anywhere from the start – while racking up sex on the way.  

Because while becoming ‘something serious’ before ‘seeing where things go’ is supposedly putting the cart before the horse – apparently the act of sex, which indisposes women with attachment to you and subsequent feelings of hollowness, (and obviously a risk of pregnancy and STIs) isn’t ‘serious’ enough to wait until after you see where things go. 

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During college, a pair of my friends hit it off during summer break and slept together on the first date. They said it felt like they were ‘falling in love.’ They slept together that night – and she took plan B the next morning because they didn’t use protection. He was the second guy she’d ever slept with. For him, she was number forty something. 

When it became clear he wasn’t interested in anything serious, she sent him a text-wall and brought up that they said it felt like falling in love. He said off the record, ‘I did say that. But that’s also how all my good first dates feel. Like we could fall in love!’

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Are these boys just stupidly clumsy with girls’ hearts? I think it’s a bit more insidious – I think these men actually do understand women extremely well and are behaving strategically on female psychology, to only play dumb to wipe their hands clean. These boys are very much voluntarily playing a game, and a zero-sum one.

Have you ever heard a guy talk about how much he loves ‘the chase’? Because I have – many times. “The fun part for me is getting a girl to want me, that’s when I’m most interested.” I’ve also heard guys say “There’s nothing more unattractive than a girl who comes onto you.” 

I’ve always found the concept of the chase disturbing. Because, if you heard a person say they like to set up mouse traps, could you honestly say that person cares about mice? 

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I had this one bizarre friend in Miami, we will call him Willy. I thought he was charming in the beginning and we became friends, though I’ve since told him to lose my number. 

One of Willy’s more off-putting qualities was his pathological need to gamify sex. On top of the not totally atypical notes app list he kept cataloging every woman he’s ever slept with, fit with a plus or minus sign, Willy had an obsession with using ‘automation’ as a method to get girls. He’d send automated texts, the contents of which ai generated, to thirty something women at a time and kept a spreadsheet of how many responses he’d get in return, how many turned to a follow up date, and how many to sex. 

Willy would eventually ask me to help fund his app idea, ‘Cost to Nut,’ a place where guys could track how much it cost to bed a particular girl – the total cost of gas, dinner, drinks, etc, to later revisit whether it’s financially worth it to hit her up again. I declined funding. 

Interestingly, Willy’s obsession with gamifying sex wasn’t ever really about sex – after all, he often grew bored of the girls he’d slept with after the second or third time, and would turn down their advances. What he really got a hard-on for was the deception. He relished the fact that for every emotionless, ai generated message he sent, he’d get upwards of a dozen real earnest, individualized messages back to him. In other words, in exchange for 0 emotional expressions of his own, he received dozens of real ones from women. He could’ve scripted the original message on his own – it’s not like the ai came up with anything particularly poignant. But to entirely reserve his own emotion and sincerity was part of the thrill. 

Willy got a similar thrill when girls would send him text-walls expressing their distraught feelings to him, upset with his behavior. He enjoyed defusing them like a bomb, and getting them to be happy with him again, no matter the number of lies necessary and no matter how little he cared about them – he’d laugh at their gullableness. 

Mostly everyone who knows Willy believes he has a full-fledged personality disorder, and obviously most young guys don’t practice his methods. But I do think a lot of young men are playing a game, and a zero-sum one. One where they often forfeit honesty and earnestness as part of the thrill. 

For instance, consider that 1 in 5 college aged men would consider lying about an STD diagnosis in order to get sex. Or that 20% of men commit adultery. These numbers are often attributed to men’s higher sex drive, but make no mistake, the rates of infidelity and the other sorts of behaviors men undertake is not the result of simply a higher sex drive but of dark triad traits. 

It’s why men are basically the sole perpetrators of revenge porn. It’s why men in polyamorous relationships still manage to cheat. It’s why despite an endless abundance of free online pornography, men still flock to leaked nudes of celebrities and influencers. It’s why most men (64%) have a fantasy about seeing a woman naked specifically without her consent, and why one in ten have actually done it. 

It’s why men are the principal consumers of manospheric content which urges men to practice deceptive dating tactics such as negging (denigrating her self-esteem in order to make her dependent on your validation), photoshopping women’s smiles in photos in order to practice ‘pre-selection,’ gaining access to a woman’s instagram account while not ponying up your own, and even how to coerce a woman into prostitution via the loverboy method. These sorts of behaviors are not the result of sex-starvation but a dark triad profile. Sex and dating is simply the conduit for these psychopathic behaviors. 

While men’s dishonesty is coddled by the dating scene, women’s psychology is left reeling with little recourse – up to 43% of women experience feelings of hollowness after sex. 

Her expressing these neurotic feelings only loses her points in the dating market – text walls expressing how hurt she feels leaves her susceptible to be written off as annoying or crazy, mocked, and perhaps become a locker room laughingstock. 

To cope she might try to parrot his dark triad behavior. I’ve seen countless viral TikToks such as, “When he says he was just using you for sex, but you were wearing a matching set.” As in, she knew they were going to have sex, thus proving she was also using him for sex. Though of course, anticipation of sex is not the same thing as just wanting sex. But when women’s neuroticism isn’t offered any cultural currency, she can only try to pathetically mimic the psychopathy of her male partner. 

We can pretend we used him too because of the color of our underwear, but the naked truth is women are being routinely used for sex and it is psychologically devastating. Imagine being gifted a puppy. You give it a name, play with it, become attached. Then one day someone comes and takes your puppy away. Imagine the devastation. Now imagine this happening half a dozen times a year. Then you can perhaps imagine the toll women take in the dating marketplace.

Many women have experienced ghosting – it’s grief without a body. Even if she isn’t ghosted, being used for sex is like the ghost routinely reappearing while you’re still harboring those all-consuming feelings of grief after sex each time, over and over. So basically you’re being haunted. 

If you’re thinking – nobody’s forcing these women to have sex before commitment, they can wait! You’re right, she can. But often women will buy into the scam that he needs to test drive the car before buying it (men’s words, not mine). And, sometimes a guy may put a label on things, to only dissolve it after hooking up. Sadly, the label is only as good as the guy who gives it to you. 

But also, commitment does not preclude a man from seeing other women –  in fact, most women have been cheated on, and additionally men are less likely to consider having sex with another person, sending nude photos to another person, sending suggestive online messages, kissing another person, flirting with another person, and lying about spending time with another person to be cheating. 

Cheating is brushed off as a more vanilla aspect of dating trials and tribulations, but it can produce debilitating psychological consequences – nightmares, obsession, rumination, anxiety, loss of appetite, and even PTSD. Especially when you factor in that cheating is often accompanied by gaslighting. 

Another common way that men also gaslight their female partners is through convincing them that their watching porn and going to strip clubs is fine behavior. Most women aren’t happy about this, yet most men still watch it. 

What I am trying to get across is that much of what takes place in the dating marketplace happens at the cost of women’s mental health. She routinely pays the toll – whether it be suppressing that her boyfriend watches porn, repressing the fact that he’s cheated on her (whether or not she continues to stay), bottling up the grief of being ghosted, or concealing the heartache of losing someone you were never technically ‘serious’ with. 

We haven’t even touched on how a lot of the actual sex women undergo is psychologically damaging – for instance, how most of the young women who’ve had anal sex have done it as a result of male pressure, and felt pain during it.

Or, how many women compromise their health by letting men use no contraception, to which 1 in 4 women have turned to emergency contraception – women are taxed with pregnancy scares for the premium of male sexual pleasure. 

Or, how a significant portion of women who undergo abortions do it as a result of pressure from their male partner.  

All in all, the average woman is psychologically abused in the dating market. 

So when you observe that a woman ‘only talks about men!’ Consider that from a Maslow-ian perspective, it’s incredibly difficult for her to graduate onto higher order needs when her need for ‘love and connection’ isn’t simply facing a deficiency, but is hooked up to poison. Of course it might be all she can think about – imagine telling someone who’s starving to quit talking about food, and to talk about a nice film they’ve seen instead. 

The male-centered woman likely isn’t even in a position yet to realize how annoying she is, because she’s too steeped in trauma. And she shouldn’t just shut up about it – talk therapy is provenly useful. She may however just be talking to the wrong person, and you both might benefit from her getting a therapist who is more equipped to help her unpack the trauma. 

We treat the trials and tribulations of the dating market as just vanilla instances of life, but they are of course psychological poison. 

I had a friend driven to suicidal ideation after being cheated on by her husband who then subsequently dumped her when she found out because he wanted to pursue the other woman. All she could think is, “What did I do wrong?” 

It certainly doesn’t help that the internet is now littered in trad-bullshit, spewing rhetoric like How to please your man so he doesn’t cheat! And teaching women if they are cheated on it’s because they’ve failed: did you nag him too much? Not dress hot enough around the house? Not give enough blowjobs? I saw a woman post to Twitter that men cheat when you don’t make them feel busy enough – such as tasking him to fix your car.

Doubly, women are taught to believe how a guy treats them is a proxy of their worth. Are you wifey material? Or are you recreational use only? Are you just a one night stand or a girl worthy enough to make him quit his bachelor lifestyle? 

When a man’s treatment of you is seen as a yardstick of your worth, it’s no wonder why a woman would spend a disturbing amount of time trying to unpack why she’s not good enough. 

What about the whopping number of men who don’t have their intimacy needs met?!  There’s a difference between not having your intimacy needs met and having them used and abused. And despite some men’s claims that women en masse are using men, I don’t buy it. 

I’ve seen two versions of this claim – one, that girls go on dates with guys they’re not interested in just to get a free meal. But practically no girl would dedicate 1-2 hours of her life (as well as the time / cost of dolling herself up) to spend time with a guy she’s uninterested in for a $14 entree – even a low rate hooker has a better hourly rate. 

Or, that girls use some guys as therapists while they screw other guys – ‘friendzone’ them. If this is the extent to which guys are ‘used’ in the dating marketplace, frankly they should be grateful for the offer of friendship considering they claim to be in the midst of a loneliness crisis. 

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I truly believe boy-obsession fits the bill of a mental illness and not a voluntary vice. I mean, have you been there? Feeling like you can’t even breathe or think or eat or sip water until you get that text back? Women are so desperate for respite from the psychological stress, that we came up with the term ‘distraction showers’ to describe trying to stop fixating on a problem with a guy. This isn’t the sort of behavior people need to do to distract themselves from voluntary vices such as gossiping – you don’t need to hop in the shower to avoid talking badly about someone, but you do perhaps when you’re struggling with addiction. 

Many women probably don’t even realize their boy-obsession warrants a therapy session because it floats by as just a more potent version of the commonplace crush. Further, I think that being male-centered can also be a proxy for other mental illnesses. That looming sense of emptiness and need to hyperfixate on something to soothe your anxiety. Being boy-crazy is more baked into our social scripts – it’s a lot more socially acceptable to say, “I’m sad he hasn’t texted me back,” than it is to say, “I feel relentlessly empty.” 

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Last year, a woman posted to Facebook that “I wish someone would love me because the man that’s suppose[d] to does not.” Along with other posts saying she wants her ex back, no matter what anybody says. That month she committed suicide at Niagara Falls and took her two young children with her. While she might’ve been struggling with postpartum depression, I bring up this story to note that the emotional fallout of a breakup can be devastating, especially when you already have depression – as more women do. 

In 2014, a high school senior’s boyfriend broke up with her. Right after, she drove to her older brother’s house, took her brother’s hunting rifle, put it under her chin and pulled the trigger. She survived and became the youngest recipient of a face transplant, but is permanently severely disfigured for life. 

I don’t want women to feel like they have to shut up about their boy obsessions if that’s what’s plaguing their mind. Similar to how I wouldn’t want a depressed person to feel pressured to fake a smile and not bring up their negative emotions, out of fear of being a burden. 

Women already resist sharing their emotions with the very guys who harm them to avoid being seen as uncool, undesirable, or crazy; she shouldn’t have to conceal those feelings with her trusted female friends as well. 

One of the beauties of female friendships is that it doesn’t traffic in stoicism the same way male friendships do – and stoicism kills. One of the reasons the male suicide rate is so much higher than women’s, is because men often don’t open up about what they’re feeling and those negative feelings swallow them (talk therapy lowers repeat suicide attempts in men). 

During the midst of a deadly loneliness epidemic, I am wary of any rhetoric that cautions women that they’re burdensome or trauma dumping, just because they’re being redundant or male-centered. Your mental health doesn’t need to pass the Bechdel test. 

None of this is to say that you have an obligation to be your friend’s therapist. By all means, gently refer her to a professional. This is all just to say treat the ‘male-centered’ woman with the same kindness you would a depressed or anxious person – as in don’t make them feel bad about themselves, don’t think of her as a moral or social failure, and don’t regard yourself with an unearned sense of superiority just because you don’t gab about boys so much. 

No, you don’t owe anyone emotional labor, but in a culture where we all too often say after news of a suicide, ‘I wish they knew they could talk to me!’ we could do a better job of actually letting people talk to us.