Decentering men
celebrating International Women's Day and recognising your inherent self-worth as a woman
‘I just hate it when everyone acts like your life is over if you don't have a man’ - Demi Moore
‘And that was it. He became the hook upon which she hung her whole self.’ - Coco Mellors, Cleopatra and Frankenstein
Black mascara stains your pillowcase as you clutch your chest in agony. You look in the mirror, half expecting to see one of those beautiful, teary-eyed, melancholic girls from the movies. Instead, you see a blotchy, swollen, red mess of a face. You switch between denying yourself all food and binging on cheap Cadbury’s chocolate or carbs. Cyclical, damaging thoughts swirl through your head like a cyclone, and you’re paralysed by fears like Who Am I Without Him? and What If This All Ends? But these afflictions are merely symptoms of a more serious and chronic illness: the belief that you, as a woman, are less worthy without a man. Without even knowing how you got here, somehow you've skipped, tripped, and fallen into a self-built hole of despair that is keeping you trapped in its cold, dark depths, all because you’ve placed your entire self-worth on whether or not a man desires you.
It's easy to slip into the belief that you have no worth unless you are loved by a man. Countless real-life and fictional women have fallen for the trap. Think of Tolstoy’s charming, aristocratic Anna Karenina, Charlotte Brontë's sad orphan Jane Eyre, the penniless unnamed narrator of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, and sisters Blanche and Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. The personalities, economic circumstances, and ages change, but the core issue remains the same: these women feel incomplete without male validation.
Considering history, it is no wonder that modern women continue to live troubled by these false ideas. For centuries, women have been denied access to economic, educational, and even personal freedoms when they failed to satisfy the men who controlled them. As Amy March stated in the 2019 Little Women film adaptation, “As a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.”
Thankfully, at least in many parts of the world, this total dominion of men over women no longer exists. Women can vote, make their own money, and generally decide to live as they please. However, the repercussions of these very recent systems of control have not been erased completely. They linger in time, advancing slowly and ominously like silent mist encroaching on a battlefield, and leak into how women view themselves in relation to men.
Victoria de Vall has a brilliant podcast episode entitled ‘Decentering Relationship Title’ in which she posed the brilliant question: Are you placing your fulfilment on something outside of yourself that you can't control?
That external factor can often be one’s relationship status. Victoria goes on to explain how “Your status of single/in a relationship/wife/divorced doesn't make you any more or less valuable” and that women are easily exploited if they have internalised the (false) belief that they are less valuable when single.
It’s a confusing paradox: that the less you need a man, the more he will most likely do for you. This is essentially the premise of the 2002 self-help book Why Men Love Bitches, which essentially explains that men don’t necessarily love horrible women, but that humans, in general, respect people that expect a lot from the world. These ‘bitches’ have high standards, firm boundaries, and don't compromise on the things they need to do in order to feel complete and fulfilled in their own right.
As Victoria highlights in her podcast episode, you are extremely vulnerable if you place your entire self-worth in a relationship, because “What if something happens? Is your entire identity going to be crushed because you're no longer in a relationship? Is your entire sense of self going to be diminished because you're no longer in a relationship?”
She asks us to remember a fundamental truth: that you have value and purpose simply because you’re you, not because a man has claimed you.
Joan Didion wrote about this important idea in her 1961 Vogue essay entitled ‘Self Respect, Its Source, Its Power’, where she presented self-respect as “a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.”
Regarding relationships, Didion reminds us that to have self-respect is “potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”
Because "Be the love of your own life" is great and all that, but what if you crave close companionship? Navigating and sustaining a healthy relationship is a tightrope walk, because when you really love someone, it’s hard to stop yourself from wanting to do everything for them. You can get so wrapped up in the bliss of love that you forget you are a complete person on your own, with or without them.
I don’t know who said it first, but on the other side of fear is freedom. What holds women back, what makes women stay in unfulfilling relationships, and what prevents women from chasing the people or lifestyles they want, is usually fear. But what if women stopped living from fear-based narratives? What if we women stopped putting men on pedestals, thinking that their validation of us is all that matters?
Because we’re going to be okay. We have infinite meaning and purpose on this planet, whether we are chosen by a man or not. We are not more or less worthy when we are in a relationship with a man.
What gives women, and humans in general, worth are attributes like kindness, resilience, humour, and compassion. A very cheesy but heartfelt message from work, shared by our wellbeing team, informed me of these facts in honour of International Women’s Day:
Women can see more colour variations due to extra cone cells in their eyes.
Women have a higher pain tolerance, as estrogen helps women handle pain better despite feeling it more intensely.
Women’s brains have better hemisphere connections, enhancing multitasking and communication.
Women outlive men by 5-7 years, thanks to stronger immunity and lower heart disease risk.
This is not to say we’re better than men. Men are amazing, and there are many brilliant men in my life who give me so much. However, to end with a quote from the iconic Cher: "I love men. I think men are the coolest, but you don't really need them to live."
I admire your intelligent analysis and true descrption of women and relationship with men. Very powerful. Well done
This is beautiful written it flows effortlessly, I absolutely love it!