Women through the eyes of men/Why negotiation is necessary

A local student at the English school told me that their mother cleans houses for a living. It’s not a profession you dream of having. A mother would not dream of that job for her own child. It implies a lack of options available through economic structure and gender alike.

When I hear this as a foreigner, I understand the frustration and grief of those living conditions, those lack of options. And yet it is tempting for me to hire a cleaner. They will do the necessary and valuable labour for a good price. It’s not that different from how men view women. They can feel frustration and grief at the female condition, if they are conscious, but also feel paralyzed and powerless in the face of systemic structures, limitations between people and those they feel within themselves, the silent contracts that have been internalized and that they live by as we all live by them because they are real and have real consequences. That is the same way I feel restricted by time, money, and resources from my capitalist job and also for the constraints of living as an expat in Costa Rica, and my inability to do anything to change the circumstances of a cleaner. There is little stopping those men from also acquiring a woman who is willing to clean their home for relatively low cost, low emotional labour. This is the clearest way to explain how men view women within our patriarchal power dynamics because we have been raised to believe men are romantics and saviours, yet this is the default general view that men will view women, that is the contract you accept if you choose a passive path in a relationship to a man.

Just as we find ourselves cleaning homes out of necessity, and as much as no one criticizes or questions this as a less than ideal life, no one around us will criticize the labour of our disadvantaged contracts in relationships to men. Yet our mothers would not dream of their daughters to become house cleaners, nor to find themselves in those relationships, doing physical and emotional labour that do not do justice to their creative potential.

Much of what men experience as equal and profound emotional connection with a woman is similar to how I would perceive paying a cleaner to be an equal exchange of value for them cleaning my home, and my pleasurable experience of having a clean home without having done physical labour, and yet my privilege of having done intellectual labour in order to earn that money to pay for it. Men may feel that they have earned their status through discipline and social intuition and calculated risk, earn their value in the free world of men, and in return can exchange that value for emotional reciprocity that a woman does not have the same freedom to earn and receive, and this must give emotional labour, vigilance over another’s body, the center of attention leaving our own somatic bodies and centered on another. A woman has no choice but to do this labour in exchange for the protection and validation of partnership. What the male experiences as equal connection is regulation being done for him by a female. An equal connection with a woman would by definition be uncomfortable and alarming because it requires them to have their bodies exist at the level of the oppressed experience, and that is not desirable. It is not desirable even for women who chronically abandon their own body state and their own truth and reality to flee from the discomfort of existing in a female body and so it would follow that a man would be uncomfortable there as well. When men are afraid of losing their independence, of submission to a female, of becoming a ‘simp,’ they are at the precipice of the power imbalance that lives within a female body, of the reality of the female experience, and are frightened by it, find it unappetizing to enter it. The female body under patriarchy is a place of trauma, just as the bank account of the poor is a place of trauma. I would be afraid to lend money to someone with chronic financial crisis. I would not make negotiations with such a person but I would hire their labour.

However a woman is trained to abandon their own body state and give emotional regulation to the other. We are taught by propaganda that this will be exchanged for emotional regulation from the male partner. That is as similar as a fantasy that the cleaner will one day live in the home she cleans. The male has no inherent desire to do so, they are happy with the default negotiated power arrangement. The only validation a man is willing to give is validation of the emotional contract to allow it to continue. “Your regulation work is good, I choose you to continue.” That is the full and disappointing value of ‘male choice’ that women orient their beings towards and compete to acquire. What is marketed to women as a prize of love and connection and freedom is in the end, winning the contract to be the most soothing, the most stable, the most selfless container for a man’s unprocessed emotional life.

It is not physically impossible for a cleaner to own a home. But it is not a default option that is given without conflict and rupture. Equal relationships are possible but they are forged with active vigilance and constant power dynamic negotiation, and all negotiations are by necessity ones that the woman has never made before, unless they have experience in negotiating those terms. But overall within a woman’s life, her worth in the social context must absolutely be negotiated, expect to do this fully, and without help. Expect to do this negotiation for basic human needs and dignities that men do not have to negotiate for. Expect to be surprised over and over again at how minimal and basic those human needs are, how little rights you actually possess by birth, over your very existence. If you are at a crossroads, thinking, I shouldn’t have to negotiate this. This should be a human right. You must negotiate more than you think is necessary.