A diet for the heart

The 'decentering men' phenomenon has something in common with the Cool Girl.

Photo: Nick Fewings

Last week, the New York Times ran a Modern Love column with the headline, “I Decentered Men. Decentering Desire for Men Is Harder.” The essay, written by Jasmine Browley, tells her story of “falling down the TikTok rabbit hole” of popular videos calling for women to “decenter men” in their lives.

Those videos made Browley feel less alone in her longtime dislike of “the concept of landing and keeping a man” as “the validation of my existence as a woman,” and the advice to decenter men felt especially relevant when meeting a new guy named Roy. “And yet,” she writes, “my heart still leaped when Roy texted two days later.”

And yet.

That, right there, speaks to so much of what the essay is about. Browley “didn’t let [herself] expect too much” and yet Roy still disappointed her. She still got hurt, because Roy was a dick and stood her up, twice. “As much as I wanted to believe that my dream career, healthy friendships and self-indulgent hobbies took up all the real estate in my heart, there was still enough wiggle room for something else to get in,” she writes. “Love? Eh.”

This Modern Love essay revived my uneasiness with some of the advice behind the trend of decentering men. It also helped to dispel my uneasiness with my uneasiness.

On the surface, decentering men is totally sensible advice. It’s an ethos of women putting themselves ahead of romance. The idea being that they should develop their own hobbies, careers, and friendships. It’s about self-realization as opposed to fulfillment through a man. It also offers meaningful community for a whole range of folks—from single moms to queer women who are interested in confronting compulsory heterosexuality.

Unlike with the “boy sober” phenomenon, the 4B movement, and women quitting dating, decentering does not involve abstinence or a total exit. It ostensibly provides a way to date and have sex with men without some of the downsides of dating and having sex with men. It resists the idea of marriage and motherhood as ultimate markers of achievement. In many ways, it’s a vision for romantic deprogramming and withdrawing from toxic visions of heteronormative love that verge on codependency. It’s like a Bechdel test for your life.

Of course, this kind of advice has been given in so many different ways over the decades. Many a dating advice guru has sold strategies of self-improvement and loving oneself first.

But there are facets of the online decentering discourse that feel deeply off to me, and the concept is also oddly reminiscent of sexual and romantic tropes of yore that many decenter-ers would surely find objectionable. For example: The Cool Girl.

Sure, quite contrary to the decentering ethos of authentic self-development, the Cool Girl of the 2010s was said to tailor herself to men’s stereotypical desires (porn, beer, sports, sex, etc.). But a defining feature of the Cool Girl—as defined by pop cultural artifacts like Gillian Flynn’s infamous Gone Girl monologue—was the insistence on controlling her feelings.

The Cool Girl didn’t get overly emotionally attached. She could have casual sex without falling in love. She could “have sex like a man.”

If a man flaked on plans, it was fine, no biggie. She certainly wouldn’t get angry at a guy for acting like a dipshit; she wouldn’t even notice. “Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want,” wrote Flynn. “Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

The Cool Girl—as opposed to the men who adore her and the cultural forces that give rise to women’s other-directed behavior—swiftly became the focus of critique.

Fast forward a decade and the concept of the Cool Girl has given way to the Pick Me, a woman who is scathingly critiqued for being too desperate for men’s attention. She is seen as so desperate that she will readily betray fellow women while in pursuit of a man (hence the related insult, “She’s not a girl’s girl”). As I recently wrote, the “Pick Me” insult is really just a new form of gender policing and slut shaming.

Both the Cool Girl and the Pick Me are blamed for falling victim to cultural pressures and being taken advantage of by men. They are critiqued for their lack of savvy and control.

The approach of decentering men is often explicitly positioned as a defense against being a Pick Me. See: the self-published self-help book, STOP Being a “Pick Me” - How to Break Free from Male Validation. In fact, that was the insult hurled at Halima Jibril last year when she wrote a feature “suggesting that some women who are involved in the ‘decentering’ men movement online can focus too much on themselves and not enough on the structural problems in our society, created by heteronormative domination and capitalism, that make decentering men and romantic relationships so challenging.”

I share Jibril’s critique, of course. I’ve written before about how “so much hetero dating advice for women ultimately reads as instructions for personally navigating patriarchy.” It blames women for their own romantic and sexual misfortune, even when that misfortune is a clear and direct result of the sexist world in which we all live.

That is the calling card of neoliberalism and post-feminism, which present empowerment as a personal problem, and a personal failing. These ideologies abandon collective struggle and systemic change in favor of individual advancement. There’s an emphasis on personal choice, agency, power, and control, and just generally getting yours, despite it all.

Some decentering TikToks suggest that this dating strategy is itself a magical portal out of our current reality. I came across one instructional video that told viewers to prepare for “entering a new culture,” as though by decentering men they would actually leave patriarchy. If only.

The thing is, I have this critique because I lived it, you know? In my teens and early twenties, as a hetero-directed young woman, I saw sexual empowerment as something that was achieved through men—by acting like them and being wanted by them. You could say that I engaged in Cool Girl-like behavior, so much of which was about being sexually curious and alive but also wanting to, you know, survive. I understood the dangers—emotionally, physically, and reputationally—of the world I was trying to navigate, and I was determined to navigate it, nonetheless.

The standard performance in that 2000s era of hookup culture was about fending off hurt and vulnerability. It was about being down—not just with whatever sexual act might arise, which is its own curious defense against the possibility of violation, but also with being casual and uncommitted. It was about being unmoved, untouched, unaffected. Don’t text too much. Don’t get jealous. Play it cool.

Over the decades, the romantic discourse and cultural trends have shifted dramatically on the surface, but I think it’s vital to recognize the throughline here. “My life was still mine,” writes Browley early in her essay, before the heartbreak. “My feet were still on the ground. There would be no family planning, no delusion, no fantasizing or floaty daydreaming about what a home would feel like if the two of us created one together.”

In his 2019 essay on heteropessimism, Asa Seresin argues that the phenomenon of “performatively detaching oneself from heterosexuality” is a response to the negative stereotype of “the overly attached girlfriend,” which he calls a “goofy male nightmare.” He writes, “Women reacted by declaring themselves absolutely and flamboyantly unattached—to men and to heterosexuality in general.”

There are aspects of the decentering movement that fall squarely within heteropessimism. As Browley put it: “Love? Eh.” The shrug of it. The sense of stuckness and inevitability. It’s all so relatable and understandable and troubling.

Beyond just the most basic and sensible advice within the decentering movement, there is an unsettling focus on constraint, control, and self-surveillance. It kinda feels like a diet for the heart. Stay even-keeled and never fall too obsessively head-over-heels. Don’t text too much, don’t check social media, keep yourself busy. As Browley put it, she didn’t let herself “expect too much.”

I am reminded of the 1995 dating manual The Rules, which told women to be “a creature unlike any other,” avoid pursuing men, wait to have sex, and be “easy to be with but hard to get.” There’s also the 2002 hit Why Men Love Bitches, which advised women on how to go from “doormat” to “dreamgirl.” These books offered romantic protection by promising to help women get the guy, while decentering men supposedly offers romantic protection by avoiding over-investment (clearly, though, it didn’t prevent Browley from getting hurt).

The truth is that some folks within the decentering movement also seem to be selling it as “get the guy” help. Consider, for example, those claiming on TikTok that the practice has made them irresistible. In this way, decentering advice can function in the play-hard-to-get vein of “wait [x] days before you call him.” Even when it isn’t explicitly sold as a seduction technique, there is often an undercurrent in these decentering videos that seems to suggest that this is how you ultimately win at love.

It’s similar to the highly cynical Female Dating Strategy, an approach developed by women in reaction to the Red Pill subreddit’s infamously misogynistic and antifeminist “sexual strategies.” As I reported years ago, FDS “wants to help women navigate the horrors of heterosexuality” by advising them to tailor their looks, personality, and dating approach to get what they want from men—namely, commitment from “High Value Males.” It’s an ethos reliant on gender essentialism, biological determinism, and evolutionary psychology; it’s also a community with a troubling amount of transphobic, fatphobic, whorephobic, anti-porn, and anti-BDSM arguments.

In fact, the FDS community makes direct mention of decentering men and there is plenty of indistinguishable rhetoric around how a woman needs “a great career, loving friends and family, financial independence, and an abundance of hobbies and pastimes to fill the hours when she isn’t crushing it at her workplace.”

These overlaps are not at all surprising. It’s the neoliberalism, babe.

It isn’t just that these approaches tend to inherently blame women for suffering that stems from larger structural problems. They can also saddle women with punishing and ineffective coping strategies. As Seresin puts it, heteropessimism is meant to protect “against the pervasive awfulness of heterosexual culture as well as the sharp plunge of quotidian romantic pain.” When you’re “faced with the possibility of disappointment,” he writes, “anesthesia can feel like a balm.”

The anesthesia doesn’t just protect against pain; it also dulls potential pleasure. A woman’s heart, her love, her desire is made into a problem—and that is really just doing the patriarchy’s work for it.

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