The Friday Roundup - 3/8/2024 Edition

The Desperation of Female Neediness; The Shore Beneath Your Feet; Saying 'No' To Productivity Culture

Every Friday, I share some of the most interesting articles, videos, and books I’m looking at with our subscribers. It’s an eclectic mix fueled by my unique personal variant of ADHD and pattern recognition, so you won’t find compilations like these anywhere else.

If you’d like access to the The Friday Roundup and all subscribers-only features and posts, you can sign up for just $5/month or $50 per year, right here:

Writing is how I make my living, so if you like what you see here, please support my work by subscribing!

If you’ve already subscribed but would like to buy me a coffee to help keep me fueled up for writing, you can do that here:

---

On the desperation of female neediness - Stella Tsantekidou/The Human Carbohydrate

As someone used to scrolling through Twitter, looking for the good discussions, I am sometimes surprised at the richness of the content I find when perusing Substack’s homepage feed.

That’s where I found

Stella Tsantekidou

at The Human Carbohydrate, whose writing is smart and compelling and uncomplicated enough that I blew through several of her posts in twenty minutes or so without falling prey to the ever-shifting focus of my incessantly glitchy ADHD. From what little I’ve seen, it’s a little salacious and reads a bit like a gossip rag, if a salacious gossip rag was capable of well-turned prose and surprising moments of sharp self-awareness. I doubt I’ll be subscribing, but the post I want to talk about here was worth the time spent reading (and now writing about) it.

“On the desperation of female neediness” was in my feed today, and it presents an insightful look at the current iteration of the male/female taiji, the inexorable dance between the male sex drive and the female drive for love and security. Tsantekidou begins by quoting a guy named James Harris from a Substack called Stiff Upper Quip, who wrote:

I think some women don’t really understand that, for men who are still out and about looking for women, it’s all rather a lot of work. There’s a slight Acme Corporation quality to being a single straight bloke, going out there, getting knocked back and then coming back again and again. I’d never reveal the number of women I went to bed with, but I would like to put on the record – and this is not, to be clear, to indicate that it was an enormous number – that it was an awful lot of effort.

Anyway, my work is now done. The beautiful women haven’t stopped though. Indeed, they seem to be making more and more of them. And what am I to do with this information? When I pass a beautiful woman on the street these days my attitude suddenly becomes almost parodically rabbinical, sort of crying ‘Oh God, why are you testing me?’ and ‘What am I to do with this knowledge, Yahweh!?’ It is difficult to communicate the deep frustrated powerlessness a married man feels in the presence of a beautiful woman as he recedes into a position of advanced harmlessness. As, to be clear, he should.

Tsantekidou (who explains elsewhere that her name is pronounced Cha-de-ki-thou) says:

The alternative reality to male hornyness, in my opinion, is female neediness. Where men want sex, women want romance. Men want adventure; women want commitment. It is all on a spectrum, and there are exceptions to the rule, but that’s not my experience, and neither is James’s.

[…]

If I had an avocado toast for every time a female friend told me how much she loves dating around, I would be on the housing ladder by now! It’s a regular conversation, especially with women who are professionally successful and secure in other ways. They will tell me about their escapades with this or that man and will reassure me that all they want is fun, and they definitely don’t care if it leads to something. The other women in the group will nod in agreement and smile reassuringly. Not me. I was raised by an emotionally reactive mother, so when it comes to picking up on other people’s emotions, I am like a predator in the jungle. I can see the increased moisture in their eye socket and the exaggerated curve of their smiles. These women suffer from what I call ‘sexual revolution Stockholm syndrome’ where because they have no choice but to date casually, they have convinced themselves they are having sex without commitment by choice.

This is especially true for women with well-paid, high-flying careers because the ego-bruising of failing to achieve your personal life goals stings so much more when you have mastered control of all the other aspects of your life.

Some of the neediest women I know will repeatedly try to convince you they don’t need a man. On the other side of the coin, I would say horny men will say they want to get laid, but God forbid they move as much as a finger to do what it takes to achieve that (go on a date, get rejected and try again, get to know someone etc.).

On the other hand, I have no such problem. The vulnerability as a brand is a millennial fad I have swallowed hook, line, and sinker. I admit to my neediness openly. I love men. I would love to have a boyfriend. I hope I fall in love and get married to one man and stay with him till I die. God bless my romantic soul. I hope He is not reading this, laughing and dusting a shelf with my name on it.

[…]

The real black pill is to realise that there are more women than men who are both suitable and willing to get married and have kids. Recently, while chatting to female friends, they claimed that it is men, in fact, who need women rather than the other way around because studies have shown that after divorce, most men are likely to remarry, unlike women, and that levels of happiness in single females in middle age are far higher than that of men. They also made the argument that men rely on their female partners as their sole emotional support, whereas women get emotional validation from multiple places, their friends and family first and foremost. Again, that may well be the case, but it does not rebut the easily observable reality that far more women are looking for stable long-term relationships than men are willing to provide them.

That last line is worth a second read: far more women are looking for stable long-term relationships than men are willing to provide them.