If I had to pick a king of women I’d call a draw between Vermeer, the 17th century painter, and Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet. Both had an outstanding capacity to take women’s interior lives seriously, to see individual women as distinct, intense and complex, and far from corresponding to any feminine stereotype. Whether it’s Vermeer’s young woman with a pearl necklace, Eustacia Venn in Hardy’s The Woodlanders or his mournful poems about his wife Emma’s death, these are moving, emotionally astute portraits.
The pick-up artist movement, which began in the early 2000s, created its own breed of Hardys
But while Vermeer seems to have been a decent husband, Hardy was not. A new lengthy biography about the writer reveals that the searing emotional intelligence, generosity and respect with which he treated women on the page was not matched off it. He was a serial cheater, obsessed with ever-younger models even as he climbed into old age.
By the time she died, his wife Emma was so eccentric and overwrought that she seems to have been mad, and it is plausible that she was driven so by old Tom himself. The last straw for Emma was the affair with Florence Dugdale, a typist, whom Hardy met in 1904 when she was 26 and he was 64. By 1912, the three were sharing a house, creating an atmosphere of nasty swirling weirdness. ‘I wonder how I came to write like that,’ he once mused to a friend miserably on the contrast between his literary synergies with women and the failure of his marriage. I’m willing to bet that he writes far better than any man alive today, but Hardy the sensitive scholar of women cum dangerous cad is a type that is much more present.
Since #metoo in particular, when a certain class of men came out in droves as ‘allies’, women have been treated to the ministrations of those who profess to be ultra-aware of our issues, from endometriosis to objectification. These men are all about ‘consent’ and ‘respect’ and know about Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem. They say they like ‘strong’ women, and definitely think it’s important for the woman to orgasm first.
Except when you date one of these professors of the female soul, they are often emotionally cruel, erratic and self-absorbed. They reel you in with the promise of being a man who could be both a best friend and a fantastic lover. But the reality is usually the kind of pain that drove poor Emma mad. One young female writer, recounting in the Guardian her dismal experiences dating ‘feminist men’, talked about the man who:
Opened a text conversation with a photo of his naked chest and encouraged me to reciprocate in the name of the Free The Nipple movement [and] the fellow who agonised over accepting a blowjob because, despite enjoying them, he found the act simply too degrading to let me perform.
Her conclusion? ‘Dating male feminists turned out to be one of the least empowering decisions I’ve ever made.’ Quite. I’ve been somewhat shocked at the alacrity with which the cleverer men of today can toggle between the correct buzzwords and the charming offer of a shoulder to cry on, and the harshest of sexual behaviour. Not just that: some are masters of deploying and subtly manipulating feminist vocabulary to justify roguish behaviour – such as their need to be free, or true to themselves or some such – and then, of course, there’s their desire not to hurt us, because we’re amazing strong women. Or they show they understand, or can appear to understand, our deepest wants and needs, and then demonstrate they don’t give two hoots about any of that by suddenly going quiet (known as ghosting) or sending deliberately mixed signals through tactics such as negging (back-handed compliments).
The pick-up artist movement, which began in the early 2000s, created its own breed of Hardys. These tended to be men with as much intelligence in their whole bodies – to say nothing of literary skill – as Hardy had in the top right quadrant of his left pinkie nail. But through studious application to a range of books, YouTube videos and online courses, they learned their way around female romantic psychology enough to trick women into going on dates with them. I once dated a Casanova – a type identified in the pick up artistry community as a bullied, unsuccessful child who becomes a true scholar of women, very good at breaking hearts, and in it for just that reason. It took me months to recover: the shock of being treated like a stranger after having been so charmed and apparently understood, with no explanation, left me reeling.
Perhaps the lesson for women is this: men who seem like they best understand, love and respect ‘women’ may be the men to steer clear of in romantic relationships. Those for whom women remain an enigma – the sort who went through all-boys school and preferred rugby or physics to facing their fears of the fairer sex – may actually be the more genuine, simpler, and less heartbreaking, article.
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