The Daily: 11 February 2025

It is the middle of February. Time to address that age-old question plaguing the minds of men: What do women want?

I once tried to explain to someone why I no longer read John Michael Greer. It wasn’t the fussiness revealed in that name nor the association with deeply disturbing organizations like the Freemasons. Nor his rapid decline into a decidedly impractical woo-woo dotage. It wasn’t even his insistence that we couldn’t do any better than things like Donald Trump and we should all just buck up and deal with our foul mediocrity. I’m perfectly willing to accept that we are mediocre. And I am a great believer in bucking up… More than that, I am a great practitioner of bucking up… I am a woman…

What annoyed me so much that I finally pushed the unsubscribe button was probably a small thing to others. The person I was talking to about this turning away certainly seemed to feel it was petty. But that person was male.

In the early days of the last Trump presidency, when women were understandably distraught because the newly elected leader of our country believed it was just fine to grab women by the pussy and rape children, among countless other horrors enacted on the bodies of women, there were marches and protests and sometimes shriek-fests denouncing this lurid turn of events. Greer, with his typical smug superiority, posted a picture of a woman from one of these marches, a woman with screaming mouth and fisted hands and tears coursing down her cheeks, so full of impotent rage was she. Why did he post this image? Was it to show empathy? To speak to the terror that women were feeling? To show the despair that we inhabit every day in this country? No such thing. Rather than trying to find some balm for women reading his column, Greer had the temerity to claim that this woman was going about life all wrong. That she should smile more. That she should be quiet and subservient. That she would catch more flies with honey… (He actually wrote that…)

I have never understood that phrase. My dad’s mother used it frequently when commenting on my general indifference to better management of my curly hair, my refusal to wear clothes that made me emotionally or physically uncomfortable, and above all to let me know in no uncertain terms that I was too loud and opinionated. I was in great need of cultivating an attitude of demure deference, particularly in the company of men — but also to her, it should be noted.

I always thought that phrase extremely odd. I mean, I don’t want to catch flies. I didn’t want to catch or entrap anything. Young girls have far too much experience with entrapment to want to visit that on others. But flies? Who wants that!

Who wants a thing that, if allowed to live in close contact, will only suck the sweetness from your life, without giving anything back? Who wants to be near a parasitic decomposer, whose only purpose is to ingest and break down life? Who wants to bear something that will feed on your body and cause you great discomfort even as you are forced to smile and defer to it? (Ahem…)

I didn’t want to catch flies. I still don’t. I don’t know any woman who does. I don’t know many who want to catch anything, nor to be caught. What women want is someone who cares so deeply about the world, and specifically about yourself, that you do not need to maintain attractiveness. That even at your lowest ebb and deepest darkness, that person will come to you with open arms and bring comfort. Not the empty sort of comfort that demands that you just suck it up and practice gratitude for the gifts of living, but the comfort that participates with you in anger, in despair, in fear and doubt and pain. That lets you know that you are seen, that you are loved, and that you are not alone. Women want someone who feels like they do, just as deep and encompassing, just as embodied and changeful, just as inexplicable and nonsensical but nevertheless real. Women want someone who will embrace you when you are mean and unattractive and raging at the world. Women want someone who does not demand smiling or deference. And perhaps most of all, women want someone who will leave them to rage when that is needed.

And it is so needed. That Greer does not see this, does not want to see this — because I fully believe that he is quite capable of seeing given his other insights — this is unforgivable. To mock a woman who is justifiably angry is unforgivable. To refuse to admit that perhaps he could learn something from this raging woman, that is unforgivable. To say that she needs to smile more so that she can attract flies… That is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. It colors everything else he says and casts doubt on all his ideas. If he is so wrong about this, might he not be very wrong about other things?

This is the problem I have with much of the intellectual lives of men. I can be humming along reading something that seems wise, something that I want to agree with, something I want to see in the world, and suddenly I receive that slap in the face that ruins everything. A word, a name, an idea, something that is not only deeply insulting, but completely at odds with experienced reality. Something that reveals absolute ignorance. Something that is pure stupidity. Quite often, as with Greer, it is something that betrays an intentional idiocy, a desire to erase reality, a will that is focused on demeaning, suppressing, and dominating others to feed its own need for smug superiority.

(For this reason, I am on a campaign to read the world’s wisdom traditions in translations and interpretations written by women… and I have just shrugged off the irredeemably sexist shit.)

This is also the problem I have with love. Love is framed around ideas like battling and hunting and attracting. The poetical notions of love are about physical bodies that appeal to other physical bodies. Consider that word. Maintaining attractiveness is an appeal. It is debasement. It is begging. It is asking someone who shows no inclination to care, unless you beg, to join you in life, to make that debasement permanent.

How sordid we have made love! Love is the central force of the universe. It is life-sustaining care, freely given. It is enchantment that reveals the wonder of being. It is the involuntary gravity that holds the universe together. It is the labor that we enact to perpetuate life. And we reduce it to the ephemeral pleasures of a human male body.

As I said, I am a great practitioner of bucking up. But the older I get, the more uneasy I am with that practice, the less I tolerate it. I feel that by bucking up I am becoming an enabler. The person who says buck up and soldier on, who says to smile despite your raging tears, who advises you to laugh in the face of adversity, that person is saying that they don’t want to see your adversity, don’t want to feel your adversity, don’t want to be affected by your adversity, and most of all do not want to acknowledge that they had some hand in creating your adversity and probably owe you some degree of restitution.

They don’t want to see adversity, but they also probably don’t want to see anything that is not about them. So they don’t want to see you. This is intolerable.

And in any case, we get nothing by being appealing. We are just hiding our adversity. This Trump presidency is graphically revealing just what we get with our smiles and bucking up. Flies… parasites… foul decomposition of everything that is built on care. Well, you want a smile? You got one… the feral grin of Baba Yaga. Who, it must be said, never appeals to anyone. She is her own sovereign power. And her raging is to be feared!

What do women want? We want to be the Crone! And we want to band together to purge this foulness from our world. We don’t want to catch it, nor be caught. We want to be free, free from your baseless judgements, free from your idiot egotistical ideas, and free to care about the whole world and give ourselves to its beauty.

I am fairly certain there are few men who understand this… There are apparently almost none who have a public persona and understand this. Or maybe they do… and they refuse to accept it. Because for the kind of man who displays smug superiority over the entire world, this speaks to their greatest fear — that none of this is ever, nor will it ever be, about them.

What do women want? For the story to be so much bigger than that…

Fit that in a Valentine’s Day card…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2025