on walking women home at night

who should check the bumps in the dark?

Manosphere misogynists and hypergamous misandrists have set the algorithmic pace of dating discourse with their diarrhetic rants about the habits of each other. Bastardised pop-culture sociology, bioessentialist pseudoscience and a medieval application of gender roles all meld together. The over-representation of contempt trickles down, wriggling beneath even the most casual conversations about love.

To Make Sense Of All This; we begin by imagining heterosexual contempt as equidistant. The misogynists and misandrists are just as bad as each other. An intuitive balance. Except it grossly understates how one gender’s contempt has been systemised into supremacism while the other’s has mutated from a place of self-defence.

So let’s back away from extremes and adjust for the context of patriarchy’s clutches, reaching back to Eve’s Original Sin and further.

When we persist in Making Sense Of All This now, well fellas; we come out looking like a collective piece of shit. In our tenure as the so-called stronger sex—what we’ve done, what we continue to do, what we have been conditioned to do, what we have the capacity to do, and what we have the ability to benefit from—all of these things precipitate the amorphous cloud of being a man; connecting wirelessly overhead like a halo of crimes, achievements and potentialities that one can’t help but hold us all responsible for.

Who could love a gender of such monsters?

The women of today ask, a few decibels louder than mothers who whispered the same question and grandmothers who could only mouth it.

At this point of Making Sense Of All This, we have lost all track of the fact that we were supposed to be talking about love. It is spooky how smoothly we can zoom out to the more fractured concept of gender, then zoom out again to the more contentious topic of inequality. The process happens in the mouth so quickly that the spirit of the thing we’re trying to Make Sense Of gets left behind.

But we’re here now so let’s loiter—at the crossroad of Blackness and maleness; where rage is fatal, physicality is animalised, lust is coveted, and tenderness suffers atrophy—with a patriarchal ideal that can be described colloquially as The Doomed Hive of Niggas.

There’s a long-running joke about all the things (straight) Black men can’t do. You notice immediately that these directives, rooted in homophobia (the wayward son of misogyny), form an amorphous ideal of Black hetero-hypermasculinity that is imposed omni-directionally. This is The Doomed Hive of Niggas.

There are infinite ways to fail The Doomed Hive. To succeed in it is perhaps worse. In the words of my dear friend, D Muthulingam,“ If you think [American] masculinity is in crisis, you should understand this culture relies on coercing men into these options: 1. Submissive wage laborer 2. Cruel imperial soldier 3. Prisoner 4. Death”. It is a very particular apocalypse that hovers over the Black Man’s head, for the libidinal appetite of The West would rather incarcerate him and covet his labour as a legal slave or trap him as fodder for their endless wars than see him become a submissive wage labourer.

Instead of abandoning the patriarchal aspirations of white capitalists, success in The Doomed Hive of Niggas leans heavier into it. It only rejects the coercion by striving for the entrepreneur, the CEO, the high-ranking general, the executive, the slave-master, which are not real rejections of the ideal but graduations, where Black men can define their manhood by their ability to exploit, rather than be exploited.

I wish I could articulate what it means like to reject this ideal altogether in a way that doesn’t sound like biracial slam poetry. I’d say something like; to be a traitor is lonely. You are welcomed by few, suspected by all, and will always feel a mistake away from being absorbed into The Doomed Hive of Niggas that are growing more unloveable with every generation. You see the doom forming in the clouds and you extend love to them, talk kinder to them than they’re used to, have more patience. But at any given moment, they can remind that you aren’t them and they aren’t you. And at any given moment, someone else might will reminded that you are them and they are you. To be a Black man is to be told what you are.

Is that too melodramatic? I told you it sounded like biracial slam poetry. Truthfully, I’m not used to writing about all this stuff candidly—I don’t think anybody is. We’re so used to masking the honesty with neat, contentified social theory. And I keep forgetting we’re meant to be talking about love. For a second, shall we turn our heads slightly to love’s prelude and look at how Anita Damina’s essay, A Man And A Feminist Go Out To Dinner, wanders the familiar fault lines of modern dating?

• The Man* brings up a hypothetical double-standard of gender roles (If you expect me to check bumps in the night as a man, why is it wrong for me to expect you to cook for me as a woman?)

• The Woman* parries with statistical risk of violence (men are more likely to handle their expectations of women by resorting to abuse or murder).

*It is important to recognise that the Western’s cultural dominance might implore you to imagine the entities of “Man” and “Woman” as white. They are not. This Man is Black. This Woman is also Black.

Note: The Man’s framing of the discussion is more egregious than the discussion itself—for he reads like a salesman trying to flog the snake-oil of domesticity. The presumption is its own problematic. But we’ll press on because his “gotcha” attempt raises a compelling point that side-steps the typical, chronically online, anti-feminist talking-points of things like child support (yikes) or who should pay for dinner (ungenerous) that make for pretty mood-killing, first-date chatter. Inside the Russian nesting doll of The Man’s initial question there is something interesting:

If you were to love me, am I expected to die when danger arrives?

The inherent complication of the traditional heterosexual relationship is that when it’s “healthy”, The Man takes on any hypothetical risk of danger that could lead to death (or killing) on behalf of his partner. Conversely, in an “unhealthy” union, The Woman takes on the hypothetical risk of being killed by (or having to kill in self-defence) her partner. On this date, The Man is assessing whether he’d be willing to die for The Woman while she assesses whether he has the temperament of someone that might kill her. Statistically, patriarchy dictates The Woman is incurring the more probable risk. This is how The Woman wins the argument.

If we leave the probabilities of death alone for now and assume The Man is neither abuser nor femicidal, we can turn our attention to economics. The Man considers his risk of dying (or killing) on behalf of his partner as the labour of an emergency responder; infrequent but high-stakes. “Checking for bumps in the night” is one duty among a hypothetical many, (i.e protecting The Woman should a threat present itself on the street, batting away leery men at social gatherings) little of which can be anticipated but are silent possibilities The Man believes he must remain alert to.

The open secret of patriarchy is that The Man fears other Men. The Doomed Hive of Niggas wants to kill him, white men want to own or kill him, and women have begun to express more and more indifference about whether he lives or dies. Death, death, death. The Man’s duty to protect his Woman from bumps in the night is a projection of a hyper-masculine ideal, yes, but it is one that uses the pervasive assumption of his inherently violent nature to leverage and justify worth. The volatility of this value makes it impossible to appraise. How does The Man himself know how he’ll react when the bump in the night comes? How can The Woman know to trust him in such a crisis? Is he accustomed to physical conflict? Does he know how to control the violence he is capable of? Has he ever had to? Does he know the disciplines of self-defence? Can he handle a weapon? Some of these answers might provide as much concern as comfort.

In exchange for the promise to fend off unknowable dangers (in pursuit of his ideal), The Man suggests The Woman live up to her ideal—to ease his unrelenting anxiety of being crowned protector—urges her to conform to the labour structure of “being cooked for and cared for”. It is impossible to compare the regularity of The Woman’s daily tasks against The Man’s infrequent staring down of potential emergency. The Woman is asked to invest in the protective aptitude of The Man on an insurance basis. Domesticity is her payment. But what if no Men aggressively hit on her at parties? What if no emergency ever occurs and The Woman finds herself bound by a predatory contract of “cooking and care” that is fundamentally unfair because The Man never has to blast a burglar out of the french doors of their living room with a twelve-gauge shotgun? But maybe, more importantly, why should she conform to an ideal just because he believes he has to?

This is the point where Damina steps away from the dinner discussion. The essay resolves by zooming out from The Man to diagnose Men in the abstract, turning to address the audience and reflect on how The Doomed Hive of Niggas need to get better at regulating their expectations. She is right. But aren’t you curious about The Man himself? His autonomy melts away, and he is herded into a philosophical bullpen to be conflated with abusers and killers. How did the discussion actually go? Did The Woman reject him? Was he disappointed? How did he react to the dashing of his expectation?

We abandon the intimacy of the conversation at the highest point of its realness to speak in a way far more detached. Disengaging from The Man to refer to Men Generally is understandable—especially when The Man has framed this entire intellectual exercise in a manner reminiscent of The Doomed Hive of Niggas. Invoking the statistics of Men’s patriarchal violence is the cleanest way to wrap up the tale.

…But doesn’t something feel off? Isn’t this all disheartening? The Man’s flagrant attempts to coerce The Woman into labour? The Woman cycling through the statistical violence of Men? Dating as a dance of necropolitics and negotiated wage labour. How do Black people even begin to talk about love with this weighted presence of death, work, the environment, captivity, apocalypse, ancestry, trauma, whiteness, debt, struggle, violence… Fear.

Ah. This entire time, we thought we were talking about love. We’ve actually been talking about the ogre on the back, cupping its hands over love’s eyes. Now that we know: how do we talk about love without fear?

By understanding there is no talking about love without fear and that, perhaps, Making Sense of All This means giving grace to each other’s fears in ways that we’d be embarrassed for others to see.

I want to affirm the fear of The Man, who believes himself trapped in the Black (hyper)masculine expectation to die, who has probably never even thought about his own fear this way, but I cannot be an apologist for his attempt to find love by coercing a potential lover into subservience, just as society coerces him into being a submissive wage labourer, cruel imperial soldier, prisoner or death. I want to affirm the fears of The Woman, who can see the framing of The Man’s thought experiment as a red-flag indication that could lead to her harm, abuse or death. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with how quickly violence is assumed, how the language of pop-sociology is dispatched so cavalierly to remove The Man from his own body and push him into The Doomed Hive of Niggas, even though I understand the hyper-vigilant fear that drives it.

Remember, the grace I’m offering is because we are trying to talk about love. If we were only speaking only about fear, perhaps we’d be examining how it’d be best for women to abandon searching for love due to the statistical risk of harm, abuse or death. We’d also consider the same abandonment for men, for when love reaches its inevitable end, “whether by the slow pull of a disease, or the shock of loose footing on a hiking trail, whether it be the corrosion of two personalities that reshape each other until they’re incompatible”, it is men who’re more likely to die of a broken heart.

We must look at the fear of each another not as something that is insurmountable but something overcomeable. The most nonsensical part of Making Sense of All This is The Woman’s fear is valid and ignored and The Man’s fear is unarticulated and misused and, despite all the crossed wires of this armed explosive, we pursue love regardless of the roulettes of death because love is not about safety, statistics or even influencing the existential trajectory of the general Man or Woman.

Love is an everyday act of stupid bravery that is, at times, an unexceptional madness; the entire endeavour is a search for The Outlier, The Exception to The Rule, The One Who Fits You as Best as You Fit Them. You date to find a person whose ordinariness is extraordinary to you, to see wonder in their mundanity, you yearn for someone like the sunrise—an appearance you can see over and over again and still be amazed. You risk embarrassment, heartache, heartbreak, time, stress, money, anxiety, abuse, harm and death trying to find them. And once you do, the hard work of weaving your lives together is endless.

We believe in love even when we’re bad at it. Even when we think we don’t deserve it. Even when it ends in an unceremonious unfollow and a whimper. Perhaps, so much of the difficulty with the fear we get from it is concentrated into looking for a person, when really what we seek is coalition. Fred Moten has a wonderful quote about multi-racial solidarity in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study:

The problematic of coalition is that coalition isn’t something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that it’s fucked up for us.

There is no greater place where this is true than in the throes of a relationship, where Men’s expectation to be death fodder is as fucked up as the expectation Women’s expectation to be unappreciated labourers. The social coercions expected of them both are fucked up thefts of their lives. He must be aware his proximity smells like death to Her until he can prove himself safe but he cannot save her from what is fucked up about his own gender-mates any more than he can save himself, any more than she can save him. They can only seek to understand each other, to articulate the depth of their fears to one another, be patient with them, and choose to resist them together.

How often have you seen relationship tips as negotiated battle strategy? Is it not more common to speak about love from a place of cunning? Instead of collaboration; power struggle. Instead of co-operation; self preservation. It is easy to treat dating as a ritual of death forecasting, of socio-emotional cost/benefit analyses, of game strategy, of banquets with the enemy. Perhaps it goes without saying that it is probably unwise for women in a patriarchal society to abandon this way of seeing and operating completely. The hard part, it seems, comes in striking the balance of vulnerability, good faith, vigilance and curiosity that one needs to remain open to love. The Man must figure out how to be safe—to himself and to others—in a way that resists the assumption that he can achieve this safety by relying on exhibitions of brute force.

This is the work and he must be endlessly curious of it.

As long as love is approached with adversarial intentions, it will garner adversarial results. As long as fear compels us to invest in the rigidity of gender ideals, we remain alienated from the true fertility of love—a site of transformation, an intimate ecosystem to be seasonal with one another, a myth-dispeller, patient, an environment of trust potent enough to dissolve lifetimes of cultural conditioning, a place where vulnerability can make conflict safe, weed out harmful beliefs and sprout better ones in their place.

That’s all well and good, my date says. But someone’s still got to check for the bump in the night. I lean forward over the candlelit table and smile.

If the time ever comes—and I hope it never does—I imagine we’d both wake up, rub the sleep from our eyes, I’d reach for my golf club and you reach for your limited edition, bright pink Hello Kitty baseball bat and we’d both whisper to each other: Hey baby, I heard a noise… Do you wanna go commit a crime together?

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