to care is to lose yourself. or so it looks to young men like my brother, who when we were little used to bargain endlessly with my mother and sisters and I about what he was getting in return for helping clear the table. nothing. nothing is what you get, at least in the way of material compensation. care is not something to be rewarded with a Strava kudos or a corporate gong or a gold star. the reward is in the painstaking construction of a good life, for yourself, for others, for and with others.
to care is to surrender your power. or so it was to my ex-boyfriend, who rarely found it in himself to ask me genuine questions, plan a day out I’d actually enjoy, or gift me anything I’d actually like. yet during our breakup lunch, over breakup pasta and through breakup tears, he ‘confessed’ he had actually booked tickets to this beautiful concert I’d been wanting to go for months, and maybe if you would still like to go with me…
in that moment he was powerless, and caring was his last-ditch attempt to get me back. to hook me back into his sphere. whilst I had been in it, no efforts were needed to keep me there: remnants of my teenage relationship fantasies and deep angst at the prospect of not having someone to hug did a good enough job of it without him having to invest more than one-word reply texts and monthly bedsheet washes. now that I had recovered this fabulous thing called agency and was in the process of mediocre-spaghetti-ing my way out of our relationship (I paid the bill, thank you very much), now was a strategic time for him to whip out the pretense of care because on it hinged something he only just then realised he wanted. now he could finally afford to give a fuck, because he stood to gain from it.
***
Here, I mean care in its most everyday sense: caring about as a precondition to caring for, the care in ‘I don’t care’. Caring in the sense of giving a fuck. ‘En avoir quelque chose à foutre’, as we poetically put it in France. Literally, ‘having something to fuck of it’, from the medieval French foutre, ‘to carnally possess’, which derives from the Latin futuō, having penetrative, vaginal sex — itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European ‘*bʰew-’, to hit (typically with a fūstis, i.e. a cudgel or club).
Writing this, I am struck by how rooted in sex and violence our linguistic expressions of care are. Caring about something is, as we literally put it, giving sex about it – caring necessitates sacrifice, and not just any kind, it seems to involve foregoing carnal pleasure. Starting to see why men are so existentially afraid of it.
On the other hand, in the French, n’en avoir rien à foutre, not caring, is essentially to lack the desire to penetrate something. So it seems the lovebombers and misogynists of this world are doing it best, providing acts or words of care only in order to secure access to a woman’s body.
Think of a fairly average catcalling interaction:
“hey, sexy, wanna blow me?”
“fuck off”
“yeah, well i wouldn’t touch you any way, you ugly bitch”
The catcaller puts forth a bet, a gamble, pushing a coin of his interest into the sex-slot-machine. The catcallee rejects him, and he must now retract his offer, at the risk of finding himself at the losing end of this one-sided transaction. He could not possibly reply, “alright, have a good night!”, for that would imply that he cared while she did not, he cared without receiving sex in return — the highest possible shame. If she doesn’t care, fine, then he never cared anyway, in fact he less than cares, he thinks she’s the worst-looking human being he has ever laid eyes on. Move on, next coin, next gamble. Same scenario.
In an essay, Farha Khalidi mentions viral Tiktoks along the lines of, “when he says he was just using you for sex, but you were wearing a matching set”. In the who-can-give-less-of-a-fuck Olympics, women are slowly catching up to men, and bragging about it. Feminism! It’s all about deception, you see: he thought he was the only one who didn’t care, and there lied his victory (not caring is so much sweeter when the other person actually cares), but actually you didn’t care either, you were also just using him, HA, didn’t see that one coming.
Why must care be this zero-sum game? Why do so many young men feel like it is necessarily transactional? That caring ‘for free’ is to get fucked over (*sigh*, there it is again)? Could it be because all their lives, they have seen their mothers, sisters, girlfriends, friends care — not just in the caring about but the caring for sense – and not only do it for free, but be valued less for it? Because high school locker-room banter consistently berates the one with a picture of his girlfriend in his wallet, what a simp, for caring too much? (In passing, to add to the cacophony of takes about the growing gender education gap, might this also have to do with caring about school having become, for some young boys, a girly and therefore lame thing?)
In response to this, troves of young girls and women feel that their only option is to be equally as detached, equally careless, that it helps protect them, that it levels the playing field between them and men. That if she was wearing a matching set, it doesn’t matter that he used her body purely for his pleasure, because she used his right back — without questioning whether it is at all desirable that we should be using each other’s bodies as commodities in the first place (how very Kantian).
As I commented elsewhere, not only does this not work for women, first and foremost because the playing field is anything from level in the face of sexual violence and purity culture, but it also just makes for an awful model of interpersonal relationships. A model based on opportunistic strategising rather than mutual respect, that relegates care and love to means-ends calculations instead of centering their vital value for human flourishing.
We will not build a society that culturally and economically values care work, parenting and domestic labour at their just worth without dismantling the “who can give less of a fuck” competition at the heart of so many aspects of gender relations. As feminists, we must continue to make the better case, be the utopia, resist discourse that injuncts women to just give in to the male way, nurturing the illusion that caring as little as men do will save them from patriarchal brutality. That is to me, let it be said, what the proverbial fifth wave of feminism should be about.
In Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, she writes:
“Men perceive the new presence of women to each other as an absence. This is the real separation they dread – that women should not be waiting there for them when they return from the male group, the hierarchies, the phallic world. This fear of women communing with each other, when not expressed as ridicule or contempt, often takes the overt forms of “Don’t leave me!” – the man beseeching the woman who is finding her spiritual and political community with other women. ‘Any really creative vision of new ways, of a new society, ought to and will have to include men’, a troubled friend writes to me, on the letterhead of one of the most sexist institutions in the United States. He fears a loss of ‘humanity’ when women speak and listen to women. I suspect that what he really fears is the absence of humanity among men, the cerebral divisions of the male group, the undeveloped affections between man and man, the ruthless pursuit of goals, the defensive male bonding which goes only skin-deep. Underneath it all I hear the cry of the man-child: “Mother! Don’t leave me!”
I could end this piece here. Except it would be too easy. Too easy to close on ‘men just don’t care’ when many, in fact, very much do. Since the publication of Rich’s book in the 1970s, even hegemonic male culture has evolved. There is more humanity among men. More developed affections. The internet culture Khalidi refers to is not necessarily representative of most regular interactions. As French feminist writer and activist Elvire Duvelle-Charles justly noted during a conference, if more and more young men are drawn to explicitly antifeminist attitudes and discourses, it is also because they are increasingly exposed to feminist ideas, which are slowly being normalised throughout generations. There is no backlash without something to reject. And many of them, far from outright rejecting these feminist concepts, make them their own, more or less consciously.
This generational shift is also mirrored by a within-life longitudinal shift. An important element of male ‘coming-of-age’ is learning to care, or maybe unlearning not to care. Many young men who hold the attitudes described above go on to become loving fathers, attentive partners, kind teachers. Many grow up to realise that caring about people and things has value, and that caring for them can be a full, beautiful, rich experience1.
Many men also don’t, or too late – how many movies, songs and poems capture the male regret at being unable to care enough, to care in time, and realising it only after losing the object of his affection. It’s the “should have gave you all my hours / when I had the chance”.
It’s the ending scene of a Hallmark movie where the brooding male main character realises that all this time, it was his family and saving his father’s farm that mattered, and not his corporate job in the big city. Reading a recent sociological book on new fatherhood, I was struck by how many times participants were quoted as saying they weren’t spending enough time with their children, and that they would probably come to regret it, but also that they weren’t prepared to make any accommodations in the present day to avoid future remorse. Many others in the same sample only realised they did not care enough after a significant life crisis – a divorce, burnout, a falling out with one of their children.
This is all one giant generalisation, of course. Many young men never buy into the ‘care as little as possible’ package in the first place. Teenage boys come in many flavours. More and more of today’s fathers set out to be truly competent parents from the get-go.
But this ‘journey to caring’ is the broad shift I am passionate about exploring in my work. How does it happen? At what stage of men’s lives? What are the sites of this learning, and who are its actors? Is it male role models and guides? Is it their first girlfriend? And how could we normalise it, change cultural models around care to make it so that the shift happens sooner, so that it isn’t the sole responsibility of women to teach men to care, or that it doesn’t just happen post-facto when they lose the thing that gave their life value? Could we map this road to caring so that younger generations have a quicker trip to the destination?
***
I initially wanted to title this piece “whatever happened to giving a fuck?” because it would fit neatly with the name of this new letter I created for when I want to write things unfit for publication in a respectable research institute (the audience of which includes my parents, and which is bound to eventually move off of Substack). But I didn’t want to add to the cacophony of what seems to be Substack’s specialty, i.e., ‘x is dead’ takes [with x typically being very much alive]. I didn’t want to imply that men somehow care less than they used to, because though I think the specific current flavour of human commodification is not a timeless one, it’s not like there was a ‘golden age’ of male tenderness and devotion that has since dissipated. They have, if anything, — although one must always be very careful of linear readings of history — never cared as much.
So instead, I like the image of the journey better. None of the above is fatally ingrained into either gender’s behaviours, nor is it symptomatic of any irreparable rifts. People learn, they mature, they grow. The patriarchal rat is cornered, and as it senses its capture near, it tends to get especially aggressive. But I am a firm believer that its end is nigh, and that a key agent of its demise is the ability all of us have to unlock our profoundly powerful capacity for care. It just might take some of us a little more homework (and a few etymology lessons!) to get there.