Dealers and Homo-romantic men

Men who would do anything not to like women, if they could

Let’s get to the point immediately. I am convinced that nowadays, a random drug dealer you meet at the beach in Albania is kinder to women than a guy you meet on one of the major European/American cities’ streets. How would I know? Empirical evidence, my people. A few years ago, I found myself stranded on a beach in Albania. Not a bad place to be stuck in, if I hadn’t gone there with a girl from Milan who was not dressed for the occasion. She came in sandals to a place we had to reach with a few hours of trekking, and she looked at me as if I were a barbarian when I suggested we could sleep in one of the tents at the campsite at the beach. Her face turned into that of a nasty Chihuahua; I proceeded to find a solution as soon as possible.

I turned my back on her and tried to find a boat before she had a panic attack. To my surprise, there was only one. But I approached the shore confidently, only to find a sassy spiritual guy from London telling me, “Babe, do you have a pass?”.

Me: “A pass for what?”

He, eye rolling like a queen, “For the festival, babe, you can’t use any boat at this beach if you don’t have one”.

At that point, at the second “babe” and seeing how dark it had gotten, I felt all my Balkan attitude could not be contained and erupted in “I don’t give a damn about the festival BABE, this is my country and I will take that boat and proceeded to surpass him”. I am not 100% sure, but I could also sense his “wearebrothersandsistersonthiserath” attitude leave his facial expression at last. But at that point, I could not care less. I saw in front of me three brilliant, adorable, beer-bellied, flat-headed, and sun-burnt faces of Albanian dealers with their amazing Gucci bum bags on that boat, and I finally knew I was safe. Yes, the prospect of travelling with three drug dealers was less intimidating than the prospect of having that Milanese friend telling around, for the next 20 years, the story of how she had to sleep at a beach in Albania once.

What I could see is that while I rested, finally feeling comfortable in that heavily rigged boat that I considered a sign of genius, innovation and recklessness, and so a healthy display of masculinity, she was clutching her invisible pearls. Bless her Milanese soul, she kept saying “omg, what did we do? Are we really on a boat in the middle of the sea with three thugs who will try to rape us for sure?”. I kept telling her, in whispers because in Albania even drug dealers speak perfect Italian, “trust me, they have no interest at all in doing so, we are not even their type”, but she wouldn’t believe me. FYI, Albanian drug dealers are not much into women who wear linen shirts and have natural nails.

As I kept quieting her down, one of the gentlemen started asking her questions about her life. He had already asked me about my origins before, and I was not that interesting to him, being Albanian myself. As they spoke, we found out he knew the small town near Switzerland, where her family came from. Turns out it's a place at the border where “they don’t check you at the customs”. His words made his assumed profession even clearer. At that point, after this small chit chat, and while the other two were peacefully speaking among themselves, the guy told us “girls, from now on be careful, this boat goes faster than what you’d expect”, and he breathed in all the admiration he had for his creature and winked at us. Then he said, “You must hold on to the seats, we must run faster because if the police find out we are here, they will fine us. Because there is a festival of drug addicts, no boat other than those connected to the festival is allowed at sea in this area”. And after a millisecond, he finished this sentence, the boat started going at an un-Godly speed, and we had to really brace ourselves to not fall down. Again, he approached us and for a minute he kept our knees down with his arm, in a very respectful and tactful way until we found our balance. As we were approaching the shore, I felt so in debt to their kindness that I proceeded to check in my purse only to find 5 euros in cash and my Revolut card. And I do not know why that looked like a good idea, but I slipped him 5 euros, saying “for a coffee”. That got him smiling, and still, he was careful not to hurt my feelings, and he said, “Oh no, no worries, I can sort myself out”. Again, she interrupted me, telling, “We must be careful now that we need to get off the boat, they will for sure try to touch us”. And again, predictably, they helped us get off being very careful not to overstep be and disrespectful.

And then it hit me, has an Italian woman from an industrialised city ever tasted a gentleness, coming from a man, that isn’t transactional? It seems like no.

But this episode gives me the occasion to get off my chest a conviction I have been building inside me for a few years: men today no longer like women, most of them are non-practising homosexuals. What I call “homo-romantic”. And, as much as I hope my priest is not reading this, if we truly want the war between the sexes to come to a halt, there might be a solution that the church might not really like: normalise being gay. It would be a service to society. There are too many men out there who are mad because they think they are supposed to like women, too many who’d rather choose time with their bros than time spent with feminine energy around. Again, nothing bad about this, until their inability to deal with their desires makes them nasty to the women they are supposed not to love, but at least like, for God's sake. These kinds of men who do not like women enough to cherish their presence, these men who, on the contrary, are envious of “how easy women have it to get attention”.

I grew up with men who were not the most intellectual, who my super left-wing girlfriends would call “machista”, and yet they were nice to women. Not in a “let me be kind to the weakest contestant of the game”, not like when you let the weakest win, not out of pity. More out of “I do not understand these species at all, but wow, they are such mysterious and wonderful creatures”, like. That is why when I first heard the term “simp”, I did not get why it existed, even and why it had a negative connotation at all. Like, “aren’t men supposed to just do that? Being devoted to women?”. The best deeds of our civilisation are based on the adoration of women by men. Be it the Virgin Mary or fictional characters like Anna Karenina. I have never seen one of these men complain that they had to pay for women; their presence was enough to bash in happiness. These men never felt that 50/50 was necessary because they inherently recognised that the intuitiveness, the emotional connection that women instilled in their lives, was difficult to quantify. And so, they paid, they helped, they supported without a complaint. Without expecting a return.

And so, I wonder, is it because we are not devoted to women that we are producing a mediocre culture?

Then I thought of a male friend who told me, “Vilma, men want to be respected more than we want to be loved. We just want to be respected, you know?”. And I have never stopped thinking about that ever since. I am not exaggerating. I have thought of all the men I loved in a way, but not respected. I found them cowardly, and that makes it impossible for me to respect somebody. I hate cowardice, I respect fear when it is paired with honesty. But cowardice is vile, and how many men have called a woman to love when they were not ready to serve love at the table? That is cowardice, and men exercise it in abundance. It is difficult for me to respect men because very few possess moral courage. And so, a lot of men have desired me, but they might have smelled like dogs do, that there was no easy praise to find in me towards them. You have to earn my respect, like you desperately do with a man who’s richer than you.

I noticed lately that all my life I have been given food for free by the pizza makers, the fishermen, the fruit seller, the butch and so on. Every damn time, you’d have me at the market having fresh shrimps handed me by Mohammed for free or getting an entire pizza for free. I have eyewitnesses. And they’d be so happy just watching me eat and being excited about my reaction to something they had done. I finally understood the equation, those men could see I genuinely respected them for what they did. I had never realised before.

However, I am wondering if this increasing strife between women and men is due to the fact that women now have access to places that were not accessible to them before. Is it because we are now increasingly around men that we have understood that what they do is not that special if we can do it somehow, even though we are hormonally impaired half of the month? Is it because we are now working so close to them that we are not so impressed? Are we so tired of being workers on top of being mothers that we are not able to find the grace to compliment them as much as our mothers, grandmothers and so on were able to? Perhaps men feel it. Perhaps they can sense we are no longer grateful, perhaps they feel they have lost our respect. Perhaps they now can feel they will need to do more to earn it, rather than be handed that respect for the mere fact that they do things that were previously inaccessible to us.

But we say that “love is respect”. I need to examine that next.

'Women and men are different, after all. Being a mother isn't the same as being a father. Motherhood means that a woman gives her body over to her child, her children; they're on her as they might be on a hill, in a garden; they devour her, hit her, sleep on her; and she lets herself be devoured. Nothing like that happens with fathers. You might ask me, What if a man tries to be part of the home—will the woman let him? I answer yes. Because then he becomes one of the children. Men's needs have to be met just the same as children's. And women take the same pleasure in meeting them. Men think they're heroes—again, just like children. Men love war, hunting, fishing, motorbikes, cars, just like children. When they're sleepy, you can see it. And women like men to be like that. We mustn't fool ourselves. We like men to be cruel and innocent; we like hunters and warriors; we like children.'

--from the January, 1990 issue of Harper’s (collected in Practicalities, 1993)