Wuthering Heights
By: Rivka Wolf
Tags: Toxic Masculinity, Masculinity, Romance, Relationships, Wuthering Heights

Literary-minded boys read gothic romance, and learn all the wrong things.

They learn that women are magical, intuitive creatures who should be able to read their minds. They learn that men must prove their manhood, generally through violent military or capitalist conquest. They learn that women expect this. They learn that disappearing — for one, or five, or ten years — need not interrupt a romantic relationship, if the woman’s heart is true.

Men read romantic classics, and learn all the wrong things. They learn to mistrust women. They learn women are cruel and capricious, unless the woman is worthy, in which case she is a paragon of domestic virtue. They learn to disappear — when they feel shame, or misery, or confusion. They learn their disappearance need not cost them ‘the girl.’

Men read romantic classics, and discount the woman’s side.

Heathcliff overhears half of a conversation and flees. He flees for years on end. When he returns, Cathy is already married. How dare she?

Or, Heathcliff mishears what Cathy says. He does not stick around to understand. He does not confront her. He does not ask her for clarification. He is a man. He does not stop to ask for directions.

He is a man. He cannot have hurt feelings and a logical head, all at once. He cannot maintain a relationship with a woman who can hurt him, even if by accident, even if while sorting through her own feelings, even if in private conversation with someone else.

Cathy, who is capricious and vain because she is a teenager not because she is a woman. Cathy, who really, truly loves him, who would have found some way to be with him, probably, if he had given her the chance. Cathy, who was not perfect, but nor is any human being. His imperfections are commonly attributed to his maleness, and therefore explained away as inevitabilities he cannot control and ought not be blamed for. Her imperfections are commonly attributed to her femaleness, and therefore explained as inevitabilities she ought to control and ought to be ashamed of. Both the products of their conditioning about what it means to be a ‘good’ man or what it means to be a ‘good’ woman. What it means to be a man worthy of love, or a woman who is.

When I masquerade as a woman, I know what I am doing, but subconsciously. I am trying to be a flirty and fun California beach surfer girl without a care in the world. I am trying to seem less like myself, and more like a Sweet Valley High Wakefield twin raised with the privilege and obliviousness of the tanned thin blonde rich blessed few I grew up with. I am not like that. I am artistic and moody. I am too smart to be a cute girl but too damaged to be a brainiac. I was a nerd in high school, sort of, but really I was an artist. Really I was always an artist, underneath the surface.

I masquerade very well. I know how much I am supposed to care and I try to calibrate my passions down to that level. A woman who is overly passionate is angry, bad, shameful. A woman who is overly mad is prey to her own madness, is crazy. A woman who expresses the lust she feels when she feels it, is wild, unrestrained, slutty. The assumption always that she is mad for no reason. That she has conjured the source of her madness from inside her own foolish brain. That she can either be wholly virginal or wholly mad with lust, that her lust has no subject only an object upon whom she fixes her passion out of some perverse need to possess and control him. That she cannot be passionate about a man because she cares about him. Women like this do not care about anyone.

Women like this have broken their commitments and ruined everything. No longer Agnes in David Copperfield with her keys and her steadfastness and her willingness to wait through David’s first marriage to a cute blonde vapid thing. Women like this want it all. We want it now. We want it on our own terms. We inspire passion, and so many men fear passion so completely.

Women like this inspire fear, because we see the truth beneath the masquerade of masculinity. I see who he really is. And someday, I might tell the whole world. Maybe that is a good reason for him to be afraid of me.

But it’s funny how we reshape the world with our own actions. Once upon a time I was a girl who told everyone how much I wanted him, and he seemed to want me but said he did not, and was I crazy? Once upon a time I told ‘the story of us’ to two then five then ten other people. Because he made me feel like I was crazy. And I wanted more input than that. I wanted to know if I was or I wasn’t. And I felt I could not trust my own mind to tell me.

Once upon a time, he turned me into a nightmare by believing I already was one. The man he thought I was sleeping with or wanted to sleep with, the longest conversation I ever had with that man was a conversation about wanting him and feeling lonely. The other man who touched me, I fled to when the man I really wanted rejected me, or I thought he had, for a girl who would do a better job of being bouncy and cute and unreproachable and all the things he and I both were taught a good girl should be.

I was taught being a good woman means doing and saying certain things. I was taught being a good girl means doing and saying other things. The two conflict. I think I often got it wrong.

But I am not a magical, intuitive creature. Not always. Not when I am sleep-deprived and overwhelmed. Not so as any man ought to rely on my intuition to save him from having to identify and name what he feels. The emotional component of relationships cannot be avoided. And it is not labor I am willing to do for him, or for any man.

Still he thinks I am a thing out of nightmares and I suppose that is true, now. I spoke and spoke about his feelings for me, or lack thereof, and mine for him. I told our story many times. I made it angry. I made it shameful. I made him into precisely the villain he was afraid I might make him into. I did that because I was hurting, and sad. I did that because he made me feel ashamed to be a person who had ever wanted him.

Women do not care about men’s performance of masculinity. Not grown-up women. Not really. We do not care about the size of a man’s dick or how aggressive he is against other men or how assertive he is or the color of his hair or how many stereotyped-feminine traits he has. We do not care whether he was a nerd in school, or an athlete. We do not care how much he can bench-press or whether he can carry us across the threshold after we get married.

We care whether he makes us feel ashamed of our femininity, or not. We care whether he understands that male bonding in a misogynistic society is about putting women down, that survival in relationships with other men is about not being the ‘pussy.’ We care whether he realizes that we are the girl. We will always, always be ‘the pussy.’ Every joke he has ever made about women, that’s a joke about us. Every time he laughs at somebody’s actions for being overly sentimental or overly emotional, he’s laughing at us too.

Men expect women to hold the same values they do. To value their performance of masculinity in the same way, and by the same measurements, as they do. We do not.

I am a creature out of nightmare, but I am also the creature who ends the nightmare, if he would only let me. Walking around in a world of dangerous men is much worse if you think there is anything they could do or say to make the people who love you, stop.

Anyway, the truth is typically not so dangerous or so scary as men believe. Heathcliff overheard a few lines of conversation and fled. He fled before he could hear the rest. He fled before he could ask Cathy whether she loved him back. He fled because he did not have faith in himself or the woman he loved. That does not mean she was unworthy of that faith.

Women do not care whether a man is a ‘pussy.’ Whether he likes to look up at the stars and name them to himself. Or whether he has read Wuthering Heights. Or whether he prefers the new Golden Compass tv show over Vikings. Or whether he has ever seen The Sopranos. Or whether the other guys at work make him feel small. Or whether he does not know how to fight back against them, so he finds a hot girl to date so they’ll admire him and lay off. Except that maybe there should be a better reason to date someone than fear. Maybe there should be a better reason to live than fear.

I know the kind of tomorrow I’m fighting for.

And I know that Cathy is not perfect. I know that she was very, very wrong about what being a good woman means. But at the end of the book, she died, because when she tried to say what she wanted, no one was listening.