Thread by @thewaronbeauty

Love and Beauty Lost: The Romantic Cost of Gender Integration, a thread 🧵

1/ Perhaps the solution to the broken male/female dynamic isn't to bring men and women together but to separate them more. As the adage goes: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

2/ There has been such an end to romance–both in love and the romance of life itself. I think both types of romance are deeply intertwined. The kind of romance that fosters affinity, respect, and potentially catalyzes great beauty, is cultivated in absence.

3/ Today, men and women are always together–in the workplace, school, and social spheres. The physical separation that once existed through social conventions, roles, and morality is gone. And with it, any mystery and love has been replaced by resentment, objectification, and “the ick.”

4/ For example, think of the American college experience where men and women are put together in total freedom for the first time. This boundary-less environment leads to the proliferation of "hook-up culture" wherein a twisted cycle of mutual objectification and resentment ensues. There is nothing romantic or lovely about it, and the romance of the institution of college has suffered because of it.

5/ Compare that to the college experience of the past, ex, Oxford of the 1920s as depicted in Brideshead Revisited. This environment was romantic and beautiful, with an air of purity – precisely because there were no women present. The focus was entirely on the pursuit of knowledge and becoming well-formed intellectually and socially to take one's place in society--without the distraction of hooking up & the inevitable drama and distractions that ensue.

6/ It should be noted that women weren’t entirely excluded from education; even at Oxford, there were sections just for women at the university, but the important thing was the sexes were segregated.

7/ In overly integrating women into male spaces and vice versa, the important societal institutions have become degraded and lost their sheen of honor. Politics no longer possesses the elegance it once had, nor does it produce any great statesmen. Similarly, the military no longer has the same powerful aura since women were allowed in combat roles.

8/ Additionally, there were once many more instances of male-female separation, such as men leaving for war, going to the office for a full day of work, or having their libraries or spaces within the home.

9/ But, its men too have entered into female spaces: salons, spas, shelters, sports, and can now even win Woman of the Year.

10/ Ironically, with the increasing integration of men and women, the sexes have come to resent each other more and more. Men would rather date ChatGPT or abandon women altogether, while women increasingly choose fantasy versions of masculinity in romance novels.

11/ The impact of this can be measured:
- By 2030, 45% of women are expected to be single and childless
- 63% of men under 30 are single
- 25% of young adults today are predicted to live their entire lives without a partner.

A paradoxical self-segregation.

12/ What happened is the breaking of the mystery between the sexes. By breaking down all boundaries, we removed the conditions for growing affinity, which leads to romance, which ultimately creates a poetic outlook on the world.

13/ Science confirms that long-distance couples report greater intimacy than other couples because they idealize each other more, have more meaningful communication, and are not put off by seeing the other person's every high and low in detail.

14/ The perfect example of how separation creates romance and love–which can lead to beauty–is Dante and Beatrice. Dante only saw Beatrice a few times in his life and never officially met her, yet his profound love for her inspired some of the most incredible poetry of all time.

15/ The physical and emotional distance between them was reinforced by customs of the time–for example, in La Vita Nuova, Beatrice only ever walks with other women through the city. And, during the mourning of her father, there were spaces where the sexes did not mix.

16/ Throughout history, this kind of conventional separation has led not only to more idealized love but also to better art. The unrequited, courtly love of the past gave birth to countless works of beauty, as women were seen as something to be appreciated from afar, which colored the man’s outlook on life positively, a lens through which he creates and strives.

17/ As this sort of love has become extremely rare today because of the breakdown of boundaries between the sexes, it is no wonder all beauty, whimsy, poetry, and honor is being drained from the noble spheres of society–education, politics, the military, etc.

18/ This has all created an extreme spectrum of unhealthy aversion to the other sex on the one hand and objectified commodification on the other. There is no longer any respect or love in the dynamic between contemporary men and women.

19/ It is time we realize that in our ‘progressiveness,’ we’ve regressed. We should look at the dynamics and relationships of the past–boundaried by social conventions, morality, and gender segregation–and honestly question whether that way contained some wisdom that we are missing.

Image Credit: Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons