Hitting the Wall Softly

It goes without saying that I am so far beyond "The Wall," I am practically knocking on Heaven's Gate. But if The Wall is defined as the moment a woman realizes that she no longer commands the Male Gaze, I reckon I didn't hit it until I was in my early forties. I was about 45 when, for the first time in my adult life, I found I could walk into a bar unaccompanied and nurse a drink for a full hour in uninterrupted solitude.  Suddenly -- it seemed overnight -- I was as invisible as a ghost, passing unseen in streets, browsing undetected in stores, attracting neither positive nor negative attention everywhere I went.

As we all know, it is a basic tenet of the manosphere that American women spend their twenties "riding the cock carousel" until they see thirty candles on their cake, and realize the day has come when they must resign themselves to dusty spinsterhood, fill the yawning void of their barren lives with either cats or sperm-jacked infants -- or else settle for some "beta" chump and start pumping out the requisite 2.5 kids to fill a tract house in the suburbs. You know, I really have no right to deride Roosh for extending his own adolescence into his mid-thirties; I did exactly the same thing. I was at least 35 when it dawned on me that maybe I should start looking around for an agreeable man to knock me up. Oops!

Fortunately, Roosh has had a revelation: "The Wall Is Softer Than We Think."  Which is good news for older women, bad news for guys like Roosh: "The wall for women is more like a speed bump that any woman with half a brain can easily pass at high speed."

You see, savvy spinsters 35-85 have technology to efficiently sift through the remainder bins of available mates, "while forcing the bottom 90% of men to lower themselves through clown game or copy pasta begging on OK Cupid." It's true that a male friend of mine who dipped his toe in Our Time reported a rush of attention --  primarily from the septuagenarian ladies.

"We all want to believe that women will be punished for their bad decisions in life, because there’s no doubt that as men we are punished for ours." Hmm... I'm not sure which "bad decisions" Roosh feels he is being punished for, but I imagine abandoning a career as a biologist in order to pursue "poosy" full-time -- and then blogging about it under his real name -- must be among them. Double oops!

"We want to think that women will be reprimanded for passing on good men in their prime to have sex with bad boys who don’t care about them. But very few will. They will have their cake and eat it too, simply because they have a vagina in a time and place where vagina has the highest value it has ever had." Hey, does this mean we're heading for a "vagina bubble" in the near future?  How will a "vagina crash" impact the global economy? (As for having my cake and eating it too, that reminds me: I still have some left over from my birthday in the freezer. Yay me!)

"In my recent stay in America I was shocked to see the nearly unlimited choice that women over 30 still have to at least get sex, and if you tell them about the wall they would not understand what you speak of. The wall, we must now admit to ourselves, has just as much power in our minds as in reality." Actually, Roosh has been stewing about Elder Sluts for years.

"There will be no redemption. There will be no comeuppance. For most of their lives, women will have it easier than us..." 

I don't know about that. The opportunity to get laid any night of the week does not necessarily "the good life" make. And furthermore, I see little evidence that one gender has it much harder than the other, and how would one quantify respective degrees of hardship, and what does it matter anyway? I used to think that wearing heels and hose everyday was a far greater burden than having to shave every morning or change my own tires. Now I'm compulsively plucking my chin hairs and wearing flat, velcro-strapped mary janes with everything I own like some superannuated toddler, so... 

Let's just agree that being a human is hard, and that sooner or later, everyone eats his (or her) peck of shit. We all have needs, sometimes competing needs: the need for freedom, the need for security; the need for recognition, the need for privacy; the need to find love, the pain of losing that love. We all get old -- that is, if we're lucky -- and we all will experience the physical deterioration that is part of the normal aging process. It's tempting to envy the heirs to great fortunes and Hollywood stars for their "easy" lives, but even Casey Kasem, grossly neglected by his once beautiful blonde trophy wife, died, in the end, of a bedsore. 

"The truth is that any woman who rejects me today will never regret it."

Now that I believe! I'll even take it so far as to declare that any woman who "bangs" Roosh will always regret it.

But getting back to "the wall" metaphor, it occurs to me that what we often think of as "walls" really are more like "doors." About a decade ago, I went out the door of youthful, fertile femininity and emerged in another country called Middle Age Cronedom. Once I had overcome the "culture shock," I began to perceive certain advantages of escaping the male gaze, a freedom and dignity that I had only hitherto experienced as a small child or when wearing an abaya and veil in the middle east. This new "invisibility" can be exhilarating, not unlike discovering a latent "super power." Security and customs officials wave me through lines without meeting my eyes; I wouldn't be altogether surprised to discover that security cameras can no longer capture my image. Certainly, this is the time in my life to consider a second career as a world-class thief, con artist, or terrorist. Strange men, who no longer find me sexually viable, either ignore me completely or initiate oddly frank and self-disclosing conversations: I have, it appears, become everyone's favorite maiden aunt. Students have become more respectful as I have become more direct and authoritative. I can get away with all sorts of bossy behaviors and displays of temperament without causing offense. Although I care less about being found "pleasing," I am certainly kinder in my intentions. In short, an aging female finally enjoys the opportunity to be her most authentic self.

I'm happily coupled and hope to remain so for the rest of my life, but if I were to find myself a lonely singleton, I would have pretty much the same options I had twenty years ago. I could look for a new love amongst my current social circle, or once more brave the trenches of online dating. The same choices are there, although given that I am not the same person with the same needs I had at 35 or 40, I might choose another path altogether: I could simply embrace the joys of single life. After all, what more does anyone need to be happy than a little dog, a stack of books, music to listen to, a small garden to tend, and meals occasionally enlivened by wine and conversation?