I picked out The Rosie project from the minibieb. The Dutch minibieb (‘little library’) is a relatively new phenomenon you might know, from somewhere in your own country; the tiny wooden homemade cabinets standing in residential areas, with books in them. The idea is to freely take or leave them. I took that one, anyway, and left a Ruth Rendell.

It’s one of those English books with the ‘fun’ jacket, where typeface is nearly everything. This one red, with lettering and an animated front, that gives you that whimsical idea of a light, funny story. A rom-com, apparently. All right then.

I read it, enjoyed it a lot, like a bag of crisps. I do like crisps. When we say page turner, that is supposed to be a good thing. Then, usually, you forget the book after having turned all those pages. But this one did not make me forget, and not in a good way. I am still annoyed half a year later, so here we are.

The idea is a socially awkward man has a list with a lot of criteria, questions, he wants to ask women, so he can try to find someone to marry. His name is Don, and the narrator is his best friend and colleague, a ‘normal’, even womanizing man, who is married to a woman and has children. The idea is this Don has maybe some form of autism. He is warmly described— up to a point. Like the author likes him and laughs at him, a little. Wants to encourage him, wants to help him, wants to explain him to us, the audience, wants to showcase him, really. ‘Look at this guy.’

Well, he is nice to look at. Apparently. I can’t for the life of me remember what the man actually looks like. He is described as slim, tall, I think. White, of course. Average, really. This author thinks: this man’s body, at least, has everything he is supposed to need.

So the idea is this man is going to look for a woman. And we might find that funny, and endearing. Then, through a misunderstanding, following the romcom rules, he finds one immediately, one that is not supposed to have this function – and she is not looking for him either, and of course in the end they get together.

This Rosie who stumbles into his office (looking for the best friend) is the prototype of ‘difficult’ woman: she is dark haired, with dark thoughts, she smokes, wears cool alternative clothes. She is fed up with men. Don is trying to understand her, give her what she wants, like he does always with everyone (what are the rules?) and she wants nothing from him, so he can be himself in her presence, which then makes him calmer and more sociable. She does not care at all for him making mistakes of some sorts. She breaks through his habits. They annoy each other, etcetera – they are doomed to each other, they understand each other, they leave each other alone, at peace, in their breaking through of the expectations of social morale. All this to say: on their first meeting things get a little out of hand, and before they know it, they’re drinking wine on his balcony in the middle of the night. Platonically.

Then Don starts to really like her, and a sequence of events proceeds, being the bulk of the story. Having nothing come natural to him, the man is used to study upcoming challenges at length and then excels in everything—when they have to be bartenders for an evening together, he knows all the cocktails, when they have to do some kind of ballroom dancing, he spins her around like’s he’s John Travolta, etc. But when they have to go on holiday together, the wife of this best friend (NOT the best friend) packs him some extra, nice looking, shirts. To be pretty for Rosie. To be able to be the romantic partner she can take to a restaurant (there was a part too where he is excluded from a restaurant for not wearing a tie, and he can do karate, so he gets in an argument, thus showing off his great physical shape/moves).

Now I am writing all of this down it is clear to me how absurd this book really is. Crisps really are addictive, aren’t they. It is absurd how Graeme Simsion described to us what he thinks men are supposed to do to ‘get’ women. To obtain them, I mean – not to understand them.

What irks me though, is how Rosie is learning, having to learn, to accept what this man will not give her. He will never kiss her (but he will have sex with her). He won’t hug her either. He will never say nice lovey dovey things. He will not empathize with her. She learns to accept all that, and that is the part that bothers me. Because – why should Don simply not look for a woman who also does not want to be hugged or kissed but does like to have sex? There are lots of women that would be happy with a relationship where there is sex and there is mutual respect and there is not the hugging or kissing. So why not look for a woman like that? Why does she have to accept this?

What also I don’t buy is Don ‘not being empathic’. Yes, he will not say the stupid things ‘women want to hear’ like some idiot robot (to get sex?), but this does not mean at all that is not empathetic towards her.

It all comes down to this: she will have to take care of him as taking care of a child. And she does– she learns to be his mother, really, thus being able to be his wife. Is that not very depressing? I am starting to think this Graeme Simsion has a horrifying idea of what women need and what you should do to get them, that is (yes, finally!) actually very funny indeed.

—

Now what would have happened if Don were a woman, looking for a man? Let’s see. Ah. Well. If Rosie was the ‘socially awkward’ one, she wouldn’t have had this problem at all, being apparently good looking. An average good looking woman can get a man. Can get sex. Easily. Can get married– yes, yes.

But she would have other problems, though. I remember once reading a letter to an advice column on sex and its great reply on slate.com. A woman writes in, in doubt. She tells an anecdote where a man told her that giving a blow job is mandatory. She writes in to ask if this is true. This might be funny, but really, it is not. The letter replier, a nice gay man with a job as a sex worker, writes very empathically, something like ‘I am so, so sorry. This really makes me hate the human race.’ He presses upon her that her instincts are not wrong at all, because, no, this is not mandatory. He explains to her about consent and having to do nothing at all, etcetera. The woman is over thirty five and describes herself dryly, funnily, as really beautiful. And autistic.

So that is what happens when Don is a girl.

Still, I ask myself again – what if Rosie was the one with ‘autism’, looking for a man? What would that book be like? I mean, in the specific sense of how would the ‘difficult man, done with women’, be trained to look out for her, thus, in the end, being able to be her life’s partner and support her?

I really have no idea.

A woman with autism is probably invisible, not invincible. She is not ballroom dancing, doing karate or learning to mix cocktails, but everything she can to keep up with ‘child rearing’. You know – normal things.

It is very sad, it is not, that Rosie learning to take care of Don like he is a child, is the main idea of a happy ending? This suits to me what a lot of traditional heterosexual marriages are still based upon – some woman packing a mans suitcase because he has no idea ‘what to wear’. It is wrong on both ends, unfair to both parties. The woman does not have to do that. The man does nothing wrong. Don wears apt, functional clothing that to him is comfortable too, but that apparently has to be mocked. Graeme Simsion, wearing the standard boring blazer on the back of the book, looking suitably the ‘author’, thinks Don does not understand anything! He should not wear what he likes, but what society, and thus, dames, expect! Good lord, this book is just really stupid.

—

I remember a long thread on Twitter, that was very funny, and very popular, from a man describing in detail the terrible disgusting things he did (vomiting, diarrhea) when a sudden bout of illness came upon him in the early stages of dating his girlfriend. The climax of the thread-story is the girlfriend handing him wet washcloths and him crying on the bathroom floor, and ‘then I knew I would marry her.’ I laughed but also felt this pang again: men looking for a new mother when looking for a wife.

Life, fortunately, is not like in this book, or like social media. I for instance, can tell you immediately about the stunningly beautiful woman that was in my masters art year, who turned out indeed to have a chronical intestines disease, as we all soon learned when we had to go on a mandatory study trip for a week to Florence. And she told this horribly embarrassing story about washcloths too, with her boyfriend in the role of having to hand them to her every hour in the beginnings of the diagnosing of the illness. Oh, how she had not wanted to go on this trip. We were all in awe of her still, maybe even more so, because of this embarrassing life fact. I don’t remember being abundantly grateful to the boyfriend either, thinking something like: my god, he does that? What an extraordinary man! I just thought something like: yes, well, that’s what you get, of course.

Taking care of each other is normal in a relationship. And that goes either way. Looking for a partner should not be learning to be as pretty as possible, or as dependable and strong as possible, but: looking for what you need. And knowing what you are worth, and can bring to the table. It really is as simple as that. That does not mean it is easy, though, because people are very different. But what I mean to say is, the more I think about it, the more what Don does in the beginning (making up the list with questions) is really not that terrible at all. Its only problem is that it’s breaking the social rules, and that is funny, or maybe uncomfortable. But he may be right about it in the first place. The best friend should just leave him alone (and his wife should not touch his suit case), and then Rosie and he will work it all out fine together. It might just be enough to have that first night of drinks on the balcony. Some things do not have to be complicated at all.

Because, in all his apparent weakness, Don is not at all easily embarrassed, or insecure.

There’s a Black Mirror episode (there’s always a Black Mirror episode) where a man has this group of voices in his head. I mean literally: the man has some kind of little chip implanted in his brain, where pick up artists are telling him what to do when standing in front of women. He goes out to a club. We see, like a zoom meeting, the guy’s view, with four little squares next to it, the pick up guys, feeding him lines, what to order, how his body language should be. He walks up to two women. One is blonde and smiling, the other is a scowling dark haired brunette. He wants the brunette. Immediately the guys in his head scream at him. ‘Don’t!’ But yes he does, of course, and ends up dead. Should have gone for the nice normal one, but this man was feeling lucky. He wanted a challenge, he wanted to win.

—

I was once picked up by a pick up artist. I mean, he tried. I told a (male) friend about this, who was, both as a friend and by profession (don’t ask) very interested in how that went.
Well, it went sort of like this: the guy asks normal questions, that have you answer him, then shifts closer and closer to you until you find yourself in a conversation. Are you going to read that newspaper? (It was in a coffee shop.) Is it ok if I sit here? You do the ‘yes’, you shift the paper towards him, you nod maybe, and then you take a sip of your coffee and proceed what you were doing – reading, or scrolling. I was reading. But five minutes later I was talking to him about the contents of some music album that I did not care about. I felt like being polite, turned into complicit. At some point I noticed something: this conversation, this shifting towards each other, was not at all like real, exciting, genuine attraction, which feels like something that is happening. This was not something that was happening, but something the guy was doing. To me. I still regret not saying, as motherly tender (because this interaction did rake up my maternal instinct) as I could have mustered, that he should not be doing this. How on earth will any relationship be, if the only way you can obtain one is by force? Because indeed manipulation is force as well. How can you trust someone wants to be with you, when you have made them so? Then again, as I a walked away (literally), I realized that was not a problem for this boy-man at all. He was indeed not looking for a relationship, just for a way to keep a woman besides him, on a leash. Might he have known what he was trying to obtain was not real, I wonder?

Don, in the book, is learning to look for the same thing – the wedding ring like a leash. The best friend is teaching him to. At first he was simply looking for what he likes.  

—

I went on Tinder the other day. I mean, last October until last week. I tried for the first time. Went through some phases: this is really annoying, this is funny, this is actually very nice, no this is not real, this is, well… tiresome. And then I quit. Maybe I’ll pick it up every once in a while, just to check. But it’s a lot of work. Anyway, Tinder might not be the ideal measure for what is considered normal, but then again, it is. I mean: everything is a little fake and a little exaggerated, but also: people are busy and really genuinely looking for a relationship in this place. Where else are you going to meet someone?
So then: what is considered normal, nowadays, is men, and, well, women too, trying really hard to work at getting a relationship. Like human contact is the reward for hard work. This usually means they convey to have everything in order: the body is fit, the house (bought!) is warm and chic, they have a pet, the social life is fun. The bio shows a possibly funny yet intelligent conversationalist. So here we are! Love us. And— yes, we can. But what Tinder does show for me, is that a lot of obtaining a relationship, is indeed sort of playing by the rules. Therefore it is so nice to see someone break through all that. (Which is, of course, the reason The Rosie Project is such a popular book.) For instance, I really liked the divorced dad saying in caps in his bio he was NOT looking for a woman to help him do caring work – he was, indeed, quite capable of doing the laundry himself, thank you very much – and looking for someone to do fun stuff with. I understood his frustration immediately, because I think a lot of women are offering themselves , consciously or unconsciously, as the carer – for the household, for the children. And I liked him. (But he had terrible taste in music.)

So yes, ok, it is a game, apparently, this girl-meets-boy thing, to a lot of people — maybe most of us, and then when someone is not immediately capable of enacting those social rules, we can enjoy laughing at them, because these are indeed rules, just made up things.

The Black Mirror episode is old, the incident with the guy in the coffee shop is old too, The Rosie Project is old. The grooming I was subjected to is thankfully considered as very bad behavior, but the teachings Don gets about wooing, are not. And the guy in the Black Mirror episode is not a grim, wanting to dominate women-type of guy, either — just a little self-conscious.
Until very recently it was considered as quite normal to need to learn how to pick up women. Like a skill set. And women were taught not to take men seriously, to see them as children. And now here we are, apparently.