Being in your mid 20s is weird. You’re young but you know you’re not ‘young young’. Like you don’t know all of the latest dance moves, songs, artists, apps, or phrases unless that is something you are specifically into. Why? Because we’re at work for the majority of the day, and we spend a large amount of the rest of our productive hours struggling to get 4G on our commutes. So for myself, as a 25 y/o, when I discovered the word ‘simp‘ on twitter I did what I usually do: head over to urban dictionary:
• A man that puts himself in a subservient/submissive position under women in hopes of winning them over, without the female bringing anything to the table
• A man that puts too much value on a female for no reason
• A man that prides himself with “Chivalry” in hopes of getting sexual gratification from women
• A square with no game other than “Rolling out the Red-Carpet” for every female
So when I understood that this wasn’t a shortened word for the ‘Simspsons’ or the word ‘simple’, and I saw tweets like this:
Especially when these tweets were coming from men, but not all men:
I was confused. I was confused about the fact that, being in an era where many claim women only have negative things to say about men, that men would criticise an action which caused women to praise men. I was confused about why such an action was perceived by a group of men as a sign of weakness. And I was confused about how spending £15 ($17.47 – for my U.S. readers) on drinks is ‘too much’ in this 2020.
But I was happy to see that, as a woman, I was not alone in the confusion:
Sorry, the next pic has nothing to do with this blog post, but when I see the word ‘woo’ I think of sims ‘woohoo’ lol
It’s odd because if we think back a couple decades to the 90s/00s, romance used to be a significant part getting to know, being in a relationship with, and falling in love with someone. There was popping and locking, passion and action, roses and couples poses. But something happened between 2010 – 2020. There are few to no music videos like this anymore:
Not to say that that’s a bad thing. Popular culture changes, societies move on. But how did we get from dancing in the streets to thinking £15 and a conversation is ‘simpish’? Are we in an era where romance is just dead and chivalry is looked down upon? And if so then where did this come from? Music? A backlash of extreme feminism? Or maybe something more personal such as them lacking self esteem so feeling the need to bring others down? Or they lack kindness in their own lives and so struggle to comprehend kindness towards others?
The only clear explanation I saw was the following:
So this is essentially an issue of power. From Irregularbeliev’s perspective, women are in a position of social power which surpasses men, meaning that they can, and do use men’s craving or attention for their own financial gain.
This is interesting to me because women tend to wear make up, wax, tan, diet, pluck, gym, and apply heat and/or colour to their hair for exactly the same reason: attention. The average woman will spend £12.9k ($15k) on make up in their lifetime. Men are often brought up to be a lot more self confident than women, which is why in the Netflix Series ‘100 Humans‘ (episode 3) it was found that men rate their physical appearance more highly than women. A study which was carried out by Cornell University found that men overestimate their abilities and performance, while women underestimate both. According to my queen Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche –
“We don’t teach boys to care about being likeable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry, or aggressive, or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reason”
So if the academics are right, and Irreuglarbeliv also has a point, then maybe some men feel like they need to splash their cash to receive attention from females because they believe that is one of the few/most effective ways of being kind to another person, specifically women.
Humans aren’t perfect. Some men are bad, some women are bad, and that includes all gender identities. So excluding those who are actually gold-diggers, I would personally say that the majority of women are not out here with the intention of giving attention in exchange for monetary gifts. The majority, from what I see, want their person of interest to show them that they are an important part of their daily life. Whether that is through spending money on the most elaborate dates, or creating a scrapbook of their relationship. The core of what females tend to be impressed with is care. Which is, in itself, kindness.
Women can, and do open their own doors, pull out their own chairs, pay their own bills, and buy their own bottles of wine. Someone else doing it isn’t self-deprecating, just an act of kindness. In the same way that we hear stories about females such as coming home from a 9-5, cooking, helping kids with their homework, and cleaning up after the day is done to consistently buying their significant other the latest year’s FIFA on ps4.
So if we are to take all opinions into account, then what I am concluding is that we all need to be a bit kinder and fairer to each other. Going off of traditional gender roles, the woman would be expected to cook, clean, and nurture before spreading her legs and pretending to orgasm at the end of the day, and the man would be expected to be the breadwinner, make the difficult decisions, be a handyman, and never show emotions relating to vulnerability. But that isn’t 2020.
Priscilla McGregor-Kerr
@cillahope – instagram & twitter
@theartwemiss – instagram
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