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Book ReviewBook Recommendation! : 30 Reasons Why Men Deserve Nothing by Imani Forester
REVIEW: 30 Reasons why Men Deserve Nothing
By Imani Forester.
10/10 (or 30/30)!
This was a concise, well-written dating manifesto that describes in plain terms why women need to prioritize themselves by raising their standards and enforcing healthy boundaries. After defining the terms in the introduction, Forester provides 30 common sense reasons why men aren’t worth settling DOWN for.
Here are a few (you’ll need to get the book to get the rest)
#1 : “if you build him, he will leave.
#7 : “Your Health depends on his wealth”
#17: “Because they told you to ‘Choose better’”
#21 : “a man is only as good as his current status, Not his Potential”
And my personal favorite
#30 : “Men must build value* and even BUGS know this!”
*she points out that incidentally, men are the ones that obsess over value … we didn’t create the market. We just live here.
She also, wonderfully, provides notes and statistics that support her position. By the end of the book, a woman who is interested in dating will be much better informed ; those who are enjoying separatism will also find a lot of research to support their separatism.
She writes with humour, and her arguments are pretty incontrovertible!
I also watch her YouTube channel - she posts regular responses to current relationship TikTok’s and other women’s issues. Her Channel Imani F. 30 Reasons Why Men Deserve Nothing, @ImaniForester
Check her out ! Buy her book! 📕 it was a great and cathartic and rejuvenating read for me… it feels great to know that if other women are catching on, we may have hope yet.
I think we might all be better off if we returned to arranged marriages and matchmaking, where you are set up with a partner who (theoretically) fulfils your standards, you have a written contract regarding each partner's duties in the partnership, and you come to love each other later, after building a life and family together.
Romantic love and this kind of pragmatic approach to dating don't really play well together. Romantic love has a tendency to make us fall for entirely the wrong people.
Yikes.
I prefer solitude to matchmaking. I’d prefer death to an arranged marriage.
I didn't mean it should be compulsory!
Don’t you worry it will perpetuate the entitlement men have? they feel entitled to a partner and frankly, they aren’t.
They feel entitled to a partner under our current preferred partner-finding system of falling-in-romantic-love-and-expecting-it-to-last-forever. And in some ways that makes more sense, because don't we all deserve to be loved? But human beings have a habit of falling in love with other human beings who aren't good for us and aren't good long-term partner material.
If the system required a man to actually have something concrete to offer, they might feel less entitled simply for existing, or might try to harder to actually offer something concrete.
To be clear, I am not suggesting we return to the woman-as-property arranged marriage, in the sense of "here, have this thing I own, my daughter, and give me something you own, those cows". I'm just saying long-term marriages might be a better option for women who want that kind of thing if we made those decisions with our head and not with our heart.
There is voluntary matchmaking, so you can avail yourself of a professional matchmaker if you wish to.
And, I mean, you can get a man who wants to have something to offer, rather than one who tries to cheat the system.
I could never have sex with a man I'm not in love with, so arranged marriage wouldn't work for me, unless I treated it as business partnership and got pregnant by turkey baster method, I guess. Even then, I would wonder if we are actually genetically compatible. Women's bodies tend to know that sort of thing.
Romantic love worked great for my parents and several other family members. (I mean, no accounting for tastes, obviously. But all aunts and uncles are/were happily married for decades.) Falling in love with people who aren't a good fit is a bug, not a standard feature of humans, imho.
Your post makes a lot of sense, I wish the people who downvoted you would argue their case.
I know quite a few people in arranged marriages, and these marriages have been no more or less successful than the marriages I know of that were contracted for love. I think the people downvoting me are assuming I mean a system where the woman has no say and is handed over like a piece of property. That hasn't happened in the arranged marriages I have seen. In all of them, various previously-vetted suitors presented themselves and it was the woman who had the final yay or nay. One of my friends took five years to find the right guy.
I think the idea of "forever marriage" probably needs to go away. It made sense in the times when nobody lived very long. If a couple married around age 18, she died in childbirth around age 20 (or sooner) and he died in battle or of some other disease around age 20 or 22 (or sooner), "til death do us part" wasn't an impossible commitment. Nowadays, it makes no sense to pretend the great relationship you have now will still be great and still work for you when you're 80, because chances are, it won't.
I think the notion of 'one size fits all' needs to go away. After spending a lot of time closer to nature, I've come to see humans as akin to all other general categories: animals, birds etc -- and there are birds and animals that mate for life, others who are just together for raising their young, others who just hook up and leave each other alone. There are those that spend their time in massive flocks or herds, those that live in small groups or pairs, an others who are extremely solitary. I think we need to recognize that different people have different needs and approaches when it comes to relationships.
This is my view. Sometimes I'll have a nature documentary narration playing in my head when I'm people-watching. lol
I like an auto-expiry. Have a marriage license expire after 5 years and force folks to renew
Do we really need marriage? If we had better laws to get men to pay for their offspring, and compensate women for the salary lost while raising children, we wouldn't need marriage laws.
Edited to add: Actually, severe punishment for giving people STDs would finally lead to punishment for people who cheat on their partners without having to bring back adultery laws.
I would vote to end marriage altogether too. I think we have enough structural apparatuses to work out property without a marital contract
Where did you get those numbers though? What time period, what country?
Now, I don't know much before Early Modern Europe, but even then marriage tended to be later (mid-twenties for men, men were definitely alive after 22!) and life expectancy much higher than you think.
Beware of average lifespan data as is is not representative: since infant mortality rate was so high, the important number is years left upon reaching adulthood.
That being said, yes, the median number of years people would have to stay together until death parts them is higher now. But not as dramatic as you make it sound, and less dramatic if you narrow it down by social classes, where marriage was earlier and people lived longer.
Off the top of my head Louis XIV was married to his second wife (which he chose himself) for over 30 years (after the death of his first wife) which isn't total peanuts.
I just bought a kindle copy of this both for interest and to support the author. This current climate where men think they’re the prize? Pffft.
I wish I’d known this back when I was young enough for it to do me some good. Women have to work to shake off the brainwashing of female socialization.
Omg I totally wish I had had a cool woman tell me this stuff 25 years ago !!
I actually did have cool, well-educated women tell me truly feminist stuff four decades ago. I started as a women's studies major at 18, but all my courses were informed by feminism. I was actually in a grad seminar with the guy who literally wrote the book on 'Men in Feminism' (I know, I know--argue away, but he did write that book). Anyway, bc I studied feminism, grew up with feminism on TV (RIP Phil Donahue) and just went all in on it, I never had a bad relationship. Women do not need to be told all the way men suck; what they need is a lifetime of education telling them they are valuable, human, important. If we value ourselves, we do not need to waste time and mental energy (as men do) devaluing and denigrating others. I learned in feminism that reversing that negativity is not the answer bc it only continues to center our lives thinking about men. It is simply a reaction formation to misogyny. I think women deserve better
We deserve a life learning about women, about ourselves, having women mentors, fighting alongside women for the end of misogyny. Bc this is how I spent my life, I have only had good, healthy relationships with men. When I was young, this meant nice guys who loved me but would not get in my way of my goals (so they were relatively easy to leave when I moved on to the next stage). When I got older, I knew enough to be alone/celibate for many years and dedicate those years to therapy to purge bad familial patterns and trauma from growing up poor and ACA. But I never lost my faith in or commitment to feminism. And then I met my best friend, soulmate and life partner and we've been together for nearly 30 years. So, yeah, romantic love can work for women, we didn't need a written contract, we are not 'spicy straights'; we lead a boring, vanilla, child-free life. But we share the same interests and values and humor. In short, it would be so easy to say it is the men. But women get into bad relationships bc they have internalized the message that they do not deserve better, that we are less than human, that it is okay to be treated like a doormat. Feminism is not learning that men are shit (even if all but a handful are); it is about learning women are human and UNLEARNING the cultural shit directed at us by men AND women (anyone's mother here ever call them 'selfish' as a kid? Run you down? make you feel shit so that you take care of the families needs, her needs, before your own?).
Rebecca West said it all years ago: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.” ― Rebecca West, The Young Rebecca: Writings, 1911-1917
Being a feminist, really being devoutly feminist, means never allowing anyone to treat you like a doormat, or a prostitute. Hardest thing in the world for a woman to unlearn, even when we oppose it for others.
I couldn’t have put it better 🙌