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Minds Without Borders

A thoughtful look at how culture, society, politics, media and economics affect us all.

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Feminism

An Icky Explanation for Why We Don’t Compartmentalize Men the Way We Do Women

Plus, a handy-dandy guide for judging women at a glance!

5 min readSep 13, 2023

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We put women into boxes because we see them as commodities to be marketed for the benefit of men who want to easily pick up just the kind of woman they want.

That’s why we compartmentalize women as madonnas and whores. The tradwives and sluts. The girl bosses and the manic pixie dream girls. The party girls and the tomboys and the Miss Goodie Two-Shoes. The gold-diggers. The fashionistas. The maneaters and hippies and girly-girls and all the rest. I could go on all day and so could you.

We have a few such boxes we put men into: Mr. Right, alphas, boy-toys, incels … I’m running out already. Men are seldom turned into a commodity like that.

We don’t put men into boxes in quite the same way.

And I have a theory about that: Women have been socialized to package themselves as something a man might want to choose.

Men have not. They are seen as the choosers and women as the products to be chosen.

This dates back to the days when we had to attract a husband to survive. When we weren’t allowed to have a…

Minds Without Borders
Minds Without Borders

Published in Minds Without Borders

A thoughtful look at how culture, society, politics, media and economics affect us all.

Michelle Teheux
Michelle Teheux

Written by Michelle Teheux

Lover of literature. Former newspaper editor. Fascinated by everything. Contact: [email protected]. To buy me a coffee:

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