Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Sasha Pasulka
I have a close male friend in tech who is obsessed with getting rich. He’s a smart, educated and hard-working man, but, truth be told, he’s probably not cut out to be an empire-builder. He could easily bring in a low six-figure income at any number of large firms, but he’s somehow got it ingrained that he has to start a wildly successful tech company and make an enormous amount of money in order to be worthy of happiness. I’ve watched him lose his health, sanity, credit and girlfriends again and again for this obsession. “This is literally killing you,” I tell him. “It has to stop.”
But it doesn’t stop.
Lately I’ve had more than one male friend confide in me about his financial insecurity: “I feel like if I don’t make a lot of money, I’m not a success.”
I can honestly say I’ve never had a female friend say this to me. My girlfriends and I are certainly driven to be successful; we want to be high achievers in our fields, and we stress over everything we haven’t yet accomplished, but no one’s especially concerned with getting rich. We hardly ever talk about money.
Then again, the world doesn’t much care how much money I make. If I want a lot of money and I’m thin and pretty enough, I can always just marry into it, right?
See, I know how men feel about the pressure of financial success. I know how it feels to walk into a room and feel like I’m the least attractive woman in it, to glance around and feel that all the other women are more beautiful – skinnier, longer hair, perkier breasts, fuller lips, better skin — to feel invisible and frightened and worthless in comparison, like everything else I’ve done and been in my life is meaningless because my thighs actually touch each other.
But for every photo of a stunning, size-zero woman that runs on the cover of a magazine, a thousand articles are written about the physical expectations we have for women and what it does to their psyche. When I feel like I don’t measure up to a certain standard, I’m surrounded by media voices screaming at me: “She’s airbrushed! She’s had plastic surgery! She had a team of twenty hair and makeup professionals! You have a million other wonderful qualities, and it’s a waste of your time to obsess on your appearance.”
We don’t do this for men. When Forbes runs a cover featuring a business tycoon, and inside he talks about his company’s success and his 22-year-old supermodel girlfriend and his eight homes in Europe, no one rushes to a laptop to bang out a piece about the pressure we put on men to make ridiculous sums of money, the pressure to provide generously for spouses and children that comes along with the male “privilege” of historically being a family’s sole wage-earner. No one’s screaming at men that they’re about as likely to start the next Facebook as I am to wake up tomorrow a dead ringer for Penelope Cruz.
And I think that matters, and I think it’s worth saying again: We put a lot of pressure on men to build empires and to get rich doing it. And men process this deeply, and it can be as insidious as a young woman’s obsession with being thin. And we don’t talk about it. We don’t actively discourage men from feeling this way.
Why? I’ll offer that this imbalance comes from a one-sided “feminist” culture that emphasizes all the ways in which women are victims while neatly overlooking the emotional struggles of the modern man. “You poor things,” we tell women, “the world is a mean place, and you’re something that can be easily hurt.”
We would never say that to our men. We would never project an inherent weakness onto men the way we do when we write about how the pressure to be beautiful hurts women.
The wealth obsession manifests silently, easily disguised as focus and drive, and never as obviously as eating disorders and botched plastic surgery highlight the pain women endure in the struggle to be beautiful.
The wealth obsession manifests silently, easily disguised as focus and drive, and never as obviously as eating disorders and botched plastic surgery highlight the pain women endure in the struggle to be beautiful.
We catch a glimpse of it it every now and then when a man loses his job and then kills his wife and children before suiciding. “What a psycho,” we say, and we talk for a couple of days about the pressure that pushes men over the edge, but there’s not a lot of room for sympathy or relatability in such extreme cases.
There’s no obvious rallying point, no foothold, for a media retaliation. So we just don’t talk about it, and some men collapse emotionally under this pressure, probably feeling very alone in it.
Some of us start companies because we love starting companies – we love being our own bosses, setting our own goals, and the excitement that comes from building something of our own from scratch. And some of us start companies because we see a handful of people become obscenely rich doing it and we want to be one of them. And neither is the right motivation or the wrong one.
But I’m just going to say it so that someone’s said it: Guys, it’s totally okay if you don’t get rich. If you never, ever, ever get rich, that’s still okay. There’s a lot more to life than being rich, and the people you really want to have in your life know that.
And, hey, if you do get rich, will you pay for my liposuction?
