Constructed Incompatibility

They built two incompatible systems and told us to inhabit both simultaneously. The first, desire operates through difference, tension, pursuit, the gravitational pull of imbalance. The second, equality is the only legitimate foundation for intimate contact. These cannot coexist. Yet we are required to perform as if they do.

The incompatibility was not accidental. It was engineered through decades of ideological renovation that refused to acknowledge what it was demolishing. The old structure, transparent, brutal, functional, assigned roles, declared hierarchy, and permitted desire to flow along established gradients. This was not natural. It was structural. But it was coherent.

The new structure dismantled the gradients without replacing the mechanisms. It said, hierarchy is illegitimate, domination is abuse, submission is internalized oppression. Desire must be symmetrical, reciprocal, purged of power. But it did not, could not, reprogram what decades of exposure had already embedded. The result is a population trained in one system, governed by another, and punished for the inevitable friction between them.

People now arrive at adulthood fluent in egalitarian vocabulary. They can recite the theory, respect, equality, enthusiastic consent, partners who communicate feelings and do not impose. They have been told that wanting anything else is evidence of damage. Yet desire does not cooperate. It still responds to the old signals, confidence that borders on arrogance, emotional unavailability, refusal to accommodate. The ones who ask permission, who defer, who embody the doctrine, trigger nothing. Correct in every way the discourse demands, irrelevant in every way desire recognizes.

The discourse names this a failure of insufficient evolution. If people are drawn to those who disregard stated preferences, it must be manipulation. If egalitarian behavior is rejected, it must be residual conditioning. The possibility that stated preferences and operational preferences are structurally misaligned is not addressed. The framework cannot survive that acknowledgment.

What created this misalignment? The shift was ideological, but the consequences are material. Feminism demanded access to male domains, work, autonomy, financial independence, sexual agency. It achieved most of this within two generations. But it did not anticipate what this would do to the logic of pair formation. When one party no longer needed the other for survival, for status, for economic stability, the foundation of negotiated interdependence collapsed. What remained was desire, stripped of its justifying structure.

Desire without necessity becomes harder to justify. Someone who earns their own income, controls their own life, does not need protection, cannot easily explain wanting someone who earns more, makes decisions for them, operates with unilateral authority. The wanting persists, but the rationale disappears. So the wanting becomes shameful, hidden, reframed as weakness to overcome. They date the egalitarian while fantasizing about the authoritarian. They say they want partnership while structuring their life to avoid it.

Others experience the loss differently. The old system gave a script, provide, protect, lead. In exchange, deference, domestic labor, sexual access, social legitimacy. The new system revoked the exchange but left the expectations ambiguous. Initiation is now reclassified as potential harassment. Pursuit is pressure. Risk-taking is boundary violation. The behaviors that signal intent are the behaviors most likely to be penalized.

So the population splits. One group learns the new rules, internalizes them, becomes risk-averse. They wait for explicit signals, avoid escalation, prioritize not offending. They are invisible. The second group ignores the rules, operates as if the old system still governs, accepts occasional punishment as the cost of continued access. They are resented and desired in equal measure. The resentment is vocal. The desire is silent but functionally determinative.

The contemporary left offers therapy. If someone is attracted to dominance, they need to examine their trauma. If someone struggles with egalitarian courtship, they need to deconstruct their conditioning. This frames the problem as individual pathology rather than structural contradiction. It assumes sufficient re-education will align desire with doctrine. But desire is not a belief. It is a response pattern built from repetition, reward, deprivation, and the early architecture of what registered as significant.

The right offers nostalgia. It claims the solution is to restore traditional roles, to return one party to economic dependence and the other to unchallenged authority. But the conditions that made that system stable no longer exist. Economic options exist. Unilateral imposition is not feasible. The old roles were never voluntary, they were enforced through lack of alternatives. Restoring them would require removing the alternatives.

What remains, two populations navigating incompatible incentive structures, punished for honesty, rewarded for performance. Admitting you want someone to dominate you gets you called a traitor. Admitting egalitarian relationships bore you gets you called damaged. So they perform the accepted positions in public and enact the rejected ones in private.

I see this in how people describe their relationships versus how they operate within them. The public account emphasizes communication, mutual respect, shared decision-making. The private account reveals who initiates, who defers, who controls money, who performs emotional labor, who threatens to leave when boundaries are tested. The gap is not hypocrisy. It is the distance between the language we have been given and the structures we still inhabit.

The feminist solution is to keep narrowing acceptable desire until only politically compliant wanting remains. Anything that involves hierarchy, pursuit, or imbalance is reclassified as internalized oppression. This does not eliminate the wanting. It drives it underground, where it festers without acknowledgment or negotiation. People pursue those they are not supposed to want, then reframe the pursuit as victimization when it ends badly. Others escalate in ways they know are disapproved but functionally necessary, then absorb the accusation of toxicity as the price of remaining visible.

What the discourse will not permit, maybe the tension is not a bug. Maybe incompatible desires are not the result of insufficient education or lingering oppression. Maybe they are structural, embedded in how differentiation itself produces attraction. Egalitarianism flattens the gradients through which desire historically flowed. Without gradient, there is no pull. Without pull, wanting has nowhere to anchor.

This does not mean hierarchy is desirable. It means the eliminationist project, the attempt to purge intimacy of all power asymmetry, produces its own casualties. It produces people who cannot navigate courtship without risking punishment. It produces people who cannot admit what they want without betraying the ideology they have been taught to uphold. It produces relationships that function only to the extent that both parties agree not to name how they actually operate.

The system is not broken. It is performing exactly as designed, generating enough friction to keep everyone confused, compliant, and convinced the problem is personal rather than structural. People blame themselves for wanting hierarchy. People blame themselves for not wanting equality enough. Both continue enacting patterns they cannot publicly defend, sustained by the quiet agreement that no one will name the gap between what we claim and what we do.