Men Haven't Changed. Women Just Stopped Putting Up With Their Shit.

Danielle Camporini Leoneli

4 minutes ago

5 min read

Today's image of a charming prince is so dismantled that women are fantasising about being Samantha Jones instead of Carrie Bradshaw. We can definitely say that a large percentage of women have returned to the dream of being a Pilates mum, but at the same time, women have grown so tired of dealing with men that many would prefer to get just one thing from them and then say bye-bye!

We know women's vision of life changed as soon as they could become independent. But the real question is: did men ever change?

The Woman Who Never Wanted to Be the Fantasy

Kim Cattrall celebrated her 70th birthday on 21 August this year, and somehow, her most famous character has never felt more relevant to the moment we're living in.

Cattrall has said in interviews, more than once, that Samantha “wasn't her”. Playing the most sexually liberated woman on television didn't mean she wanted to live like her. Which is almost funny, because two decades later, that's exactly the character a generation of women decided they wanted to become.

Samantha was never supposed to be the blueprint. She became one anyway, a huge inspiration to women who grew up dreaming less about the perfect wedding and more about a life with money, a career and nobody's permission required.

If you watched the show, you know that independence got wild in a specific way: women started treating men the way men have always treated women. Wild enough that on TikTok, some women now say they identify with Mr Big more than with any of the four leads. Not the woman who chased him for six seasons.

We Were Sold Ambition, and We Believed It

If you grew up on 2000s rom-coms, being a successful girl was the whole plot, even when the poster sold you a love story. The guy was the hook. The real arc was always about her: the job, the apartment, the version of herself she was becoming, with or without him.

Chasing your own goals and actually achieving them, as a free agent, had never been such a loud message. We didn't just watch that life; we started planning for it.

That freedom was never really about men. But somehow, we kept rerouting our own paths around them anyway. Carrie spent an entire series losing her self-respect to a man who could barely commit to a phone call. Samantha was the one actually living without needing one because, as far as she was concerned, they're all cut from the same cloth.

The Machine Didn't Change. We Changed the Settings.

You can watch the evolution of men and women in real time, and here's the uncomfortable part: apart from hitting us less, men still cheat, still disappear and still perform the same tricks, just with better production value.

The machine runs exactly as it always has, with men still at the controls. What changed are the settings we use to survive it. The truth is, men didn't change. We changed ourselves enough to survive them and called that progress. You can see it happening in real numbers, not just in feelings. Women are choosing, on purpose, to opt out of dating, sex, marriage and even having kids with men, full stop.

Some call it the 4B movement. Others just call it “boy sober”. Different hashtags, same decision: no more men, thanks.

None of that is women giving up on love. It's women finally being allowed to price it correctly.

So What Does Day Eleven Actually Look Like?

Not every woman is opting out. Plenty are still building a life with a man, still choosing to stay past the ten-day mark the old fantasy warned us about. But staying doesn't look like it used to.

It used to mean tolerating. Now it means auditioning him first: how he handles conflict, whether he does the dishes without being asked twice, whether he can hear “no” without punishing you for it.

Women aren't staying longer because men have become easier to deal with. They're staying because they finally screen before they invest, and most men don't make it past week one.

So no, men didn't change. What changed is how much rope we hand out before we notice it's the same guy in a different shirt.

Nobody Gets to Call It Unromantic

When women say they'd rather be a Samantha, they're not rejecting romance. They're choosing their own terms. We built new settings because the alternative was changing our entire path every time an insecure man needed managing.

We're still handed the short end of the stick by society in plenty of situations we don't get to choose. But this is one place where we do have a choice now: whether to keep dealing with it in our sex lives.

Call her a whore if you want; nobody's asking your permission.

A man who sleeps with the whole city gets to just be a guy. A woman who sleeps with whoever she wants, whenever she wants, finally gets to just be a woman.

Wellness Culture Is Doing the Old Job

None of this happened by accident, and it isn't a phase. Naomi Wolf called out this exact pattern decades ago in The Beauty Myth: every time women get closer to real power, the beauty standard gets stricter, as if to keep us too busy managing our bodies to manage our lives.

It got a serious boost from the matcha, clean-girl, wellness era, which put the Pilates mum right back on her pedestal. Let's not even start on the thinness-is-better relaunch we're currently living through. It's the same old myth wearing a new filter.

All of it reflects exactly what women are anxious about, both in relationships and in the wider world.

While you're busy chasing the aesthetic of a well-optimised life, you're only allowed to dream about the wedding, the house, the kids.

Sounds peaceful. It also conveniently leaves no time or need to worry about your own career.

I'm not saying every woman should want one. I'm saying the sheer number of women being talked out of wanting one by an algorithm should worry you more than it does.

We're being redesigned, again, into the perfect wife, even those of us who are still working, since that just means you get to pay half the bills and burn out managing your own life and his.

Same machine, different settings.

Which is exactly why not dealing with a man, or even bothering to identify with one, has become so much easier to choose. We've spent decades proving we know how to move the settings. The 2000s taught us that. We may never get to touch the machine itself, but we can keep adjusting the dials to survive the disrespect built into it.

We were never going to change men. But we can absolutely feed them their own poison. So no, there's no real choice between Carrie and Samantha. There's only one decision left to make: get the fuck away from your Mr Big.