A few nights ago I watched the Netflix nature documentary Dancing with the Birds, about, you guessed it, Abraham Lincoln. Just kidding, it’s about dancing birds! This is why I get the big bucks.
While watching the cute profiles of various bird species that all incorporate dance into their mating schemes, I cleverly noticed a running theme. In each case, when it came to the effort of courting and relationships, it was exclusively the male birds that had to put in the work.
We know that male birds are often the more flashy and colourful but these little guys also put in the physical and emotional labour, and none more so than the MacGregor’s bowerbird. To impress the female MacGregor’s enough to even be considered as a mate, the male bowerbirds have to build, decorate, clean and maintain an elaborate tall structure made of twigs and various nature items.
The MacGregor’s bowerbird featured in the documentary works for seven years (!) on his bower and builds a structure more than one metre tall, beautifully and specifically decorated with sap. It isn’t the end of the effort though – that is all just to entice his crush to come near, the first step in his plan. He then takes her through a meticulously planned series of events. He puffs out his colourful chest, impressing her with his plumage. He displays his nimbleness and his hopping dance moves by instigating a fun game of hide and seek around a tree stump. That would be enough to woo any creature but he doesn’t stop there. He wraps up the events by putting on a final big display, showing off his incredible mimicry skills. These birds can mimic other birds but our guy in the documentary could also do the sounds of wood chopping, dogs barking and children playing. Classic first date stuff. After all of that effort, if the lady bird is impressed enough, he gets his reward – two seconds of bird copulation.
The bar for boy birds is high. It sounds silly but the reason this jumped out at me is because I have been noticing a trend on TikTok, largely taking place in the comments section. If a woman posts a TikTok of her male partner doing literally anything even mildly thoughtful or nice, the comments are filled with other women saying “Oh my God he’s a keeper!” and “Wow! Does he have a brother?” and so on. This happens on videos when a man has actually done something nice but what slightly disturbs me is when it happens equally as much on videos of men doing the absolute bare minimum or nothing at all.
For example there’s a TikTok prank where women pretend they broke their boyfriend’s TV screen and film their reaction when they run into the room. Time and again I have seen the same response in the comments – if the man does not violently flip out and punch a wall, he gets an unbelievable amount of praise. The bar for boy birds is so high and the bar for boy humans is so low. It’s not just women in relationships – there seem to be a lot of women who are desperate to just experience a man being kind to them, paying them attention. I tweeted the below about how a TikTok of a bungee jump instructor doing his job turned into some sort of romantic fantasy in the comments but it largely wasn’t about sex – it was literally fantasies about a man being thoughtful.
I cannot express how much this is just a video of a bungee jump instructor instructing a woman who is about to bungee jump pic.twitter.com/7LWg97j6Uh
— Bec Shaw (@Brocklesnitch) April 3, 2023
There is a recurring segment on Jimmy Kimmel’s show where they ask men basic questions about their partners and it is truly depressing viewing, watching women be shocked that their (sometimes long-term) partners don’t know their birthdays or eye colour.
This kind of apparent lack of interest or care lines up with a lot of anecdotal evidence I’ve heard from scores of friends out in the dating world. When this is a kind of straight man that women are out there encountering, other men begin to get credit for doing normal, non-thoughtless things. He asked you questions about yourself on a date? Amazing, husband material. He remembered your birthday and got you something? Was he built in a lab for women? He cares if you have a good time in bed? He was sent from God. These are all things that are nice to do, and are things to be grateful for, but they shouldn’t be so out of the ordinary as to be remarkable. We should all be more like the bird girlies, calmly expecting effort, and only rewarding those who are willing to enthusiastically demonstrate their appreciation of us. We should all raise the bar.
Obviously what I’m saying doesn’t apply to everyone but I can already hear some men flexing their fingers to write an angry comment. So let me address a couple of things – yes, some women are bad. Yes, not all men are bad. And if you are not one of the men I’m talking about, that’s great! Congrats, there are a lot of you. Some of my best friends are thoughtful husbands! But if you are someone who is feeling defensive after reading this, maybe examine why. All I am saying is that everyone should make sure the bar is high enough to get the sort of partner they want and deserve.
Nobody is asking you to build a tower 10 times your height using only a beak and claws to show your partner you care – but you could at least learn a little dance.
• Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney
