I stumbled across this image on the discussion boards at Mumsnet, where it was getting a pretty rough reception, after it had been sent to a commenter’s daughter during a break-up. I’d seen it before, but since it has so much casually wrong about it, I thought I’d take it apart too. As with some previous posts on here, I’m not analysing it because I think it’s the worst and most evil thing that has ever been said to a young woman, but the opposite. It’s apparently supportive and helpful – at worst a bit trite and anodyne – but it quietly encodes a lot of sexist and damaging attitudes about gender and sex. Really quite a lot. So I thought I’d try a list, and would welcome commenters adding any of their own…
- It starts by saying that girls are like objects. Boys in this analogy get to be humans, but girls get to be a still life. A basic point, and one which may seem to be missing the point of an analogy, in which things are compared to other things. But metaphors have weight, and they can reveal hidden assumptions about what we assume is like another thing. They can show up patterns and grooves in our thinking. And, in fact, only one person is being the subject of an analogy here. In the apple tree world, boys are still boys. Only girls are objects.
- It assumes that dating is a process by which boys select and achieve the girls they want. Girls have no part in this process, they simply have to wait to be chosen. Again, I could be accused of not knowing how to metaphor. But this isn’t too far from how a lot of dating advice and popular media sees the world. Men don’t like women who’re too forward. They like to feel like the pursuer. Pretend to be less clever than you are. Don’t mention that you earn more than him. Wait for him to call back.
- It encourages young women to locate their worth in their difficulty as a prize. Not that there’s anything wrong with a young woman liking to be inaccessible to male attention, but here it’s being valued because of how it appears to a boy, not because it’s what she likes.
- It sets girls against each other, suggesting that the reason one woman is having an unhappy time emotionally is other women, rather than the men she is dating. It suggests romantic and sexual relationships are a zero-sum game in which some people win by ensuring that others lose. Despite the imagery of physical exertion and achievement, it doesn’t say that the boys are in competition with each other, rather that the girls are competing to be picked.
- It repeats damaging ideas that sexually active women are somehow rotten or worthless. “Easy” is the term used here, playing into both unpleasant notions that a girl can become less valuable by acting upon sexual feelings, and the idea that girls should be compared like objects.
- It thus sets up a paradox, in which the imaginary girl at the top of the tree is valuable so long as she is difficult and inaccessible, but will lose her value as soon as she allows herself to be part of a relationship. If the girls below her were “rotten” and “easy” because they had sex, how is she any different once the boy climbs to the higher branches? Purity culture in action: she is valued by how long she refrains from sexual activity, but sexual activity is the standard by which she is judged.
- It genders virtues in very traditional ways. Boys here have to be brave and not mind about getting physically hurt. Girls have to…stay in their place and wait to be picked.
- It equates sex with the consumption and destruction of one person by another. The boys in the analogy are eating the apples, otherwise the references to the “rotten” ones makes no sense. So the romantic and sexual relationship set up by the image involves one active participant and one passive participant, one who consumes and one who is consumed.
- In setting up girls as a prize to be achieved with various levels of difficulty, it reinforces the model of romantic love as a particular kind of stalking which is justified by male emotion. The refusal to accept that she’s not interested, the persistence in pursuing her, the belief that she doesn’t know how great you could be together: these are tropes we all recognise from movies and books. And they’re harmful in practice.
- It follows a long-standing association between female sexuality, sin and apples. It’s a less ambiguous version of the traditional sexist reading of the Garden of Eden, which has simply elided the difference between Eve and the apple, and simply decided that women are fruit and their sexuality is rotten. A rotting apple is often associated – for obvious reasons – with mortality. So we’re getting pretty close to sex = death (and both are women’s fault.)
- It assumes that it’s natural for men to want to have sex with women whom they also despise. The “rotten apples” at the bottom of the tree (whom the boys are eating instead of climbing higher) are objectively unpleasant, but it’s assumed that the boys will eat them. It should shock us that our culture assumes men will despise and dislike women whom they also want to have sex with. It casts women in a very dangerous role. This can appear in the violent resentment of the Men’s Rights Movement, who rail against women’s supposed power over them. It can surface as the callousness expressed towards a rape victim who drank alcohol that night or flirted with the man who raped her. It is continually emphasized by pornography which imagines sex as a spectrum of things which are more pleasurable for a man if they are unpleasant for a woman. It’s reinforced in the advice given to young men by the media about how to persuade their girlfriends into certain acts, as if sex is a game which has to be lost by someone in order to be won by someone else.
Those are the points which immediately struck me about this image – I’d love to hear how you see it.
1. I agree with number 2, but this felt weird:
“Men don’t like women who’re too forward. They like to feel like the pursuer.”
Huh? I’m surrounded by guys who are tired of pursuing, who are so socially inept that are dying for a small sign from a woman so they’ll know they can at least try to talk. No, man DO NOT enjoy being the pursuer. It’s terrible. Being a pursuer means wasting so much effort on one girl only to get a ‘no’ in the end.
3. I completely agree with you on the shaming of ‘easy’ girls. There’s no pride in being ‘diifficult’ – it’s like being pride of being antisocial. There’s a saying – a slut is someone who has sex with everyone but you. If a girl wants to have sex with 100 guys, even at the same time, well, why not? I just hope she’ll enjoy it.
4. You’re taking it a bit too far in the ‘consumption’ and ‘rotten apple=death’. Apples here aren’t viewed as food but as a prize, and death isn’t mentioned at all. I do agree this analogue reinforces the idea that women are a ‘prize’, which is stupid. It’s what makes guys believe they deserve a hot woman just because they’re guys. I wish someone told me it was bullshit when I was younger.
In general though, I enjoyed this analysis. You pointed a lot of bad ideas that I still see people carry. This analog smelled like bullshit from the beginning. We need to end these silly image macros.
Thanks for your comments – I’m particularly interested by the idea that women aren’t told not to pursue men. I’ll believe very willingly that many men find this ridiculous, but aren’t most movies and magazines still oriented towards “he the pursuer, she the pursued”? At the least, aren’t women whose “pursuit” is found irksome judged and treated much more harshly than their male equivalents?
Men are presented as the pursuer more often. It doesn’t mean, however, we like it. If we did, then all these discussions about women and how interact with them would not have been filled with depression.
Almost any conversation about how to approach women I’ve seen is riddled with anxiety and fear. We know it’s expected from us to pursue, but we don’t enjoy it.
Aha, sorry, I see the issue here – we’ve been talking past each other. This post wasn’t about what men like or don’t like.
Yes, men are usually the pursuer, but I would caution you to dismiss female desire as an independent variable in this matter. Women do pursue, but those who don’t usually don’t do it because they want to test the men’s level of interest.
“to NOT dismiss female desire”, obviously.
Oh, I can buy the eating/sex/death bit, though it can be done in a way that’s sexy (D H Lawrence, Medlars and Sorb-Apples). There’s a nice pseudo-Chaucer poem about women who are like quinces, rotten almost before they’re ripe. So I think the connotations are there.
I would add that it reinforces the fairly common notion presented to women (and particularly common in these motivational-type gifs) that if you are suffering, it is because you are spectacular.
I had to look at a lot of these relating to illness and impairment for this post and found so many, highly feminine gifs about depression or chronic pain along the lines of, “You’re not sick because you’re weak. You’re sick because you’ve been strong for too long!” or something about the special burden God/ the universe has deemed us very special ladies to carry.
Folk need to frame their misfortunes however they see fit, but as a survivor of domestic abuse, I am extremely wary of messages that encourage women to think they are ennobled simply by existing in situations which make them unhappy. Especially in combination with “You’ve just got to wait for the guy who would break his neck to get you.” because he is not necessary good news.
Brilliant insight, many thanks Goldfish.
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Apples are a fruit. The purpose of all fruit is to be desirable (delicious) so they will be consumed. The consumption of the fruit allows the seed within to be distributed, thus spreading life. A ‘fruit’ is one cunning strategy used by plant genes to ensure their continued existence, through reproduction.
In the same way human genes ensure their reproduction and continued existence by making men and women sexually attracted to each other. Without that sexual attraction and general broodiness men and women would be far less inclined to make babies and go through all the risks and burdens that reproduction places on them.
We might live in a modern (sort of) sophisticated society today, but our bodies are driven by the same instincts and hard wiring that we had 20,000 years ago when life was a day to day struggle just to survive.
Women bear the most burden of reproduction biologically speaking, whereas men bear the most burden socially/ economically.
Men’s role is to provide resources and protection to mother and child during pregnancy and childrearing stages – especially when the mother is incapacitated due to pregnancy, nursing etc. Men are naturally attracted to young, healthy, attractive (good genes) and fertile women because men know their role is to invest a huge amount of labour and risk life and limb to provide and protect for their mate. They naturally want their mate to give them the most chance of a successful reproduction otherwise all that work and effort is for nothing.
Likewise, women are attracted to high status, wealthy, dominant, rugged, and even aggressive, Alpha men because these are the men most capable of providing them with resources and protection – even in harsh and hostile environments – which gives them the best chances of a successful reproduction – and surviving the whole ordeal of pregnancy, childbirth etc.
So women naturally emphasis the characteristics which men find attractive all of which are indicators of youth/ fertility and general good health (thick hair, big clear eyes, flawless skin, curvy body, childbearing hips, big breasts, rosy cheeks etc)….. and men naturally emphasise their social status, wealth, confidence, ‘swagger’ (Alpha status) and so on, which women are attracted to.
Both sexes emphasise (or even exaggerate) that which makes them attractive to the opposite sex in order to increase their own value in the relationship/ sexual marketplace which means they can attract the best possible mate.
At the top of the female apple tree are young, healthy, fertile virgin women. These women are not already pregnant, have no nasty infections (they are virgins) and they are as fertile as they’ll ever be and have the best genes (as evidenced by their good looks, facial symmetry etc etc).
At the top of the male apple tree is good looking, strong, confident, successful, wealthy high social status men. If resources are scarce (ie widespread poverty, people starving) then wealth often will trump looks or age in women’s eyes … and if resources are in abundance (a bustling 21st century city with loads of well paying job opportunities for women that don’t involve manual labour) then looks will trump age and wealth. If there’s no decent technology or its a war zone women will tend to go for rugged, strong, brutish men…. and if it’s a heavily socialised, feminised, big government type of society women will tend to go for more beta (metrosexual) men… because Big Government is already acting as their Big Patriarchal Daddy with guns who ensures they will always get resources from Alpha men (via taxes).
So if a guy dumps his girlfriend that is him telling her (a) she is not at the top of the tree, and the guy can actually do better than her ……. or (b) Perhaps she has more sexual value than him (she’s hot and young, and he’s an average looking guy with a low paid job) which means he must always work overtime to satisfy her demands (which she knows her youth and attractiveness make her entitled to) and he is simply not prepared to put up with her demands and BS even if she is desirable. He’d rather find himself a less attractive, less high maintenance, and nicer girlfriend.
Either way being dumped is always a slap in the face. And the stupid apple tree thing is just an attempt to bolster her ego and ‘self confidence’ by running down men and putting women on a pedestal just for being female. A bit like feminism itself really.
I’m sorry, I’m sure I’m being rather slow and not understanding your comment, properly, but are you:
a) suggesting an alternative reading of the image system, via the critical theory of evo-psych, which would make better sense of the apparent contradictions and paradoxes of the tree image?
b) performing a satire on the bloviations of Men’s Rights Activists, and how they would read this image?
c) Adding extra points to the feminist critique of this image?
I love the youthful flawless skin thing – does that mean that acne should get us all going? Very youthful, acne.
By which I mean young skin is rare if ever ‘flawless’
By flawless I mean smooth, wrinkle free… youthful!
How much money do women spend annually on anti ageing creams and cosmetics which (to use advertising speak) ‘visibly reduce the appearance of wrinkles’?
I rest my case 🙂
Also how many women in their forties would happily endure a few spots in return for having the taught skin of their twenty year old self?
Spots can be covered with foundation….. wrinkles, bags and jowls less so.
I don’t find this comment very convincing, but I’m always confused when people who present themselves as enlightened, seem to have such strange difficulties accepting that evolution is also a process of involving sexual competition.
I’ll have to live with your disappointment.
I’m sure you’ll manage 😉 This isn’t about my disappointment, rather about my not understanding – which is why I said ‘confused’, not ‘disappointed’. I’m more interested in their (your) rationalisation about why and how to exclude sexual competition from evolution (which I suppose they (you) still do accept as baseline theory about the origin of species, including humanity.) Btw, I’m very sceptical of evolutionary psychology too, but acceptance of the relevance of sexual competition for evolution as such doesn’t require acceptance of evolutionary psychology.
Well, for what it’s worth, evolutionary biologist here, and I just wanted to clarify that sexual selection operates on *heritable* traits. These are things like the size of the fetus relative to the mother, or the considerable variation in the shape of the penis across primate species as compared to the conserved shape of the vagina (indicating that female choice has more effect on production of progeny than male choice). And so on. Sexism is not heritable, yet anyway, so sexual selection has no bearing on this post.
Pretty much all human behaviors are culturally determined, the exception being neonatal smiling. Biology actually seems to be easier to change (through breeding programs) than cultural assumptions, but that doesn’t alter the fact that they are cultural.
But wouldn’t that part – “indicating that female choice has more effect on production of progeny than male choice” – be the origin of problem that led the culture that created the apple tree story to come up with it? Seems to me this kind of fundamental asymmetry between the sexes is the root cause for the cultural practices addressing it.
Also – breeding programs??? I doubt there have been human breeding programs outside of James Bond films, At least I would hope so…
(I hope the appears somewhere near Some Person’s reply on the 9th at 5:59.)
Biology as the root cause? Not really. What we do with biological differences is up to us. Richer people, for instance, are less physically strong as a group than poor people. They’re given social control of resources. That’s a cultural decision. Men’s and women’s biological differences are used to justify social decisions, but they don’t cause them.
As for breeding programs, I meant judging by animals. Look at the variation in dogs. That’s all achieved in a few generations. Good luck with changing a society to that extent in a few generations. But you’re right. There’s never been a controlled scientific breeding program for humans. Probably not even in a Bond film, since Hollywood is bored by real science.
Sorry, Curiosetta, your last reply isn’t going to be approved. If you’d like your comments to show up, please bear in mind the sort of blog you’re on.
> please bear in mind the sort of blog you’re on.
One that censors civil, intellectual debate?
Shame 😦
Comment edited to remove offensive content. My blog, my rules. And if you think what you wrote was civil or intellectual we don’t need you commenting here.
I’m just barging in here to laud the idea that I fancy beautiful, high cheekboned, emotionally intelligent men in eyeliner… sorry, “beta (metrosexual) men” because my country has a National Health Service. I suppose my flat-chested hipless-ness would also be acceptable in such a state, because the valleys and mountains of the bountiful mother-country will fulfil that yearning for the curves of ‘real’ femininity.
Hang on… *gasp* would social safety net allow us to dump idiotic, status based security alliances which stem from a culture of scarcity and instead seek liaisons with people we actually like and find attractive? Or are you just bitching that a façade of machismo entitles you to the female body?
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a better argument for full communism.
Thanks for the warning – it’s very much appreciated.
> For your personal protection and for that of your readers, please be aware that Curiosetta is a troll.
Trolls are people who appear out of nowhere and make unfounded claims and personal attacks against other people with no evidence to back up their claims. Exactly like what you are doing to me.
If you are going to make accusations, at least have the DECENCY and HONESTY to LINK to any blog posts where you are claiming I have said nasty things about people so that anyone who is interested (god knows why they would be!) can READ FOR THEMSELVES what it is that I wrote.
I suspect you are the TROLL (using a different user name now to avoid being accused of stalking me) who has followed my every post ever since I disagreed with you about something in a blog post once many months ago, and who now tries to poison every blog I leave a comment in with hateful accusations.
What you are doing is called STALKING. Please stop.
If you have some issue with anything I said LINK to it and QUOTE it and then make your case. Don’t just throw excrement at me (and on someone else’s blog!) and then run.
And please stop spreading your toxic hate campaign against me in other people’s blogs. For their sake as much as mine. Thank you.
This is your last strike, Curiosetta. I’ve edited this comment to remove some offensive content, but if you don’t start acting less offensively, I will ban you.
A very interesting essay, thoughtful and thought-provoking.
And many thanks to Jeanne de Montbaston for providing the link.
I really want to make a ‘rotten medlar’ joke here, but it’s 7am in Australia and I can’t get it to gel.
Hahaha. Wonderful as well-prepared “rotten” medlars are, I’m not sure, despite a full day of caffeinated beverages, how even medlars could get around the problem of being fruit rather than human.
I think that The Goldfish’s comment is closest to the mark here. I think that it is important to reflect upon this image in terms of its context and use. The context of such an image is usually a highly stereotypically feminine social media setting such as Pinterest. The image is intended to serve as an affirmational quotation for the romantically challenged or disappointed.
It is important to distinguish here between the affirmational and the motivational quotation. The affirmational quotation is designed to assure people that they are beautiful/special/loved/perfect/strong, etc. the way that they are. The motivational quotation, by contrast, is designed to embolden people to get up and do or change something, to push them to exercise their agency. Although practised by both men and women, affirmational discourse seems to have a particularly pronounced significance in certain feminine contexts.
As affirmational discourse, the purpose of this image is to assure a woman that it is not her fault that she is not in a relationship or that her relationship has failed. The implied passivity of the apple is a feature rather than a bug of this image insofar as it functions as affirmational discourse. If the apple had to do something to get chosen, its failure to be chosen would suggest that it had done something wrong and would lead to painful self-doubt and perhaps a crippling re-evaluation of self-worth. Rather, the message is that you are beautiful and valuable the way that you are and that all that is required is the right guy who can see this and is brave enough to take the risk. The fact that so many other women seem to be in relationships doesn’t mean that you aren’t beautiful and valuable. In fact, it can be seen as proof of your worth. The other women are in relationships because they were more accessible. The guy who truly ‘deserves’ you hasn’t yet appeared. You are beautiful and you don’t need to change: you just need a guy who can see and appreciate it. Affirmational discourse—which is certainly not limited to social media images like this one, but can be found in academic and theoretical discourse—fairly consistently pathologizes or blames other parties for our unsatisfactory outcomes, while denying the elements of responsibility that lie at our own door. It rationalizes passivity and blames others for their failure to exercise sufficient agency on our behalf.
Affirmational discourse is, to a large extent, palliative care for people with wounded or diminished self-worth. There are often germs of truth within it, but much of it falls into the category of obliging lies. Treated as objective claims about or taxonomies of reality—as within the post above—it rapidly breaks down. It also consistently serves to insulate people from the painful but important self-reflection that failure in relationships or life should often occasion (for example, this can involve taking seriously the fact that the one common element in our failed relationships is ourself and the possibility that we unwittingly played a large part in occasioning the failures in our relationships). For instance, affirmational discourse statements such as ‘if you can’t handle me at my worst then you don’t deserve me at my best’ are great for drawing attention away from a person’s own faults to focus upon the other party’s failure to put up with them. Rather than recognizing our dysfunctional behaviours, we get to blame others for being unaccommodating of them.
Hi Alastair, I agree that motivational vs affirmational can be a useful distinction. However, here I think that an awareness of the context doesn’t help us too much wrt this particular image. Yes, it’s a feature not a bug of this image that women are passive objects waiting for men to be brave enough to pluck them, and I appreciate that its aim is to encourage women who have not yet been plucked. However, even within that context, Jem’s points about what a series of unhelpful and damaging ideas and assumptions are encoded within the image. It doesn’t just tell women to wait until the man comes along (damaging as that is in itself) but also that other ‘easier’ women (presumably those who already have got partners) are rotten and spoilt and only chosen by lazy men too scared to try for the best apples. Even within the affirmational context, you don’t need to dissect the image or apply taxonomies of reality to it before you uncover the rotten messages, so I’m not sure what contextualising it adds to the debate, except an opportunity to deliver sideswipes about feminine contexts where palliative care is given to those (women) with low self-worth. Particularly in light-hearted cultural contexts aimed at women, it’s useful to interrogate what messages are being implied or smuggled in under what might otherwise appear as a panacea for those with damaged self-worth.
(Small point: what do you mean when you say Pinterest is stereotypically feminine? Do you mean most users are women, or that it is mainly used for interests stereotyped as feminine by modern American/English culture? Not a trick question – genuinely confused!)
The differentiation between motivational and affirmational is really helpful, thank you. I also think there’s an issue of this Positive Thinking thing of insulating folk not just against self-reflection, but any kind of negative emotion. It’s like there’s no room for commiseration and the acceptance of bad luck; the negative must be swapped with a positive at once.
“For instance, affirmational discourse statements such as ‘if you can’t handle me at my worst then you don’t deserve me at my best’ are great for drawing attention away from a person’s own faults to focus upon the other party’s failure to put up with them.”
This statement has long fascinated me and where I see it, I can never work out whether it is deeply arrogant or deeply defensive. Rather like when a woman refers to herself as a bitch, I don’t know whether that means, “I am nasty and I don’t care” or “Sooner or later, people are going to call me names, so I might as well get there first.”
‘As affirmational discourse, the purpose of this image is to assure a woman that it is not her fault that she is not in a relationship or that her relationship has failed.’
Am I being slow? I thought that was more or less what this blog was taking issue with. We know the image is designed to reassure women that it’s not her fault. That’s the problem. No?
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This article certainly generated a lot of discussion. I believe that is one of the most important goals of articles like this … people have to think and reason. However, some people find thinking in new ways hard and painful, and lash out at the source of their pain. I don’t pity them, as they just perpetuate the cycle of anger and violence.