Femininity as a compensation

In the picture, the man’s having his arms around the woman. He’s in a very controlling position while the woman can only sit still and smile. He can decide what he wants to do to the woman, like giving her a kiss, but she’s just on the receiving end, taking whatever he’s willing to offer her. He’s the dominant in the picture while the she is the compliant. Feminist scholars also found that men tend to take up more space whereas women are taught to take up less space. The man does look big in the photo with his outstretched arms, especially when being compared with the woman whose arms are clinging to her body for her to look small. In a word, the man’s acting very masculine and the woman’s acting feminine; there is nothing surprising about this photo in a hyper heteronormative world. But what if I tell you the woman is from one of the wealthiest families in Hong Kong, enjoying extremely high social status, while she herself being a famous model and social media influencer at the same time. The man’s only a low-income security guard. They used to be married. The power relation they demonstrate in the photo is different from what we’d assume after knowing their backgrounds. One might also wonder how a marriage of two people across the social ladder could work. Hoang’s analysis of low-paying niche markets can be helpful here. Just like Western men with lower income need women in sex bars who are willing to perform gender in order to preserve their dominance and positions as the economic provider and project their status anxieties onto women’s bodies, the man in the photo need the wealthy woman to act feminine and submissive in order to compensate his insecurities about not being the economic provide in the family. Since he failed to acquire masculinity by being the one with more social power and economic capitals in the marriage, the woman had to act even more feminine for him to feel masculine and secure. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough: people still don’t like it when the woman in a heterosexual relationship holds more power than the man. He killed her and dismembered her dead body in the end, but that was another story to tell.