Tags
Rationality
Lifelonglearner has an excellent instrumental rationality sequence which is the best thing I’ve read on LW 2.0 so far. See also their post about how self-help should be self-defeating (but often isn’t).
In Defence of Epistemic Modesty. I don’t 100% agree but I think the world would be a better place if more people took into account the considerations in this post. (Also, there should be MORE POLLING OF EXPERTS so that I can do epistemic modesty properly.)
Gender
High rates of male loneliness and what we as a culture can do about them. Content warning: extremely depressing, especially if you are lonely yourself or care about someone at high risk of loneliness.
Second-trimester abortions often medically necessary and tragic.
Ronan Farrow, whose father raped his sister and got away with it due to being famous, helps uncover Harvey Weinstein, a man who raped women for decades and got away with it due to being famous. I feel like this would make an amazing biopic.
All 31 school shooters between 1995 and 2015 experienced “emasculating bullying” due to their failure to conform to masculine gender roles. “It seems to me that the feminist mainstream is eager to condemn the brutality of masculinity and the violent excesses of men, but surprisingly reluctant to concern itself with the violent brutalisation of boys that instils that brutality in the first place. If we genuinely want to challenge male violence, if we want to reduce male violence, if we want to dismantle the very foundations of patriarchy, it seems to me that is precisely where we need to begin.”
Corporate sexual harassment trainings don’t work.
Miscellaneous Social Justice
Private, court-appointed guardians sell the possessions and control the lives of seniors, the vast majority of whom they did not meet before becoming the person’s guardian, without their consent.
Civil rights activism was never popular. “Only 22 percent of all Americans approved of the Freedom Rides, and only 28 percent approved of the sit-ins. The vast majority of Americans—60 percent—had “unfavorable” feelings about the March on Washington. As FiveThirtyEight notes, in 1966, 63 percent of Americans had a negative opinion of Martin Luther King.”
Six people charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection to the Flint water crisis.
Jeff Sessions has a surprisingly good record on prosecuting hate crimes.
Effective Altruism
In an excellent use of financial resources, FBI does multistate hunt for two dying piglets rescued by animal rights advocates, probably for the purpose of intimidating advocates into silence. Content warning: detailed descriptions of factory farming, including pictures.
Science
Bonobos not actually hypersexual matriarchal peaceful egalitarians.[Comments suggest this may actually be a poor source; I’m leaving the link up for now, but take it with a grain of salt, and I am interested in responses from any biologists who happen to be reading.]
Open Philanthropy report on anti-aging research. I think I’m supposed to like it from an effective altruism perspective but I actually just like it as a source of technobabble for science fiction.
Just Plain Neat
Thing of Things 
The video is utterly unsurprising. Ask any tortoise owner and they’ll tell you that torts are fucking RELENTLESS when they want something. Large ones have burrowed through underground concrete meant to contain them simply because tortoises’ claws and scales heal & regenerate, while concrete doesn’t.
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What I’m getting out of this is that The Doctor ain’t got nothing on tortoises.
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>”Second-trimester abortions often medically necessary and tragic.”
>Article mostly talks about the author having a second-trimester abortion, which was not medically necessary.
>Never an abortion that was medically necessary.
Did you, uh … paste the wrong link there?
Assuming you’re posting this in reference to the recent US bill the article is responding to, I’m also curious if you’re under the impression that the bill in question bans medically necessary abortions after 20 weeks. (One would certainly get that impression from the linked article, and from most of the media coverage.)
Because – spoiler alert- this is a flat-out lie.
From the text of the bill (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/36/text):
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Blah, there should be a “mentions” in the third sentence there.
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Oh, and so I don’t give the wrong impression: this bill also considers cases where continuing with the pregnancy would “merely” risk e.g. a loss of fertility, it’s just that that bit is in a separate paragraph.
(Ctrl+F “ADDITIONAL EXCEPTIONS AND REQUIREMENTS.”.)
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The link about high rates of male loneliness and the shooter link are kind of related. Many people including more than a few self-defined feminists have no problem enforcing traditional gender expectations when it suits their purposes. This includes allowing bullying of boys that fail to conform to masculinity if seen as freaks in high school or male loneliness in latter ages. I think that many people are partnered people are suspicious of heterosexual men that aren’t good at the entire relationship thing. They are seen as low status at best or creepy freaks at worse. Couples socialize with other couples or with single women but an older incel man registers in a bad way with many people.
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No one should be bullied ever. However, there is a big disconnect here. When feminists talk about the male gender role and gender non-conformity, we are absolutely not talking about our own sexual availability, nor should we be. That topic is “off the table.” So what’s next?
Can a person build a “life worth living” without love and romance? Obviously some people do. Others struggle. What can the first group teach the second group?
Personally I don’t think we’ll ever have an egalitarian society. After all, it’s hard to put five people in a room without the emergence of some pecking order, even if it’s sublimated. We should, however, avoid bullying behaviors. The problem is, to the person on the bottom, merely being rejected can feel like being bullied.
At least it does to me. I’ve been there. Actually, I ended up there this weekend. (Sort of. It’s complicated.)
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@Veronica
A large part of feminist critique involves discussions of how the choices that people make impact others. It’s generally considered perfectly acceptable to debate the impact of choices that men make, criticize them and shame people into making different choices, due to reasons of fairness.
However, when the topic is the choices that women make in love and romance & how this negatively affects men, the entire range of critical analysis is often perceived by feminists as a demand that women should have no standards and sleep with everyone and/or a demand for traditionalism. This is usually an extremely bad faith interpretation of the critique and gives many men a strong impression that the romantic well-being of men is of zero concern and that female romantic behavior may not be criticized.
Anyway, a pretty large part of the debates between us have involved me trying to make this clear to you and you perceiving that as a demand that women have sex with romantically unsuccessful men, so I’m not very hopeful that my point will come across this time.
PS. Just because it is natural for people with certain traits to lose out, doesn’t mean that we can’t mitigate that. For example, we came up with welfare to help people who fail at capitalism in one way. We have consumer protection laws to help people who fail at capitalism in another way. We teach people maths, so they can function better in capitalism. Etc. Similarly, there are many possible solutions to improve romance for people. This seems generally open for discussion as long as the focus is on improving romance for women, but when the topic of improving romance for men is brought up, almost no reasonable discussion is possible. It’s that double standard that I object to first and foremost.
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Dude seriously, sexual availability is completely off the table. Bzzt. Stop. Women are not the “sex class.” We are not things.
We can discuss how women relate to men whom we don’t want to sleep with. Honestly, things get very dysfunctional very fast. But then, gamergate happened. How much energy do I need to spend trying to help men who resent me?
It’s hard. I have a friend who, in her late thirties, suddenly developed a passionate attraction to an old friend of hers. He was a weird, overweight nerd guy who dressed terribly. He hadn’t been with a woman in about ten years. She knew him from her board gaming friends circle. She was married to a woman. She opened her marriage to be with the guy.
Attraction is a mysterious thing. This could have been a really happy story. It was not.
You can guess what happened. He instantly changed from “sweet guy” to “hyper controlling jackass.” He repeatedly demanded that she violate poly boundaries, expecting time she had promised to her wife. He refused to drive her home one night. Ultimately he sexually assaulted her in a futile attempt to be “the man.”
She broke up with him. When we talked about it, she said, “I dealt with that shit when I was a teenager. I’m an adult now.”
I’m sure you’ve heard stories like this before. Sure, it’s an anecdote, but dammit it’s almost commonplace. This is the real “truth on the ground” for women. Insecure men with broken notions of masculinity are all around us.
When we talk about male gender roles, we’re talking about men like this guy. Sure, he was awkward. She knew that. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was his insecurities and poor strategies to compensate.
Long ago, I spent a whole decade with zero romantic or sexual contact. I was so alone. But honestly, I had to fix myself. I had to do the hard work to become a more complete person. Now I’m dating a woman who is a humiliation slut. She likes it when I pee in her mouth.
One of the axioms of DBT is, “You may not have caused all of your problems, but you have to fix them anyhow.”
The “problem of lonely men” emerges party from the fact that, given a free choice, women would rather be alone than with these men. They’d rather build their own life, their own friends circle, and occasionally have an NSA hookup with some hottie.
We’re not stupid. We understand the trade-offs.
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@Aapje
It’s generally considered perfectly acceptable to debate the impact of choices that men make, criticize them and shame people into making different choices, due to reasons of fairness…
However, when the topic is the choices that women make in love and romance & how this negatively affects men, the entire range of critical analysis is often perceived by feminists as a demand that women should have no standards…
You’ve got my (skeptical) ear with that framing. What’s an example of such “critical analysis” that you consider on par with reasonable-feminist demands on men? (link to past comments is fine if you don’t feel like repeating). (working definition of “reasonable-feminist” is roughly “Ozy wouldn’t denounce it”).
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@ADifferentAnonymous — One thing though, gender is not symmetrical. Masculinity and femininity are different, inasmuch as they involve patterns of dominance and submission. Thus you cannot expect a nice tit for tat. You don’t get to say, “Oh, so women made three demands, now we get to make three.”
Likewise, the right to be left alone is different from the right to command attention. If someone feels isolated, that’s a real problem, but that doesn’t create an obligation to any particular woman to develop sexual interest.
This is why I’m asking for a bright-line distinction between the topic of sexual availability and the topic of how we treat lonely men in non-sexual ways. The latter is a perfectly reasonable conversation. In practice, however, men want to talk about the former. Asking for a bright-line distinction makes it clear what is being said.
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I’d like to comment that part of the reason men want to talk about the former is what was discussed in the article: for many men, the only socially acceptable emotionally intimate relationship is a romantic-sexual one. So the conversation about dealing with male loneliness becomes a conversation about sex.
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While I recognize that nobody as any right to anybody else’s body, it seems really self-serving that the faction advocating more open sexuality in society wants the people excluded from this to deal with their situation with maximum grace and sincerity. They know that isn’t how people are psychologically and they know it.
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@LeeEsq — We get to ask, though, what exactly do you want? As I said, we can talk about how lonely men get treated in a non-sexual context. If you have specific requests, lay them out.
You won’t get all you ask for, of course, in exactly the same way that transphobia doesn’t disappear when we trans folks complain. Likewise the root cause of your pain remains in place. I have partners. You don’t. That might not change anytime soon. (Unless it does, and you find someone, in which case yay!)
A while back Ozy pointed out that attraction and desire cannot be redistributed the way that material good can. Ozy is correct. Thus whatever social justice approaches we take toward the problem of loneliness — they will be very different from how we approach poverty. Likewise loneliness is different from race, inasmuch as race is a fixed identity, whereas loneliness is not. Furthermore this conversation happens in the context of patriarchy, the history of social systems where men control and dominate women. Those social trends remains in place, as exemplified by the anecdote I shared above. Lonely men are just as often hyper-controlling insecure jerks as non-lonely men. They just need some woman to step up and submit. The desire to control remains in place.
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@veronicastraszh
I think Aapje is at least claiming to have proposals that don’t amount to “women should sleep with men they don’t want to sleep with”. I’d estimate a 99% chance that I’ll still think his proposals impose unacceptable demands on women, but also a 5-10% chance that they’ll convince me there are important nuances I hadn’t been considering, which in my book makes it worth reading.
An example of a proposal that arguably blurs the bright line could be “we should fight the shaming of women who have sex with low-status men”, since it would likely increase sexual availability but in an unobjectionable way.
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@ADifferentAnonymous — That makes total sense. I 10000% agree that we should fight shaming women who have sex (or romance) with “low-status” men.
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@Ozy — Oh I get that. In fact, that is an enormous part of the problem, and it’s baked into the feminist critique of masculinity. After all, why should men limit their emotional intimacy to their sexual partners?
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Welfare and consumer protection aren’t about failing at capitalism or at least not entirely about it. The welfare state is about protecting people from the vagaries of life. You can be a very successful person and that can all be gone in an incident because of one massive, unlucky break like a really bad but sudden accident that say leaves you alive but unable to work for a long time. Very few people anticipate these incidents and even fewer people can save up for them. When you add dependents things get even trickier. If people anticipated all these sudden accidents we wouldn’t have any money because nearly all discretionary money would be dedicated to rainy day funds in case the incident occurred.
Consumer protection exists because caveat emptor is a really bad policy. There have been many business people that attempted to get rich by selling cheap to make defective products into the market and its really difficult for even well-educated people to detect these things. Food adulteration was a repeated issues during the 19th and early 20th century because of this tendency. Same with selling snake oil. Having manufacturers prove that there product is what states to be or does what is supposed to is not an undue burden on them and is a boon to the public. Why should people want to spend money when every merchant is a potential cheater and there are repeated cases of said cheating?
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@Veronica:
Because even if open to emotional intimacy elsewhere, other people might not be open to give it to them because of said societal rules. The exception to this might be parents and siblings but a lot of jokes are made about single men close to their parents. This effectively places most men on the romantic-sexual track.
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@LeeEsq — Yeah I get that. Friendship is a group activity. You can’t do it alone. However, according to the article, there are a lot of lonely guys out there, enough that it is a social problem. So consider: we have a population of lonely men. Some no doubt live near one another. Likewise, the internet can shrink distance. The big challenge, however, is the social programming that limits non-sexual intimacy between str8 men.
Hmmm. If only there were an obvious solution to this dilemma.
If only it were possible to go onto “meetup.com” (or whatever) and create a group whose mission statement involves the difficulty straight men face in forming emotionally intimate, but non-sexual, bonds with other str8 men.
Honestly, I suspect forming such a group would be challenging. First, you’d have to overcome “nohomo” impulses. You’d likely have to be anonymous, cuz the social shaming of lonely men is very real. (The various twelve step programs might provide a model for that.) It seems doable.
You’d be overrun, I expect, with “migtows” and other vicious woman-haters. You’d have to navigate that.
The big point: whether it succeeds or fails has absolutely zero to do with the actions of feminists.
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@veronica, when a bunch of lonely men hang out together in real life or online its generally seen as a conspiracy against women, they are seen as Red Pill/MRA types, or they get made fun of for not having girlfriends/wives or both. You know this.
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I suppose what really gets to me about the situation with lonely men isn’t that women get to reject, they obviously do, but the expectation that all the pain, misery, and loneliness your going through isn’t supposed to matter and if you finally meet somebody you have to be ready for whatever she is ready for.
On a Pandagon thread many years ago, there were a bunch of people both lambasting lonely men that think they could jump into sex and men that refused to date single mothers at the same time. My impression is that I’m supposed to me by simultaneously mature enough for “instant family, just add daddy” and too immature for physical intimacy. That makes no sense. Any romantic pain, loneliness, and sexual frustration you experience as cis-gender heterosexual man gets a consideration value of zero or close to zero.
If you finally meet somebody into you, the idea that she might need to bend a little or compromise a little because of your past experience is seen as preposterous. You can’t point out you never got to do this or that or missed out on these things. But if she had bad past experiences than God help you if you aren’t a real man who will do the right thing and make up for it.
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@Veronica
Sorry for being late to come back. I had a busy day yesterday.
Let’s go back to my capitalism example. You are like an advocate of pure capitalism who sees any criticism of capitalism as a demand that businesses employ people they wouldn’t normally hire on; those who cannot do the job, those who steal from the boss, those who harass coworkers, etc. Strongly rejecting that is reasonable, but it is wrong to argue that there are no good alternatives to pure capitalism because one specific alternative is worse. There are many other ways to temper the downsides of
current romantic behaviorextreme capitalism and most critics of pure capitalism don’t actually favor forcingsexwork relationships on unwilling participants.Rounding all criticism down to a far more extreme position is unjust to all the critics who have nuanced positions. It is also extremely harmful to finding non-extremist solutions, when no one actually wants to discuss nuanced positions because they get misrepresented as extremist positions and dismissed based on flaws that only exist for the extremist positions.
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@aaple, can you provide some concrete ways to engineer the dating system that you consider workable? Its very easy for lots of people to find things wrong with the dating system but I’m not sure they are actionable in the same way that most people find the problems of capitalism actionable. You can pass laws requiring that products work as advertised but a law stating you can’t reject anybody because they are a science fiction fan or a Harlequin Romance fan is not going to be much less enforceable.
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@ADifferentAnonymous
An example is ‘enthusiastic consent’/’ending guess culture’ which are pretty popular feminist solutions, I think, but which generally seems to boil down to the person who escalates (typically the man*) having to ensure that the other person (normally the woman) wants that escalation. The problem with this is that there are female behaviors that cause issues. Two examples of this:
1. There is a study among college women which found that ~40% use token resistance (which were typically the non-feminist women). If this is not addressed, then men who strictly adopt ‘enthusiastic consent’ cut their dating pool by a huge amount, while feminist women merely benefit from no one mistaking their true resistance for token resistance. From my perspective, a reasonable solution is to recognize that ‘token resistance’ exists and teaching women not to do this at the same time as you are teaching men to treat no as no, even if it isn’t. Instead, what I see is that feminists typically spread a lie, that ‘no means no’ (which regularly is not true) and attack those who point out that a large percentage of women do engage in token resistance.
So instead of recognizing that harmful female behavior is pretty common and feeds dating dynamics, which allows us to address that & which also brings more men on board (because many figure out that they are getting lied to), it’s common for feminists to portray men trying to push through female resistance as something that only men favor and that merely harms women for the benefit of men (as Veronica puts it: “social systems where men control and dominate women”). The actual reality is that many women seem to see upsides to demanding men to push through some resistance.
2. Many women see approaches by low status men as harmful to their own status & react aggressively to maintain their own status (like: ‘Get away, creep’), which harms the man in various ways (including depressing his status even more). This is very harmful to low status men who try to employ ‘ask culture’. My experience is that feminists typically assume that men who complain about being called creeps were actually being creepy, which means that there is little or no recognition that many women will try to punish low status men for expressing interest. Because of this lack of recognition, there is very little pressure on women to stop this.
So my position on the common feminist demand for ‘enthusiastic consent’/’ending guess culture’ is that I’m in itself supportive of the goals, but very critical of how the analysis of the issue and the proposed solutions typically seem derived from an extremely biased point of view, with very little empathy for men, with denial of both scientific evidence that doesn’t match the narrative and rejection of lived experiences of men while lived experiences of women get taken very seriously, with a denial that there are also upsides that come with the downsides for the old situation and that the proposed solutions have downsides with the upsides. In other words, the same issues that exist with other dogmatic Utopian belief systems.
Feminists (logically) tend to demand that alternatives make sense within their belief system. However, from my perspective the belief system is usually extremely biased, so egalitarian solutions tend to be rejected in favor of solutions that are highly biased to women (and more specifically, feminist women). So talking about solutions is often useless unless we address more fundamental issues first.
—
Now, of course this is just an analysis of how to get people mated up better. Some people are incapable of finding a sufficiently compatible partner or ought not to mate-up. In that case, we could try to come up with non-mate solutions. However, talking about solutions is often useless because of a lack of empathy with (lonely) men means that the reflexive emotional response is usually to deny the problem, see it as just punishment for bad men, judge all solutions as being somehow harmful to women without any evidence that this is true except for a ‘just-so story’ while you could just as easily come up with a different ‘just-so story’ that could explain how it could make life better for women, etc.
LeeEsq pointed this out as well. Male spaces are often automatically assumed to be misogynist by virtue of them only having men, a bit of evidence of misogyny if often used to tar all these spaces and demand that they be eradicated and reformed. Female spaces tend to get judged completely differently and misandry that happens in them is laughed away. Additionally, female and/or feminist cultural standards are often taken as obviously correct, so sub-cultures that deviate this often get attacked, like gaming culture. So male spaces are only allowed to exist if they are perfect (which is an impossible demand) and/or comply with what feminists/women tend to prefer (which doesn’t appeal to most men, for gender role and possibly biological reasons).
* And people usually assume that the man escalated regardless of whether he actually did and/or don’t count female escalations as potentially harmful, so this standard is even more lopsidedly used to blame men than their actual behavior warrants.
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I wouldn’t phrase it the same way as aarpe but feminist approaches to dating ignore a lot of inconsistent desires that people I have. Based on my experience, a decent percentage of women want to not be sexually harassed, and definitely not assaulted, obviously, but they also want guess culture (men able to read non-verbal cues and act on them). Or blunter they want what they see as the benefits of modern dating and the traditional system and none of the down sides.
That’s human. Most people want it both ways at times but it requires men to be telepaths or be willing to take substantial risks. They have to be willing to be able to do things that might be harassment if unwanted in order to generate chemistry when attempting a relationship or do low risk but low chances of success actions until it works.
I’m not sure if there is any solution to this conundrum but it would be nice to have at least have it acknowledged or be able to point it out without being attacked as misogynist.
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@LeeEsq — on this:
I specifically said such a group would need to be anonymous.
Look, the problem in forming such a group won’t be the terrible women who judge you. It will be the men. It will be all the “toxic masculinity” we talk about. The men who join will fear intimacy. They will fear any whiffs of homosexuality. They will be emotionally closed off, unable to express any feelings besides frustration and anger.
I read an article a while back. Did you know that the person who coined the term “incel” was a queer woman? She invented it to describe her difficulties finding love, sex, and intimacy. She began a “foreveralone” style forum, long before such things were commonplace. It was mixed gender.
There is a social dynamic where, when you have a large group of frustrated people, they might gather. When they do, the community they form might either work to ease their frustrations in healthy ways, or else it might deepen their frustrations. Which type of community do you think grows faster?
Think of all the angry old white men watching Fox News. Look who is now president. We know very well which type of community grows faster.
Look at who the term “incel” now denotes.
To form a healthy community based on non-sexual male intimacy won’t fail because of women. However, when I suggested such a thing you immediately blamed women. Hmmm.
Feminists have a strong, valid critique of lonely men. However, it is not because they are lonely. It is based on how loneliness combines with masculinity.
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@Veronica
Yes white women swung to Trump, but how many were inspired by him? I voted for Clinton. I certainly did not feel inspired by her.
“Trumpism” is a thing more narrow than who voted for Trump. It’s core is angry men.
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Ultimately, what works for LGBT people is not going to work for cis-gendered heterosexuals because cis-gendered heterosexuals are going to want romantic and sexual relationships with members of the opposite gender and most likely a cis-gendered one. Other types of relationships can substitute for this in the short or long term but no heterosexual is going to what it as a permanent solution. This is true for men and women. LGBT support circles work because the participants have a decent chance of finding a partner in the support circle. Heterosexual women and men aren’t going to find a partner in a same gendered support circle. At least not directly.
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@LeeEsq — I think we have a disconnect. I’m talking specifically about how men can form close, emotionally intimate (but non-romantic/sexual) relationships with other men. Above you mentioned that you have difficulty relating to your married friends. However, the articles that Ozy posted suggest male loneliness is a common phenomenon, where lonely men experience complete isolation. Furthermore, they suggest that one partial cause is that men conflate emotional intimacy with romantic/sexual intimacy. I’m suggesting that, if this is common, then you can find other men in the same boat. You can relate to them. Emotional intimacy is perhaps possible, but only if you collectively learn to separate the different kinds of intimacy.
You correctly point out that social forces work against this. They do. In fact, I doubt anyone could create a large movement based on this, simply because large movements typically optimize for grievance and frustration. The participate in toxic feedback loops. Thus you get the “manosphere.”
Needless to say, such spaces are the opposite of healthy emotional intimacy. Smaller groups, however, might avoid this. Maybe.
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@Veronica
The ‘manosphere’ is not a movement. It is a catch-all term for very disparate groups and individuals. The term is nearly always used to tar anyone who talks about gender-related topics from a non-feminist perspective with the same (very negatively stereotyping) brush. Like you are doing here.
Also, I’ve got a question. By your logic, feminism would “typically optimize for grievance and frustration” & “participate in toxic feedback loops”. Do you believe that?
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@Veronica
This is anti-rational, anecdotal and feelings-based reasoning. How is your lack of enthusiasm for Clinton relevant??? Many men were not inspired by Clinton and voted for her anyway. Does that mean by the same (lack of) logic that few white men were inspired by Trump?
How do you know how many men and women were inspired by Trump? How can you justify just equating ‘inspired’ with ‘anger’? Perhaps many were inspired by hope for a better future under Trump. In just a few sentences, you make one illogical conclusion after another and present absolutely no evidence for any of it.
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@LeeEsq
You mostly got it. This is a completely unreasonable demand and the many people who believe in the dogma that men have it much better than women push constantly to offload the downsides of modern dating on men, as they see it as getting closer to equality. However, you are wrong by assuming that the unfair demands have to involve guess culture. There are many ways to get men to experience most of the downsides, also for ask culture solutions.
A major issue is also that many believe that it’s fair to restrict male freedom, but they also believe that almost all female desires should be catered to, even those that cannot be simultaneously be granted if you just think logically. A man cannot know which women are willing to be approached when they are not wearing headphones, which women only want to be approached in dating settings, which women like cold approaches, which women only date people they know, which women want to be asked before a kiss, which women want ‘spontaneity,’ etc. Ultimately we either need to give everyone an RFID tag or we need a bunch of general rules of what behavior we consider reasonable in our culture & then we also need to tell the men and women who prefer differently to suck it up. However, the current delusion is to just pretend that this issue doesn’t exist, so women get the message that men are responsible for behaving according to their particular standards, while men get told by a thousand different people with different standards that they ‘obviously’ need to adopt their specific standards.
Anyway, this is why there isn’t much point in me giving detailed suggestions for how we can improve dating, because the very fact that my proposals will also require women to consider the needs of men, will force men and women into a standard that not everyone prefers & will hold women to the same standards as men; is going to be perceived as misogyny/perpetuating patriarchy/etc.
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@aapje, word. The counter argument is that everybody on this blog might be over thinking things. Most people do manage to find at least one partner in their life. Most have at least two or three I guess. The number of men and women made nearly life long miserable by the dating system of the developed world is probably at best in the hundreds of thousands and this is out of hundreds of millions of people. That falls squarely into if its not broke don’t fix it. Most people have average love lives.
The key is that most people, and this includes many very intelligent and intellectually curious people, really don’t overthink these things. They just learn the dating process and go with it the best they can. The people on this blog theorize. I theorize, you theorize, Veronica theorizes. Lack of romantic success plus theorizing most likely equals emotional misery more so than just lack of romantic success.
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Oh gawd we’re really going to the “women in headphones” example.
Look, we go back to the asymmetry: the right to be left alone is different from the right to bother people
Simple answer: don’t cold approach. Don’t try to “pick up women.” It won’t work. You’ll look like a douche.
Unless of course you already are doing it successfully, in which case carry on I guess.
“But what about that guy…?” you say.
Look, cold approach requires some combination excellent social calibration and fabulous good looks. Do you have excellent social calibration? Do you have fabulous good looks?
Be honest, you probably have neither.
I’ve never cold approached in my life — well except once when I was maybe thirteen. It didn’t work out. Nor have I ever accepted a cold approach. Yeesh. Men who cold approach are usually creepy as fuck. Don’t be that guy.
“But it works for my friend Pete…”
You’re not him.
I have thirteen lifetime sexual partners. Eight of those happened in the last year. One happened last night. Yay.
I’ll likely have three more by the end of the month, if all my travel plans work out. (I’ll give 50/50 odds. It’s complicated.)
I date within my social network. I date people who I meet, or interact with on social media, or who I know through friends — various ways.
There are no tricks to this. Actually, it’s stupidly easy. There is a simple question: is someone attracted to you or are they not? That’s it. That’s the whole story. If they are, then dating is easy as fuck. If not, then there isn’t a damn thing you can do that won’t make you seem like a creep.
“Dating advice” comes down to looking good (as good as you can), having a decent personality, having basic social calibration, and leading a life that seems interesting. Furthermore, it’s about not being a milquetoast wet noodle or an insecure clingy weirdo.
If someone likes you, and if you like them, then you flirt. Together you start slow. You both feel the chemistry. You both escalate. And sure, “the guy” is supposed to ask out “the girl” out, which involves saying, “Hey you wanna hang out sometime, just the two of us?” The answer is already yes. You already kinda suspect it will be. It’s obvious.
This is how dating works for most people. Is that not happening for you?
If not, then you’re either terribly unattractive, or in the wrong social circle, or in too narrow a social circle, or you’re socially clueless and missing cues, or you’re personality is off-putting, or you dress like crap, or you’re too risk averse — etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and so on.
That’s it.
When feminists talk about expanded male gender roles, we largely mean that gender-non-conforming men should not be bullied. That doesn’t mean we find any particular man attractive, nor are we obligated to. Nor does it mean we want to deal with clingy men, nor unwanted sexual advances, nor repeated, unreciprocated attempts at flirting, etc.
Most women like masculine men. Most men like feminine women. Most people care about looks more than they want to admit. There are exceptions. Most people like a complicated mix of “guess culture” and “ask culture.” That won’t change.
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@LeeEsq
The statistics show that we aren’t in a static situation. For example, the number of single people has kept increasing over the last decades. We have to adapt our society to this. If we don’t think this through and find fair solutions, we end up with unfair solutions and mismatches between the desires of people and institutions.
The statistics also suggest that an increasing number of highly educated men and women remain involuntarily childless. A major reason is probably that well-educated people are postponing having children until the age where fertility issues become significant. You can argue that this is because people are overthinking it, but also that people are underthinking it. Probably the most accurate way to put it is that people seem to be wrongthinking a lot.
The #metoo discussions also show that many people want change, but from my perspective, these discussions tend to get stuck at stereotyping and attacking men. I prefer to figure out a solution that allows men and women to achieve many of their desires, but restricts them in ways that often tend to get out of control. “They just learn the dating process and go with it the best they can” that you describe as working well is extremely gender normative in an unnecessary way, with many bad effects. I believe that we can improve things.
For example, if we get women to approach others more (and teach men how to react to this), this benefits shy men and the women who like those men, this spreads the cost of rejections and of having to reject, this equalizes how often people get approached (many women get approached/complimented too much, which resulted in feminists coming up with their one-sided ‘objectification’ theory, while many men get too little of that, resulting in low sexual self-esteem), this makes men and women have more empathy during interactions, because they understand the downsides of the other role better, etc.
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@Veronica
Thanks for demonstrating my point that the current zeitgeist tends to make many women feel that their own preferences must be catered to, without being taught that other men and women may have different preferences and can’t just be ignored. Unfortunately, you are being serious. I’ve long since noticed that what you call ‘Social Justice’ seems to actually be ‘Selfish Justice.’ You continuously make judgments based on how you personally will be affected, relate your advice for others to how it will make these people behave more pleasantly to you and seem unable to understand that not everyone shares such a narcissist outlook on life. So you presume that others, such as I, desire a system that is optimized for them, rather than a system that is most fair to everyone.
I’m not interested in your dating advice or discussing my dating life with you. I know that I’m atypical in ways that make me desire a more atypical way of life, that makes me less compatible with those that want a more typical way of life and which causes other issues. My abnormalities are not caused by gender norms or dating norms. However, I do think that there are many aspects of gender norms and dating norms that we could change to improve life for everyone. The impact of that on me is probably slightly positive, but you shouldn’t care about that, because my well-being is not more important than the well-being of others. Similarly, your well-being is not more important than the well-being of others to me (this is why many of your argument are utterly unpersuasive to me).
This is why we are doomed to keep talking past each other, because I am unwilling to go to the personal level and you are unwilling to go to a level that is relevant for society, rather than the individual.
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@aapje, the fact that the most educated are remaining childless the longest isn’t necessarily incompatible with my overthinking things thesis. The most educated people of all genders and sexualities are going to be the ones that over think these things the most. One issue with modern dating is that is based on raw chemistry more than it should be but the people really good at raw chemistry seized the narrative and aren’t letting go.
There are many reasons why the number of single people are rising. One of them is that we are much wealthier as a society and it is lot easier for people to live alone. In the past a lot of marriage was done because of sheer economic necessity. Unless you were at the real top, being single was not to your economic advantage at all. There were also lots of cultural pressure to marry. At least in the United States, there was an attempt to enforce the idea of no sex before marriage until the early 1960s. Contraceptives were hard to come by. Landlords prevented singles people from having guests of the opposite gender in their room outside mixed groups. When these changes, so did the need for early marriage.
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@aapje — Dude, I have zero confidence that any of your ideas would do anything to increase global happiness.
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@LeeEsq
I think that one common reason is that people consider themselves not ready, for reasons of maturity, financial stability or such. That can be considered overthinking. However, many well-educated people also seem to be have this vague hope/belief that if they follow the ‘career path’ despite not really enjoying it, they will eventually end up in paradise (while reality is that they usually just get more of the same, but with gradually more pay and more pressure). A common response when people realize this is the ‘midlife crisis.’
In the past, the career path for men mainly consisted of quickly finding a job with good potential, a wife, having a kid with her and then providing for the family. The female counterpart was finding a husband and having children ASAP, followed by being a mother and housewife. In the modern reality, well-educated people of both genders seem to get pushed into more narrow path primarily focused around the job. Most people still tend to have the goal of getting married and having children, eventually. So people throw themselves into their jobs until they get a crisis where they realize that they actually need to put serious effort in achieving these other goals as well, because otherwise they end up missing out. Due to biological reasons (a more severe drop in fertility), I think that nowadays it’s especially women who tend to have severe midlife crises. I get the strong impression that very many people then end up regretting not changing their goals sooner. I would argue that this scenario can best be classified as underthinking.
People can both underthink and overthink at the same time, when they get overly worried about some issues (like having sufficient money to pay for a child), while simultaneously not giving sufficient consideration to other issues (like fertility issues and the risk of not being able to find a suitable partner to have a child with, in time).
As for description of the reason why more people are single, I agree. Unlike (most) conservatives, I am not at all opposed to singlehood and cohabitation becoming more common. My point is that social norms, laws and such are lagging behind, which is harmful.
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@Aapje
Wow this thread took off while I was away, but thanks for the write-up.
re: token resistance, you do see that there’s a not-especially-sinister reason feminists don’t want to acknowledge that that exists? Note that if all men could be persuaded simultaneously that no means no, token resistance would vanish pretty fast. If there were a way to discourage token resistance without simultaneously broadcasting that it’s common, I would consider it a good idea. But my standards are very asymmetrical here, following the asymmetry between missing out on potential consensual sex and having unconsensual sex as harms.
re: low-status vs. creepy approaches: I’m pretty sure this one is just a bravery debate, where lots of women still have trouble firmly rejecting inappropriate advances, and feminists are pulling the rope. If we could advance a standard of “don’t inflict gratuitous harm on people making non-threatening advances” without lots of women hearing it as “if you hurt the feelings of someone approaching you, you did bad”, I’d support that.
Also, I’ve been toying with an aphorism: “You’re aware of two cultural standards, the one you believe in, and the one that threatens you.” As a man living in progressive spaces, prefeminist patriarchy is neither, whereas the extremes of feminist reverse discourse are the latter. To a woman in the same spaces, patriarchy is the latter, while extreme reverse discourse is neither.
So to man, it can seem like there’s no cultural standard that women should have any regard for the feelings of men who approach them. But to a woman, it can seem like there is still a strong social pressure in this regard. I’ve myself witnessed a very feminist woman dealing with unendorsed guilt about rejecting someone in what I thought was a pretty reasonable way.
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@ADifferentAnonymous — On token resistance, yeah exactly. There is an intergalactic void of distance between missing out on sex and rape. @Aapje seems to be saying, hey, we’ll give up coercive sexual strategies if women make sure we don’t need them. But bzzt! No. They are not symmetrical.
Honestly, token resistance is dumb. However, if you’re ever faced with someone doing that, then use your words:
“Hey babe, I think you’re sexy and I really wanna fuck you, but if you’re not into it we can do something else.”
She either wants to fuck or she does not. She has a mind. If she can’t make up her mind, then talk to her. She’s a person.
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@ADifferentAnonymous
I never claimed that there was a sinister reason. I claimed that it is unreasonable. Many people are very honestly convinced of very unreasonable things. That you assume that I was thinking that feminists have a sinister reason, suggests that you judge me by a stereotype. I’d prefer that you judge me by my actual words.
But that’s not how reality works. Different men have different sensitivity to social pressure and the power of social norms also varies by subculture. So basing policy on the fantasy that you have a mind control switch, is setting yourself up for failure.
What is actually most likely to happen is that the men most sensitive to feminist messages will end up listening and being less successful at dating, while men who are fairly insensitive to this will end up with these women. These are presumably the men who also disproportionately have habits that harm women. Having a smaller supply of men who are willing to engage in token resistance relative to the number of women who desire it, also logically means that women will lower their standards for the men whom they accept. This also increases their risks of ending up abused/assaulted.
So your solution then ends up harming the men that listen to you (turning some against you, while ‘merely’ making others unhappy) & harming a bunch of women and all of this because you refuse to hold men and women equally responsible for their contribution to bad dating norms, so they adopt better norms at about equal rates, not creating the problems I described.
So do you think that feminists should shut up about rape/sexual assault then? Because the exact same logic about broadcasting rape/sexual assault as being common applies there! You apparently think that feminists can’t teach people the downsides of token resistance without making people do more of it, so by the same logic, feminists can’t teach people about rape/sexual assault without making people do more of it.
As I explained above, this is a completely false way to look at it. Your solution may actually simultaneously decrease the amount of potential consensual sex and increase the non-consensual sex.
But we need to teach people a nuanced position where it is indeed bad to hurt the feelings of those who don’t deserve that, while it is fine to hurt the feelings of those that deserve it. Any nuanced position that balances all concerns well, will end up with false positives and negatives, so then sometimes women will err to hurt men a bit too much and sometimes they will err to hurt men a bit too little. I can see the use in erring a bit more on the ‘too much’ side, but I see a lot of people who push so much in that direction, that they are unwilling to speak out against pretty abusive behavior which does harm men.
You may think that you make women safer by extremely asymmetric solutions that harm men way more than women, but isn’t your belief that damaged men (aka toxic masculinity) end up harming women?
I agree that women are often conditioned to be very non-confrontational and end up not being reasonably assertive. However, merely direction pushing women towards assertiveness causes women who are already sufficiently assertive to go too far. Also, you can get behavior that is based on factors that should not matter, like women who act differently based on the race of the man, his looks, etc; rather than his behavior. Helping people make good decisions requires a nuanced approach, IMO.
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@Veronica
See my other response. It simply doesn’t work like that, because men are not a hive mind that you or I can control. Pretending that I’m some sort of puppet master of men who denies things to you out of spite is quite delusional.
Your solution is like the War on Drugs. Going after drugs sellers has never ever worked when there was a demand. There will always be less scrupulous people who want the big benefits of fulfulling the demand. You either need to provide a safe avenue for people to get what they want (like the BDSM community has done for their preferences) or convince people to change their preferences.
The entire point of guess culture is to select for people who aren’t blunt like that, but who push the right buttons at the right time. The people who want others to guess typically have no understanding of what they are actually doing, but have non-rational beliefs like that ‘sex just happens’ or such.
It’s not realistic to think that this worldview can be fixed by addressing it in a high-stress dating situation. These things need to be addressed in settings where people can consider them properly and gradually change their views & by people who aren’t treated as skeptically as a wooing man.
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@Veronica,
I made a lengthy post at one of the linked sites. I will get to your comments about dating later, but for now I’d like to talk briefly about the role of non-sexual peer networks, and the lack of the them, in the lives of the lonely. It is essentially the root cause of everything else, including sexual loneliness. I cross-posted the post I made there right here, at the bottom of this page. I know it’s long, but for context I encourage anyone reading this to read it before reading the rest of my post here.
It’s funny because without ever having read anything in this thread, I briefly touched on your proposed solution (“let all the lonely people collect somewhere together, preferably as far away from the rest of us as possible”*) and that it’s inadequate. (It’s the difference between #2 and #3 in the list that starts my post at the bottom.) In that post I didn’t really get into why it’s inadequate, though.
It won’t work because it’s hard enough to overcome inertia and establish new adult friendships for most people, let alone those with the least amount of experience with it and the least amount of existing social integration between them with the towns and cities they live in.
To be more blunt, it will fail for the same reason that trying to alleviate long-term poverty in poor communities by redlining them into new ghettoes will fail. It will fail because it was not meant to succeed. It was meant to minimize the inconvenience on “normies” as much as possible, and that is incompatible with actually doing something about the problem. *Earlier, yes, I know you never said “preferably as far away from the rest of us as possible”. But that is how your proposed “solution” will work out in practice. It takes either a stunning naivete not to see that, or a complete indifference to the lonely except insomuch as displaying the token amount of sympathy for them is necessary to prevent the ideology you represent from looking bad.
The only solution is integration of some sort or another. Some normies won’t like this. But (a) as Veronica said but in a different context, it’s not a tit-for-tat that’s equal in all respects. The desire to be socially integrated with one’s peers and the desire for maximal distance from the icky social lessers who are beneath you are not ethically equivalent desires and shouldn’t be treated as such, and (b) it is impossible to tackle this problem without making some normies uncomfortable because it was the sensibilities of the normies that caused the problem in the first place. How to better integrate the lonely with their peers, I briefly touch on at the end of my earlier post at the bottom, but I put the focus on shifting social norms. Honestly, ending the stigmatization against addressing this problem directly may do most of the legwork by itself, something I allude to in the last paragraph when I talk about how this problem is only allowed to be discussed in the context of not having close confidantes. Imagine if the lonely could simply pay someone to help teach them how to make adult friends, and if there was zero stigma attached to this.
I’ll respond to what you say about dating issues when I have time later.
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@ADifferentAnonymous, this might be a bit late but this is in response to your comment about one thing we can do to alleviate the problem of lonely men is to stop shamming women who date low status men. There are two issues I see with this. The big one is that it is relatively trivial issue even by the standards of any sort of social problem and there for isn’t exactly a high priority. The other issue is that low status heterosexual men are just too useful as a social punching bag by many groups that more people are aided by the status quo then by changing it.
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@Veronica,
Now, on to the dating issue that I said I’d get to,
Where, in your demands on what’s acceptable and not acceptable for men to talk about, is there any room for, say, the criticism of female shallowness? Because criticism of male shallowness is certainly abundant in our society. Is criticizing female shallowness crossing your “bright line”?
Shallowness encompasses more than just physical appearance. What most people believe, and I think this is basically true, is that women are selected more intensely on looks alone, while men are selected based on more of a mix of looks and other traits. Those “other traits” are at least part of what we talk about when we talk about “status”.
Men, from boyhood onwards, are often cruelly judged and separated based on standards that have nothing to do with how good or just or compassionate people they are. Nothing to do with how productive as citizens they will be. And mostly to do with things that are either beyond their control, part and parcel with a rough atavistic sense of masculinity that proper Blue culture types claim to oppose, or both. Much of this affects how they are socialized into the dating world and sexually stigmatized in the eyes of others. We cannot discuss this without discussing dating world dynamics qua dating world dynamics and thus violating Veronica’s “bright line”. Yes, criticism of one’s shallowness can be unpleasant, and involve psychical pressures to women (and men) to act in different ways. This does not make it wrong, nor does it make it “force”, nor does it mean anyone “should sleep with men they don’t want to sleep with”, to use ADifferentAnonymous’s phrasing. After all, any criticism of male shallowness, for starters, could be described in the same way.
—————-
I could leave it at this, but this general topic of dating and men and all that, comes up frequently enough, and along the same fault lines, that I’m about to triple the length of this post by explaining something in detail. I really feel like I shouldn’t need to say this, but I feel like there are otherwise reachable, reasonable people, who nonetheless have a certain underlying thought pattern cum blind spot whenever this topic comes up. Let’s take female shallowness as the underlying frame, since I’ve already started talking about it, though not every problem here is reducible to it. The underlying thought pattern is: criticism of female shallowness is unpleasant and can involve psychical pressure >> in a world where the social critiques by people like pocketjacks have been internalized by the mainstream, SEX (and relationships) are happening that would not have otherwise happened in a world without such critiques >> ergo, unpleasant, pressuring methods are being recruited to extract SEX from unwilling participants! This is just… a fallacy on so many levels, one that comes up often enough that it should really garner its own name (I’m going to call it the Criticism is Force Fallacy for the time being for the lack of a catchier name). The short rebuttal is, again, by the same reasoning, female criticism of male shallowness could be described in exactly the same way, and I don’t think criticism of male shallowness, even where I may disagree with it, violates anyone’s freedom or forces anyone to have sex with anyone. The long rebuttal is:
Say there’s a spread of women ranging from very against dating a certain man and vocal about it, to those who just low-key wouldn’t consider it, to those who may consider it, to those who actually would be interested. Say that man tries his hand at the first type of woman. Now. The argument isn’t that the first sort of woman shouldn’t believe those things and that she should instead go out with him. The argument, as I’ve always understood it, is that female shallowness should be treated the same as male shallowness, in that this woman doesn’t have to go out with him, but public expressions of her disgust or distaste for him should entail the same reaction and the same social consequences as if a man did the same thing to a woman. We all learn from a young age not to point or stare at the man with the funny glass eye – we all know how to keep polite about other human beings who are to our personal distaste. I’m not buying that anyone can’t control this if they really wanted to. By having this sort of behavior be acceptable, which is debatable but I think it’s more acceptable than the gender converse, we are impeding that man’s ability to meet the third and fourth kinds of women. Have something like this happen to him a few times, and he’ll avoid talking to women, avoid parties, avoid who knows what else. He is being kept from meeting women who would be into him via double standards and selectively sanctioned social aggression against “lesser” males. That’s what’s wrong, that’s what we seek to change. Not the fact that certain women who really don’t want to be with him, aren’t going to be with him.
Also, once the culture has been sufficiently suffused with voices objecting to a certain type of shallowness, subsequent generations raised in that milieu, as well as people of this generation who never really had an opinion on the matter to begin with, grow up thinking that way from the very beginning and freely act accordingly. So it’s not clear who is being “wronged” here, even in loose theory.
I mean, you could argue against this along the tack of “brainwashing”, but that’s inherently a much trickier argument to make.
There is a component of anti-shallowness discourse, whether it’s against male or female shallowness, that consists of asking people to stay their hand of easy dismissal for just a little while, to get to know people a little better, because who knows they may be what you want if you’d just give them a chance. Personally, I think this view has much to recommend it. I think we should all be more open to others, whether it be men and women in dating or men and men or women and women or men and women in friendships, or people of one political camp vs. people of another political camp, etc. But this is only real example of anti-shallowness criticism that could even be ungenerously construed as “making” someone “have sex with someone they don’t want to” – not really, since he or she is still free to say no after staying their hand a bit – and it still doesn’t account for the other two examples above.
I feel like nothing I’ve said is particularly esoteric or difficult to figure out. If we asked most SWPL, Blue culture people on “why criticisms of male shallowness are not a violation of men’s sexual autonomy and freedom of choice”, most of them could deduce the previous three paragraphs, with the genders reversed, from first principles. And hell, it’s not just the gender flip either. I’m not even talking about anything specific to the dynamics of sex and dating. I’m simply describing how social criticism works.
Take a well-coordinated pro-environment campaign that uses a usual mix of incentives and censures to penalize littering; enforce recycling; dispel negative myths about the environment, the national park system, and volunteering in these areas, which make people not want to participate; and encourage those who may have considered volunteering at parks and for environmental causes to get out and do so. I hope I don’t have to belabor the point and spell out individually what is the analogy for what here and you can grok that out on your own. There are people for whom being prodded to recycle and not litter goes against their politics, and those for whom such strictures genuinely presents greater burdens than it does for others. Still, most people can agree that bylaws against littering and for recycling make sense and is an acceptable form of prodding. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, volunteering at parks and wildlands cleanups spikes after this campaign. The Criticism is Force Fallacy is that which basically frames this as “non-environmentalist political dissenters are being forced and conscripted to work for government park services”! After all, being pressured to recycle and not to litter can be disagreeable to many, and the number of people volunteering is higher after the campaign than it would have been had the campaign never existed!
I think everyone, even the most non-environmentalist Right-wingers, could see the obvious fallacy in that. Yet we don’t see it when we proclaim or insinuate that criticisms made by the likes of myself, Aapje, LeeEsq, etc. as concerns men, status, and dating, something something “force women to have sex”. We are, of course, not the same and may disagree on a lot of matters, but I think we’re substantially coming from the same place. Prejudice against low status men runs deep. People are desperate to find an excuse not to apply fairly commonsensical principles, even those that naturally result from gender theories they’ve devised, if it would lead to improving low status men’s social and dating lives. The horror! From there comes the Criticism is Force Fallacy, which kinda sorta sounds right because it hits a few common buzz words, and they stop thinking after that point.
(There are aspects to this – social norms and informal structural barriers that work against the type of men most likely to be lonely, in terms of their navigating a successful romantic life – which can’t all be lumped under being against shallowness, but which still need to be addressed and criticized. Because my posts tend to be long, I won’t address it right now, but suffice to say, there are more reasons to reject Veronica’s “bright line” than merely that it doesn’t allow for the rightful criticism of female shallowness.)
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@Veronica,
Speaking specifically of socially lonely and isolated men,
It is impossible to talk about lonely men without ever crossing your “bright line” and talking about sexuality, because the experience and stigma of loneliness and in particular male loneliness, is sexualized. One immediate and illustrative example: when people reach for an insult to make at a lonely man for whatever reason, they very very often reach for a sexualized insult. Specifically, a de-sexualizing insult. The following is simplified, but simplification can provide a welcome clarity: until we live in a society where this is no longer true, any demands that pro-lonely advocates skirt around sex and dating is unfair and will go unheeded.
(It’s possible that I am misunderstanding and that you are actually placing your “bright line” someplace that would be reasonable and agreeable by everyone here. But the fact that ADifferentAnonymous says that the idea that women who sleep with low status men shouldn’t be shamed “arguably crosses the line” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the way people are interpreting the words as you’ve presented them. Not only is the described sentiment so obviously true, it seems like such a piecemeal and rearguard pronouncement that we could go a lot further while still staying in the same territory. Women who are interested in low status men shouldn’t be pre-emptively dissuaded from being so, either – that would be sexual policing – which I think reflects a much more common scenario. That would be wrong, and I don’t think that’s really arguable either.)
Finally, I’ll get to what you wrote in response to me in the thread below, soon. I’m sorry to take so long with replies, but I actually sit down and work on comments for a longer time than I think most do, so I have to find the time for it.
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@pocketjacks — I’d want to separate out how we talk about unattractive men in general versus how we reject some specific approach by a man.
I’ll state straight up: it’s usually problematic to speak in general terms about rejecting a large swath of people based on factors they cannot control. For example, if someone says, “I’d never date a trans women” — well fine, but why do you need to spell that out? I’m well aware that I’m considered undatable by many people. Do I need to know that this person thinks that way? If I try to flirt with them, they can cold-shoulder me or brush me off. (I can take a hint.) If I ask them out directly, then “no” is a complete sentence.
I feel similarly about fat people, short people, etc. It’s wrong to talk shit about them.
I make an exception on issues of character. It is totally fine to speak openly about those. For example, I’ll never date a Trump supporter. Those people can fuck off. Likewise, I’d never date an “MRA” or someone who participates in “incel” culture, because in my view membership in those subcultures represents a failure in character.
I also make an exception for sharp power differences. I consider it very different for a black person in the US to openly refuse to date white people. By contrast, I think it is out of bounds for a white person to openly refuse to date black people. (As I said above, they don’t have to date anyone they don’t want to. I’m referring to how we talk about it.)
The issue of how women deal with direct approaches is different. When a man approaches, when he actually “makes a move,” I have a different standard, namely this: demanding women be “nice” in how they reject men is out of bounds. Sorry. Now, I’d prefer we be as nice as we can, but niceness is too often either misinterpreted or outright manipulated by creeps. Thus it is important that women learn to overcome the social pressures for them to be “nice” and always assuage a man’s feelings when rejecting a direct approach.
I’m sorry. I know that’s tough, but we get to plan utopia when it becomes possible. For now, I brush off men using whatever strategy will lessen my immediate discomfort and danger. Yes, in the hands of some women this can manifest as bullying. However, any strategy to lessen that will be “gamified” by creeps to abuse us. Full stop.
Have you been paying attention to the news? There has been some discussion of sexual harassment.
I can sum up a lot: flirting is sex.
It is not coitus. But it is sexual. Thus, just as we gals will want to cuddle, kiss, or fuck some men and not others, we will want to flirt with some men and not others. Trying to control who feels entitled to flirt with us is a social minefield, particularly in male dominated spaces.
Regarding the “women should get to know men” — first, nope! We don’t owe any man “a shot.” Sorry. That said, yes, for a lot of men, getting to know women in a relaxed social setting is a necessary first step for dating. If you’re not HAWT, then you probably will not generate instant attraction. However, over time attraction can grow. I’ve certainly experienced this, where attraction grows due to someone’s personality more than their looks. It takes time. It’s worth doing. But it is a long game that requires the participants manage their insecurities and sexual frustration.
Which indeed, managing one’s insecurities and frustrations really is needed, and for a very simple reason it’s hard to have a “relaxed social setting” with “boner-guy” or “constantly insecure guy” or “can’t take a hint guy”, etcetera. Such men are sexualizing a situation in unwelcome ways. Actually, they are undermining their chances, given that attraction can form for less attractive men, if they have solid personalities. But that won’t happen if you creep women out.
And yes, a very attractive man can get away with sexualizing a situation much more rapidly. He gets used to this. It works for him. You can grow bitter about this, and build a self-fulfilling prophecy, or else you can learn to “play the hand you were dealt.”
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@pocketjackets, its incredibly hard to get somebody to do something they really don’t want to do unless you are prepared to use a lot of immoral coercion. This does mean that some people might be just out of luck when it comes to many things but the alternative is worse.
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All social norms/pressure need to find a balance between extremes. If society focuses too much on what people can do to prevent being victimized, many victims will feel blamed for their plight. If we don’t focus on it enough, many people will become victims while they could have avoided it by being a little more careful. If we put too much pressure on women to turn down men nicely, it will make many avoid being forceful enough to men who violate boundaries. If we put too little pressure on women to turn down men nicely, it will make many women hurt men who don’t deserve that & won’t teach men the difference between no and NO. There are thousands of social ‘dials’ like this.
Because people have different sensitivity to these messages, different circumstances, etc; you can’t actually have social norms/pressure that are perfect for every individual. It’s always going to be a compromise. I believe that the overall outcome is generally shaped like a normal distribution, where if you go too far to either extreme, the overall outcome is much worse. For example, if the social pressure is too much for 60% of the population and too little for 40%, then a move to 61%/39% is going to make 61% of the population worse off and 39% better off. So the damage gets greater and the benefits fewer, the further you get from the optimum. Furthermore, the more imbalanced/unjust the situation, the harder the disadvantaged will resist/seek to subvert, while those who benefit have less reason to self-police. Another issue is that a lot of information is conveyed by having people react with increasing volume the further away from the norm the behavior is. If the dial is set to an extreme setting, many people will start responding in a binary way: zero or MAXIMUM. This makes it very hard for the other person to learn.
Anyway, I think that men’s needs are often not even considered at all in this equation, let alone that they get a fair deal.
Furthermore, I think that there is a lot of delusion about the dials that are available to us and their actual effects. So instead of turning all dials to 50/50, people try to push one dial to 100/0, while leaving the other dials on 30/70 and 70/30 (and those may actually respond to becoming more imbalanced in response, because the dials react to each other).
Compare it to how the NRA wants to solve crime: by putting more guns in the hands of citizens. Then this in turn likely causes the police to be more fearful in interactions with citizens, which creates bad police/citizen cooperation. This then causes more people to solve their own issues with violence, increasing the level of crime. So pushing that dial in a way that superficially seems like it might solve the problem, just pushes the other dials further out of whack and actually causes a feedback loop of hurt.
So…I think that to get to gender equality, regardless of whether you believe that women have it worse, you still have to be willing to push a dial that is/seems imbalanced in favor of women towards 50/50, because that dial will often prevent other dials from moving. Women may lose a little by losing an advantage for dial A, but they’ll more than get it back when dials B and C move to equality in response.
Shifting all the dials to 50/50 is positive-sum, so ultimately it’s not about pulling one over on the other gender, but about finding a solution that makes both genders better off overall.
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(I’m going to continue this thread down below.)
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@LeeEsq
People who are emotionally repulsed by men who don’t conform to their gender role, but who see themselves as gender egalitarians, can resolve the cognitive dissonance by assuming that these men are single due to them justly being rejected by women for being creeps/misogynist/etc. This builds on traditionalist notions of men having to prove themselves worthy to women, which actually also maps very closely to the demand that men have to prove themselves to not be ‘toxically masculine’. We also know that people tend to confuse a lack of benevolent sexism with misogyny. So truly egalitarian men are perceived as misogynists. So IMO, a lot of people didn’t actually reject traditionalism, but instead found concepts in the new ideology that allowed them to retain their existing antipathies & have biased perceptions as well that make them perceive gender inequality as if it was gender equality.
I don’t think that there is gender-swapped variant of this that can be used to rationalize hatred of single women.
—
Ultimately, men are taught that failing at life is their fault and responsibility to fix. Asking society for help is partially self-defeating even if society does want to help, since it results in the feeling that all of society rejects them for doing this, because of how they are socialized. When men stay closer to their gender role by fighting for the needs of other men, rather than for themselves, that is often considered anathema and no one is willing to assist them (like the guy who started a male domestic violence shelter in Canada, got no help and committed suicide).
I think that women who are unhappy about their personal situation have a much easier time finding support and working within the system for change. So it’s not surprising that they are less likely to commit violence over gender-related issues.
The interesting thing is that quite a few women have been part of left-wing terrorist groups, so it’s not that women are necessarily that much less willing to support violence. For example, the Symbionese Liberation Army had as many female as male members. However, in that case, the cause was not the personal situation of the members, but a greater ideal.
So I think that a good case can be made that the difficulty for men to improve their personal situation, which is much easier for women, is a major factor in men much more often choosing violence; rather than that men are inherently (that much) more violent.
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I’m in more or less agreement with you but with most people, I think its just better explained by simple opportunism than elaborate theories. While many women might not like most of their traditional gender role, I’m pretty sure that a lot of them like the traditional male role when it comes to relationships at least or at least the chivalrous/benevolent sexism type. Since wanting to have your cake and eat it to is pretty common human falling and cognitive dissonance rarely bothers most people, its really easy for for most people just to go along with that. People aren’t trying to resolve cognitive dissonance because they don’t care about it.
That being said, I wouldn’t say that most of the heterosexual women I know in real life who refer themselves feminists are exactly with traditionally masculine men. Their men aren’t the opposite either but something of I guess an in-between.
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@LeeEsq
I think that people do have a strong need to resolve their cognitive dissonance, but that most people very easily self-deceive themselves with rationalizations that fall apart at the slightest scrutiny (but if one knows better than to scrutinize, that is not a problem). I think that a major personal flaw is that I can’t help myself from scrutinizing, so I have to work very hard to self-deceive and often cannot do so with the fictions that society accepts.
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Its about more than romantic attraction though. While not a perfect replacement, platonic friendship with other men or women is a way of not being lonely. I find that its really hard for late term single people to maintain friendships as their friends hook up and gain marriage but its really hard for long term single men to maintain friendships with their married male friends. This is because the societal expectation is that the married man will devote himself to his wife and children and shouldn’t really spend any time with their bachelor friends, some sort of vague undefined trouble might result. Even in mixed groups, its hard to secure an invite if your a bachelor.
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@LeeEsq
Yeah. This is indeed partially caused by the narrative where the man has to ‘grow up,’ where this is defined by dedicating himself to his family (directly and indirectly, the latter by earning more, for example). Pretty much all self-care for married men that happens without the spouse is treated as a personal flaw that at best must be tolerated (like the ‘man-cave’). I think that in the modern narrative, time spent at work is often not as highly regarded as time spend taking care of the family, so we see differences in hours worked between men and women often ignored, while differences in hours spent on the household are portrayed as injustice. So in the modern narrative, men might theoretically be allowed a little more room for self-care by male bonding, but then in practice they end up never ‘earning’ this right.
Anyway, I think that many men solve this in part by finding excuses like team sports and in the red tribe, hunting trips, to legitimize a bit of male bonding.
In contrast, women get a lot of messages about how they should take care of themselves and I think that it is generally perfectly accepted for married women to engage in female bonding without any pretense.
That said, single women also have the issue where friends who get children become totally consumed by that and thus the friendship breaks up. However, I think it is generally easier for them to find new friends.
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Many households are dual-income households. The man might usually work longer but I don’t think its that uncommon for both husband and wife, again assuming heterosexuality, to put in just about the same hours. The complaints about housework is because its seen that women are on double duty, housewife and earning income for the home.
If we had a homosexual couple and both worked around 40 to 50 hours a week but one did substantially more housework, most of us would see the one doing the most housework as having a just cause to complain.
Another reason why male socialization is looked down upon is that there seems to be a general assumption that men are up to no good and will do things to get in trouble. Bachelors are seen as very trouble prone because they don’t have a wife or kids to consider and can lead their married friends in a bad direction.
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@LeeEsq
Many different permutations exist. Households where men and women work equal hours obviously exist, but so do many household where men and women don’t work equal hours. If we are talking about general patterns, rather than judge individual households, we need to talk either about averages (which is women working less than men) or separate out several different groups.
What is not reasonable IMHO, is to cherry pick households where men and women work equal hours and complain about double duty for women; while ignoring the households where men and women work unequal hours and men possibly have a larger duty overall.
If you look at the time use survey results for 35-44 year olds, then it definitely seems that on average there is a pretty good balance between the hours that men work more and the hours that women spend more on household, child care and shopping. So if there is an imbalance for some groups, like women who work full time, then this logically must be offset by other groups. Otherwise you can’t end up with a pretty good balance overall.
I object to merely taking a group that fits the ‘double duty’ narrative and declare that there is injustice to women; without then simultaneously discussing the group(s) where by similar logic, injustice is done to men. In fact, one can make a good argument that men are overall worse off, because there is a greater disparity between hours worked & desired work hours and hours spend on child care and desire childcare hours for men than for women.
It’s pretty clear that people usually don’t prefer to maximize or minimize hours for various activities, but rather, prefer to spend some specific amount of time on a kind of activity. For example, most people like to work some hours a day, to shop some hours a day, to childcare some hours a day, etc. In that case I think that the best way to judge fairness is not one where you simply add up all the hours spent on these activities and compare them, but rather a model where you determine the gap between the desired hours spent and the actual hours spent for each activity.
However, in practice we see that the models commonly used to make gender comparisons and the (cherry picked) data to which they are applied results in women looking maximally disadvantaged, while I think that alternative models and datasets better describe reality, the effects on both genders and thus allow better and fairer interventions.
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Ozy,
Woody Allen’s daughter didn’t claim that she was raped by him, so you are not just picking sides in a situation where there is no hard evidence either way, but are engaging in slander.
Furthermore, the claim that Woody Allen got away with it due to being famous goes against the available evidence. We only have a statement by the state’s attorney that he didn’t charge Allen because he and Mia Farrow didn’t want to traumatize Dylan Farrow further. Do you have any evidence that this was a lie?
PS. I would suggest watching Jagten to gain some understanding of how similar accusations can happen as leveled against Woody Allen without the person being guilty (not that this means that Allen is innocent, but it might reduce your level of confidence in his guilt substantially).
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“All 31 school shooters between 1995 and 2015 experienced “emasculating bullying” due to their failure to conform to masculine gender roles”
I just so happened to look up the Westside Massacre yesterday, and what I read portrayed Jonson as a bully who was performing the role of the stereotypical violent gang member. There was a mention that he’d brought up past sexual abuse at his trial, which was made to sound unsubstantiated, but maybe I should look into that part more closely?
I didn’t find as much detail on Golden. As in, the only detail I learned that I didn’t pick up in the immediate aftermath of the shooting is the details of his friendship with Jonson.
Of course, at least some teenagers performing toxic masculinity do so because they want to avoid being the victims thereof. Anecdotally, 2/3 bullies told me this outright while it was on-going. In absence of further evidence, a shooter having been a bully beforehand doesn’t seem to be strong evidence either way.
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Re: “epistemic humility”
1. What a wonderfully Orwellian term.
2. The authoritarian impulse goes back at least as far as the “philosopher kings.”
3. The second most effective way to learn that “shut up and listen to your betters” is a bad idea is to actually meet some of those betters.
4. The most effective way to discredit that paradigm is to actually be one of those experts.
I wound up writing entire sections if the SEMATECH/ITRS yield enhancement and metrology standards. Because someone on the ITRS plenary committee knew my manager, who told him I was his gal Friday on certain equipment toolsets. You submit the draft, add tweaks so that the other members in the working group don’t obsolete their pet techniques (sorry TXRF!) and voila! You get a line on your annual accomplishments and vast amounts of solicitations from salesweasels.
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I followed the bonobo link and the book it reviewed looked pretty sketchy. Like “self-published under a pseudonym” sketchy. Apparently the author has some kind of vendetta against biological evidence for nonmonogamy and her only other work is a polemical takedown of “Sex At Dawn.”
Scott briefly had the same link up at SSC, but took it down after the comments pointed out how dubious it looked.
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I’ll add a caveat for now. (Although my nonexpert understanding is that Sex At Dawn is actually inaccurate.)
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There is nothing “sketchy” about the book. It is not published under a pseudonym. Its author is Lynn Saxon. A real person with that real name. Whoever told you otherwise is lying to you. It is self-published, as are thousands of good books every year now. Her book has an extensive bibliography, all of her points are based on (and cite) peer-reviewed published studies of bonobos.
Primatologist Craig Stanford has endorsed the book, as have other behavioral science researchers: https://twitter.com/craigstanford7/status/719739088123748354
Lastly, if you want to criticize a position arguing something is true or false.. you should cite evidence. These claims are empirical. Strangely, nobody is trying to speak to evidence. It’s vague character assassination “that person is bad, so the information must be bad” which is fallacious and in this case, just plain wrong.
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I posted the following in Ally Fogg’s article about male social isolation and school shootings, which I am cross-posting here. Both because I found that article via the link here, and I think it’s relevant here:
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On the loneliness and isolation, I’d broadly categorize the following forms of loneliness, which go from most to least severe, but all of which society would be better off with less of:
1. Isolation in its purest form. Lack of social contact from any and all human beings. Disproportionately affects men, the elderly, and especially elderly men. Becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, leads to men not even seeing doctors and social workers and such and thus dying preventable deaths.
2. Social isolation from peers.
3. Peer segregation. To the extent that a given lonely person doesn’t suffer from #1 and #2, it’s because all the barely-above-#2 have clumped together. Better than the alternative, I suppose, but a much better solution would be social integration, whereby people are socially connected with different kinds of peers.
This is also the breeding ground for much of the social isolation that can turn destructive, especially when a socially-adroit, sociopathic leader gets in control of them for their own purposes.
4. Romantic loneliness.
The necesssary battle as I see it is over #2 and #3.
Loneliness really is a poverty of the spirit. It deserves to be talked about in many of the same ways we talk about poverty and economic issues. No one may die because of loneliness per se, but by that same token, only absolute poverty below a certain point kills; not relative poverty, not underrepresentation, not performance gaps, and not “economic issues” in general. (Yes, the latter may have deleterious health effects at a population level. So does loneliness – some really vicious ones, in fact.) I reject any segregation of empathy whereby the plight of the cripplingly lonely is a sad fact of life we must accept, but We Cannot Rest as a Society unless the latter are largely erased. I would much rather be a middle-income person who for demographic reasons may never reach an executive position, but with flourishing and rewarding relationships with the people in my community, an abundant social life, and many romantic prospects, than an upper-income person with none of these things. I suspect I’m not the only one. I think most people, when you get down to it, are the same way.
It seems to be taken for granted that we all have sympathy for lonely people, and lonely men specifically as per the concerns of this thread. Amidst all this so-called sympathy, there is a distinct lack of any sentiment that overall loneliness levels in society must come down, or that the lonely be made fewer. It mirrors the distinct lack of any sentiment by Parr as quoted in the OP that bullying must come down.
It’s also odd in the way we talk about loneliness, in that it’s apparently a problem without villains. Is this some triumph of nuance and rational thinking? Unlikely; the same people resistant to real help toward the lonely have no problem designating the most simplistic of villains elsewhere. Every social problem has some group of people that needs to change, because that’s how it got to be a problem in the first place. One gets the feeling that an inability to see any antagonists here who need to change their behavior, or more likely have it changed through outside social forces, is at best due to indifference, at worst due to sympathy with the antagonists.
Being selectively cold to anyone who comes into our lives without an already apparent high degree of prior peer status is wrong. It’s this sort of attitude that makes loneliness a self-reinforcing cycle. Treating people better or worse based on where they stand with respect to a peer hierarchy is wrong. We all do these to some extent. I notice it in myself, because I am only human, though I am rightfully ashamed at the more egregious instances of my doing so and make efforts to correct them. But some people are noticeably worse about it than others. Those people should be shamed when they do so. This entire prejudice should have a name, and be mentioned whenever we see, for instance, a piece of media indulging in it. There is, unfortunately, a human tendency to want to create or maintain hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion that put other people at the bottom in order to feel better about oneself. With so few socially acceptable hierarchies remaining, a lot of it gets dumped into this area.
Loneliness and isolation are growing problems (http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-loneliness-epidemic-more-connected-than-ever-but-feeling-more-alone-10143206.html) and other social concerns that stem from them will also get worse unless we tackle them – which may entail abandoning certain shibboleths. This is a gendered problem; both genders report loneliness at about the same levels, but the underlying numbers being worse for men is a consistent finding in this area. Certainly, loneliness in both genders deserves to be addressed, as well as the unique ways the problem can manifest in women, but it is important that there also be avenues to discuss it in gendered terms from within the male perspective. Existing models fail to adequately address this problem. Let’s roughly divide one’s social universe into close confidantes, friends, warm contacts (people who you hang out with once every few months, or those you are really close with at work but never see outside of work), and contacts (people in your life, for the most part around your age, who are potential warm contacts). For most people, having healthy social connections with the world means a concentric enlargening of all these circles. But most articles written on this subject focus exclusively on close confidantes. Why is this? A big part of the reason, I’d argue, is a social prejudice that trying to increase the numbers of the others for its own sake is shallow. No; what’s shallow is rejecting people because they score low on such scales and they have low current social value. Wanting a healthy and varied social life is normal and to be encouraged.
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@pocketjacks — I’ve been stewing on this for a few days. I want to offer a few points in rebuttal.
First, there is always a tension between looking for collective/social solutions versus individual solutions. I can bring up analogies to drug addiction or domestic violence issues, etc. This is obvious.
Working solutions will always be two-pronged. First, we want to tackle the underlying social inequity. At the same time, however, we want to encourage those afflicted to work on their own strength. Speaking for my own community, I don’t have time to wait for transphobia to disappear. I’m alive now. I won’t be alive in that distant future (if it ever comes). In the meanwhile, I get tough. I help my sisters get tough. I support them however I can. This isn’t an answer to transphobia, but it keeps me alive.
Furthermore, fixing a social problem requires understanding the underlying mechanism. Here we see that loneliness disproportionately affects men. Okay. Why? Well these men tend to be single. Okay, but there is roughly a 50/50 gender divide. For each unmarried man there is (roughly) one unmarried woman. We see that these men are socially isolated, emotionally cut off. We see the opposite with women.
#notallwomen, #notallmen. I’m going to trust the reader to translate my broad generalizations into “enough people to have a statistical effect.”
My ex-wife’s father is such a man. He is divorced, lives alone, is depressed, has attempted suicide, etc. My wife is very sad about this. Her sisters are as well. The thing is, they try to help. They try a lot, but he is bitter and stubborn and resistant to help. These problems are inside-him stuff. He barely leaves his room.
I can offer a clue. This is from the loneliness article:
Emphasis mine. But consider what is being said there. Let it sink in. For men, marriage gives connection. For women, it degrades connection.
What the fuck!
If you talk to women, these patterns are actually pretty clear. While every marriage is unique, I see this play out so much. Emotionally speaking, the men don’t show up. They are emotional deadbeats. Why would a woman want to marry such a man? Maybe if he’s super wealthy or very attractive, then that could be enough. Most men are not.
I saw it in my parent’s marriage. I saw the aftereffects in my ex-in-law’s broken marriage. I’ve seen it among my friends. I admire greatly the women who “nope on out” of this shit deal.
The problem is masculinity.
Masculinity was always a broken social technology. It worked as well as it did only because of the emotional sacrifice of women, those who would put up with these deadbeat men — or those who had very little realistic choice, which was my mother’s world.
Here is my theory: the emotional tools that would help a man be a good partner, that would lead him to be emotionally “present” — these are the same tools that would help “romanceless” men form intimate bonds outside of a relationship. In other words, this loneliness problem reflects a broken masculinity and the fact that women no longer sacrifice our own shot at happiness for the sake of a closed off and ungrateful man.
This is why I relentlessly reject the topic of romantic or sexual availability. It’s a trap.
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I don’t have any statistics but many emotionally unavailable men still seem to do rather well in getting into relationships or maintaining them because plenty of women aren’t attracted to more emotional men at all.* They also tend to be traditionally masculine in other ways. Emotional unavailability tends to hurts men the most socially when its not combined with other aspects of traditional masculinity.
The issue becomes why do many men end up acting as emotionally unavailable. A big reason is that it ends up as good defense mechanism. It makes the pain of all sorts of social rejection at least hurt less outwardly. You can also end up on the receiving end of a lot of punishment by being emotionally available because traditional masculinity is still enforced even by many women. In relationships being emotional available too early can come across as desperation and desperation is not attractive. The entire thing is like walking on a tight rope and one misstep will cause everything to crash down. Many men believe from their own experience that you really can’t recover from a misstep. The lesson learned is that even in the most progressive parts of Western society, emotional availability still has more drawbacks than advantages for men. Men act accordingly.
*One of my biggest pet peeves about these conversations is that they end up assuming that all women want the same thing when it comes to relationships or have the same progressive beliefs about relationships. That isn’t true at all. Women are just as varied in their desires as men. Some might want emotionally available men and others would detest them as weak.
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@veronicadire, do you believe that heterosexual men might have some desires that are mutually inconsistent? Like say the desire for emotional availability early on but no feeling of desperation from a man or emotional availability but also other aspects of traditional masculinity that don’t necessarily mesh well like stoicism? Emotionally available men are going to react more emotionally to bad things happening to them than emotional deadbeats and this will be off-putting.
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@LeeEsq — I’ll make one suggestion: don’t assume that masculinity is a uniform blob. It’s a collection of related traits, some of which are quite toxic and others that are quite wonderful. When we note that (many) women are attracted to masculine men, that doesn’t mean they are attracted to emotionally closed off men, at least not in particular. It is possible for a man to have many attractive masculine traits while at the same time being emotionally receptive and secure. Likewise, men who lack the typical attractive masculine traits are not automatically emotionally secure. In fact, it is very often the exact opposite. (For example, my anecdote above about my friend who dated the “foreveralone” guy. He was an emotional trainwreck.)
Summary: those aspects of masculinity that many women find attractive are not the same thing as those that tend to make men emotionally closed off — modulo the fact that women vary and masculinity is complicated with a lot of moving parts.
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On the second question, “fragile masculinity” pretends to be strong. It is not. Deep inner strength provides the capacity to be vulnerable.
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@Veronica
As usual, you blame everything on men.
The problem with your explanation is that it doesn’t explain why women stop being more lonely after age 49. Do men suddenly stop being emotional deadbeats and/or change their masculinity when women turn 50? If you look at the actual study, figure 2 shows that younger women have substantially higher expectations on intimacy and table 2 also suggests that women have different expectations than men, although the study didn’t examine that in detail. If expectations of (younger) women are higher and/or different, then it seems unfair to automatically blame men for not being able to meet these higher/different expectations, without recognizing the possibility that these expectations may be too high and/or more difficult to meet. It’s not a given that were the average woman be placed in the situation of the average man, she would be able to meet the expectations of their female partner.
There is also the possibility that women may tend to prefer stoic men over more feminine men. For example, when Norah Vincent tried (cross-dress) dating as a man, she found that women she dated preferred way more masculinity than she expected (as she is a butch lesbian, but was considered way too feminine by the women she dated). If that is the case, it seems quite unreasonable to require men to simultaneously be stoic and emotionally capable, in the same way that it is unreasonable to expect a glass of water to be hot and cold at the same time.
You really need to allow for the possibility that femininity is also broken in a way that contributes to the problem and/or that there are fundamental incompatibilities between femininity and masculinity that are no ones fault. Of course, if you simply take femininity as the norm, then masculinity automatically becomes deviant and the cause of all issues. However, if one were to take masculinity as the norm, then from that perspective it looks like femininity causes all problems. So I would argue that if one always blames one gender role, this is caused by a bias to favor one perspective.
Your claim was that men have these issues outside and inside of marriage & they cannot actually behave differently, which makes it absurd to now suddenly blame the issue on men being ‘ungrateful.’ I would personally prefer not to be faced with uncharitable claims that don’t seem based on reason.
Finally, if you listen to men, many have their complaints about how women tend to behave in relationships as well and many tend to feel that they do have to make many sacrifices for their partner. It’s certainly not such a one-sided affair as you make it out to be.
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@Aapje — Dude, calm down. I don’t blame men for “everything.” Instead, I say that toxic masculinity drives the higher levels of loneliness among men than among women.
I can reiterate my #notallmen and #notallwomen. These things are not universal, but the statistical differences are real.
About age 49, I know how it played out with my parents. Eventually my mom grew fed up and basically let my dad know he needed to shape up, to be more “present” in the relationship, or else she would move on. He shaped up. It was a long haul for him, but they made it work. For my ex’s parents, on the other hand, her father could not shape up. The marriage ended in infidelity and divorce. He has, since then, continued his downward emotional spiral to where he is today, effectively beyond anyone’s reach.
Regarding expectations, there is no “correct” level of expectations. The cost of low expectations is a lousy partner. The cost of high expectations is diminished experience. In either case, men are not required to meet anyone’s romantic expectations. They can make their own way in the world. They are, just like women, free to date on their own terms.
Where did I say they cannot behave differently? By contrast, I believe they both can and should behave differently. Their happiness depends on it.
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Toxic masculinity always seemed one of those phrases that should be void for vagueness. It covers too wide a range of men and masculine behavior. Its so all encompassing that it covers men like Donald Trump, narcissistic power obsessed a-holes, and men just frustrated about their romantic prospects and venting about it to just about any violent male criminal on the planet.
There is an element of both “I know it when I see it” and plausible deniability in the term. This allows both the widest range of masculine types and behaviors to be determined toxic as stated above and for some behaviors to be toxic in some men and neutral or even a positive in others.
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Everybody is free to date on their own terms in theory but that isn’t how it works out in practice. The most generically attractive people, meaning people look at them and say wow I’d like to be with them, are going to have more of an ability to date on their own terms than the non-generically attractive people. Likewise, the party seeking a relationship/consent is going to be bound by the party giving consent sets. They have the power to either stop pursuit or meet the conditions but they can’t really negotiate, especially early on in the relationship.
For heterosexual relationships, this means that men are generally going to be less able to date on their own terms because they are least likely both to be generically attractive and more likely to be the party seeking rather then receiving for the dating part of the relationship.
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@LeeEsq
We can also expect that, since it will generally be impossible to find a partner who perfectly satisfies one’s needs, people will rank their needs and prioritize their most important ones. It is pretty clear that there are gender differences, similar to how in job-seeking, men seem to prioritize income much more and women work/life balance much more (on average).
When there are differences in demand, you logically also tend to get differences in supply, as those who want to make a deal try to make themselves attractive by offering what is most commonly demanded by the other side. This is similar to how ‘male professions’ tend to offer higher salaries and ‘female professions’ tend to offer more part-time positions, better secondary benefits, etc.
I think that claims that the demands by one gender are unfair and/or that the pressure to meet those demands is unfair, often take for granted the benefits that the other gender gets and the one doesn’t. This is similar to how the ‘workplace gender inequality’ debate is often reduced to complaining that women get paid less, with no recognition of the fact that men get other benefits less. So to me it often seems to boil down to demanding all the benefits of the male and female role, with no recognition that you can often have one, the other, or a compromise; not the best of both worlds.
Furthermore, I think that many men feel that society is being dishonest. Imagine a situation where pretty much all employers tell their workers that they support a good work/life balance, but where you notice that any person who gets pregnant or cuts his/her work hours is massively more likely to get fired, for under-performing. Then the logical conclusion is that many employers merely support a non-existing type of good work/life balance, which doesn’t cost them anything. This is indistinguishable from not actually supporting a good work/life balance, even though the employers probably sincerely believe that they do support it (humans are pretty good at deluding themselves).
Historically, feminism has called out such hypocrisy when it harmed women, like men who are fully in support of women who work, as long as they also do all of the household work and such. However, I think that there is a huge blind spot for the situation where women/feminists merely talk the talk & don’t walk the walk.
Furthermore, the male gender role strongly disincentivizes men from calling out this hypocrisy and for society to accept that there is hypocrisy. Until we changed that, we probably can’t solve this problem where many men feel themselves trapped between incompatible demands. Telling them to just ignore one of these demands doesn’t work, because the punishment for not living up to them is real.
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@aapje, we can even take this further and point out that toxic masculinity is perfectly compatible the dating model advocated at least some feminists. In previous posts, mainly De-Radicalizing the Romanceless, it was pointed out that its a lot harder for women to be targeted with the un-feminine accusation in the developed world because of the success of feminism. For men, masculinity is still something that has to be earned. The modern dating system still holds that heterosexual men just have to prove their value and earn a woman’s affection like they have to earn their masculinity. This reinforces toxic masculinity whether people like it or not because it states to men that you are worthless and possess no innate value, you need to work for every little thing.
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@LeeEsq — Look, I understand that things look very different when you’re an “outsider” to relationships. But still, even you get to date on your own terms, in the sense that you get to decide if you even want to try. Likewise, even someone like you get to have desires, needs, and boundaries. You get to negotiate those with potential partners. If you don’t like the “deal,” you can step away.
Yes, attractive people have more options. We all know this.
Myself, I work hard to be as attractive as I can, because I understand the delight that comes from beauty. We are physical beings.
The OkC data suggests that, indeed, women are on average more attractive than men, at least they are perceived as more attractive, whatever that means. We can spend a lot of cycles discussing the ontology of beauty. So fine. But don’t assume this is a good deal for straight women. I would suggest the opposite. It kind of sucks for straight women.
You get that, right? Being desired by people you don’t desire isn’t so great.
I expect it’s better than not being desired at all. Sure, fine. Acknowledged.
The winners, I guess, are lesbians and bi women, at least those of us who live in a thriving queer community. Yay us!
There are, nevertheless, downsides to being queer (she says ironically).
Women get to decide for themselves if they like the “heteronormative lifeplan” (which means marriage to a man who takes a “provider” role, perhaps a “secondary” career, kids, family, etcetera). Revealed preferences show that women have mixed feelings about all of this. They like some aspects, dislike others. I think a lot of women want the good parts but not the bad. Why shouldn’t they?
Of course, like men, they have to pursue the goals with other people, according to the desires, needs, and boundaries of those other people. It’s a tough conversation, but women are not wrong to reject the life my mother had.
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@veronica, IIRC, and it wasn’t by you or on this site, that as heterosexual man then no I’m really not allowed to have needs. Desires and boundaries maybe but needs definitely no because I’m a man and entitled to nothing. On another forum I was heavily blasted for you using the word needs/
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@LeeEsq — I’m pretty sure I never said that. Perhaps you interpreted something I said that way, but it was not my intended meaning.
You are allowed to have needs. However, with regard to sex and relationships, those needs do not create an obligation for any woman to meet them.
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I guess I should clarify what I mean by “needs” in this context. First, I’m not talking about things like food and shelter, which are required just to live. This is not economic. I’m talking about relationship needs, emotional needs.
Here is the thing: no one is obligated to meet your needs. If I need a hug, no one has to hug me. However, if I’m in a relationship with someone, I have a right to state my needs. For example, if I am monogamous (I’m not), I might need them to be faithful. Similarly, most people need touch from their partners, they need emotional connection. I might need to see my partner at least once a week (baring issues of travel or whatever.) I had a girlfriend, long distance, who really needed to speak on the phone with me every night (with occasional exception).
These are needs in the sense that, if not provided, then it’s not worth pursuing the relationship. “If you can’t do X, then we need to break up.”
Heterosexual men definitely get to have needs. However, such needs don’t create obligation. For instance, in the case of my former girlfriend, I don’t call her ever night anymore. We broke up. Likewise, she does not get to select a random person and tell them, “Hey you have to call me every night. I need it.”
It doesn’t work that way, obviously.
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@veronica, in my post I acknowledged that you never said that to me. I said that other women said this to me.
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@LeeEsq — Ah, I misread.
Anyway, that’s a very silly thing to say. I doubt those women will have very successful relationships.
I’d be interested in seeing a link to such a thing. If they are saying “No woman should every consider her partner’s needs…” — well that would be an awful thing to believe. It’s dysfunctional. On the other hand, if they were saying, “No woman needs to consider the romantic and sexual needs of random men she is not dating…” — well I kind of agree.
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@veronica, if I’m remembering correctly it was a rejection of terms needs itself. Needs suggests obligation to do something you don’t want because if your partner needs something they have to have it rather than it being a nice thing to have. Wants is a term of desire and suggests more of a choice, you can choose to meet your partner’s wants but your obliged to meet their needs in their thinking. At least that was my impression of their rejection.
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I thought the link about male loneliness was very interesting, and certainly it hit close to the bone, but reading it, I felt there was an unchallenged, unspoken assumption throughout the text, and I’m surprised that nobody seems to have picked up on it in the comments here : the assumption that a woman’s friend will be women, a man man’s friend will be other men.
I’m a man who has recently reached the dreaded age of 25 and finished my studies in June, which means according to the article that the number of my friends will soon start decreasing.
A worrying prospect since I only have two really close friends.
Both of them are female (one of them is actually my ex).
I’d say most of my acquaintances (i.e Facebook friends. I only add people I know in the flesh) are women as well. It’s more or less an accident, the result of choosing a subject that few men choose.
One thing that struck me when I was a teenager and on which I’ve been reflecting lately is that teenage girls tend to have one very close friend of the same sex whereas teenage boys seems to favor being part of a pack with looser interpersonal connections, and, if they cannot, they end up alone, as I was more or less until the end of highschool.
I think it’s grimly ironic that men have so much difficulty being emotionnally open from fear of appearing gay, yet many gay men retain the same sense of aloofness.
Some of them insist on making sexual relationships as impersonal as they possibly can.
Being bisexual, I’ve often wondered why it felt so unthinkable to me that I could ever fall in love with a man. Back when I was struggling against my own internalised homophobia, I though it was just an effect of that.
Now that I have had sex with more men than women, and while I guess I’m not actually done struggling, I think it’s more complicated.
I think there’s also something I dislike in other men, I find masculinity (in others) rather offputting in general. To this day I myself would feel weird hugging a male friend (if I had any male friend), whereas it’s not a problem for female friends.
I think it affects my life in a number of ways of which I’m not always conscious.
For example, I keep thinking I should exercise more, but I really dislike the idea of going to a gym, probably in part because I’d rather not mix with the kind of men that go to the gym.
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So this article came across my feed today: https://markmanson.net/sex-and-our-psychological-needs
My takeaway — first, there is a lot there to think about. However, there is one thing I’d like people here to notice: men see sex in terms of status and self-esteem. Okay fine. The thing is, this seems very true. In fact, scroll up and read what Lee, Pocketjacks, and Aapje are saying. So much is about male status and the role women play in determining this.
Here’s what I say: balls!
We didn’t ask to be tokens in your status games. Insofar as we are thrust into this role, men did that to us. We don’t assign status. Instead, we act on our attractions.
Women aren’t actually attracted to “high status” men, at least not status alone. If we were, then we’d be saying very different things right now about Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK.
Women want connection, which is a fine thing to want. Men are not required to provide connection, but if you do not, we will seek it elsewhere. As Manson says in the article:
Not every woman succeeds at doing this, of course. In my own case, I fail a lot. I get into bad relationships and suffer. For example, one thing that has been on my mind lately, I let “mean girl” types get under my skin.
It happened two weeks ago, where a “mean girl” found the perfect buttons to hit. It fucked me up bad.
She’s a shitty person. People should avoid her toxic nonsense. Fortunately, my girlfriend made the right choice and backed me, which made the situation bearable, if still mildly traumatic.
The “mean girl” was terrible, a true narcissist. All the same, I’m 100% responsible for my own reactions. My girlfriend was 100% responsible for hers. Part of being a grown-up is learning to deal with awful people.
Manson has a lot to say about relationships, both how men fuck up and how women fuck up. I listen to him. In fact, I admire him greatly. His book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is one of my favs. (Read it.)
The reason I listen to him and not someone like Aapje or Pocketjacks is simply this: he is an emotionally secure man with no desire to control women. He doesn’t see us as tokens to fix male inadequacy. Thus he manages to give advice with a very different tone.
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@Veronica
Both genders care about status in various ways. There is substantial overlap, but there are also differences. Manson exaggerates the differences in that article to a point where basic facts don’t support his thesis. For example, if it were true that male promiscuity and having sex were the main source of status & self-esteem for men, they wouldn’t want to settle down with 1 woman, they wouldn’t want exclusive relationships, they would cheat far more than women, they would never stay in sexless marriages, etc. The facts simply don’t show these gender differences that would have to exist for his theory to be true.
Manson completely ignores that the science overwhelmingly supports the theory that the male sex drive is higher on average and the reason why men push harder for sex can thus at least partly be explained by higher needs on this front.
Nobody here claimed that women are only attracted to status. As for your other claim, studies show that women are more attracted to high status men than men are attracted to high status women. See this study or this one.
That is a very transparent passive aggressive insult. I have explained again and again that I don’t want to control women, but that I want more gender equality. You keep failing to engage with Pocketjacks or my actual argument, presumably because you simply cannot grasp what we are saying.
You cannot have men be incompatible things: you demanded earlier that men follow the traditional male gender role, like by being a provider, but also that men eschew that role to be emotionally supportive. Men are pushed into the male role by policing their emotions and such, so these are incompatible demands.
Many men have the experience of women telling them to be emotionally open, but then being disgusted when they actually are. It’s toxic manipulation that their gender role pushes women into, without realizing what they are doing. Actual egalitarianism is confronting people with their toxic behavior, men and women.
I favor discussing this openly, so women don’t get to do this unknowingly. It’s not about forcing them to change, it’s about making them want to change by making them realize the damage they are doing.
The gender-flipped version of this, calling men out for engaging in damaging behavior without realizing the consequences, is normal within feminism. That you see an egalitarian application of this principle as misogynist is exactly why feminism is not egalitarian.
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@Aapje — I’m pretty sure I can grasp what you think you’re saying. I think you’re wrong and totally misguided.
Short version: women are no longer willing to do unreciprocated emotional labor for men.
If we ask men to be more open, and then we are disgusted by them, well then work on your values and character. Or don’t. We don’t owe you our attraction or approval. The point is, emotional openness is really hard work. Do the work.
I did the work. It was really fucking hard. I had to take full responsibility for my self.
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Veronica, I don’t think you speak for all women. You might want more emotional labor from men and so do many other women. Millions of other women might still like traditional male stoicism or have different ideas about what emotional labor means.
We might need to actual define what is meant by emotional labor or emotional openness. Its also perfectly plausible to want emotional openness and be disgusted by the results for a variety of reasons. Its sort of like the question “how are you?” Even among close friends, this question usually isn’t an open inquiry into a person’s state but more of a way to start a conversation. The usually appropriate response is a bland “I’m fine. How are you?” rather than a full blasting report about your pain.
What I think more than a few women mean by wanting more emotional labor or openness towards them is that they want men to express more genuine concern and empathy about their, the woman’s, pain or problems while wanting men to be stoic about their pain or problems. People can be opportunistic this way. So I’m with Aapje on this point. The call for more emotional labor or openness is very one way.
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@LeeEsq — Of course women vary, but we’re looking at broad trends. Recall, this conversation began by talking about male loneliness, which on its face does not need to be about relationship dynamics. However, the article posited that one (among many) cause of this is that men limit intimacy to their romantic relationships, while women are more generally intimate. I think this is true and important.
Of course it’s #notallmen and #notallwomen. However, we’re looking at the broad trend.
Further, I think we mostly agree that there has been a change in sexual availability by women, due to various social and economic causes.
That is the base of this conversation.
I am saying that this: men were always emotionally stifled, and that masculinity as a social technology only worked because women did the hard emotional work, and that this was a shit deal for a lot of women, and now that women have a choice many women are choosing very different sexual and romantic strategies than before.
Again, #notallwomen, but enough that the statistics are clear.
In turn, this conversation predictably turned to the topic of sexually and romantically frustrated men railing against women’s decisions, cuz of course it did. It always does.
Here’s the thing tho: women aren’t going to fix lonely men. We don’t want to. Actually, we cannot. Our mothers and grandmothers were forced into it, by the social and economic conditions, but I’ve seen first hand how awful those marriages could be. Nowadays things are different. Today we can see a lonely, frustrated, unattractive, insecure, needy, sadsack man and say, “Well, that sucks, but he’s an emotional black hole that no one can fill.”
The bitter truth is we are very often correct.
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That sounds more like a lack of empathy than anything else. I have friends and an active life through friend, family, and work but at the same time never been in much of a romantic relationship. Either I’m going to have to do without a lot or any woman I might end up with is going to have to realize this and might need to provide more than she expected to because of my history. The same is true for other men or women with little to no romantic experience past a certain age. If women want men to accept them as they are than they should extend the courtesy.
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@LeeEsq — If she wants a relationship with you, then I suppose, yes, she’ll have to do additional work. But how much work? It’s fine to say, “Accept me as I am,” but why should they, if they have better choices?
Go reread my anecdote above, about my friend dating the lonely guy. She was right to break up with him.
Read this: https://captainawkward.com/2017/11/14/1048-the-unbearable-awkwardness-of-dating/
That guy sucks at relationship and communication. Sure, he has issues. I expect they’re not all “his fault.” But they’re his. They make him unpleasant to date. In fact, they might easily undermine his relationship with the woman in the story.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose he’s the sort of guy for whom this is a pattern. If so, then at some point he might look in a mirror and ask why all his relationships go to shit. He could say, “Women should have more empathy towards me” (or something similar that offloads the hard work he needs to do). He could say that many times, every day for the remainder of his lonely life.
I have empathy. Most women do, to varying degrees. Certainly we have as much as men. However, my empathy is not boundless. If someone lives a life of self sabotage and fosters a petty little victim complex, well dammit my empathy dries up fast.
And by the way, this is emotional labor, expecting women provide empathy to make up for what you lack.
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My reading of that post is completely unsympathetic. Men are frequently told to accept women as they are because the important thing is that they are with you now and that’s that. There are entire movies on this point like Chasing Amy. Any man who might get overwhelmed or even a little jealous of a woman’s past experience is per se a bad person. If a woman also had bad experiences in the past the man is supposed to be some sort of gallant and be incredibly patient with her while she learns to trust men again or something.
Men are not afforded that luxury. It doesn’t matter if you only known rejection and frustration. If your woman wants you to be bold and fulfill the traditional gender roles I dating while at the same time giving all the benefits of modernity to. Its rot. Why should you get to have your cake and eat it to? Why should you be able to make mutually inconsistent demands while protesting those made against you?
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@LeeEsq — I think women are asking men to rise to our level in terms of emotional availability. So yes, you’re (on average) starting lower and thus have more work to do.
It pays off, you know. Relationships skills are great. Get them.
Or don’t. The thing is, no one owes anyone a relationship. You have precisely the same right to walk away as we do.
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@Veronica
What I’m saying is that men AND women demand stoicism from men. For example, the expectation is that men are protectors, leaders and providers. To fulfill these roles to the extent that men are usually expected to, men are forced to become very stoic. For example, this qualitative study found that the men they surveyed experience it that way (see page 156 for the conclusions).
I think that women especially, often do not get how their expectations of men are causing men to be stoic (because women are not on the receiving end of these expectations and thus don’t have to figure out how to live up to them). Instead, it is treated as a male defect that is merely caused by a male toxic culture. Especially due to feminism, women are taught that they deserve many of the parts of the traditional gender role that benefit them, but also deserve men who do not have the negative traits of the male gender role. However, these are incompatible demands!
So I’m not asking women to heal damage to men caused by others! What I’m asking (men and) women is to recognize the consequences of their expectations of men and to figure out a way to reduce the damage that they are causing in the first place. This may mean lowering some of their expectations, because they don’t deserve to profit from exploiting others in the first place.
What you seem to believe is that I’m asking you to pet the rabid dog. From my perspective, most (men and) women really want to have a bunch of watchdogs in society that defend them from harm, where the dogs ignores their fear, the dogs prioritize the well-being of those perceived as weaker over their own health, the dogs will fetch stuff on command even if they want something different, etc. Then when the the result of these demands is a bunch of fucked up dogs, the dogs then get blamed for what they were turned into, also by the people who made them this way in the first place! I get upset over this kind of victim blaming, which adds insult to injury.
Now, I’m not saying those who cause this damage are evil. History is full of people who harmed others out of ignorance or even convinced themselves that they were helping them. However, doing damage for these reasons hurts people just as much as doing it out of a desire to hurt them.
So I believe that people have an obligation to be willing to consider how they themselves are contributing to this problem and then should make a choice. Either demand that men act traditionalist and then accept the benefits and costs; or liberate men from this role and then accept the benefits and costs from that. My preference is the latter, but either is more fair than putting impossible demands on men.
Since I seem to have to keep repeating this: this doesn’t mean that women have an obligation to magically fix messed up men, not by sleeping with them or any other way. I merely ask for an actual willingness to consider the possibility that women are also harming men and a willingness to demand that women also work to reduce this.
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@Aapje — If men want to stop being stoic, then stop. Women have very little material power over you. You say we “demand” it of you, but you have no reason to meet that demand. After all, what can we do to you?
Sure, if some malevolent woman decides to ruin your life, perhaps she can. If some random asshole on the internet decides to ruin mine, well it’s not hard to track me down. One of my intimate partners, for example, was doxxed by Milo Y. She survived, but it was rough.
But for men, as adults operating in normal social spaces, really-actually what can women do that “demands” your stoicism?
Refuse to sleep with you?
Of course.
There are aspects of “stoicism” that are clearly good: strength, character, discipline, etc. There are aspects that are clearly bad: stifled emotions, callousness. If you want, you can choose the good rather than the bad. In fact, I recommend it.
That study you link is a phd thesis. I’m sure it’s lovely, but a lot of phd’s are granted each year. I’m sure I can find others that say different things.
That said, I scanned over the conclusion section. I don’t see where it places the blame on women. Try quoting.
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@Veronica
I believe that social norms are extremely strong, way stronger than institutional norms. You can see this in the huge differences between some cultures. You can see this in how some laws are routinely broken, like speeding laws in the west, drinking laws in Iran, corruption laws in Afghanistan, etc.
A major strength and weakness of social norms is that they become internalized. Because they become part of people’s self-image, people follow the norms by ‘choice,’ rather than having to be constantly policed. Of course, this ‘choice’ is obviously largely an illusion, because if it actually was a free choice, people would make different choices as much as comply with the social norm. That they don’t, shows that they don’t really have a free choice.
This sounds bad, but if we didn’t have it, we’d probably kill each other and wouldn’t be able to have civilization, democracy, etc. So having it is a lot better than not having it.
I think that making light of people’s inability to just violate social norms is fundamentally no different from telling a paraplegic that they should just stand up if they want something from the top shelf or telling a severely depressed person to just stop desiring suicide. People cannot make these inabilities go away just by willing them to go away and pretending that people can do so is cruel.
Also, social norms are enforced in many ways, from small comments that show disapproval to full on bullying, from criticizing choices that others make to making personal choices that have negative consequences to those who violate the norms, etc. Women have this power just as much as men. If you believe that women get policed in many ways to follow social norms, then you can’t just dismiss the possibility of the same happening to men, even if you are not aware of how this exactly happens.
Feminism has put a lot of effort in trying to describe and criticize how men enforce social norms in a myriad of ways. All I’m asking is for people not to be sexist and start trying to describe and criticize the enforcement of social norms by women equally. Not more, but also not way less, as currently happens.
My complaint is not about one specific thing that women do, it is way more high level: that there is a structural problem with how people analyze reality, because female agency gets downplayed or ignored. As a consequence, when women do things, people tend to see this as behavior forced on them by others/men, but when men do things, people tend to see this as their free choice.
This double standard is a highly sexist and traditionalist way to analyze reality, that is unfair to both genders. My point is that we cannot fix many gender issues until we hold men and women to the same standard.
PS. I agree that there are advantages to stoicism and it probably would be best if women became a bit more stoic on average and men became less stoic. Of course, that means that women will need to give up demanding as much ‘stoic labor’ from men. Some of this stoic labor is a form of anti-emotional labor that women tend to desire and take for granted. So women then have to expect less of this from men. Then this in return allows men to do more emotional labor for women.
PS2. The PhD study shows that many of the respondents believe that their protector and leadership roles demand stoicism. These roles are pushed on men by society (thus: men and women). That you think that I referred to the study to exclusively blame women shows that you are merely pattern matching my words to a stereotype that you have about me. You don’t actually read what I write and you thus don’t understand my world view at all.
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Okay, I’m going to concentrate everything on this thread because going back and forth between threads is going to be confusing.
I don’t see any evidence you want to do the former at all, first of all. That wouldn’t be a problem in itself. Most people don’t care about most issues because they have limited time and energy. The problem is that you actively try and impede other people from doing it, on this and every other thread where this issue is brought up. (To be clear, socially lonely men and low-status men and romantically struggling men are not perfectly overlapping groups, but let’s face it. There are broad overlaps, and everyone is already talking as if they are equating them.) You evidently have enough time and energy for that, to the count of what, over a dozen posts on this post alone.
I’m of course certainly not against lonely men “[working] on their own strength”, or what they could do Doing Better, from a practical standpoint, or even an ethical standpoint. I just think the number of things that those who socially police lonely men, think that they are socially above them, and work to keep it that way, could be Doing Better, is much longer. Diet and exercise advice has its place, but there should be places for fat people and their sympathizers to commiserate and talk about social prejudices without it intruding on the discussion. I also think if there’s any place to talk about the latter, a thread like this would be it, but we can’t have that without certain people barging in and re-centering the discussion on the flaws, real or imagined, of lonely people themselves. I find that frustrating.
The original Ally Fogg article that started this all was a fisking post directed at a particular researcher who wrote an article about how bullied and isolated boys can turn dangerous, that damn near sounded like it was justifying bullying. Fogg heavily criticized this aspect. I agree with him, and while Parr almost certainly does not actually support bullying, she does have a huge blind spot, which is shared by all those who would sympathize with her, or with Veronica in this thread. She probably honestly thought she was being empathetic and generous to the victimized boys in what she wrote, doesn’t see the problem with it, and would get defensive if the problems were pointed out.
The basic problem with the way Blue/SWPL people (I’m intentionally not specifying “feminist”) talk about bullied boys and low status men (one group tends to become the other as they grow up) is the following. If I could encapsulate the way I hear people like them, including Parr, talking about this issue, I’d summarize it in the following:
P1
It is then, increasingly and encouragingly, pointed out how incredibly victim-blaming this all sounds. But Parr, Veronica, and the like-minded still don’t get it. The latter’s focus on all the things that lonely men themselves are supposedly doing wrong plays right into this mold.
“What? I said that they didn’t create that system!” I can hear the Parr-in-my-mind objecting. “I said I want them to have better self-worth! How much more sympathetic could I be?”
[…] […]
Consider the following:
P2
Yes, this analogy sort of breaks away at the end as it becomes increasingly on the nose, especially that last sentence there; but that’s intentional. That last sentence, with genders reversed and all that, is what is overwhelmingly implied, if somewhat exaggerated in this case to firmly make a point, in the current discourse surrounding low status boys and men, and that is what I oppose so strongly.
This is, essentially, what it would sound like if people like Parr had genuine compassion and understanding of the issue:
P3
See the difference? Not only is this more compassionate to the victims, it is also more accurate and actually cuts to the heart of the problem. (This should be expected since, after all, in a way lack of compassion to the victims is the heart of the problem.) I’ve intentionally colored it feminist, and included rhetoric I don’t agree with myself (I think most can figure out what parts those are), just to prove that it’s more than possible to be feminist and on the right side of this issue, and we are not asking anyone to renounce their feminist beliefs or think exactly like us in all respects. But of course we never see anything like this.
I’ve spoken before on how I used to be a bully growing up. Rest assured, P3 sums up the bullying mentality quite well, from what I can remember, though I would never have admitted it on those terms during that time. Unsurprisingly, mainstream social psychology, populated by good liberal social science majors with the right PC opinions on gender, has historically just not gotten bullying. I grew up going to morning assemblies that taught me that both bullies and the bullied shared many commonalities and that they both suffer from low self-esteem and were rejected by their peers.
Who are they kidding? Any boy, especially those of us with experience being a bully, knows that bullies have high esteem and are generally looked up to by their peers. That’s why we did it. (More recent research has increasingly come to find this, thankfully.) And while the old party line on bullies being outcasts does get truer the older one gets – if I had to peg it, junior year of high school seems to be a turning point – that’s only true of coarse bullying, while subtler forms retain the exact same dynamic, including largely the same targets. (I went through my own lonely period for about a couple years in college where I saw the social world from the other side, and it obviously played a part in shaping how I see the world. But that story is for another time because this post is already getting very long.) Compare stereotypical Red State racism to Blue State racism. From ages 5 to 15, bullying is like Alabama racism. From 16 onwards, it’s like New York City racism.
Actually, that analogy works on many levels. Bullying, even the bullying of and by middle school students, can be complex. Even with the boys I bullied, there were times when we shared jokes with each other, took each other’s sides when we happened to find ourselves in the same team at gym, and got along quite well when forced together for group assignments. (Of course, right after these detentes were over, things went straight back to normal.) That’s not to excuse bullying, and it goes without saying that bullying must be punished and stopped. It’s just to say, coarse bullies and genteel ones are not that different, and the coarseness manifests largely when unlike groups are forced to share the same space. The fact that the worst stuff only stops when the dominant group manages to achieve complete separation isn’t something to celebrate.
Because meanwhile, in the adult world, we go to great lengths to make sure men who don’t clear a certain status cutoff are edited out of our existence to the fullest extent possible. Their low confidence and other undesirable traits are taken to be innate – especially jarring coming from a group of people who otherwise react to the consideration of innateness of traits like a vampire reacts to sunlight – with no talk allowed of the actions taken against them that led them to that state, nor the continuing actions taken to keep them there. How many of the purported flaws of real-life lonely people are the result of, and not the cause, of their isolation from peers? From my experience, it’s quite common for a casual, constant level of rudeness and verbal hostility to be practiced against that subset of people that is roughly the same age as the peer group in question, and male, and low-status. Rudeness and hostility that would simply be intolerable if done to most any other group. Not every environment is like this, obviously, but enough are to serve as an effective policing mechanism. You should be grateful enough for those environments that are merely not like this; don’t you dare forget your place and actually try to be included in anything. But it is so ubiquitous that most people don’t see it and regard it as part of the background. And it’s not okay.
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Indeed. I would add that one of the things that keeps this system in place is that much of society feels entitled to the fruits of a harsh competition between men that pushes some men to great heights and forces many men to ignore much of their own needs. It’s a swim or sink system. To have a system work that motivates people by fear, you need dead bodies at the bottom of the pool.
I consider most feminists to be in substantial part traditionalist, because they aren’t advocating that we throw lifebuoys to these drowning men and find a better way to motivate men (by having society treat them as people with needs who deserve fairness and help if they cannot manage, rather than resources to be exploited, for example). Instead, they stand by the side of the pool and yell ‘useful’ instructions to the drowning men.
This is like giving weight-loss advice to overweight people and then when some/many don’t manage to lose weight and complain about being abused for being fat, telling them that they are feeling entitled. Of course, this would be considered victim blaming by most social justice advocates. I am merely asking that they be consistent, rather than making white men an acceptable target. No one should be called entitled for demanding an end to abuse and/or discrimination, no matter their gender or race.
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That’s a terrible analogy. Of course I would happily throw a lifebuoy to someone who was drowning.
There are just so many differences between the situation of someone drowning and someone feeling lonely and unlovable — where to even start!
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Of course you would throw a lifebuoy, if you didn’t have aquaphobia, which makes you so afraid of drowning that you don’t want to move close to the edge of the pool to actually look what is happening* or literally get your hands wet. Furthermore, this condition makes it highly emotionally soothing to keep the lifebuoy around your own waist. So you have convinced yourself that the guy who is shouting for help doesn’t need a lifebuoy, but can best save himself from drowning by quickly learning to swim, where you ‘helpfully’ give instructions (which resolves the cognitive dissonance between having the phobia and the moral obligation that a rational & emphatic assessment suggests that people have**)
* By this I mean having empathy with men. You have a lot of sympathy, but not a lot of empathy.
** Reasoning away an obligation is very common, so it’s not like this makes you exceptional in any way. You falsely reduce the various problems that (lonely and unloved)*** men have to them not having sex, whereupon you falsely conclude that the only possible solution that men could be demanding from women, is that women have sex with men they don’t want to have sex with, which you then dismiss as being a greater evil than the problem it would solve. Of course, various people have tried explaining time and again that the problems go way beyond merely not having sex and that many more solutions are possible than making women have sex with lonely men. However, you seem unable to set aside your own beliefs for a moment and build up a mental model of our beliefs*.
*** Many of the problems that I’m talking about are actually also problems for men who are not lonely and unloved.
PS. The point of an analogy is not that two situations are identical at the concrete level, but rather to make a comparison at an abstract level. The two situations need only share the abstract pattern that one wants to draw attention to. It’s actually preferable that the analogy is not more similar than necessary for that goal, because otherwise it is easy for people to reason at the wrong level of abstraction, not recognizing the abstract pattern that one is trying to communicate. So your complaint about there being many differences between the two situations strongly suggests that you don’t understand the purpose of an analogy and are not capable of interpreting them as intended.
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The analogy sucks because it is a situation of immediate danger. The drowning person does not have time to “learn to swim.” Furthermore, throwing a lifebuoy is a very small commitment.
Loneliness is a long term issue. It is an issue of attitude and character. Furthermore, it is an issue related to masculinity and the long history of male domination of women and women’s status as the “sex class.” There are so many pieces here that are utterly unlike “that guy is drowning. Throw him that life vest.”
I’ll throw anyone a life vest. That ain’t what you’re asking.
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@veronicastraszh, They’re also not asking what you say they’re asking, as they’ve explained repeatedly, apparently without you ever managing to notice. I normally have little to no sympathy for anti-feminist positions, but you have done an impressive job in these lengthy debates of making your side look bad. You might want to consider quitting while you’re behind.
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@Protagoras — They have several times rejected the proposal that sexual availability is “off the table.” If they accept that in an unqualified way, then this conversation might take a very different form. As long as they reject that, even if they follow the rejection by long paragraphs, we will remain at an impasse.
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Part of what renders much of the advice so useless, both from others and Veronica, is that there’s a catch 22 embedded in it, and the erroneous assumption of fungible social skills.
“Improving social skills” is, in part, a catch-22 – if, due to early exclusion, you wind up with “limited social skills”, this actually makes it palpably unpleasant for people of “higher social skills” to interact with you. But the only way you will ever improve is to have precisely these sorts of interactions and get a chance to learn from your mistakes. So the only way you can “learn social skills” is to find someone who will voluntarily tolerate you and your mistakes, and take you under their wing, sacrificing their comfort to help you in precisely the way Veronica opposes. This is literally precisely what happened to me – I had “limited social skills” until finally, I encountered someone with “higher social skills” who was willing to tolerate and teach me out of a mix of her altruistic nature and my ability to pique her interest with the very features that initially led to my exclusion.
I’ve put a lot of the “limited social skills” stuff in quotes because I actually had a very active social life from age 12 onward, just within the circles of other nerds/geeks/weirdos. I had a rich social life and many friends, but few/no “normal” friends, and I found interactions with “normals” to be difficult and fraught. After the mentorship above occurred, I was then more able to manage normal people, but conversely, I could see why normals found us weirdos sometimes off-putting. In retrospect, I didn’t necessarily “learn social skills” (I had those before), what I learned was how to interact with people with different (not necessarily better) social traditions and different interests, although I am still far from perfect. Ironically, I’ve now begun encountering social situations where the behaviour of “normals” is ill-suited and leads to their “social awkwardness”; they seem rather ill-at-ease when surrounded by a group which is 85%+ PhD scientists.
I would also like to “push back” against some of the overtly stereotyping statements made about “why men want sex”. Looking back on myself before I lost my virginity, I could very much see an “incipient Nice Guy” – I was romantically unsuccessful, baffled by why, and suffered from crippling self-doubt on the topic. The cliche about “it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all” really is true, and there’s a special type of hell in wondering why you have literally *never* been successful and if this means you are truly unlovable. And I was deliberately, consciously aware of my reasons for wanting sex – it represented the ultimate level of acceptance and intimacy, irrefutable proof that, at least at that time and place, a woman desired and cared for me enough to take that final step. It wasn’t sexual triumph or something I was owed or a coming-of-age, it was proof that I was not unlovable or repulsive.
In a way, desperation creates a similar catch-22 to “low social skills”. As you go longer and longer without ever having been able to find someone, you literally do become desperate, because the alternative is empirical proof that you are undesirable and unlovable, and that the most fundamental of human experiences isn’t for you. But desperation is unattractive, so you must hide it, lie to her, put on a mask to conceal your anxieties and fears and yes, desperation, while you second-guess everything you do and say and every corresponding response. Your desperation is a fact, and so your only choice is displaying a highly unattractive trait or dishonestly concealing it. And nothing short of a relationship will change this. (Honestly, my way out was possibly even worse, as it involved a years-long emotionally neglectful open poly relationship, which I didn’t realize because I had no reason to expect better, and which I bailed on the moment I met my now-wife and realized I could be genuinely loved, rather than just someone’s secondary/ side-piece).
Finally, I think Veronica and many others weighing in on this subject need to, essentially, “check their privilege”. It’s easy to demonize or dismiss the lonely and the desperate if you’re conventionally attractive and have a long history of romantic success, because, quite frankly, you don’t understand true loneliness. Loneliness isn’t the state of being alone, it’s the dreadful realization that you could very well be alone *forever*, and that fixing it is beyond you. Listening to pretty people with dozens of sexual partners talk about loneliness is like someone who’s had a lifetime of grinding poverty listen to college kids complain about how poor they are because mommy cancelled their credit card.
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I think it’s best not to assume things about whether people in this comment section have or have not experienced loneliness. In particular, Veronica has made many comments about her history of depression, loneliness, and anxiety.
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Well, I can only go by what I see here. If that’s true, she displays a remarkable lack of empathy and focus on victim-blaming.
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@Cerastes — From age 19 to age 30, I have literally zero physical intimacy, and very little genuine emotional connection with anyone. It was a rough time.
I think I have a fairly normal capacity for empathy.
I don’t accept that lonely men are necessarily “victims.” Certainly, many such men were (and perhaps still are) victims of bullying. However, on its own terms, being romantically unsuccessful does not a victim make.
Aside from the personal attacks on me, I don’t necessarily disagree with what you said. You are correct that social skill are hard for some people to learn. That said, they aren’t optional. It’s not an unfair burden that one must learn them. Instead, they are the very material out of which relationships are built.
There is an entire section of the DBT skills set that focuses on basic social skills. There are various other sources that give foundations. After that, indeed you have to practice. Indeed it helps if you can find people willing to invest in you. That said, “if no one helps me I cannot progress” is a self-defeating attitude, as is insisting it is a “catch 22.” On their own, such attitudes will make people less eager to invest in you.
Understanding that is one of the social skills each person needs to learn.
I understand that, in your mind, sex became a token of acceptance. Fine. But that happened in your mind. Take responsibility for it — and note that “taking responsibility” is not the same as accepting blame. Many things are not your fault that nevertheless you must fix. This is particularly true for “inside your head” stuff.
Sex is great. It is indeed quite validating. However, becoming fixated on it, treating it as the only possible source of true validation — such attitudes are a mistake. You describe feeling trapped by this, but again that was “inside your head.” It creates no obligation for anyone to sleep with you.
Another thing that each person must learn.
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Veronica, you seem unable or unwilling to let go of your fixation on an imaginary “obligation to sleep with people”. Literally EVERYONE these comments has denied that they wish to create such an obligation (whether explicit or implicit), yet you keep insisting on it, over and over and over, even in response to comments like mine, which don’t even mention it in any way, shape or form. Your obsession with this strawman has effectively derailed any attempt at productive discussion, because you equate even the most mild suggestions (“maybe society should realize that not everyone socializes the same way and not demonize those who are slightly different”) with obligatory coitus.
Correspondingly, you respond with overt hostility to any suggestion that people may need help like Ayn Rand scowling at a hobo. Indeed, your entire attitude seems largely to line up with the “self-man man/woman” who assumes that, because they escaped poverty to find prosperity, their success is attributable solely to their own merits and decisions, and thus anyone who doesn’t also “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” is a lazy imbecile who deserves to rot in poverty. Considering that the topic at had (social interaction and relationships) *by definition* require and consist of interactions with multiple people, this seems utterly baffling.
Yes, people have to make an effort to fix things themselves. Nobody here has disputed that, so you don’t need to keep repeating it. The area of dispute is whether there should be deliberate effort to change social norms to reduce shunning and increase tolerance for those who aren’t necessarily on the same page. Not “force social interaction with terrible people”, just “don’t shun someone at the first social error, or just because they have an ‘odd’ interest; wait and see rather than assuming they’re awful”. This is asking for nothing more than any movement to expand the notion of female beauty or promote acceptance of neurodiversity. Are fat acceptance activists “forcing me to sleep with fat women” by suggesting that society shouldn’t demonize them or that there is beauty in larger sizes? Am I being “forced” into social interactions with autistic people by simply being informed that ticks and stimming are typical behaviors? How are these any different?
Finally, you offer absolutely no substantiative response to my “catch-22s”, only a fiat assertion that even acknowledging the existence of two opposite feedbacks is somehow “bad” and itself worthy of shaming. Perhaps the term itself implies a level of finality or inescapability that isn’t correct, but that’s mere semantics. Individuals without a certain skill, or with lower skill levels, will be more prone to error, but advancing in the skill requires practice. If error results in inability to practice more, it becomes impossible to improve, so there needs to be some level of mitigation of error consequences. The plethora of terms for this alone is proof – “training wheels”, “safety net”, “starter ____”, “training mode”, etc.
Maybe you learned “social skills” entirely on your own, with zero help or interaction beyond the therapy office, but most people actually need practice, and acknowledging that is not, to counter your inevitable objection, “obligatory intercourse”.
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@Cerastes — Then let me ask, where is our disagreement? If you do not object to the statement, “Sexual availability is off the table,” then how do you disagree with me?
If you agree with that, then we agree. Let’s all hug it out.
If you disagree, then I take issue.
So, what is happening here?
Obviously lonely people need support. I’ve said so. I think it is important. I’ve said that. The thing I said that seems to generate controversy is, “Sexual availability is off the table.”
If everyone agrees with that, then why is this conversation happening?
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Veronica – Let me spell it out for you simply: The problem is not that you have said “sexual availability is off the table”, nor that other people don’t agree with that. It’s that you keep erroneously inserting into the debate and accusing others of rejecting it, when others have said no such thing. And when they clarify that and try to explain why they never said that, you ignore their explanations and insist on trotting out that strawman. Have someone mischaracterize your positions is frustrating and insulting, so we keep responding. *That* is why the conversation is still happening – your insistent strawmanning and our compulsion to object to this behavior and to clarify your intellectually dishonest representations of our views.
Seriously, read these comments again. In your absence, everything is reasonable and fine, but the moment you intrude with your strawman, it derails the debate as everyone scrambles to clarify and deny that your strawman is real. The common element is you and your insistence that everyone else is saying something they have repeatedly told you that they aren’t.
Literally everyone participating has said, explicitly, that people should not be compelled to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with. You, however, keep ignoring that and trotting out your strawman characterizations. If this is what passes for reasoned debate for you, you should be ashamed.
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@Cerastes — Let’s see if anyone will give an unqualified affirmation that sexual availability is off the table.
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So, “sexual availability is off the table” does not mean the same as “people should not be compelled to have sex with people they don’t want to have sex with,” since everybody has given an unqualified affirmation of the latter, and apparently that’s not sufficient. The crux of the debate then is the question of what the former includes that the latter doesn’t, and I would briefly explain the complaint of pretty much everyone who has opposed you in this discussion as that it seems that for you, the former is the latter plus anything else you feel like adding. Obviously, nobody is going to give an unqualified affirmation of open-ended agreement to whatever you might choose to include, because that’s entirely unreasonable.
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@Protagoras — The point here is, ultimately this is an argument about sexual availability. It didn’t need to be. A conversation about loneliness and social isolation does not require addressing sex and romance. We could talk about simple friendship instead. Certainly friendship can cure loneliness. However, that’s almost never what happens. Instead, these conversations invariably turn to the frustrations of romantically unsuccessful men, which in turns becomes a conversation about what women are doing wrong.
Because of course it does.
Women seem to navigate this emotional landscape better than men, on the whole. We seem to suffer less loneliness. We seem to manage the emotional complexities of relationships better.
Why?
I say it is a matter of socialization and skills.
We can share these skills. In fact, we do, frequently.
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This conversation feels to me like it is shedding more heat than light, and also I am tired of reading it, and also it has been a week and a half so you all should have said your bit by now. [Mod voice] no more of this.
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@Veronica
Humans often need things from each other and engage in trades. Some of these trades are called relationships. The offers and demands that people make have an impact on the other person. They can also be unfair.
Feminists have a long history of claiming that men have made unfair demands of women and should be making different offers and demands. This kind of criticism extends to male sexuality, where the sexual offers and demands that men make get criticized as well. I think that the (modern) feminist criticisms are often too one-sided and gender essentialist (blaming men for behavior that women do very often as well), but I do agree with the basic premise that demands can be unfair and can enforce unfair gender roles.
I also believe that unfair demands are made of men. An example is the demand for men to be overly stoic. I believe that men and women who demand that men are overly stoic are causing real harm to men. Male gender role elements such as high stoicism are certainly not merely perpetuated by demands that women place on potential partners, but it is part of the mechanism that keeps these gender roles intact. As such, I think that it is necessary to also debate and criticize the sexual/dating decisions that women make, just like it is necessary to (fairly) debate and criticize the sexual/dating decisions that men make.
My belief is that if as a society, we open our eyes to the damage that’s being done, most people will voluntarily want to stop hurting others, because they never did so intentionally.
So I don’t want to make a law to force women to make different sexual/dating decisions. I don’t want to bully people into submission. What I’m asking for is empathy with men: actually listen to men when they for example say that their experience is that women tend to react very negatively to them opening up emotionally in a way that doesn’t match the male gender role. I’m asking for a narrative that allows for the possibility that female behavior is unfair to men on a large scale. I’m asking that we study this in academia, teach it to people, etc.
Then women who feel disgusted by men who open up emotionally in a way that doesn’t match the male gender role, may in turn feel disgusted by their own feelings. This doesn’t magically change what women are attracted to, but I do think that will change in the long term. Especially since a lot of sexual desires are enforced by society and people get shamed for being attracted to those who go against the norm. If this is reduced because people realize how unfair it is, women don’t get taught the same level of disgust at men who fail at masculinity.
Many women got very lonely and unhappy a century ago when society changed so their traditional gender role didn’t work so well anymore. Then they fought for a change to their gender role, access to the kind of schooling and jobs that resolved some of this, etc. It was not just that women behaved differently, they fought against the forces that make this hard/impossible.
Traditional masculinity doesn’t work very well in current society. Men can’t just behave differently, because there are forces that make this hard/impossible. Unfortunately most people are currently not capable of recognizing these forces and the currently popular response is to blame men for not behaving differently, not the forces that teach them to behave this way and punish them if they don’t.
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Ozy,
Sorry, didn’t see your mod decision until after I submitted my comment.
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I won’t delete it since you typed so much and it was an honest mistake.
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