I grew up with a feminist mother and learned to hate myself as a boy. I can't remember a time in my childhood where I felt like being a boy was a good thing or something that my mother wanted. From my earliest memories it felt like something to be ashamed of.
My feelings are easily traceable to the way feminists regularly talk about men. They often range from dismissive to outright hateful. Any pleas that they be more kind or empathize with the experience of hearing their words is rejected with a sneer. Even a simple feel-good measure that could blunt or heal some of the pain like International Men's Day is met with waves of derision. "You don't need it!" I needed it.
It's not some wacky theory that this resulted in my devastated self-worth. It's just straightforward cause and effect. An easily believable story, if you empathize with an emotionally vulnerable child for just a second.
A close friend of mine just *yesterday* talked about how her and her gay male friend both have "a shared hatred for straight men". Come on. That's not a freak coincidence, it's just a fairly common thing for progressive people to say or think. I haven't had the heart to say anything to her about it.
It's true that feeling worthless as a boy/man isn't the only problem I've had with dating. But it was a big one. A huge one. I was one of those guys who was terrified of showing attraction or asking a girl out. And the #1 reason was that I felt worthless for who I was. I felt like I was asking someone better than me to put up with someone who could only bring her misery, because I was male. And I felt like being male made me worthless.
I feel a lot better about being male now. But part of my healing process has been accepting my truth, my lived experience. Instead of letting people like you gaslight me out of my own childhood memories.
I’ve always been well-served by interpreting sweeping statements about society (by people I think are insightful and arguing in good faith) to be claims about the shape or center of a distribution, rather than about a binary. Yes, binary language is often used, but that’s more for rhetorical effect.
Your case is a valid example of what is probably a 4-sd more extreme instance of feminism causing anxiety than the norm. You have a valid complaint, but that’s not inconsistent with Ozy being generally correct.
When I hear these statements from time to time I'll say "I'm literally right here", and get a response back "we'll I'm not talking about youuuuu :)".
Honestly these types of feminists aren't always very logically consistent.
So that is, in fact what almost anyone, outside of an internet comment section of some strange echo chamber of the internet, means. I'd prefer they didn't say it like that but whatever.
Inartful categorical statements don't mean we still shouldn't find some way to lock Andrew Tate in an underground dungeon, among other things.
There's alot that can be said about ... ahem ... modern dating but Ozy isn't your enemy here.
Thinking on it, I want to further add that there's a very, very large gulf between what I sometimes feel feminists think of me when I read their writings or ... polemics ... on the internet, and how they treat me when meeting me in real life. On the internet, often I feel like they're very unsympathetic to my feelings. In real life they seem to like me and sometimes want to help or date me.
4-sd is a big stretch, but Ozy's intentions are pretty clearly good, and to point out a human universal even if they overstated their case (which I think they somewhat did, though I don't entirely disagree with them).
For whatever it's worth, "men are horrible beasts" isn't an exclusively or even primarily feminist statement. Plenty of anti-feminist women are similarly cruel to their sons; the idea that men are always and forever a danger to women is one of the main stories patriarchy uses to justify itself.
100%. My dad and uncles and everyone else's dad and male teachers spent my teenage-hood trying very hard to convince me that boys were extremely dangerous creatures that I needed to stay clear of. Personally I never heard any of that from moms/aunts. And anyway I found boys to be quite delightful and fascinating and not at all scary, so their attempts to convince me didn't work, but this was a constant drum-beat from older males.
Protective instinct. When my daughter was born, my best friend who has two said "cool, now we can go to the shooting range together" and I understood exactly what he meant.
"Accept my rule because I am bad?" does not sound like a working proposition.
Perhaps it is more like "don't get mad on me sexually harassing you, all men are bad" ? But that is not strictly patriarchy (rule of men/fathers), more like a particular kind of male privilege of getting away with shit. (An then often not getting away with it these days.)
“the idea then men are always and forever a danger to women is one of the main stories patriarchy uses to justify itself” - can you, or anyone here, unpack that a bit? My mental search engine finds overprotective fathers (“some men are currently a danger to my daughter in particular”), and then I run out of content and start inventing fan fiction in the style of Thomas Hobbes (Ada Palmer has broken my mind, apparently).
I am not sure my idea of this is the same as OP's, but what comes to mind for me is "women should not do [thing] because Some Theoretical Man might harm them while they do it". Walking alone at night and going to clubs to get drunk are common examples of this. In more conservative worldviews, wearing a short skirt is another example.
This idea that men are inherently dangerous is obviously wrong, and hurtful for men, but it's also bad for women because it means they're afraid to do things that are not actually all that dangerous. It "justifies patriarchy" in that it makes people believe it is necessary to limit women's choices so they will be safe from (largely imaginary) harm.
Yes, that's what I had in mind. A woman's place is in the home, because the rest of the world is full of men, and men are beasts.
Though I would've added that sometimes the danger isn't imaginary. Around here it mostly is, but the world is large and history is long. Men have never been inherently dangerous but there have always been dangerous men, and I live in an unusually safe time and place.
There's a symbiotic relationship between the threat of male violence and the demand for male control. It's no coincidence that the most patriarchal places, where women are most brutally "protected" by their husbands and male relatives, are also the places where it's hardest for women to get justice. Saudi law is horrific on rape, and that goes hand in hand with its requirement that every woman have a male "guardian".
After all, protection is control. There are people who get to give even the POTUS orders: the bodyguards. This has been described well in Tom Clancy's Executive Orders, the most powerful person on the planet is living in a prison with very polite jailors. Because there is a need for protection.
When you say "asking people out is just scary [for normal social-anxiety reasons]", I'm definitely on board with "asking people out is scary [for those reasons]", but not the "just". In particular:
> But at some point I start to ask myself, is it the case that society has, by complete coincidence, managed to uniquely fuck up every single category of person in a way that means that they don’t ask people out?
Yeah I mean there's only like, three categories you mentioned, and there's a myriad of ways people are fucked up about sex and dating. Seems unsurprising that every category would end up with a few each.
---
Separately, I'm annoyed at people who tell the "feminism gave me dating anxiety" story that you described. I don't think feminism gave me dating anxiety, but instead that feminism and my dating anxiety come from a common cause, which is me hearing a bunch of stories about men being shitty to women, and then other men (their friends, or acquaintances, or random Internet strangers) closing ranks and protecting them from consequences without displaying *any* curiosity (to my eyes) about whether or what harm was done. I heard these stories from my friends, heard their pain, saw them under pressure not to feel angry or protect themselves. I heard them from internet communities I was involved in or peripheral to. Just a lot of my early exposure to stories of heterosexuality was stories of it going wrong. After that, pursuing romance myself felt like listening to someone talk about how they'd been mauled by a dog as a child and still had nightmares about it, and I'm there like "oh no that sounds horrible I'm sorry, also I really want to show you my dog". It just felt really selfish, slimy and unappealing.
I mean, in the years since then I've had a fair handful of happy and successful relationships, so I wasn't exactly ruined by this. But I do stand by the claim that it's made me more timid, quicker to drop interest when I'm not sure it's welcome, put a bunch of labour into seeming as unscary as possible, and put a higher bar on feeling like expressing my interest in someone is going to be worth it for them. It's relatively recently that I've been able to be comfortable with the idea that by default, the fact that I like someone is often *good news* for them, even if they're not interested in me.
To be clear, I absolutely don't mean to erase the harm caused by this kind of situation! I think it's a real and genuine harm, and we need to improve feminist messaging so that it doesn't wind up with men feeling like their sexualities are inherently predatory and unwanted. (And other kinds of messaging as well-- for example, a pattern like is isn't uncommon for men who grew up in Christian purity culture.)
*And* I think that this is a particular way that "asking people out is horrible" is inflected by gender and orientation and personality and subculture. I want everyone both to be aware that social messages are making asking people out more horrible and that's bad, and to feel empathy for people in different circumstances for whom asking people out is *also* horrible but in a different way.
Judging by a lot of the comments written below, it seems like a post on potential ideas to "improve feminist messaging so that it doesn't wind up with men feeling like their sexualities are inherently predatory and unwanted" would be a fruitful follow-up.
Feminism may not be the root cause of most people's dating anxieties, but there's some very obvious ground to point out how internet feminism isn't particularly motivated to assuage those anxieties in any way, or how, as Ben points out, the very empathy for the female experience that men were told to cultivate has engendered a hesitation to approach that (some, not all) feminists then go on to deride as insecurity rooted in male entitlement.
And while many people in the feminist space embrace removing mental health stigma and using the "You wouldn't ask anyone to just get over a broken leg or cancer, so why would you ask someone to get over depression or anxiety?" argument, it's difficult to ignore that in many spaces, male anxiety about asking women out is one of the few anxieties in which it's not only acceptable but almost virtuous to say "your anxiety isn't a big deal, just don't overthink it and be normal."
Yeah, I think I was unclear on whether I was disagreeing with you or not, and rereading your post I better understand your point and I agree -- I'm definitely on board with spreading the understanding that dating is difficult for many different kinds of people and not *uniquely* for people afflicted by this particular thing, and indeed hearing more of women talk about what they want romantically but don't have was somewhat healing in making me feel more like I had something positive to offer them (e.g. https://eudai.substack.com/p/the-odds-are-good-and-the-goods-are?s=r )
Another good reason to highlight this is that I think for me the political / moral reasons to find dating difficult sort of obscured the fact that it was also difficult for "normal" reasons: I *am* afraid of rejection, but as long as I had a political / moral reason to avoid taking risks with women, I didn't notice or work on my personal, self-interested aversion to it.
"I think it's a real and genuine harm, and we need to improve feminist messaging so that it doesn't wind up with men feeling like their sexualities are inherently predatory and unwanted."
You're one of the most genuinely empathetic people I've ever (virtually) met... but I don't think you can do that! I think if you didn't do that the bad guys would go all over the place and rape and harass women like they used to in the 80s and 90s.
Super disagree. We don't just have a single dial to turn between "men experience shame about their desires" and "men are free to trample over other people's boundaries in pursuit of their desires". We can get the calibration a lot better -- we can more clearly distinguish between positive and negative expressions of sexuality. IMO feminism has done a good job at highlighting the negatives but largely (and understandably) hasn't tried as hard to highlight the positives. I think if we did a good job of communicating about both it would be pretty clear we can have one without the other.
Fair enough. I'm not smart enough to figure that out, and I usually stay out of activism because I figure I'll get in trouble.
Honestly, dude, this is just my gut feeling, but these are women who are angry at men, in many cases for quite good reasons either historically or personally. We all know there are lots of horrible men out there. You might date or befriend a feminist personally--lots of people with better social skills can pull this off--but there's always that level of resentment against a class you belong to and can't leave without transitioning (and in the case of TERFs not even then!). And you can do well for years or decades, but then something goes wrong, and the knives come out, and all your old friends are digging your grave. Maybe it's not even something you did--all accusations must be believed now, right?
I agree male gender roles kind of suck, but--IMHO of course-- these are the last people we can expect to help us. Movements aim to help specific groups of people. Feminism isn't 'for men too'--it's specifically *against* men. You might support them if you think men have too much power or are doing too many bad things to women (many men do). But--I dunno. Ozy seems to have some sympathy for us, but I would say as a rule, feminists do not have our best interests in mind, and often enjoy our suffering. Remember 'I drink male tears'? The bear? They'll never like you, no matter how self-abasing you are. It's like being a German in Israel--no matter how good you are, there's too much bad blood.
Thinking logically, a "behave better" message will inevitably:
1) cause those who are already self-reflective and probably "good enough" feel anxiety that maybe they are not being actually good enough, or might not be seen so
2) the actually bad ones will of course ignore it
3) some of the actually bad ones will double-down and engage in Tate-like "vice signalling"
So instead of "behave better", the message should be "these are the new norms". If you are already following them, you can relax.
There are women out there who are angry at men, and they contribute something to the conversation, but they don't own the conversation, and they aren't the only people talking. My experience is that the feminist women around me resent men generally less than I do.
> And you can do well for years or decades, but then something goes wrong, and the knives come out, and all your old friends are digging your grave.
I think this isn't true, but it's a little difficult to persuade you without being able to cite decades of evidence, which obviously isn't really practical. I think in the 15 or so years of adulthood I've had, I've never had anything "go wrong", despite spending most of that time dating or attempting to date. I don't have a ton of male friends but I can probably count a few decades of accumulated "years of male experience" between them. I'm aware of maybe one or two people in my social circle who've had allegations float around them. They've been negatively impacted by those allegations, but they haven't been ruined by them. They've lost some friends but have plenty left. The notion that every man is one allegation away from social ruin just doesn't match my experience.
> all accusations must be believed now, right?
I think there's a bit of a mess here where many people see us transitioning out of a regime in which ~all accusations were suppressed, and given that generally these accusations are about interpersonal behaviour in private spaces and we often aren't going to have direct access to the truth, it can feel like the only alternative to "all accusations are false" is "all accusations are true". But clearly both of these regimes are nonsense. What we need instead (IMO) is something more like "I'll treat all accusations like they might be true or might be false, and try to figure out how my various options would play out in either scenario, and pick what seems best with both scenarios in mind". For example, that can mean praising the bravery of accusers without assuming that what they say must be true. It can mean excluding people from situations that an abuser could exploit, while being clear this is a precautionary risk-management move and not an assertion of guilt or a moral judgement.
> Movements aim to help specific groups of people. Feminism isn't 'for men too'--it's specifically *against* men.
I don't see it that way. Feminism focuses on the things women want. Sometimes that means reallocating power from men, in which case, sure, it's against men retaining that power. But I'm idealistic enough to believe that many of the social things that women want increase the size of the social pie, not just their share of it. In the end it's in all our interests to get along better with each other.
> Remember 'I drink male tears'? The bear? They'll never like you, no matter how self-abasing you are.
Yeah again there's not one bug "they" who all feel the same way. Some people will never like me, and in some ways that's sad, but I learn to live with the fact that I can't prove to everyone that I'm not who they expect me to be. Some people do like me, they think that's compatible with their feminism, I think it's compatible with their feminism, and that works out great.
(For the record, I think the whole bear discussion was incredibly stupid, and I've been mostly happy to just ignore the whole thing.)
No, there is something much deeper going on. There are two ways to hear an accusation. One way focuses the attention on the perp and calls for punishment. Basically it is a call to fight. This is the old, trad, masculine view. The other focuses the attention on the victim, and calls for help and healing. Often, just for holding space. This is supposed to be the new, leftist, feminine way of looking at things, thinking like a healer, not a fighter or judge.
Just of course this is really difficult! Because people still will be angry at perps, because some fights are necessary, and we do need to restrain perps somehow so that they don't keep on doing it again and again.
So I guess at this point no one really knows how exactly to adopt this new view. We have a vague idea we have to pay more attention to victims and focus more on healing than retribution, but unsure how to do this in practice.
But this is what it is really about. "Believe victims" means more like "help the victim heal" than "punish the accused". We are just not yet sure how to do this kind of culture yet.
But basically we don't want to shoot down a call for help because of lack of evidence.
I also felt that way whenever I tried asking women out before I realized I was a lesbian. To extend your metaphor, offering to show my dog to someone who had been mauled by a dog felt really selfish, slimy, and unappealing, so I tried offering to show my cat instead, and it felt waaay better. That was almost 2 years ago and I haven't dogmoded since then :3 (okay, I maaaay have taken this metaphor a bit too far xD)
I might rephrase the OP as: the anxiety will be there no matter what, so *the anxiety itself* isn't strong evidence of anything. Other information isn't worthless, but if you're letting other people's anecdotes and some old OkCupid charts dissuade you from asking out the cute person in front of you who's laughing at your jokes; then maybe anxiety has taken the wheel and is causing you to make a mistake
Yeah I have to disagree here. Or half-disagree -- I obviously do have to agree that there's a certain base-level of scariness involved. But I'd also say it's pretty clear that the phenomenon generally known as "internet feminism" (yes that's a terrible term sorry I don't have a better one), along with its also important but less-mentioned companion, university orientations, made things quite a bit worse, at least for me.
I was on my way to figuring this stuff out before I encountered this stuff, but hoo boy did I fall down a hole afterwards. Like, before I was just afraid of, I don't know, embarrassment, like you describe. Only after encountering this sort of material did I start worrying that by doing this I would be *harming other people*! That's much worse!
This new pit trap was much deeper than the first and took me a lot longer to climb out of. And whereas the first one I was getting out of on my own, this one I couldn't, because I was told that even questioning these new moral precepts made me a terrible person! (Also, like, you deserve a lot of the credit for getting me out of it, so, y'know, my gratitude to you for that. Scott and Sarah were also instrumental here.) It was a lot of work that involved, like, basically rebuilding my moral compass around such things from scratch. Getting over the earlier problem (to the extent that I did, which I didn't totally, but did a fair amount) didn't involve any of that!
So, sure, asking people out is just scary (although actually in many cases it *isn't* once you've done it once or twice -- I could comment more on your examples but that'd be a different point so let's just skip that), but "internet feminism" (sorry) and university orientations needlessly made it a lot scarier by turning it from "potentially embarrassing" into "potentially harmful to others". I don't think it's wrong to blame them for that!
The post makes a completely valid point that *nobody* likes having to be the one to ask someone else out (otherwise, it would have been a role that feminists would have fought over the decades to make more acceptable for women!); this is not a feeling that just started with men as a result of 2010's internet feminism. But I feel, at the same time, the post completely misses the point that people (women nowadays as well as men!) are making when they complain that 2010's internet feminism has resulted in men being more scared to ask women out.
I think the point could be better summarized as, prior to 2011 or so, nobody much liked the role of having to be the one initiating dates (and other things), but men sort of accepted that they were put into that role, and everything basically *worked* (well, with a lot of creepiness and sleaziness and women feeling pressured and sometimes not being able to go out in public without being bombarded with verbalized male interest and so on... there are valid reasons why feminists wanted to change things!). And the style of online feminism (visible to certain prominent bubbles of the Anglosphere) throughout pretty much the whole first half of the 2010's, followed by the Me Too movement a little later (highly visible to the whole rest of the Anglosphere), has noticeably resulted in men feeling like they can't win but "damned if I do, less damned if I don't", and has resulted in a decreased willingness for men to approach women in a non- dating app/event context. (The rise of online dating apps is a HUGE factor in this, mind you, but this rise itself was probably assisted by changing societal beliefs coming from current popular feminism.)
Myself, I'd be less than honest if I were to blame feminism *primarily* for my terror of approaching women back when I was a grad student circa 2013, because it's clear to me that I had (and still mostly have) a preexisting bundle of neuroses which made me phobic of it. But the emerging social movement (again mostly online but which very much permeated my young academic social environment) *absolutely* fed into this in the worst way possible and made my phobia perhaps a lot more intense than it otherwise would have been.
I have a male friend (of similar background and sensibilities, though somewhat older than me) who had done tons of asking out and dating in his life, but by the late 2010's, was vowing not to ever show interest in any woman until she showed explicit interest in him first (he directly justified his conviction through the Me Too movement). He once got confronted by a woman in one of his collaboration groups (maybe not part of his professional job? I don't remember) who suspected he was hitting on her, and he not only desperately and vehemently denied it to her face but felt the need to exclude her from emails sent to the group, I guess so that she would feel like he was bothering her or demanding her attention in any way whatsoever? That last things strikes me as a completely irrational reaction, but it's an example of what fear can do to someone, even if a more extreme example than what we'd find with the average progressive-leaning guy living as an adult through last decade.
I don't have data to cite, but I think most would agree from their own experiences, honestly, that certain social movements coming from feminism have contributed to a decrease in men asking women out (the result being that almost nobody is asking anyone out, and the rate of romantic/sexual relationships is plummeting), that women are noticing and unhappy about it as well as men. (And this may well be a worthwhile cost to stigmatizing aggressive/pressuring/creepy behavior, but it has been a cost.) This is completely compatible with the point that no demographic has ever found it easy to be the askers-out in the first place.
Did it though? Seemingly ironclad "men pursue" norms taught me that it was *my responsibility* to react to suspected indications of interest from female friends with over-reciprocation, lest I leave those female friends in the "silently rejected" position of Ozy's hypothetical straight woman exemplar. This created a bad habit on my part of over-reading these "indicators" and, for a period of several years, essentially inventing romantic feelings within myself about basically any woman I ever became friends with. I'd say it's likely neither I nor my high school girlfriend were *ever* actually romantically interested in each other, despite us dating for several months, and to this day I feel that any nonverbal romantic signals I perceive must be disregarded as noise.
I'm happy to accept that more dates happened under such norms, but I'm skeptical that it's actually overall better for the people involved or the culture they create.
Let's notice something about those old-time norms. It was about men deciding their attraction to women entirely based on looks. Which is a form of objectification and the new norms rejected that - basically the new norm is show some friendly interest in the person as well, or fuck off.
This IMHO entirely changes the meaning of what "asking out" means. A dinner date out of the blue might in itself imply such objectification - deciding to spend $100 on someone only because of their looks.
If one withholds deciding on attraction only after getting to know the person, the new kind of asking out is "grab coffee and chat?" without initially showing any sexual interest.
Also I think your choice of examples somewhat masks this by having the lesbian example be something completely different when in fact lesbians are often affected by this too, as Kelsey has written about on Tumblr! (http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/106549627991/that-scott-aaronson-thing) Use the same example and it's clearer that, yeah, something bad is going on here.
^ This, I suspect. Anxiety plus confirmation bias prompts interpretations of internet feminism to support the anxiety (which, internet feminism being what it is, doesn’t take a lot of exaggeration), dropping you into a deeper hole than previously.
I think some things get blamed on feminism which really are a consequence of the fact that we haven't yet developed appropriate new norms. Truth is lots of people did benefit from being able to meet romantic partners at work but the ways the old norms worked were open to abuse and we haven't completely come up with good replacement norms.
And that change has screwed some people who have very few opposite sex coded interests or friends, don't do well with apps and are workaholics.
That's not an indictment of feminism -- every set of social norms around dating produces winners and losers -- but some people are worse off in this new equilibrium and I hope that one day we can find a new set of norms that allow people to meet in professional situations in a better way (if everyone just got on one of those see if you are both interested apps it might work but there are coordination issues).
I agree, but one of the big problems here is getting everyone to coordinate on one app. Ideally it would be a common standard like SMTP not a single app.
I don't think that's necessary for the purpose of matching people with mutual interest -- ie I register and list the people I'd be interested in dating and they do the same and we only find out if we both list each other. You can identify the person you're interested in using their email and the protocol can identify the appropriate host to handle matching for those addresses via a DNS query as well as find whatever cryptographic keys are necessary (like the mailkey implementations and suggestions to implement mail encryption this way). .
I think dating apps do fine for meeting people this is only needed for verifying mutual interest.
--
You need to do a bit of cryptographic fussery to ensure that the system doesn't reveal interest merely by trying to check and doesn't allow impersonation but it's not national security so it's not the end of the world if nerds who pour over the raw logs can gain an extra 5% confidence someone likes them by analyzing traffic patterns so you can just hide true checks amoung many fake ones (you should be able to use public key style crypto to check if you both specified the same pair w/o revealing what pair you specified if you didn't both pick the same pair)
I mean, my working assumption after "girl power", evo psych, game, #MeToo and redpills, is that while men and women may *individually* form loving partnerships (or more for you poly people), men and women *in aggregate* are natural enemies with interests at cross purposes bound together by the need for one of each to reproduce, so given how much power men had for a long time you'd expect women to organize for their collective interests, and men to oppose it.
Not at all. For starters, it has almost always been members of the same sex enforcing gender norms -- and perceived power imbalances -- rather than the opposite sex. Men pressure men to comply with male roles and women with female roles. This whole men vs women thing is mostly a construction of feminist recruiting (we need to stop oppressing ourselves isn't a great pitch) -- it's almost always been men and women working together to enforce gender roles not men oppressing women.
Also the married folk busy raising kids together are less visible online.
Secondly, the (correct) perception of an unjust gender arrangement is largely a product of our adjustment in the 19th and 20th century to a very different societal and economic context. Going back to the medieval or even Tudor periods it was more like men and women were in seperate but symbiotic worlds that were effectively incomeasurable.
Sure, men had more explicit power in the home but lives were as regulated by norms, religion and reputation in the village -- and harsh punishments were common that applied to men more than women. I don't know which I'd prefer to be if I was born then (can't import our modern individualistic norms). And I'd exchange power and happiness any day and we don't know much about how that was shared out.
Not really. Only in a culture that normalizes selfishness, such as ambulance-chasing lawyers. Basically this problem is much less anywhere outside the US. For example, when I divorced I bought my ex and child a house. I was not forced so by lawyers. It was my idea. If I kind of failed at the husband and father thang, at least I can do one thing for them. The idea of coming out of the marriage keeping as much of my finances as I can would have felt preposterous. I basically have no need for money for myself. 5 years later I am still living in a hotel room sized apartment, feel entirely comfortable there. Kids need living space, playspace, single adults do not.
No disputing that asking people is, and always will be, scary.
But anecdotally, when I moved from a feminist operating memeplex to one that was a lot less feminist, I found the asking a lot easier. I think the former encourages the asker to imagine an audience looking for any possible discomfort caused. It also overestimates how bothered people are by a bit of discomfort in the opening stages of dating.
ok but like. i literally can’t ask anyone out even before we get to the what if it’s creepy cycle, because i’ve been on T for nearly a year and don’t pass at all and can therefore not sell myself either as a man or as a woman, because i can’t actually deliver on either. i can’t even make a dating profile without feeling like a crook 😅
we do all these think-through taking each case in turn but what do people do who are in between cases
not an urgent query because i’m also old and tired and whatever but like these are the things that go through my head and i’ve had a martini
LGBT events? Play up the androgyny? I was on OKCupid, and kept running into people with ambiguous gender. 'Agender', 'bigender'...I'm sure there's some bi/pan people who'd be really into whatever you can present yourself as.
I always had a thing for masculine women, which you can never admit, because calling a woman masculine is seen as extremely insulting.
You'd be surprised. There are often people who want what you're selling. I had people like me even before I had the money, and I never figured out why. If you find someone you like, it may not even matter.
I feel you. I'm a transwoman, I completely pass, and still I don't dare ask anyone out because I know for a fact that most men wouldn't even consider dating a transwoman, and there's only that much humiliation I can take.
I feel like this is a place for the apps. You can make it perfectly clear, maybe even wear stuff with the trans flag on it. Your first priority is to make damn well sure any guy who might be prone to violence on finding out doesn't come near you.
After that, maybe bi/pan people? Since their identity isn't tied up in dating people of a certain gender, it doesn't matter whether you 'pass' or not. A lot of bi people seem to enjoy some androgynous aspects in a partner so you might actually be ahead of the game!
As for the humiliation...I'm going to sound reverse-woke, but a lot of men have to keep shooting our shot and get humiliated (and as you can see increasingly we don't bother). So it may not be possible to avoid humiliation in the context of finding a partner.
Apps have their own problems. They're designed to be addictive and inefficient at actually finding good matches. This is true for everyone, but being trans certainly doesn't help.
As to bi people, there isn't much in the way of "bi spaces" (yes, I looked). There are spaces for meeting (and possibly dating) people of the same gender. But bi people mostly don't bother with creating their own spaces, since they can already use either straight spaces or gay spaces to date.
Yeah, I agree. The apps suck. And being trans is going to make it harder.
All I can think of is poly and kink spaces, but you have to actually either be poly or kinky, and frankly I would hate to recommend kink to anyone given the risks and stigma (and limited partners). Looking back now I wish I'd never opened that door.
Why? I am a cis male Top, I found nine subby women in 5 years on FetLife, despite the founder explicitly saying it is not a dating site - it is, if you do it the smart and tactful way. I don't see much risk, because I just do the oldschool kink (floggers, blindfolds etc.) which is pretty safe.
Or you mean risks like police and lawsuit related ones? I think US culture is heavily selfish (think ambulance chasing lawyers) really my neck of the EU is much less so (we consider it preposterous to sue the paramedics who tried to help you), but also regional (NY seems extremely selfish to me, Austin less so), but this may be a personal issue too, if you are selfish you will tend to attract selfish people.
I mean I am not calling you bad. Here is the deal. Selfishness is usually just ambition and unselfishness is usually just laziness and lack of ambition. Me and my partners are quite lazy. We work as little as we can get away with etc. If you would go on a dinner date with them and talk about big ambitions like starting a business and all, they would roll their eyes. They are the types who make ironically doomer jokes on late stage capitalism.
So if you come across as someone just brimming with ambition, you will attract people who also do, and their ambition might include some version of taking revenge on ex partners and suchlike.
Encouraging men to ask out women might not be against idealized feminism, but it is contrary to the movement "feminism." Just like how building men's shelters like Erin Pizzey did isn't contrary to idealized feminism, but was rejected and punished by the movement.
The funny thing is, you can't direct your criticism to the movement feminism because that would threaten your group membership, so instead you direct it at men. Let me translate your post for you and you tell me how I'm wrong, here's the message: "Just man up."
If you believed in gender roles, you could say that with your chest, but instead you have to pretend that "manning up" is somehow feminist, so you don't have to realize that what you're advocating for is not gender equality. It's the secret message of feminism, which is that wherever women are unequal in a bad way, (the workplace) that inequality is abhorrent and should be removed, and wherever women are unequal in a good way, (the dating market) men need to step up.
I'm not an MRA to be clear, I believe in inequality, I just believe in it universally, not just where it benefits me.
Unfortunately, you have a point. Perhaps, half a point. Consider the history of Marxism. Basically everybody ignored Marx's idea that as long as capitalism has not yet reached a post-scarcity stage, market competition is necessary. Instead Marxism as a movement basically simplified everything down to a war against capitalism by whatever means possible.
Similarly, it is thinkable that feminism as a movement ignores everything Martha Nussbaum wants and it simplifies down to a war against men by women.
But the point is - why would this be a good value proposition for heterosexual women who actually like men? Who actually want to fall in love with men? This is why I see half a point here.
Consider the counter-point, the PUA/redpiller stuff that started out as "seduction" and is now a war on women. But only a small number of men participates. Most men do not want to hate people whom they want to love.
If you ask someone out and are rejected, you may feel big shame and humiliation, which is no doubt extremely unpleasant whether you are a man or a woman. For men asking out women, there's an additional hurdle: if you ask out a woman who didn't want to be asked out, you've committed an unwanted sexual advance, which is sexual harassment, which makes you ethically defective, worthy of moral condemnation, and complicit in a culture of relentless psychic violence against women.
In a strictly logical sense I don't truly believe what I've just written, but it very much "feels true" to me, and it does seem for all the world like it's the logical conclusion of the message that "internet feminism" has been trying to push. In the end maybe it doesn't really matter: men with crippling anxiety generally make bad partners anyway.
What's interesting is that the apps provided something that made getting together SO MUCH EASIER: they pre-screen for mutual interest without either having to feel rejected. Tinder's big innovation was that you swiped to show interest, and it would tell you when someone you were interested in was also interested in you -- before anyone ever had to say anything or make themselves vulnerable by showing that interest. And if you never saw that person again, you could just tell yourself the app never showed you, so no rejection.
This was actually a giant benefit and made things so, so much easier. Talking to someone that you already know thinks you're cute and is interested in talking is about a thousand times easier than putting yourself out there to potentially get rejected. And yet everyone moans about the apps and how terrible they are.
There used to be literally no way to pre-gauge interest without a huge investment of energy in a majorly inefficient manner. You had to actually devote time to trying to get to know someone or flirt and you might waste weeks before finding out they already had a boyfriend/girlfriend and were remotely open to proposals from ANYONE. Or you had to utilize social networks to develop intel for you, by having a friend talk to their friend to find out if there was any interest, etc. Or just go with the tried and true classic of using alcohol for liquid courage.
I think things actually are much easier than they used to be 20+ years ago. But like everything, as soon as there's an improvement or new convenience, everyone just immediately adjusts and updates their standards, and doesn't appreciate the benefits while staying focused on the drawbacks. Pre-modern era, no one expected that they'd even have much if any opportunity to meet someone outside of their immediate circles, options were so much more limited, and you were really putting yourself out there because if your attempt bombed, everyone you knew was going to know about it. If anything I think stakes and effort required are so much lower now that it's just made everyone -- both the asker and the askee -- exquisitely sensitive to and intolerant of the slightest bit of social discomfort.
I think it probably worked that way for a while, which is why so many Internet millenials miss old OKCupid. But now, especially if you're in the bottom 3/4 of people, you wind up discovering what a completely frictionless dating market looks like. Men send hundreds of swipes into the void on women who have hundreds of men after them who don't really care and are just desperate to find anyone. Everyone loses, except for a couple of guys who can play Hugh Hefner and a couple of ladies who can have a reverse harem.
Massive agricultural improvements meant everyone could theoretically have enough food, but in practice farmers went out of business and had to work in factories to survive. Just because something can lead to massive improvement for the average person in theory doesn't mean it will actually work out that way.
The mass swiping is why I always left the apps days after I signed up. At first I was happy, then surprised, then extremely skeptical, at the number of matches I always had. There was no way that that many dudes were reading my profile, looking at my pictures, and deciding there was anything compatible about us. Then a male friend confirmed that strategy, and I just stopped altogether. Almost all of my relationships came from jobs or mutual friends.
I am an "elder" Millennial who also looks back fondly on OKCupid like you describe, though. While they did have the same problem (dudes mass-messaging women without looking at profiles), it was to a lesser and more manageable extent, and women could actually get the info they wanted about the dudes they were scrolling through.
I often look at this dating and dating app situation right now with extreme gratitude that I am already married.
Agreed. I'm an Xennial, so we're probably pretty close in age.
You know, I didn't date seriously during the period of my career when I was moving around because I didn't want to force some poor lady to move for me and f*** up her career. (Despite my feelings about feminism I try to avoid damaging people close to me.) I regret that now.
Yeah I get it that there's a very lopsided ratio but also if guys would stop just mass swiping right on everyone, it'd do a lot to help (collective action problem there). Still, there are tons of couples who met on apps...almost all of them these days it seems...and they're not at all just the top 5%ers, plenty of them are regular people. I grant you that if you're in the lower 30-40% on looks, a photo based app is definitely not going to work for you.
Right, and if you ladies would stop filtering out everyone under 6 feet... ;)
You're right, of course, but the nature of collective action problems is such that you can't just 'do the right thing', because you'll lose. (And you know this.)
I don't know. My working assumption at this point is society is selecting for good looks and social skills, and the old pathway of 'make money and be stable' for introverted guys has closed unless they're very wealthy. I suspect this isn't good long-term, but there isn't much I can do, and frankly at this point I'm increasingly taking the opinion of "the West decided I was inferior, let it burn".
While I totally agree with the thrust of your post -- see my other comment for a brief quibble -- I think it's worth recognizing that that as a result of shifting/vague/unclear norms about when it's appropriate to ask someone out we may have created more contexts -- or at least more high stakes contexts -- in which appealing proposals are appreciated but unappealing proposals are labeled as objectionable/creepy.
I think the kernel of truth here is people -- usually men -- seeing that lots of successful romantic relationships are formed via proposals they rightly realize might be labeled as creepy if they made the same overture feel unfairly locked out of many avenues of romantic contact. However, a fair response is that it's just men dealing with the same reputation concerns women always have faced.
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Unfortunately, it's not easy to solve because reacting to romantic proposals has an element of reputation management involved -- if you don't label the proposal as being unacceptable/inappropriate are you implying that you aren't disgusted or that they are in your league? Certainly, a sufficently socially skilled and confident person can turn down any proposal politely without reputational harm but it's not just the people doing the asking who are insecure and socially awkward.
As long as social norms make it clear that a certain kind of proposal is acceptable this isn't too much of an issue -- maybe you say "ewww" to your friends but no larger consequences -- but when the norms allow you to call a proposal unacceptable there is the incentive to do so.
And to some extent this has kinda always been true. Sean Connery could probably get away with asking women if they'd like to come back to his hotel room even at a time it would get most men slapped. But I do fear that -- outside of apps -- that quick social change has made it the case that a greater fraction of successful romantic proposals now occur in contexts where an unwanted proposal could result in serious social harms.
I think your general verdict is correct and arguably this effect is more than offset by apps. But I suspect that lots of dating related complaints are less worries about being absolutely worse off but really about resentment that someone else is getting to do things you can't.
I think it could be accurate to say that feminism makes it harder to start a romantic relationship, but then one also has to say that toxic masculinity does too. Empowering any group will result in some members of that group abusing their power, resulting in other people becoming afraid of them and trying to avoid them. With feminism this manifests in men who avoid asking women out because they're afraid of being cancelled, and with toxic masculinity this manifests in women who turn down invitations because they're afraid of being assaulted and potentially not believed.
The way to actually make progress is to A) get to a reasonable middle ground where each gender has about the same overall power (which I think has mostly been accomplished now in the US), and B) work on pruning away the extremes who would abuse their gender's form of power. (Which seems to not be happening and I'm not sure how to fix this.)
I basically agree. Power is abused and when you have power you can make it harder for people to stop you from abusing--look at how Harvey Weinstein survived for so long.
My sneaking suspicion is that because childrearing and pregnancy is so unpleasant for women, when you give women full autonomy, the birth rate falls to levels where you get outcompeted by other cultures. Patriarchy doesn't persist because it's pleasant or good, it persists because it produces lots of soldiers to wipe out less patriarchal cultures. Now that there's nukes it's less of an issue...but I've noticed China seems to be dialing up the patriarchy at the same time it's trying to recover its geopolitical status.
Well agriculture works exactly like this, so why not patriarchy. War is the father of all and all polities culturally evolve towards winning wars.
Feminism and other progressive stuff are downstream from not needing to train every man as a soldier. Imagine the kind of guy who finds it normal, even glorious to stick a bayonet in someone's gut. How much will he respect consent? He will solve domestic disputes with his fists. Nazism was downstream from everybody coming home from the Somme with a massive case of PTSD and just finding it normal to be crazy aggressive.
It really all started to hippies don't want to study no war no more. Still the culture was crazy aggressive, if you look at the circumstances in which Easy Rider was made. Hopper pulling a knife on Torn etc.
Then slowly all this violence started piping down.
This might be more a me thing, and doesn't totally not fit with the idea that everyone is looking for a distinct framework to explain their common feelings, but I think that the distinctive factor is being _morally_ (not just socially) judged _by a group you generally agree with_. I do think that hard-avoiding someone who has asked you out in an uncomfortable way, and even being clear with your (trusted to some degree) friends about why, in ways that may have impacts on the asker's reputation and welcome in the shared social context, can be reasonable. It's sure to have it's share of false positives, but overall it's not a general practice I feel justified objecting to - there aren't hard lines that I see where I can call a degree of avoidance or warning unreasonable that also match with what I think keeps me safe from the consequences of an honest misunderstanding.
I think that the risk of being judged as pathetic or slutty (for women asking men out) is different - it has a different kind of real power, but it's also entrenched in a value system that, presumably, the sort of women-and-adjacent folks who read this blog reject. Similarly, I feel no anxiety about the possibility that Al will see me ask out Barbara while I'm also dating Connie and judge me for being polyamorous; I reject the ethical basis of that judgment. I think that women considering asking out women worrying about seeming presumptuous are in sort of a similar place, where they might be anxious about being perceived as deceptively misusing a platonic bond, if it's tricky to articulate the concisely observable differences between being predatorily presumptive and being innocently mistaken.
That said, I agree with you that it's often overblown, quite likely often reinforced by anxiety that simply finds its place, not its cause, inside that justification. I just think it's still meaningfully different, though I'm not sure what to do about it - again, I don't think it would be on net good to move the balance among false positives and false negatives in ways that are short-term favorable to me in this specific way.
Presumably the men-and-adjacent who read this blog reject the idea that male sexuality is naturally predatory and unwanted or that it's always your fault if you ask someone out in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable! Intellectually rejecting a belief doesn't mean that you emotionally reject it. Some people (and social groups) are unreasonable, and you might still worry about how they react. And a lot of women (especially women who are fat, disabled, neurodivergent, gender-non-conforming, or Just Kind Of Ugly) have a *lot* of self-hatred wrapped up in their undesirability to men. There exist kinds of shame and humiliation that have nothing to do with doing something morally wrong.
But even if those men personally have rejected the idea that their own male sexuality is inherently predatory or unwanted, it won't help their anxiety if *the women they want to date*- or society and the court of public opinion- haven't rejected that idea as well.
You're right to point out that both men and women have valid dating anxieties that can't just be handwaved away by "I can't get a date because muh feminism", but as AndHisHorse points out, there are some anxieties that are less palatable to society's value systems at large.
I doubt we've reached a point in society where a man worried about being called creepy is afforded the same sympathy as a woman worried about being slutty- and while there are valid cultural and historic reasons for this disparity, that's all the more reason to point out why anxious men may not find their concerns easily dispelled by well-meaning reassurances that dating is hard for everyone.
> And a lot of women (especially women who are fat, disabled, neurodivergent, gender-non-conforming, or Just Kind Of Ugly) have a *lot* of self-hatred wrapped up in their undesirability to men. There exist kinds of shame and humiliation that have nothing to do with doing something morally wrong.
This is very true. But I'd argue there's a public perception that being "non-creepy" or "non-predatory" is considered more within one's locus of control than simply being disabled or Just Kind Of Ugly is, and therefore less ripe for sympathy for the men that struggle with it.
> Presumably the men-and-adjacent who read this blog reject the idea that ... it's always your fault if you ask someone out in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable!
I mean, I do *now* (again, largely thanks to you I feel like it's worth noting), but as I said in my other comment, there was a time when I *didn't*, and like -- yes, it matters a lot whether you think you are hurting people other than yourself! If you're just worried about being judged in a way you disagree with, you mostly just need to learn courage. If you're worried about hurting other people in a way you don't quite understand, that doesn't help!
Huh. I see "male sexuality is naturally predatory or unwanted" - or perhaps the lighter form, "men have the total responsibility to avoid coming across as predatory or unwanted, and if someone gets a Bad Vibe from a man, that person is obviously correct" - as less overtly alien or opposed to *gestures vaguely at a cluster of liberalism and leftism and things that I consider generally good* than slut-shaming (maybe the same way that TERFs are more closely related to modern feminists than prescriptivist TradWife types are?), but not having personal/internalized experience with the latter, I'm not terribly confident in that position.
"And a lot of women (especially women who are fat, disabled, neurodivergent, gender-non-conforming, or Just Kind Of Ugly) have a *lot* of self-hatred wrapped up in their undesirability to men. There exist kinds of shame and humiliation that have nothing to do with doing something morally wrong."
Exactly, and the incels (nonviolent majority) are the flipside of that. Most humans want relationships, so failing to measure up in that regard is deeply humiliating.
> I think that the risk of being judged as pathetic or slutty (for women asking men out) is different - it has a different kind of real power, but it's also entrenched in a value system that, presumably, the sort of women-and-adjacent folks who read this blog reject. Similarly, I feel no anxiety about the possibility that Al will see me ask out Barbara while I'm also dating Connie and judge me for being polyamorous; I reject the ethical basis of that judgment.
I agree it's different, but I want to highlight that sometimes people intellectually reject a moral system, but had a difficult emotional path to get there, and may not have purged it from their minds completely; I think polyamory and promiscuity are both frequently emotionally charged in this way.
Like, I have a problem with not really being able to reject a value system I want to get rid of - I have a lot of Issues about (not) working for pay and tying my sense of self-worth up with "legitimate" achievement and fears of eventually running into financial disaster. (After getting an engineering degree I basically spent the last 20 years as an unpaid family caregiver instead of joining the formal workforce, and now that all the people that I had been caregiving for have passed away - including my wife - I'm probably going to need to figure out something else to do with my life besides comment on blogs and play video games. And I'm going to need to spend a few years working and paying payroll taxes instead of living off of inherited assets or else I'm going to get stuck paying for Medicare Part A instead of getting it free like most people.)
Oh yeah the point about valence is important -- being judged as bad isn't bad when it's by the bad guys; indeed, it can even be *good*.
There is (or was -- been quite a while since I've dealt with this) annoying assumption generally present in "social justice" spaces that it's the judgement of people *opposed* to them that matters socially, even though to those who consider them the "good guys" (such as, y'know, their own people!) it is obviously *their* judgement that matters socially. There's a failure to acknowledge that they have any influence!
...mind you, I don't know how that has changed in recent years. There's a reason I stay away from such places these days...
Eh, the judgment of those whose values you oppose is still relevant when they are significant gatekeepers, formally or otherwise. If I lived in the American South rather than liberal coastal America, the judgments of anti-ENM peers would probably have more weight and relevance. In that regard I am fortunate to live in a bit of a bubble.
Sure sure. It's just important to recognize that these bubbles exist -- there is or was a lot of claims by the SJers that they don't have influence *anywhere*, that things are *uniformly* against them!
Oh yes. I think the thing is it wouldn't ruin your career for a while. But before that you had your reputation in the village to worry about. Things are less new than we think. And, some people didn't find anyone and/or reproduce. Heck, many cultures have a monastic class that doesn't even try.
To be fair, I could totally compliment my buddy's appearance, cuddle my platonic friends, seek qualities in romantic partners that I also like in platonic friends (eg, sense of humor), and have them advise on the sexiness of my outfits. Drunkenly making out might be pushing it, though.
Being Xennial and growing up in a very liberal area, I got a heavy dose of (the aftershocks of) second-wave feminism in my teenage years, and the thing I realized was that you could always be safe from feminist attack if *you never expressed sexual interest in a woman". Never touch them, never express any observation about their appearance, never look at them too long. And...I got by at school and work. I got my degree and kept my job.
I was finally in my late twenties (this would be the late 2000s) when I felt feminism had started to wane enough I could start dating. I discovered Roissy and was knocked away...here's these people I've been terrified of all my life, and *he's attacking them*! Well, I didn't do all the 'game' stuff (I never assumed I was clever enough to neg without insulting), but there were concepts like social proof and not appearing desperate that were useful. I took decisions and tried to escalate, and all of a sudden I wasn't friendzoned anymore.
(Roissy then turned into a Nazi, or else his successor Heartiste did, if they're not the same person. This doesn't actually make what he originally preached ineffective. William Shockley had all kinds of awful views, but we still use cellphones with the transistors he invented in them.)
I wasn't able to attract anyone I was actually attracted *to*, which leads to some funny situations, but it was an improvement of sorts--I finally tried the sex thing (it was kind of underwhelming to be honest). I even did the kink thing (you know what happens when you go through life and 'your sexuality' and 'what feminists hate' have a Venn diagram that's a circle?) and had a good time--unsurprisingly being paranoid about false accusations makes you very respectful of consent, and it's so much easier to just discuss everything you like ahead of time. The vanillas should try it.
Of course, then #MeToo hit, and when my last relationships ended I decided not to pursue others (yes, I had *two* for a while; isn't life grand occasionally?). Besides, by this point I had assets to protect, and I realized that was probably the elephant in the room that was generating attraction in the first place.
Sunrise, sunset. Life is such a wheel that no man can stand on it for long, and it always comes round to the same place again. And if you caught those without Googling I'm dating myself. But so be it.
Now was it feminism, or was I pathologically anxious? Both, of course!
The thing I've come to conclude is that the interests of (straight) men and women are opposed--it's like Israel and Palestine, or labor and management. Believe more true accusations, you believe more false accusations. You want to make women more comfortable, you do that by terrifying men. You give women the ability to make money, now the bottom third or so of men are totally useless, because they don't have the flexibility to adopt 'feminine' virtues like empathy and emotional support and they'll never be good at them anyway. (I'm not a biodeterminist; most things are nature and nurture.)
I've got an estimated 30-40 years to live by the actuarial tables, and assets in the low seven digits. For the first time in my life, *I can survive cancellation*. If the boss doesn't like my face, I can retreat to an apartment and live off the dividends and capital gains. But what to do with the rest of my life? Who knows!
I grew up with a feminist mother and learned to hate myself as a boy. I can't remember a time in my childhood where I felt like being a boy was a good thing or something that my mother wanted. From my earliest memories it felt like something to be ashamed of.
My feelings are easily traceable to the way feminists regularly talk about men. They often range from dismissive to outright hateful. Any pleas that they be more kind or empathize with the experience of hearing their words is rejected with a sneer. Even a simple feel-good measure that could blunt or heal some of the pain like International Men's Day is met with waves of derision. "You don't need it!" I needed it.
It's not some wacky theory that this resulted in my devastated self-worth. It's just straightforward cause and effect. An easily believable story, if you empathize with an emotionally vulnerable child for just a second.
A close friend of mine just *yesterday* talked about how her and her gay male friend both have "a shared hatred for straight men". Come on. That's not a freak coincidence, it's just a fairly common thing for progressive people to say or think. I haven't had the heart to say anything to her about it.
It's true that feeling worthless as a boy/man isn't the only problem I've had with dating. But it was a big one. A huge one. I was one of those guys who was terrified of showing attraction or asking a girl out. And the #1 reason was that I felt worthless for who I was. I felt like I was asking someone better than me to put up with someone who could only bring her misery, because I was male. And I felt like being male made me worthless.
I feel a lot better about being male now. But part of my healing process has been accepting my truth, my lived experience. Instead of letting people like you gaslight me out of my own childhood memories.
I’ve always been well-served by interpreting sweeping statements about society (by people I think are insightful and arguing in good faith) to be claims about the shape or center of a distribution, rather than about a binary. Yes, binary language is often used, but that’s more for rhetorical effect.
Your case is a valid example of what is probably a 4-sd more extreme instance of feminism causing anxiety than the norm. You have a valid complaint, but that’s not inconsistent with Ozy being generally correct.
When I hear these statements from time to time I'll say "I'm literally right here", and get a response back "we'll I'm not talking about youuuuu :)".
Honestly these types of feminists aren't always very logically consistent.
So that is, in fact what almost anyone, outside of an internet comment section of some strange echo chamber of the internet, means. I'd prefer they didn't say it like that but whatever.
Inartful categorical statements don't mean we still shouldn't find some way to lock Andrew Tate in an underground dungeon, among other things.
There's alot that can be said about ... ahem ... modern dating but Ozy isn't your enemy here.
Thinking on it, I want to further add that there's a very, very large gulf between what I sometimes feel feminists think of me when I read their writings or ... polemics ... on the internet, and how they treat me when meeting me in real life. On the internet, often I feel like they're very unsympathetic to my feelings. In real life they seem to like me and sometimes want to help or date me.
4-sd is a big stretch, but Ozy's intentions are pretty clearly good, and to point out a human universal even if they overstated their case (which I think they somewhat did, though I don't entirely disagree with them).
For whatever it's worth, "men are horrible beasts" isn't an exclusively or even primarily feminist statement. Plenty of anti-feminist women are similarly cruel to their sons; the idea that men are always and forever a danger to women is one of the main stories patriarchy uses to justify itself.
100%. My dad and uncles and everyone else's dad and male teachers spent my teenage-hood trying very hard to convince me that boys were extremely dangerous creatures that I needed to stay clear of. Personally I never heard any of that from moms/aunts. And anyway I found boys to be quite delightful and fascinating and not at all scary, so their attempts to convince me didn't work, but this was a constant drum-beat from older males.
Protective instinct. When my daughter was born, my best friend who has two said "cool, now we can go to the shooting range together" and I understood exactly what he meant.
"Accept my rule because I am bad?" does not sound like a working proposition.
Perhaps it is more like "don't get mad on me sexually harassing you, all men are bad" ? But that is not strictly patriarchy (rule of men/fathers), more like a particular kind of male privilege of getting away with shit. (An then often not getting away with it these days.)
“the idea then men are always and forever a danger to women is one of the main stories patriarchy uses to justify itself” - can you, or anyone here, unpack that a bit? My mental search engine finds overprotective fathers (“some men are currently a danger to my daughter in particular”), and then I run out of content and start inventing fan fiction in the style of Thomas Hobbes (Ada Palmer has broken my mind, apparently).
I am not sure my idea of this is the same as OP's, but what comes to mind for me is "women should not do [thing] because Some Theoretical Man might harm them while they do it". Walking alone at night and going to clubs to get drunk are common examples of this. In more conservative worldviews, wearing a short skirt is another example.
This idea that men are inherently dangerous is obviously wrong, and hurtful for men, but it's also bad for women because it means they're afraid to do things that are not actually all that dangerous. It "justifies patriarchy" in that it makes people believe it is necessary to limit women's choices so they will be safe from (largely imaginary) harm.
Yes, that's what I had in mind. A woman's place is in the home, because the rest of the world is full of men, and men are beasts.
Though I would've added that sometimes the danger isn't imaginary. Around here it mostly is, but the world is large and history is long. Men have never been inherently dangerous but there have always been dangerous men, and I live in an unusually safe time and place.
There's a symbiotic relationship between the threat of male violence and the demand for male control. It's no coincidence that the most patriarchal places, where women are most brutally "protected" by their husbands and male relatives, are also the places where it's hardest for women to get justice. Saudi law is horrific on rape, and that goes hand in hand with its requirement that every woman have a male "guardian".
After all, protection is control. There are people who get to give even the POTUS orders: the bodyguards. This has been described well in Tom Clancy's Executive Orders, the most powerful person on the planet is living in a prison with very polite jailors. Because there is a need for protection.
Ozy wrote about it here: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/bears-vs-men
Was your mom also a fan of "men are pigs"?
When you say "asking people out is just scary [for normal social-anxiety reasons]", I'm definitely on board with "asking people out is scary [for those reasons]", but not the "just". In particular:
> But at some point I start to ask myself, is it the case that society has, by complete coincidence, managed to uniquely fuck up every single category of person in a way that means that they don’t ask people out?
Yeah I mean there's only like, three categories you mentioned, and there's a myriad of ways people are fucked up about sex and dating. Seems unsurprising that every category would end up with a few each.
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Separately, I'm annoyed at people who tell the "feminism gave me dating anxiety" story that you described. I don't think feminism gave me dating anxiety, but instead that feminism and my dating anxiety come from a common cause, which is me hearing a bunch of stories about men being shitty to women, and then other men (their friends, or acquaintances, or random Internet strangers) closing ranks and protecting them from consequences without displaying *any* curiosity (to my eyes) about whether or what harm was done. I heard these stories from my friends, heard their pain, saw them under pressure not to feel angry or protect themselves. I heard them from internet communities I was involved in or peripheral to. Just a lot of my early exposure to stories of heterosexuality was stories of it going wrong. After that, pursuing romance myself felt like listening to someone talk about how they'd been mauled by a dog as a child and still had nightmares about it, and I'm there like "oh no that sounds horrible I'm sorry, also I really want to show you my dog". It just felt really selfish, slimy and unappealing.
I mean, in the years since then I've had a fair handful of happy and successful relationships, so I wasn't exactly ruined by this. But I do stand by the claim that it's made me more timid, quicker to drop interest when I'm not sure it's welcome, put a bunch of labour into seeming as unscary as possible, and put a higher bar on feeling like expressing my interest in someone is going to be worth it for them. It's relatively recently that I've been able to be comfortable with the idea that by default, the fact that I like someone is often *good news* for them, even if they're not interested in me.
To be clear, I absolutely don't mean to erase the harm caused by this kind of situation! I think it's a real and genuine harm, and we need to improve feminist messaging so that it doesn't wind up with men feeling like their sexualities are inherently predatory and unwanted. (And other kinds of messaging as well-- for example, a pattern like is isn't uncommon for men who grew up in Christian purity culture.)
*And* I think that this is a particular way that "asking people out is horrible" is inflected by gender and orientation and personality and subculture. I want everyone both to be aware that social messages are making asking people out more horrible and that's bad, and to feel empathy for people in different circumstances for whom asking people out is *also* horrible but in a different way.
Judging by a lot of the comments written below, it seems like a post on potential ideas to "improve feminist messaging so that it doesn't wind up with men feeling like their sexualities are inherently predatory and unwanted" would be a fruitful follow-up.
Feminism may not be the root cause of most people's dating anxieties, but there's some very obvious ground to point out how internet feminism isn't particularly motivated to assuage those anxieties in any way, or how, as Ben points out, the very empathy for the female experience that men were told to cultivate has engendered a hesitation to approach that (some, not all) feminists then go on to deride as insecurity rooted in male entitlement.
And while many people in the feminist space embrace removing mental health stigma and using the "You wouldn't ask anyone to just get over a broken leg or cancer, so why would you ask someone to get over depression or anxiety?" argument, it's difficult to ignore that in many spaces, male anxiety about asking women out is one of the few anxieties in which it's not only acceptable but almost virtuous to say "your anxiety isn't a big deal, just don't overthink it and be normal."
Yeah, I think I was unclear on whether I was disagreeing with you or not, and rereading your post I better understand your point and I agree -- I'm definitely on board with spreading the understanding that dating is difficult for many different kinds of people and not *uniquely* for people afflicted by this particular thing, and indeed hearing more of women talk about what they want romantically but don't have was somewhat healing in making me feel more like I had something positive to offer them (e.g. https://eudai.substack.com/p/the-odds-are-good-and-the-goods-are?s=r )
Another good reason to highlight this is that I think for me the political / moral reasons to find dating difficult sort of obscured the fact that it was also difficult for "normal" reasons: I *am* afraid of rejection, but as long as I had a political / moral reason to avoid taking risks with women, I didn't notice or work on my personal, self-interested aversion to it.
"I think it's a real and genuine harm, and we need to improve feminist messaging so that it doesn't wind up with men feeling like their sexualities are inherently predatory and unwanted."
You're one of the most genuinely empathetic people I've ever (virtually) met... but I don't think you can do that! I think if you didn't do that the bad guys would go all over the place and rape and harass women like they used to in the 80s and 90s.
Super disagree. We don't just have a single dial to turn between "men experience shame about their desires" and "men are free to trample over other people's boundaries in pursuit of their desires". We can get the calibration a lot better -- we can more clearly distinguish between positive and negative expressions of sexuality. IMO feminism has done a good job at highlighting the negatives but largely (and understandably) hasn't tried as hard to highlight the positives. I think if we did a good job of communicating about both it would be pretty clear we can have one without the other.
Fair enough. I'm not smart enough to figure that out, and I usually stay out of activism because I figure I'll get in trouble.
Honestly, dude, this is just my gut feeling, but these are women who are angry at men, in many cases for quite good reasons either historically or personally. We all know there are lots of horrible men out there. You might date or befriend a feminist personally--lots of people with better social skills can pull this off--but there's always that level of resentment against a class you belong to and can't leave without transitioning (and in the case of TERFs not even then!). And you can do well for years or decades, but then something goes wrong, and the knives come out, and all your old friends are digging your grave. Maybe it's not even something you did--all accusations must be believed now, right?
I agree male gender roles kind of suck, but--IMHO of course-- these are the last people we can expect to help us. Movements aim to help specific groups of people. Feminism isn't 'for men too'--it's specifically *against* men. You might support them if you think men have too much power or are doing too many bad things to women (many men do). But--I dunno. Ozy seems to have some sympathy for us, but I would say as a rule, feminists do not have our best interests in mind, and often enjoy our suffering. Remember 'I drink male tears'? The bear? They'll never like you, no matter how self-abasing you are. It's like being a German in Israel--no matter how good you are, there's too much bad blood.
Thinking logically, a "behave better" message will inevitably:
1) cause those who are already self-reflective and probably "good enough" feel anxiety that maybe they are not being actually good enough, or might not be seen so
2) the actually bad ones will of course ignore it
3) some of the actually bad ones will double-down and engage in Tate-like "vice signalling"
So instead of "behave better", the message should be "these are the new norms". If you are already following them, you can relax.
> these are women who are angry at men
There are women out there who are angry at men, and they contribute something to the conversation, but they don't own the conversation, and they aren't the only people talking. My experience is that the feminist women around me resent men generally less than I do.
> And you can do well for years or decades, but then something goes wrong, and the knives come out, and all your old friends are digging your grave.
I think this isn't true, but it's a little difficult to persuade you without being able to cite decades of evidence, which obviously isn't really practical. I think in the 15 or so years of adulthood I've had, I've never had anything "go wrong", despite spending most of that time dating or attempting to date. I don't have a ton of male friends but I can probably count a few decades of accumulated "years of male experience" between them. I'm aware of maybe one or two people in my social circle who've had allegations float around them. They've been negatively impacted by those allegations, but they haven't been ruined by them. They've lost some friends but have plenty left. The notion that every man is one allegation away from social ruin just doesn't match my experience.
> all accusations must be believed now, right?
I think there's a bit of a mess here where many people see us transitioning out of a regime in which ~all accusations were suppressed, and given that generally these accusations are about interpersonal behaviour in private spaces and we often aren't going to have direct access to the truth, it can feel like the only alternative to "all accusations are false" is "all accusations are true". But clearly both of these regimes are nonsense. What we need instead (IMO) is something more like "I'll treat all accusations like they might be true or might be false, and try to figure out how my various options would play out in either scenario, and pick what seems best with both scenarios in mind". For example, that can mean praising the bravery of accusers without assuming that what they say must be true. It can mean excluding people from situations that an abuser could exploit, while being clear this is a precautionary risk-management move and not an assertion of guilt or a moral judgement.
> Movements aim to help specific groups of people. Feminism isn't 'for men too'--it's specifically *against* men.
I don't see it that way. Feminism focuses on the things women want. Sometimes that means reallocating power from men, in which case, sure, it's against men retaining that power. But I'm idealistic enough to believe that many of the social things that women want increase the size of the social pie, not just their share of it. In the end it's in all our interests to get along better with each other.
> Remember 'I drink male tears'? The bear? They'll never like you, no matter how self-abasing you are.
Yeah again there's not one bug "they" who all feel the same way. Some people will never like me, and in some ways that's sad, but I learn to live with the fact that I can't prove to everyone that I'm not who they expect me to be. Some people do like me, they think that's compatible with their feminism, I think it's compatible with their feminism, and that works out great.
(For the record, I think the whole bear discussion was incredibly stupid, and I've been mostly happy to just ignore the whole thing.)
>> all accusations must be believed now, right?
> mess
No, there is something much deeper going on. There are two ways to hear an accusation. One way focuses the attention on the perp and calls for punishment. Basically it is a call to fight. This is the old, trad, masculine view. The other focuses the attention on the victim, and calls for help and healing. Often, just for holding space. This is supposed to be the new, leftist, feminine way of looking at things, thinking like a healer, not a fighter or judge.
Just of course this is really difficult! Because people still will be angry at perps, because some fights are necessary, and we do need to restrain perps somehow so that they don't keep on doing it again and again.
So I guess at this point no one really knows how exactly to adopt this new view. We have a vague idea we have to pay more attention to victims and focus more on healing than retribution, but unsure how to do this in practice.
But this is what it is really about. "Believe victims" means more like "help the victim heal" than "punish the accused". We are just not yet sure how to do this kind of culture yet.
But basically we don't want to shoot down a call for help because of lack of evidence.
I believe you experienced what you say you experienced.
For my part, I think I am going to steer clear of progressive spaces. But of course, that doesn't mean they are *wrong*.
Good luck to you whatever you wind up doing or being.
I also felt that way whenever I tried asking women out before I realized I was a lesbian. To extend your metaphor, offering to show my dog to someone who had been mauled by a dog felt really selfish, slimy, and unappealing, so I tried offering to show my cat instead, and it felt waaay better. That was almost 2 years ago and I haven't dogmoded since then :3 (okay, I maaaay have taken this metaphor a bit too far xD)
I might rephrase the OP as: the anxiety will be there no matter what, so *the anxiety itself* isn't strong evidence of anything. Other information isn't worthless, but if you're letting other people's anecdotes and some old OkCupid charts dissuade you from asking out the cute person in front of you who's laughing at your jokes; then maybe anxiety has taken the wheel and is causing you to make a mistake
Yeah I have to disagree here. Or half-disagree -- I obviously do have to agree that there's a certain base-level of scariness involved. But I'd also say it's pretty clear that the phenomenon generally known as "internet feminism" (yes that's a terrible term sorry I don't have a better one), along with its also important but less-mentioned companion, university orientations, made things quite a bit worse, at least for me.
I was on my way to figuring this stuff out before I encountered this stuff, but hoo boy did I fall down a hole afterwards. Like, before I was just afraid of, I don't know, embarrassment, like you describe. Only after encountering this sort of material did I start worrying that by doing this I would be *harming other people*! That's much worse!
This new pit trap was much deeper than the first and took me a lot longer to climb out of. And whereas the first one I was getting out of on my own, this one I couldn't, because I was told that even questioning these new moral precepts made me a terrible person! (Also, like, you deserve a lot of the credit for getting me out of it, so, y'know, my gratitude to you for that. Scott and Sarah were also instrumental here.) It was a lot of work that involved, like, basically rebuilding my moral compass around such things from scratch. Getting over the earlier problem (to the extent that I did, which I didn't totally, but did a fair amount) didn't involve any of that!
So, sure, asking people out is just scary (although actually in many cases it *isn't* once you've done it once or twice -- I could comment more on your examples but that'd be a different point so let's just skip that), but "internet feminism" (sorry) and university orientations needlessly made it a lot scarier by turning it from "potentially embarrassing" into "potentially harmful to others". I don't think it's wrong to blame them for that!
I'm with Sniffnoy on this.
The post makes a completely valid point that *nobody* likes having to be the one to ask someone else out (otherwise, it would have been a role that feminists would have fought over the decades to make more acceptable for women!); this is not a feeling that just started with men as a result of 2010's internet feminism. But I feel, at the same time, the post completely misses the point that people (women nowadays as well as men!) are making when they complain that 2010's internet feminism has resulted in men being more scared to ask women out.
I think the point could be better summarized as, prior to 2011 or so, nobody much liked the role of having to be the one initiating dates (and other things), but men sort of accepted that they were put into that role, and everything basically *worked* (well, with a lot of creepiness and sleaziness and women feeling pressured and sometimes not being able to go out in public without being bombarded with verbalized male interest and so on... there are valid reasons why feminists wanted to change things!). And the style of online feminism (visible to certain prominent bubbles of the Anglosphere) throughout pretty much the whole first half of the 2010's, followed by the Me Too movement a little later (highly visible to the whole rest of the Anglosphere), has noticeably resulted in men feeling like they can't win but "damned if I do, less damned if I don't", and has resulted in a decreased willingness for men to approach women in a non- dating app/event context. (The rise of online dating apps is a HUGE factor in this, mind you, but this rise itself was probably assisted by changing societal beliefs coming from current popular feminism.)
Myself, I'd be less than honest if I were to blame feminism *primarily* for my terror of approaching women back when I was a grad student circa 2013, because it's clear to me that I had (and still mostly have) a preexisting bundle of neuroses which made me phobic of it. But the emerging social movement (again mostly online but which very much permeated my young academic social environment) *absolutely* fed into this in the worst way possible and made my phobia perhaps a lot more intense than it otherwise would have been.
I have a male friend (of similar background and sensibilities, though somewhat older than me) who had done tons of asking out and dating in his life, but by the late 2010's, was vowing not to ever show interest in any woman until she showed explicit interest in him first (he directly justified his conviction through the Me Too movement). He once got confronted by a woman in one of his collaboration groups (maybe not part of his professional job? I don't remember) who suspected he was hitting on her, and he not only desperately and vehemently denied it to her face but felt the need to exclude her from emails sent to the group, I guess so that she would feel like he was bothering her or demanding her attention in any way whatsoever? That last things strikes me as a completely irrational reaction, but it's an example of what fear can do to someone, even if a more extreme example than what we'd find with the average progressive-leaning guy living as an adult through last decade.
I don't have data to cite, but I think most would agree from their own experiences, honestly, that certain social movements coming from feminism have contributed to a decrease in men asking women out (the result being that almost nobody is asking anyone out, and the rate of romantic/sexual relationships is plummeting), that women are noticing and unhappy about it as well as men. (And this may well be a worthwhile cost to stigmatizing aggressive/pressuring/creepy behavior, but it has been a cost.) This is completely compatible with the point that no demographic has ever found it easy to be the askers-out in the first place.
> everything basically *worked*
Did it though? Seemingly ironclad "men pursue" norms taught me that it was *my responsibility* to react to suspected indications of interest from female friends with over-reciprocation, lest I leave those female friends in the "silently rejected" position of Ozy's hypothetical straight woman exemplar. This created a bad habit on my part of over-reading these "indicators" and, for a period of several years, essentially inventing romantic feelings within myself about basically any woman I ever became friends with. I'd say it's likely neither I nor my high school girlfriend were *ever* actually romantically interested in each other, despite us dating for several months, and to this day I feel that any nonverbal romantic signals I perceive must be disregarded as noise.
I'm happy to accept that more dates happened under such norms, but I'm skeptical that it's actually overall better for the people involved or the culture they create.
Let's notice something about those old-time norms. It was about men deciding their attraction to women entirely based on looks. Which is a form of objectification and the new norms rejected that - basically the new norm is show some friendly interest in the person as well, or fuck off.
This IMHO entirely changes the meaning of what "asking out" means. A dinner date out of the blue might in itself imply such objectification - deciding to spend $100 on someone only because of their looks.
If one withholds deciding on attraction only after getting to know the person, the new kind of asking out is "grab coffee and chat?" without initially showing any sexual interest.
Also I think your choice of examples somewhat masks this by having the lesbian example be something completely different when in fact lesbians are often affected by this too, as Kelsey has written about on Tumblr! (http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/106549627991/that-scott-aaronson-thing) Use the same example and it's clearer that, yeah, something bad is going on here.
^ This, I suspect. Anxiety plus confirmation bias prompts interpretations of internet feminism to support the anxiety (which, internet feminism being what it is, doesn’t take a lot of exaggeration), dropping you into a deeper hole than previously.
I think some things get blamed on feminism which really are a consequence of the fact that we haven't yet developed appropriate new norms. Truth is lots of people did benefit from being able to meet romantic partners at work but the ways the old norms worked were open to abuse and we haven't completely come up with good replacement norms.
And that change has screwed some people who have very few opposite sex coded interests or friends, don't do well with apps and are workaholics.
That's not an indictment of feminism -- every set of social norms around dating produces winners and losers -- but some people are worse off in this new equilibrium and I hope that one day we can find a new set of norms that allow people to meet in professional situations in a better way (if everyone just got on one of those see if you are both interested apps it might work but there are coordination issues).
Better apps might go a long way.
I agree, but one of the big problems here is getting everyone to coordinate on one app. Ideally it would be a common standard like SMTP not a single app.
I think you need a hybrid model where an actually person verifies your pictures, status and stats.
I don't think that's necessary for the purpose of matching people with mutual interest -- ie I register and list the people I'd be interested in dating and they do the same and we only find out if we both list each other. You can identify the person you're interested in using their email and the protocol can identify the appropriate host to handle matching for those addresses via a DNS query as well as find whatever cryptographic keys are necessary (like the mailkey implementations and suggestions to implement mail encryption this way). .
I think dating apps do fine for meeting people this is only needed for verifying mutual interest.
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You need to do a bit of cryptographic fussery to ensure that the system doesn't reveal interest merely by trying to check and doesn't allow impersonation but it's not national security so it's not the end of the world if nerds who pour over the raw logs can gain an extra 5% confidence someone likes them by analyzing traffic patterns so you can just hide true checks amoung many fake ones (you should be able to use public key style crypto to check if you both specified the same pair w/o revealing what pair you specified if you didn't both pick the same pair)
I mean, my working assumption after "girl power", evo psych, game, #MeToo and redpills, is that while men and women may *individually* form loving partnerships (or more for you poly people), men and women *in aggregate* are natural enemies with interests at cross purposes bound together by the need for one of each to reproduce, so given how much power men had for a long time you'd expect women to organize for their collective interests, and men to oppose it.
Not at all. For starters, it has almost always been members of the same sex enforcing gender norms -- and perceived power imbalances -- rather than the opposite sex. Men pressure men to comply with male roles and women with female roles. This whole men vs women thing is mostly a construction of feminist recruiting (we need to stop oppressing ourselves isn't a great pitch) -- it's almost always been men and women working together to enforce gender roles not men oppressing women.
Also the married folk busy raising kids together are less visible online.
Secondly, the (correct) perception of an unjust gender arrangement is largely a product of our adjustment in the 19th and 20th century to a very different societal and economic context. Going back to the medieval or even Tudor periods it was more like men and women were in seperate but symbiotic worlds that were effectively incomeasurable.
Sure, men had more explicit power in the home but lives were as regulated by norms, religion and reputation in the village -- and harsh punishments were common that applied to men more than women. I don't know which I'd prefer to be if I was born then (can't import our modern individualistic norms). And I'd exchange power and happiness any day and we don't know much about how that was shared out.
Not really. Only in a culture that normalizes selfishness, such as ambulance-chasing lawyers. Basically this problem is much less anywhere outside the US. For example, when I divorced I bought my ex and child a house. I was not forced so by lawyers. It was my idea. If I kind of failed at the husband and father thang, at least I can do one thing for them. The idea of coming out of the marriage keeping as much of my finances as I can would have felt preposterous. I basically have no need for money for myself. 5 years later I am still living in a hotel room sized apartment, feel entirely comfortable there. Kids need living space, playspace, single adults do not.
No disputing that asking people is, and always will be, scary.
But anecdotally, when I moved from a feminist operating memeplex to one that was a lot less feminist, I found the asking a lot easier. I think the former encourages the asker to imagine an audience looking for any possible discomfort caused. It also overestimates how bothered people are by a bit of discomfort in the opening stages of dating.
ok but like. i literally can’t ask anyone out even before we get to the what if it’s creepy cycle, because i’ve been on T for nearly a year and don’t pass at all and can therefore not sell myself either as a man or as a woman, because i can’t actually deliver on either. i can’t even make a dating profile without feeling like a crook 😅
we do all these think-through taking each case in turn but what do people do who are in between cases
not an urgent query because i’m also old and tired and whatever but like these are the things that go through my head and i’ve had a martini
There are people who are attracted to androgyny.
LGBT events? Play up the androgyny? I was on OKCupid, and kept running into people with ambiguous gender. 'Agender', 'bigender'...I'm sure there's some bi/pan people who'd be really into whatever you can present yourself as.
I always had a thing for masculine women, which you can never admit, because calling a woman masculine is seen as extremely insulting.
You'd be surprised. There are often people who want what you're selling. I had people like me even before I had the money, and I never figured out why. If you find someone you like, it may not even matter.
I feel you. I'm a transwoman, I completely pass, and still I don't dare ask anyone out because I know for a fact that most men wouldn't even consider dating a transwoman, and there's only that much humiliation I can take.
I feel like this is a place for the apps. You can make it perfectly clear, maybe even wear stuff with the trans flag on it. Your first priority is to make damn well sure any guy who might be prone to violence on finding out doesn't come near you.
After that, maybe bi/pan people? Since their identity isn't tied up in dating people of a certain gender, it doesn't matter whether you 'pass' or not. A lot of bi people seem to enjoy some androgynous aspects in a partner so you might actually be ahead of the game!
As for the humiliation...I'm going to sound reverse-woke, but a lot of men have to keep shooting our shot and get humiliated (and as you can see increasingly we don't bother). So it may not be possible to avoid humiliation in the context of finding a partner.
Apps have their own problems. They're designed to be addictive and inefficient at actually finding good matches. This is true for everyone, but being trans certainly doesn't help.
As to bi people, there isn't much in the way of "bi spaces" (yes, I looked). There are spaces for meeting (and possibly dating) people of the same gender. But bi people mostly don't bother with creating their own spaces, since they can already use either straight spaces or gay spaces to date.
Yeah, I agree. The apps suck. And being trans is going to make it harder.
All I can think of is poly and kink spaces, but you have to actually either be poly or kinky, and frankly I would hate to recommend kink to anyone given the risks and stigma (and limited partners). Looking back now I wish I'd never opened that door.
Why? I am a cis male Top, I found nine subby women in 5 years on FetLife, despite the founder explicitly saying it is not a dating site - it is, if you do it the smart and tactful way. I don't see much risk, because I just do the oldschool kink (floggers, blindfolds etc.) which is pretty safe.
Or you mean risks like police and lawsuit related ones? I think US culture is heavily selfish (think ambulance chasing lawyers) really my neck of the EU is much less so (we consider it preposterous to sue the paramedics who tried to help you), but also regional (NY seems extremely selfish to me, Austin less so), but this may be a personal issue too, if you are selfish you will tend to attract selfish people.
I mean I am not calling you bad. Here is the deal. Selfishness is usually just ambition and unselfishness is usually just laziness and lack of ambition. Me and my partners are quite lazy. We work as little as we can get away with etc. If you would go on a dinner date with them and talk about big ambitions like starting a business and all, they would roll their eyes. They are the types who make ironically doomer jokes on late stage capitalism.
So if you come across as someone just brimming with ambition, you will attract people who also do, and their ambition might include some version of taking revenge on ex partners and suchlike.
That really sounds like it sucks. I hope Ozy has some good advice for you -- sorry I don't -- but TBF that's not the fault of feminism.
Forever and always, the ideology is not the movement.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
Encouraging men to ask out women might not be against idealized feminism, but it is contrary to the movement "feminism." Just like how building men's shelters like Erin Pizzey did isn't contrary to idealized feminism, but was rejected and punished by the movement.
The funny thing is, you can't direct your criticism to the movement feminism because that would threaten your group membership, so instead you direct it at men. Let me translate your post for you and you tell me how I'm wrong, here's the message: "Just man up."
If you believed in gender roles, you could say that with your chest, but instead you have to pretend that "manning up" is somehow feminist, so you don't have to realize that what you're advocating for is not gender equality. It's the secret message of feminism, which is that wherever women are unequal in a bad way, (the workplace) that inequality is abhorrent and should be removed, and wherever women are unequal in a good way, (the dating market) men need to step up.
I'm not an MRA to be clear, I believe in inequality, I just believe in it universally, not just where it benefits me.
Unfortunately, you have a point. Perhaps, half a point. Consider the history of Marxism. Basically everybody ignored Marx's idea that as long as capitalism has not yet reached a post-scarcity stage, market competition is necessary. Instead Marxism as a movement basically simplified everything down to a war against capitalism by whatever means possible.
Similarly, it is thinkable that feminism as a movement ignores everything Martha Nussbaum wants and it simplifies down to a war against men by women.
But the point is - why would this be a good value proposition for heterosexual women who actually like men? Who actually want to fall in love with men? This is why I see half a point here.
Consider the counter-point, the PUA/redpiller stuff that started out as "seduction" and is now a war on women. But only a small number of men participates. Most men do not want to hate people whom they want to love.
If you ask someone out and are rejected, you may feel big shame and humiliation, which is no doubt extremely unpleasant whether you are a man or a woman. For men asking out women, there's an additional hurdle: if you ask out a woman who didn't want to be asked out, you've committed an unwanted sexual advance, which is sexual harassment, which makes you ethically defective, worthy of moral condemnation, and complicit in a culture of relentless psychic violence against women.
In a strictly logical sense I don't truly believe what I've just written, but it very much "feels true" to me, and it does seem for all the world like it's the logical conclusion of the message that "internet feminism" has been trying to push. In the end maybe it doesn't really matter: men with crippling anxiety generally make bad partners anyway.
What's interesting is that the apps provided something that made getting together SO MUCH EASIER: they pre-screen for mutual interest without either having to feel rejected. Tinder's big innovation was that you swiped to show interest, and it would tell you when someone you were interested in was also interested in you -- before anyone ever had to say anything or make themselves vulnerable by showing that interest. And if you never saw that person again, you could just tell yourself the app never showed you, so no rejection.
This was actually a giant benefit and made things so, so much easier. Talking to someone that you already know thinks you're cute and is interested in talking is about a thousand times easier than putting yourself out there to potentially get rejected. And yet everyone moans about the apps and how terrible they are.
There used to be literally no way to pre-gauge interest without a huge investment of energy in a majorly inefficient manner. You had to actually devote time to trying to get to know someone or flirt and you might waste weeks before finding out they already had a boyfriend/girlfriend and were remotely open to proposals from ANYONE. Or you had to utilize social networks to develop intel for you, by having a friend talk to their friend to find out if there was any interest, etc. Or just go with the tried and true classic of using alcohol for liquid courage.
I think things actually are much easier than they used to be 20+ years ago. But like everything, as soon as there's an improvement or new convenience, everyone just immediately adjusts and updates their standards, and doesn't appreciate the benefits while staying focused on the drawbacks. Pre-modern era, no one expected that they'd even have much if any opportunity to meet someone outside of their immediate circles, options were so much more limited, and you were really putting yourself out there because if your attempt bombed, everyone you knew was going to know about it. If anything I think stakes and effort required are so much lower now that it's just made everyone -- both the asker and the askee -- exquisitely sensitive to and intolerant of the slightest bit of social discomfort.
I think it probably worked that way for a while, which is why so many Internet millenials miss old OKCupid. But now, especially if you're in the bottom 3/4 of people, you wind up discovering what a completely frictionless dating market looks like. Men send hundreds of swipes into the void on women who have hundreds of men after them who don't really care and are just desperate to find anyone. Everyone loses, except for a couple of guys who can play Hugh Hefner and a couple of ladies who can have a reverse harem.
Massive agricultural improvements meant everyone could theoretically have enough food, but in practice farmers went out of business and had to work in factories to survive. Just because something can lead to massive improvement for the average person in theory doesn't mean it will actually work out that way.
The mass swiping is why I always left the apps days after I signed up. At first I was happy, then surprised, then extremely skeptical, at the number of matches I always had. There was no way that that many dudes were reading my profile, looking at my pictures, and deciding there was anything compatible about us. Then a male friend confirmed that strategy, and I just stopped altogether. Almost all of my relationships came from jobs or mutual friends.
I am an "elder" Millennial who also looks back fondly on OKCupid like you describe, though. While they did have the same problem (dudes mass-messaging women without looking at profiles), it was to a lesser and more manageable extent, and women could actually get the info they wanted about the dudes they were scrolling through.
I often look at this dating and dating app situation right now with extreme gratitude that I am already married.
Agreed. I'm an Xennial, so we're probably pretty close in age.
You know, I didn't date seriously during the period of my career when I was moving around because I didn't want to force some poor lady to move for me and f*** up her career. (Despite my feelings about feminism I try to avoid damaging people close to me.) I regret that now.
Women rarely decide on attraction on looks alone. However, for that you need a computer, not a phone, and actually write stuff, not just swipe.
Yeah I get it that there's a very lopsided ratio but also if guys would stop just mass swiping right on everyone, it'd do a lot to help (collective action problem there). Still, there are tons of couples who met on apps...almost all of them these days it seems...and they're not at all just the top 5%ers, plenty of them are regular people. I grant you that if you're in the lower 30-40% on looks, a photo based app is definitely not going to work for you.
Right, and if you ladies would stop filtering out everyone under 6 feet... ;)
You're right, of course, but the nature of collective action problems is such that you can't just 'do the right thing', because you'll lose. (And you know this.)
I don't know. My working assumption at this point is society is selecting for good looks and social skills, and the old pathway of 'make money and be stable' for introverted guys has closed unless they're very wealthy. I suspect this isn't good long-term, but there isn't much I can do, and frankly at this point I'm increasingly taking the opinion of "the West decided I was inferior, let it burn".
While I totally agree with the thrust of your post -- see my other comment for a brief quibble -- I think it's worth recognizing that that as a result of shifting/vague/unclear norms about when it's appropriate to ask someone out we may have created more contexts -- or at least more high stakes contexts -- in which appealing proposals are appreciated but unappealing proposals are labeled as objectionable/creepy.
I think the kernel of truth here is people -- usually men -- seeing that lots of successful romantic relationships are formed via proposals they rightly realize might be labeled as creepy if they made the same overture feel unfairly locked out of many avenues of romantic contact. However, a fair response is that it's just men dealing with the same reputation concerns women always have faced.
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Unfortunately, it's not easy to solve because reacting to romantic proposals has an element of reputation management involved -- if you don't label the proposal as being unacceptable/inappropriate are you implying that you aren't disgusted or that they are in your league? Certainly, a sufficently socially skilled and confident person can turn down any proposal politely without reputational harm but it's not just the people doing the asking who are insecure and socially awkward.
As long as social norms make it clear that a certain kind of proposal is acceptable this isn't too much of an issue -- maybe you say "ewww" to your friends but no larger consequences -- but when the norms allow you to call a proposal unacceptable there is the incentive to do so.
And to some extent this has kinda always been true. Sean Connery could probably get away with asking women if they'd like to come back to his hotel room even at a time it would get most men slapped. But I do fear that -- outside of apps -- that quick social change has made it the case that a greater fraction of successful romantic proposals now occur in contexts where an unwanted proposal could result in serious social harms.
I think your general verdict is correct and arguably this effect is more than offset by apps. But I suspect that lots of dating related complaints are less worries about being absolutely worse off but really about resentment that someone else is getting to do things you can't.
I think it could be accurate to say that feminism makes it harder to start a romantic relationship, but then one also has to say that toxic masculinity does too. Empowering any group will result in some members of that group abusing their power, resulting in other people becoming afraid of them and trying to avoid them. With feminism this manifests in men who avoid asking women out because they're afraid of being cancelled, and with toxic masculinity this manifests in women who turn down invitations because they're afraid of being assaulted and potentially not believed.
The way to actually make progress is to A) get to a reasonable middle ground where each gender has about the same overall power (which I think has mostly been accomplished now in the US), and B) work on pruning away the extremes who would abuse their gender's form of power. (Which seems to not be happening and I'm not sure how to fix this.)
I basically agree. Power is abused and when you have power you can make it harder for people to stop you from abusing--look at how Harvey Weinstein survived for so long.
My sneaking suspicion is that because childrearing and pregnancy is so unpleasant for women, when you give women full autonomy, the birth rate falls to levels where you get outcompeted by other cultures. Patriarchy doesn't persist because it's pleasant or good, it persists because it produces lots of soldiers to wipe out less patriarchal cultures. Now that there's nukes it's less of an issue...but I've noticed China seems to be dialing up the patriarchy at the same time it's trying to recover its geopolitical status.
Well agriculture works exactly like this, so why not patriarchy. War is the father of all and all polities culturally evolve towards winning wars.
Feminism and other progressive stuff are downstream from not needing to train every man as a soldier. Imagine the kind of guy who finds it normal, even glorious to stick a bayonet in someone's gut. How much will he respect consent? He will solve domestic disputes with his fists. Nazism was downstream from everybody coming home from the Somme with a massive case of PTSD and just finding it normal to be crazy aggressive.
It really all started to hippies don't want to study no war no more. Still the culture was crazy aggressive, if you look at the circumstances in which Easy Rider was made. Hopper pulling a knife on Torn etc.
Then slowly all this violence started piping down.
This might be more a me thing, and doesn't totally not fit with the idea that everyone is looking for a distinct framework to explain their common feelings, but I think that the distinctive factor is being _morally_ (not just socially) judged _by a group you generally agree with_. I do think that hard-avoiding someone who has asked you out in an uncomfortable way, and even being clear with your (trusted to some degree) friends about why, in ways that may have impacts on the asker's reputation and welcome in the shared social context, can be reasonable. It's sure to have it's share of false positives, but overall it's not a general practice I feel justified objecting to - there aren't hard lines that I see where I can call a degree of avoidance or warning unreasonable that also match with what I think keeps me safe from the consequences of an honest misunderstanding.
I think that the risk of being judged as pathetic or slutty (for women asking men out) is different - it has a different kind of real power, but it's also entrenched in a value system that, presumably, the sort of women-and-adjacent folks who read this blog reject. Similarly, I feel no anxiety about the possibility that Al will see me ask out Barbara while I'm also dating Connie and judge me for being polyamorous; I reject the ethical basis of that judgment. I think that women considering asking out women worrying about seeming presumptuous are in sort of a similar place, where they might be anxious about being perceived as deceptively misusing a platonic bond, if it's tricky to articulate the concisely observable differences between being predatorily presumptive and being innocently mistaken.
That said, I agree with you that it's often overblown, quite likely often reinforced by anxiety that simply finds its place, not its cause, inside that justification. I just think it's still meaningfully different, though I'm not sure what to do about it - again, I don't think it would be on net good to move the balance among false positives and false negatives in ways that are short-term favorable to me in this specific way.
Presumably the men-and-adjacent who read this blog reject the idea that male sexuality is naturally predatory and unwanted or that it's always your fault if you ask someone out in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable! Intellectually rejecting a belief doesn't mean that you emotionally reject it. Some people (and social groups) are unreasonable, and you might still worry about how they react. And a lot of women (especially women who are fat, disabled, neurodivergent, gender-non-conforming, or Just Kind Of Ugly) have a *lot* of self-hatred wrapped up in their undesirability to men. There exist kinds of shame and humiliation that have nothing to do with doing something morally wrong.
But even if those men personally have rejected the idea that their own male sexuality is inherently predatory or unwanted, it won't help their anxiety if *the women they want to date*- or society and the court of public opinion- haven't rejected that idea as well.
You're right to point out that both men and women have valid dating anxieties that can't just be handwaved away by "I can't get a date because muh feminism", but as AndHisHorse points out, there are some anxieties that are less palatable to society's value systems at large.
I doubt we've reached a point in society where a man worried about being called creepy is afforded the same sympathy as a woman worried about being slutty- and while there are valid cultural and historic reasons for this disparity, that's all the more reason to point out why anxious men may not find their concerns easily dispelled by well-meaning reassurances that dating is hard for everyone.
> And a lot of women (especially women who are fat, disabled, neurodivergent, gender-non-conforming, or Just Kind Of Ugly) have a *lot* of self-hatred wrapped up in their undesirability to men. There exist kinds of shame and humiliation that have nothing to do with doing something morally wrong.
This is very true. But I'd argue there's a public perception that being "non-creepy" or "non-predatory" is considered more within one's locus of control than simply being disabled or Just Kind Of Ugly is, and therefore less ripe for sympathy for the men that struggle with it.
> Presumably the men-and-adjacent who read this blog reject the idea that ... it's always your fault if you ask someone out in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable!
I mean, I do *now* (again, largely thanks to you I feel like it's worth noting), but as I said in my other comment, there was a time when I *didn't*, and like -- yes, it matters a lot whether you think you are hurting people other than yourself! If you're just worried about being judged in a way you disagree with, you mostly just need to learn courage. If you're worried about hurting other people in a way you don't quite understand, that doesn't help!
Huh. I see "male sexuality is naturally predatory or unwanted" - or perhaps the lighter form, "men have the total responsibility to avoid coming across as predatory or unwanted, and if someone gets a Bad Vibe from a man, that person is obviously correct" - as less overtly alien or opposed to *gestures vaguely at a cluster of liberalism and leftism and things that I consider generally good* than slut-shaming (maybe the same way that TERFs are more closely related to modern feminists than prescriptivist TradWife types are?), but not having personal/internalized experience with the latter, I'm not terribly confident in that position.
"And a lot of women (especially women who are fat, disabled, neurodivergent, gender-non-conforming, or Just Kind Of Ugly) have a *lot* of self-hatred wrapped up in their undesirability to men. There exist kinds of shame and humiliation that have nothing to do with doing something morally wrong."
Exactly, and the incels (nonviolent majority) are the flipside of that. Most humans want relationships, so failing to measure up in that regard is deeply humiliating.
> I think that the risk of being judged as pathetic or slutty (for women asking men out) is different - it has a different kind of real power, but it's also entrenched in a value system that, presumably, the sort of women-and-adjacent folks who read this blog reject. Similarly, I feel no anxiety about the possibility that Al will see me ask out Barbara while I'm also dating Connie and judge me for being polyamorous; I reject the ethical basis of that judgment.
I agree it's different, but I want to highlight that sometimes people intellectually reject a moral system, but had a difficult emotional path to get there, and may not have purged it from their minds completely; I think polyamory and promiscuity are both frequently emotionally charged in this way.
Like, I have a problem with not really being able to reject a value system I want to get rid of - I have a lot of Issues about (not) working for pay and tying my sense of self-worth up with "legitimate" achievement and fears of eventually running into financial disaster. (After getting an engineering degree I basically spent the last 20 years as an unpaid family caregiver instead of joining the formal workforce, and now that all the people that I had been caregiving for have passed away - including my wife - I'm probably going to need to figure out something else to do with my life besides comment on blogs and play video games. And I'm going to need to spend a few years working and paying payroll taxes instead of living off of inherited assets or else I'm going to get stuck paying for Medicare Part A instead of getting it free like most people.)
Oh yeah the point about valence is important -- being judged as bad isn't bad when it's by the bad guys; indeed, it can even be *good*.
There is (or was -- been quite a while since I've dealt with this) annoying assumption generally present in "social justice" spaces that it's the judgement of people *opposed* to them that matters socially, even though to those who consider them the "good guys" (such as, y'know, their own people!) it is obviously *their* judgement that matters socially. There's a failure to acknowledge that they have any influence!
...mind you, I don't know how that has changed in recent years. There's a reason I stay away from such places these days...
Eh, the judgment of those whose values you oppose is still relevant when they are significant gatekeepers, formally or otherwise. If I lived in the American South rather than liberal coastal America, the judgments of anti-ENM peers would probably have more weight and relevance. In that regard I am fortunate to live in a bit of a bubble.
Sure sure. It's just important to recognize that these bubbles exist -- there is or was a lot of claims by the SJers that they don't have influence *anywhere*, that things are *uniformly* against them!
Adding to this, it also seems that "it's hard to ask women out" is an older meme than [whenever we want to argue that feminism ruined dating].
Oh yes. I think the thing is it wouldn't ruin your career for a while. But before that you had your reputation in the village to worry about. Things are less new than we think. And, some people didn't find anyone and/or reproduce. Heck, many cultures have a monastic class that doesn't even try.
To be fair, I could totally compliment my buddy's appearance, cuddle my platonic friends, seek qualities in romantic partners that I also like in platonic friends (eg, sense of humor), and have them advise on the sexiness of my outfits. Drunkenly making out might be pushing it, though.
I mean, you're not wrong.
Being Xennial and growing up in a very liberal area, I got a heavy dose of (the aftershocks of) second-wave feminism in my teenage years, and the thing I realized was that you could always be safe from feminist attack if *you never expressed sexual interest in a woman". Never touch them, never express any observation about their appearance, never look at them too long. And...I got by at school and work. I got my degree and kept my job.
I was finally in my late twenties (this would be the late 2000s) when I felt feminism had started to wane enough I could start dating. I discovered Roissy and was knocked away...here's these people I've been terrified of all my life, and *he's attacking them*! Well, I didn't do all the 'game' stuff (I never assumed I was clever enough to neg without insulting), but there were concepts like social proof and not appearing desperate that were useful. I took decisions and tried to escalate, and all of a sudden I wasn't friendzoned anymore.
(Roissy then turned into a Nazi, or else his successor Heartiste did, if they're not the same person. This doesn't actually make what he originally preached ineffective. William Shockley had all kinds of awful views, but we still use cellphones with the transistors he invented in them.)
I wasn't able to attract anyone I was actually attracted *to*, which leads to some funny situations, but it was an improvement of sorts--I finally tried the sex thing (it was kind of underwhelming to be honest). I even did the kink thing (you know what happens when you go through life and 'your sexuality' and 'what feminists hate' have a Venn diagram that's a circle?) and had a good time--unsurprisingly being paranoid about false accusations makes you very respectful of consent, and it's so much easier to just discuss everything you like ahead of time. The vanillas should try it.
Of course, then #MeToo hit, and when my last relationships ended I decided not to pursue others (yes, I had *two* for a while; isn't life grand occasionally?). Besides, by this point I had assets to protect, and I realized that was probably the elephant in the room that was generating attraction in the first place.
Sunrise, sunset. Life is such a wheel that no man can stand on it for long, and it always comes round to the same place again. And if you caught those without Googling I'm dating myself. But so be it.
Now was it feminism, or was I pathologically anxious? Both, of course!
The thing I've come to conclude is that the interests of (straight) men and women are opposed--it's like Israel and Palestine, or labor and management. Believe more true accusations, you believe more false accusations. You want to make women more comfortable, you do that by terrifying men. You give women the ability to make money, now the bottom third or so of men are totally useless, because they don't have the flexibility to adopt 'feminine' virtues like empathy and emotional support and they'll never be good at them anyway. (I'm not a biodeterminist; most things are nature and nurture.)
I've got an estimated 30-40 years to live by the actuarial tables, and assets in the low seven digits. For the first time in my life, *I can survive cancellation*. If the boss doesn't like my face, I can retreat to an apartment and live off the dividends and capital gains. But what to do with the rest of my life? Who knows!
Any thoughts on Bumble no longer requiring women to text first?