In a comment, David Gendron linked to this post by Clarissa, in which she critiques this post by Nav:
In fact, my life has been a litany of missed and misunderstood romantic looks. There was the New Year’s Eve party in which repeated, prolonged glances from a woman only made me exasperatedly respond “What?!” There was the time I dropped off a coworker at 5AM and, when she cocked her head and asked me if I wanted to come in, I obliviously said “No, it’s late, I’m gonna’ go home and sleep.” I’ve even had a woman analyze my hopelessness at the end of an evening: “yeah, there were a couple of times that were perfect for you to kiss me… but you didn’t.”
It’s as if I were absent the day everyone else got their Romantic Moments 101 Handbook. Once during grad school, we had our last class at the professor’s house. There, over beer and talk of the sublime, I kept glancing at another student, who kept meeting my gaze in return and smiling. When class was done, we said farewell on the street and—while she stood next to her boyfriend, mind you—she looked intensely at me, with an expression you might describe as…. pleading? Apparently I was supposed to do or say something so that we could… what? Meet later so she could cheat on her boyfriend? I have precisely no idea.
I profoundly empathise, and could give similar anecdotes from my own life.
Clarissa is less sympathetic:
OK, just to help a person out amongst all this television-induced confusion:
My impression is that Nav uses a fictional scene (in the introductory part of his post which Clarissa did not quote) merely as a rhetorical device to lead in to his subject. It was not his intention to attach any great significance to the fictional incident he referred to.
all of these “meaningful looks” are nothing but a fantasy. Women are not ciphers in need of analysis. Women can and do transmit their sexual desires just as well as men can and do. And please, save me the sermon about societal conventions. I have seen a woman from a rabidly conservative, virginity-obsessed family sit for 6 hours outside a man’s apartment in biting cold because she wanted him so much. I’ve seen a fundamentalist Christian woman drop everything and hop on a plane that would take her across the country to spend the night with her ex. I’ve seen a timid housewife dump her husband, drop 60 pounds, transform her entire life, and start hunting a guy with the single-minded determination of a drone.
I’m sorry, Clarissa, but your anecdotes do not trump our lives.
So if you feel like you need to analyze glances and figure out clues, I have a very simple explanation for you: She’s just not that into you. And when she is, no guessing and wondering will be needed.
Neither do your theories.
I’m taking the time to respond to this rambling and strange post for one simple reason. The post is based on a very serious misconception that many men – even good, normal men – seem to share. The misconception is that women transmit their feelings and desires indirectly and that in order to get laid men need to decipher women’s intentions.
As an initial matter, I detest the way these discussion are always reduced to “getting laid”. I realise that a lot of men do frame it in this way, but just as many aspire to relationships which are sexual, but which are not merely sex. I see nothing in Nav’s post to suggest that he is not among the latter. That he uses the word “romantic” on a couple of occasions suggests the opposite. “Getting laid” is entirely Clarissa’s framing here.
Nor do I think men are under the “misconception” than men need to decipher women’s signals in order to enter into intimate relations. What men think they need to do is initiate. They don’t think this because of anything they’ve seen on TV. They think this, because that is what they experience. If they don’t initiate, they don’t get to enter into relationships.
The signal-decipherment part of it is that men don’t want to be initiating with women who aren’t interested. Not only is rejection painful, but with every rejection comes the risk that you get labeled creepy and obnoxious. Again, this isn’t something men have learned from TV. It’s what men experience. And they’re not going to be impressed by the theories and anecdotes of women who have never experienced the social environment men find themselves in, but who nevertheless think they know better than men themselves, what men’s lives are like.
And this way of thinking is a road straight to Rapist Land.
Nobody has suggest that signal-decypherment should be a substitute for consent. Instead, it’s filter to decide which women to seek consent with.
But I see what you just did there. The choice you’re offering us is:
1. Resigned celibacy.
2. Follow my patent recipe for forming relations.
3. You’re a rapist.
The trouble is, the only people who could possibly believe that the patent recipe will actually work for low-status men are people who aren’t low-status man. For low-status men, your choice practically amounts to
1. Resigned celibacy
2. Yearningly disappointed celibacy
3. You’re a rapist.
The next time you wonder about “the next move to make”, stop and maybe let the woman make the move first. Being desired and being shown that you are desired is a very good, pleasant feeling.
And what about the move after that. And the move after that? Are you suggesting that the guy sit back and let the woman do everything?
Of course, the common excuse that I hear from men who can’t wrap their heads around the idea of relaxing and letting women show desire for them is that “This way I will never get any sex.” This idea is completely wrong and misguided and I sincerely wish these guys got out more and watched less TV.
And I sincerely wish that you could recognise that if they say “This way I will never get any sex.”, this isn’t something they’ve seen on TV. It’s because they’ve done it this way, and they never got any sex.
I’m a woman who is not interested in any sex that is not initiated by me. That’s my sexual scenario, that’s who I am. And my greatest problem was finding men who would give me time and space to exhibit my sexual interest. By time and space I don’t mean days. I don’t even mean hours. OK, I barely even mean minutes. I would always see men who would begin to beg and push and cajole and whine for sex immediately. They would even do it when it was obvious that this went completely against their own sexual scenario, that they suffered and hated doing it, and that they were not prepared for any actual sex.
I’m sorry that you had such problems finding sexual partners who could meet with your exacting standards. My problem was that I couldn’t find any sexual partners at all.
And then there was a sad group of men who were so brain-washed by TV shows and magazines that they would break down almost in tears and ask, “Please, just tell me already what your game is. Why are you saying all these things about me being beautiful and desirable? Just tell me what you want already because this is so confusing that I’m going out of my mind.”
Again I don’t know why you keep insisting that this is due to brainwashing by TV. There was a time when I would have reacted that way, and it had nothing to do with being brainwashed by TV, and everything to do with being bullied, picked on, and ostacised so relentlessly though my entire childhood that by the time I reached adulthood, the idea that I had internalised was that I was a walking piece of excrement.
In fact, at that time in my life, if someone had told me that I was beautiful and desirable, I would have felt I was being made fun of.
Oh and by the way, telling a man that he’s beautiful and desirable is not a clear and unambiguous expression of interest. A lot of us have been told that we’re attractive and desirable people, by women who had just made it plain that they were not attracted and did not desire us.
So my suggestion is: men, relax. Breathe in deep. You are absolutely not missing any opportunities by not deciphering something correctly or not begging often enough. To the contrary, when you remember that you deserve to be desired and shown that you are desired clearly and honestly,…
At last, something good.
You do realise of course, than this is the exact opposite of what most feminists tell men like me: “Nobody deserves sex”
…you open up for yourself many opportunities for honest communication and great sex.
Again, another wonderful theory, but which only someone who isn’t a low-status man could think applies to low-status men. The “I deserve better” mindset is good, not because it leads to good relationships, but because it means that you reject bad ones.
Having said that, I’m not going to fall into the trap of assuming that what works for me will work for men who aren’t like me, nor even that what works for me now would have worked for me back then. Those bad past relationships nevertheless met a need. The need for intimacy which raged through me throughout my twenties just isn’t there any more. I do not assume that, even if I could have adopted the “I deserve better” mindset, I could or should have rejected those relationships then.
This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. The “Regular Parallel” thread can be found here.
I feel like this is a classic case where the concept of privilege could actually be helpful, if it weren’t for the fact that most female gender thinkers adamantly refuse to concede the possibility that they have it. Whether or not she avails herself of it, Clarissa has dating passivity privilege, and appears to be unaware that relying exclusively on unambiguous romantic cues to prompt behavior would doom a large percentage of men to long or even interminable stretches of involuntary celibacy.
Great post, Daran.
I wish I had a dollar for every feminist who’s told me how hard she had it — where “hard” was defined as a lack of *correct* guys falling over her with zero effort on her part. Sure she had plenty of attention and could’ve gone out and had sex pretty much any evening she’d wanted to, but you see, the guys who gave her attention wheren’t the ones she wanted.
That’s a kind of “hard” that 95%+ of men can only dream of. For a man -hard- is more like: *nobody* seems to want a relationship and/or sex with me, not even if I initiate. Waiting ? Yeah, I could do that for 80 years, that’d work, if only because by then I’d be dead and thus the problem would be “solved”.
Feminists are however unable and/or unwilling to admit that they themselves have enjoyed massive dating-priviledge. Look at this thread by a somewhat more clued-in feminist who *do* admit that women send negative signals even when they desire the man to move ahead; but nevertheless insist that it’s not that hard to figure out. (3 or 4 men chime in to try to tell her that yes, it -is- hard)
http://www.thedirtynormal.com/.....ment-11463
Nah, she is perfectly aware she is talking bullshit. Advice to “relax, breath deep, chill” isn’t even pretending to be serious. She’s just being catty rather than making sense, swatting at the men to get them to do what she wants.[Wilson, this is just an ad hominem attack (i.e. you're attacking Clarissa instead of her argument). We do our best to avoid ad homs here at FC. You claim to know that Clarissa is posting in bad faith — that she doesn't believe what she is claiming to believe — but I see no reason to make that assumption. You should assume a person believes what they are saying unless there is very clear and demonstrable evidence to the contrary. —ballgame]
Somewhat related, Clarissa linked to a post Schwyzer wrote about feminist pick-up:
Which do seem to imply that women currently aren’t as empowered as they should be to take the sexual initiative. Which I can only presume means that a number of women do not take the sexual initiative. I guess Clarissa missed that.
As a sidenote the framing on how to achieve this new different model for men and women alike, based on mutuality, kindness and willingness to prioritise other’s boundaries as well as one’s own pleasure was quite glaring; men need to work on “acting ethically” (stop doing something negative) while women deserve the tools to act boldly (something positive).
Perhaps it’s not a matter of lacking tools, perhaps the dating passitivity privelege is too comfortable to give up and we need to rephrase it to “women just need to work on acting less cowardly”. Now it at least is more in line with the “men need to work on acting ethically”.
The concept of privilege was invoked repeatedly in the post.
The word did not appear, which was intentional on my part. Clarissa herself rejects it, and given how obnoxiously it is commonly used, I thought it better not to. It’s also worth noting that Clarissa is different from “most female gender thinkers” in that she has explicitly disavowed the idea that privilege is something men have and women don’t.
Clarissa is in complete denial of the way most women approach dating. In my experience (when a romantic relationship is successfully created) the woman makes the first *subtle* move, the man responds with a overt move, and it escalates.
In fact, a significant cause of the “nice guy” who can’t get a girlfriend is the inability to recognize women’s subtle moves when they do occur.
While one of the ideals of some feminists is that women should be equally empowered to initiate sex & romance, just asserting that is a long way from more than a small percentage of women actually practicing that. Until then men will have to watch for these subtle signals and accept the risk of being wrong. If he is wrong, he probably will not be considered a creep if his advance is not crude or too forward and allows the woman to decline. But being labeled a creep is still a risk he must take.
The reality is that the average man faces a sexual-intimacy scarcity that the average woman simply does not, never has, and possibly never will.
Present that statement baldly and you’ll hear all the qualifiers start creeping in as the woman explains that she can’t get the KIND of sex she wants, or with the right TYPE of guy, or that sure she could ‘get laid’ if she was willing to lower her standards enough, but that doesn’t count.
Guess what, ladies? To the average man, that DOES count. Quite a bit. We’re talking about any intimate contact whatsoever, not just the ‘quality’ kind you prefer. It’s available to a much larger population of average women than it is to average men. That’s reality; and every average man lives with that reality, every day.
Is it any wonder a bit of bitterness creeps into the starving guy out on the street as he watches women in the supermarket complain that they just can’t find the right combination of nutritious, delicious meals that still fit their budget?
Regarding the TV thing, I wonder if TV may actually present women as initiating more often than they do in reality, not the other way around. I don’t have any hard data on this, but there seem to be many scenes where “girl likes guy and while talking on the couch and watching TV she starts kissing him” (though not so many girl asks guy out on date scenes).
This could all be confirmation bias, but I think there’s something to it.
But as for the rest of her post, it just makes me want to shout “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!!”
Interesting observation, TokenGreyGuy.
Had to google your last reference, though, even though I watched TNG during its initial run. Guess it’s been a while.
“I’ve even had a woman analyze my hopelessness at the end of an evening: “yeah, there were a couple of times that were perfect for you to kiss me… but you didn’t.”
And of course neither did she, but that doesn’t merit a mention any more than the fact that the room was full of air did. The concept of privilege may be used obnoxiously, it may be poorly and superficially formulated in general, but it does apply here.
“But I see what you just did there. The choice you’re offering us is:
1. Resigned celibacy.
2. Follow my patent recipe for forming relations.
3. You’re a rapist.”
Yes.
“Clarissa has a long history of criticising feminist misandry, often in quite colourful and forthright terms”
Apparently she can see a speck in other people’s eyes better than the plank in her own. You read her correctly above, and thata is about as man-hating an attitude towards male sexuality as it is possible to have.
“Getting laid” is entirely Clarissa’s framing here.”
It’s tendentious straw-manning that seems almost always of having the efect of trivializing men’s issues on the matter and handing control of the conversation to the wopmen using this ploy.
“all of these “meaningful looks” are nothing but a fantasy. Women are not ciphers in need of analysis. Women can and do transmit their sexual desires just as well as men can and do”
OMG, is she trying t deny that women play hard to get and that this air of mystery is one of the favored tactics. She is not going to convince any of us that the earth is flat, that it was created in six days or that women are forthright in declaring their sexual intentions, especially not when feminists have rightfully been decrying for 20 years at least how women are sometimes – often – slut-shamed into the ground for doing that.
She most definitely is trying to assert that the world is flat. Women not only never sends ambigious signals, there is also no such thing as good looks – i.e. all men should have similar dating-success. A few quotes from her blog-post and answers she’s given in the comments to same:
By the way, I’m not sure it’s justified assuming good intention with someone who in a debate will make statements like : “When you actually become a man instead of a whiny and pathetic little boy, you can come back and I will be kind enough to teach you the basics of a healthy sex life.”
Becoming a rapist a choice? I hope this is not serious…
Ginkgo,
“And of course neither did she, but that doesn’t merit a mention any more than the fact that the room was full of air did. The concept of privilege may be used obnoxiously, it may be poorly and superficially formulated in general, but it does apply here.”
Clarissa actually does mention this, both in the article and in the comments. In fact, she’s even harsher. She sees it as a conscious, passive-aggressive power play:
“So when somebody says to you, “yeah, there were a couple of times that were perfect for you to kiss me… but you didn’t”, they are trying to set up a relational model where you are an ignorant little school-child being gently scolded and instructed by a benign, condescending authority.
Letting this happen is an enormous mistake. (Unless you really enjoy being condescended to).”
Read the final paragraph of the post, and her May 10 12:14 comment.
That said, I’m not quite sure what to make of much of her post.
She does point that out, kilo, and it’s great that she recognizes the toxic potential such passivity may hold for that woman’s partners. But as Daran points out, she can’t seem to grasp that female passivity is the rule, not the exception, and for average guys it’s often a choice of a) trying to establish a relationship with a passive woman, or b) no relationship at all.
Passivity is not an exception but men should not embrace it. (unless the man’s sexual scenario contains his initiative on passive women)
Clarissa strikes again.
http://clarissasblog.com/2013/05/28/passive-women/
David,
Wow. There is so much fail in that one little post – the sexist all-knowing woman, the sexist femsplaining in repsonse to a man’s experiences, the ethnocentrism of making a point of mentioning the man’s Third World (backward) background, the passive-aggressive expression of faux concern about him getting to such an age and still being so clueless.
David and Ginkgo…
I’m afraid I don’t believe a single word she’s written on that page, post or comments.
Daran,
“As an initial matter, I detest the way these discussion are always reduced to “getting laid”. I realise that a lot of men do frame it in this way, but just as many aspire to relationships which are sexual, but which are not merely sex. I see nothing in Nav’s post to suggest that he is not among the latter. That he uses the word “romantic” on a couple of occasions suggests the opposite. “Getting laid” is entirely Clarissa’s framing here.”
Thank you for calling this out. I’m so sick of the way feminists relentlessly dehumanize men in these discussions. And they do it in exactly the same way the “patriarchy” they claim to oppose does, too- portraying men as sex-driven animals without the complete human (that is, female) range of emotions.
And it’s striking how often it seems disproportionately directed at men who are low-status and/or unmasculine. They despise the same men the “patriarchy” despises, with equal or greater intensity.
ballgame,
“I feel like this is a classic case where the concept of privilege could actually be helpful, if it weren’t for the fact that most female gender thinkers adamantly refuse to concede the possibility that they have it.”
God, yes. Her line, “Being desired and being shown that you are desired is a very good, pleasant feeling” practically screams this, in particular.The whole thing reads like a rich heiress telling a pauper that he should just send his manservant to the pâtissier if he’s so damn hungry, while shaking her head contemptuously at how ignorant the poor are for not figuring out such an obvious solution.
While I agree with the scarcity aspect I’m not sure the grass is really greener on the other side. It’s a tricky issue, because the question is *what* is actually comparable, and what is not. Could a significant part of women get casual sex easier than most men? Sure. Women have, in that respect, what a lot of guys want. If *they* also wanted what guys wanted, that would be great. But, it seems to me, most women, at least in that respect, *don’t* want what most guys want. So, if we’re applying a measure that’s based on how much people aren’t able to get what they want, I’m not sure whether men or women fare worse on the dating market. I mean, sure, it still sucks to see that someone else *could easily have what you want*, and it’s not easy to understand that something so valued by yourself is not even considered valuable by someone else, but it’s apparently the way it is.
On the subject of Clarissas post I would like to mention the following: there’s a distribution of dating personalities. *SOME* women do initiate all the time, some women only when they really want to, most women will adhere to the standard script and expect a male initiator most of the time, and some women will expect a male initiator all the time. I find it odd that a woman would not consider “slut shaming” to be a factor inhibiting female sexual expressiveness.
So, her less than generous tone and a couple of off-base generalizations aside, I think Clarissa is also making a very important point that I believe is valuable for a lot of guys – but is also extremely hard to believe and perform: the belief in their own sexual attractiveness – what some people in the Seduction Community call “consider yourself the price”. She’s absolutely right that that awareness alone is attractive and conducive to the kind of “confident” male performance many women find attractive – and which may women be less concerned about slut shaming and initiate more often. However, it is also very hard to display something one doesn’t really believe in – and the scarcity experienced by many men is making it very hard for them to believe that. Hence, they need to initiate more – and the discussion becomes circular, in a way.
Wow! Who knew my sister was this popular in the cyber world? Dissecting her blog posts, writing separate blog posts to analyze hers, quoting stuff from the comment section of her posts and even including time stamps as precise reference points? Not sure if I should laugh or be concerned. I’m keeping it PG to respect your blog rules, but this is frankly bizarre.
Hey,
I’m the Nav who wrote the original post… I didn’t agree with Clarissa’s take on my post. It was a personal piece of writing that was meant to go elsewhere, but ended up on my blog. It was meant only as a way for me to talk about the difficulty I have interpreting what to most people are clear and obvious signals.
Clarissa’s concern, as far as I could tell, were totally legitimate: that taken out of context, my post seemed to express the pernicious patterns of sexuality that construct women as passive things to be read and reacted to appropriately. It was a fair concern that I think she took too far by suggesting that there is no non-verbal communication, or that one can’t always practice a perfect feminism: sometimes a woman is simply shy, or in that specific instance, wants the man to make the first move.
So I find the robust, lengthy criticism of Clarissa’s blog post a little weird. She made what I think is a totally legitimate reading of my post that is perfectly understandable given the world we live in; it just happened to be wrong because she didn’t and couldn’t know my views. Your reaction here seems to be part of a broader anti-feminist politics that I just can’t get behind. And I guess that was the only point I wanted to make, really: that though I disagree with Clarissa’s reaction, I don’t in any way, shape or form wish to support your reaction to her’s.
Well written Daran!
Personally, I think gynocentric feminist backlash against sexually frustrated men that has been so popular of late is thhe spark that will lead to a more widespread legitimization of men’s issues. I find the parallels between what is being said to men by gyno feminists so eerily similar to what was said to early feminists by wealthy men.
@Nav IIRC the authors here consider themselves feminists and seek to make it better rather than anti- it.
“So my suggestion is: men, relax. Breathe in deep. You are absolutely not missing any opportunities by not deciphering something correctly or not begging often enough. To the contrary, when you remember that you deserve to be desired and shown that you are desired clearly and honestly,… you open up for yourself many opportunities for honest communication and great sex.”
Hmm,… Sounds like I’ve heard that before… Oh yeah, it was “All you have to do get women is just be yourself – then women will flock to you.”
If it were only that easy for many of us.
Hey this article is pretty sweet! http://www.rolereboot.org/sex-.....en-like-me
A feminist article about dating passivity!
“I tell all my single guy friends to watch out for online dating. It is a sad, soul-crushing place where good guys go to die a slow death by way of ignored messages and empty inboxes. You will peruse profiles and find a few women who aren’t posing in a bathroom with their stomachs exposed. You will look for things in common in their profile (they like Scrabble too!). You will send them a note, carefully crafted to show interest and attention to detail. The first seven will not respond. The next one will, but she spells “you” as “u” and you will let the conversation stall. Finally, one of the cool girls writes back, and you will banter a bit, swapping favorite restaurants or concert venues. You will ask her to meet up “in real life.” At the bar, you will chat nervously for an hour (she is not as pretty or as funny as you had hoped she’d be), and then you will be saddled with the $27 check even though she ate most of the sweet potato fries. She will offer to split, but you think she doesn’t mean it and you don’t want to be a jerk. You will march home to an empty inbox and the desire to spend another hour browsing and writing will start to fade.”
I lasted about a month with online dating…
It WAS soul-crushing…
I met my wife just as the Internet age began (actually we met on CompuServe), so I never played the match.com game. Could it really be a soul-crushing as trying to meet women in a dance club?
““The reality is that the average man faces a sexual-intimacy scarcity that the average woman simply does not, never has, and possibly never will.”
This is an over simplification, and as Sam pointed out, I’m not sure the grass is always greener. All women do not have the experience with men just as all men do not have the same experience with women. I’ve been told my more than one source that low-status women (read: not considered attractive by most men) often find men willing to have sex with them privately but will not have relationships or even date them in public where they might be seen by his friends. I can imagine this has got to be very damaging to one’s self esteem, and I’ll bet few men have sex with women who won’t be seen with them in public. At least guys who are “just friends” with women they long for can tell themselves she’ll eventually see what a great partner he’d be.
(duplicate post removed)
“I met my wife just as the Internet age began (actually we met on CompuServe), so I never played the match.com game. Could it really be a soul-crushing as trying to meet women in a dance club?”
I don’t do dance clubs. I love metal, so I’ll check out bands. Sexist thing to say, but back in the day we’d be like “the better the music the less women you’ll see.”
Just a few days ago I saw a girl with a Carcass shirt so there are ladies with good taste.
Got dragged to a club one or two times and HATED it.
That’s one of many reasons why I’d never become a PUA, why oh, why would I want to force myself to “sarge” in a club.
@John Markley:
“And it’s striking how often it seems disproportionately directed at men who are low-status and/or unmasculine. They despise the same men the “patriarchy” despises, with equal or greater intensity.”
Well of course. And it’s quite clear to people, feminists even, who are willing to look at it:
“I was not prepared to hear over and over from men how the women—the mothers, sisters, girlfriends, wives—in their lives are constantly criticizing them for not being open and vulnerable and intimate, all the while they are standing in front of that cramped wizard closet where their men are huddled inside, adjusting the curtain and making sure no one sees in and no one gets out. There was a moment when I was driving home from an interview with a small group of men and thought, Holy shit. I am the patriarchy.”
– Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
“Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it intereferes with the satisfaction of female desire. [...] In feminist circels, men who wanted to change were often seen as narcissistic and needy. [...] Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved.”
– bell hooks, The Will to Change
@Sam:
“So, if we’re applying a measure that’s based on how much people aren’t able to get what they want, I’m not sure whether men or women fare worse on the dating market.”
I think I agree with your post; just one comment. I think it’s dangerous to consider what people want without also taking their situation into account. If men were able to get what women can get just as easily, would they still want it in the same way as they do now?
@Daran, nice post. Clarissa clearly seems to have extrapolated her own personal experience and preferences in a general way that is unfair and often wrong (based on my own personal experiences and speaking with other women not named Clarissa). As someone who went from clueless about this to clued in later in life, with correspondingly much more romantic and sexual success, the problems with Clarissa’s perspective really stand out.
I’d love it if more women initiated like Clarissa apparently does, but arguing that men should always wait for the woman to initiate isn’t reasonable even in a world where women initiated as often as men. In an equal world, half the relationships would be initiated by men and half by women, and even a regular initiator like Clarissa should acknowledge that men would have the right and obligation to initiate part of the time. (Wow, that was hard to write, given the culture I live in that is 180 degrees from Clarissa and still doesn’t see much regular initiation by women.)
@Nav, you wrote, “It was meant only as a way for me to talk about the difficulty I have interpreting what to most people are clear and obvious signals.” I doubt most men find women’s signals “clear and obvious” even if the women making them characterize them this way. It’s possible to get better at seeing them, but it is not effortless nor universal. I think your lack of ability here is probably more characteristic of “most men” or at least “many men,” so don’t feel like you’re abnormal in this social skill.
@Racnad, you’re correct that many women don’t have it great, either. I’ve been witness to at least one of these secret relationships where there was sex, but no public acknowledgment of the relationship because the man seemed embarrassed about who he was with. I thought he was pretty horrible about it, but she was desperate to be with him and went along. People often take what they can get, even if it is ultimately being used in an unfair way no one deserves. The male version is usually the guy offering friendship and emotional support but not getting the sex, and living with it because he’s desperate to be close to the woman he adores even if he’s not happy with the situation.
john, I identify as feminist, but Daran and Hugh do not. However, we’re all gender egalitarians and would qualify as feminist by that standard. None of us identify as “anti-feminist” so far as I know.
That was a good article. Thanks for sharing that link!
To those claiming that the world of dating sucks for women just as bad as it does for men, because they’re not getting exactly what they want, either: I have to confess I really don’t have a lot of patience for this view.
If you take the most attractive men and the most attractive women, both groups would seem to have their pick of either casual relationships or a committed one. Arguably, the men would have an advantage because they could have children without the risk and discomfort of pregnancy, plus their sexual desirability would not be quite as tied to their youth as women’s. But whether or not you agree, this is a fairly small portion of people.
I really don’t know if life is better or worse for women at the bottom than for men at the bottom. Once again, this is a small portion of people, though.
It is in the vast middle that women — at least, pre-menopausal women — seem to have a decided advantage, as even the female feminist writing in john’s link appears to concede. It may be that women have a greater interest in LTRs than men, but even if that’s true (and I don’t know that it is), a person’s ability to get into a LTR with a person they want is closely correlated with their ability to get into a casual one. If you have 40 suitors, you’re much more likely to connect with someone you want to spend an extended amount of time with than if you have two (or zero).
People who argue that women have it just as bad in this arena because they aren’t making those long-term connections as readily as they want appear to me to be assuming (without evidence) that the bulk of men shut out of relationships have no desire for LTRs themselves. It would be like going back to the 1950s or 1960s, listening to women complain that they aren’t being hired for the good-paying factory jobs or promoted to middle management like men, and having someone respond, “Well, you know those male factory workers and middle managers actually want to be vice presidents and CEOs, so they have it just as bad.”
No one with a brain would accept such an argument.
Welcome to the brave new world of this thing we call “the Internet,” Sister! I’m sure it will seem much less “bizarre” once you get used to it! I’m sure Clarissa herself doesn’t consider what we’re doing here to be strange … after all, it was just a couple of days ago that she herself was complaining that we WEREN’T responding to her blog posts.
Thanks for keeping it PG for us.
Thanks for stopping by, Nav. I agree with your complimentary assessment of Daran’s critique as “robust.” In-depth criticism of the one-sidedness of gynocentric feminist analysis is what we specialize in here. I disagree with your notion that Clarissa’s response to you “just happened to be wrong because she didn’t and couldn’t know my views”; in fact, the inability to understand and empathize with the way gender oppresses men is a profound flaw found throughout the mainstream feminist community that undermines its avowed goal of gender equality. (Hence our site, which is egalitarian and feminist critical, not “anti-feminist.”) Our patriarchal culture even frowns upon men empathizing with other men when it comes to men being oppressed by gender, so your rush to disassociate yourself from a critique that is in many ways on your side is — while quite sad, in its own way — not surprising to me at all.
[Note: I’m exempting myself from the ‘no consecutive comments’ NoH rule. —ballgame]
@Sam
I could go with this, Sam – but this notion of whether or not a certain privilege is actually wanted by the group you’re claiming has it is generally disregarded.
Which is a shame, because for me it’s key to undermining the emotive aspect of the concept of privilege. “Privileged!” is something regularly spat at men – it’s not relevant that many of us actually hate, and have always hated, the idea of working ourselves into the grave to support a family, or getting shot in the gut in some foreign country on the orders of a government that doesn’t care about you. I don’t think many actually like their gender scripts when bound into them, especially not men, but we are accused of being privileged regardless and attempts to apply the same standard to women are frequently laughed off.
The entire notion of privilege is one giant game of Who’s Got The Greener Grass, where one side is feverishly denied a turn by the other.
Claiming that a person who doesn’t get exactly what he wants, is as bad off as a person who gets nothing isn’t very convincing.
I don’t think anyone would claim that the guy who drives a modern Toyota is suffering the same problem as the guy who has no car at all, because the Toyota-driver really wanted a Ferrarri.
I don’t think anyone would claim that the woman who eats a variety of healthy and delicious food is as bad off as the starving woman, because she really desired Michelin-star quality meals.
Yet you do sometimes hear that a woman who can take her pick in any given week among a multitude of men who desire her, is equally bad of as the man who’s been single for 3 years and had nobody indicate even the slighthest interest in those years, because the men she can pick among aren’t her top picks.
Having to settle for your n-th choice of car, meal or intimate partner is objectively superior to having no car, no meal and no intimate partner.
I’d also like to chime in that in my lived experience (I can’t speak to whether other men experience this or if this is isolated), the supposed “friendhsip” that I received from the women I had interest in has usually been one-sided. I would provide them with emotional support and help them with manual labor & computer problems. In return, they let me help them. Generally speaking, they never contacted me to hang out if they didn’t need something, and despite telling me how great I was, they would run themselves in circles trying to intercept any of my attempts to flirt with their friends (on the rare chance that they accidentally introduced me to one). These women were not my type, they would boldly claim, don’t worry any woman would be lucky to have you.
Gunnar:
“Yet you do sometimes hear that a woman who can take her pick in any given week among a multitude of men who desire her, is equally bad of as the man who’s been single for 3 years and had nobody indicate even the slightest interest in those years, because the men she can pick among aren’t her top picks.”
I don’t believe women who are at the bottom of the desirability scale “can take her pick in any given week among a multitude of men who desire her.”
It is possible for unattractive men to offset their physical appearance by developing charm, charisma or wealth (or the appearance of it). These are some of the skills taught by the PUA community. If a women is grossly overweight and has the wrong kind of genes, it can be more difficult to overcome.
I also understand the symbolic importance of being a sexually active adult (especially for men) having lived through periods of involuntary celibacy, but depending on the context just being sexually active doesn’t make one better off. Would you argue that women forced to work in the sex trade or victims of sexual abuse have something beneficial in their lives that the involuntary celibate lack?
@Racnad I also don’t believe that women near the bottom of the desirability-scale can take their pick in any given week. But I *do* believe that while very few men can do so, a much larger fraction of women can. A average woman, faces much less scarcity when it comes to intimacy and sex, than an average man does.
It is true that looks is a bigger factor for women than it is for men, and this does give some men an advantage over similar women. A under-average guy who has charisma and wealth, may outdo an under-average woman who also has charisma and wealth, because looks weight heavier on the scale for women.
On the flipside, women think average men are ugly, while men think average women are average — see the OkCupid study posted here on FC a while ago, thus even if a man and a woman are both objectively average (i.e. if the other gender is forced to *rank* them, they’ll rank near the middle) while if the other gender is just asked to give them notes, most women will rank actually average-looking guys as being ugly.
I’m not sure I buy the “easier to change” claim. Is it really easier to become wealthy than it is to reduce your weight ? Is it really easier to change your personality and become more assertive and more confident, than it is to change your visual styling ?
Sexual abuse or trafficking ain’t relevant here. I’m talking about the *relative* position of a woman who wants sex and can easily get it, but not from her first choice of partner, versus a man who wants sex and has a lot of trouble finding *anyone* willing to be his partner. In that situation, I think it’s very clear that the former is preferable.
I never claimed that being sexually abused is preferable to being celibate, and that’d be a completely absurd claim to make so I don’t know where you got it from.
While I agree that men have it worse than women on average when it comes to the ease of getting sex/relationships in our present culture, I think we should try to be very fair and considerate of individual realities. If we criticize some feminists for ascribing privilege to all men, including homeless vets on the edge of suicide, that are generally only reserved for a small fraction of men, we should be careful not to do the same by ignoring or marginalizing the women at the bottom and their real problems in the relationship/sex arena. I always hated seeing some PUAs talk about “warpigs” and similarly nasty terms for physically unattractive women. It would of course be best to have scientific studies with quantitative statistics to do proper comparisons on who has it worse, but those are hard to come by on exactly the questions of most interest here. I believe most people have a tendency to see their own worst problems to be as bad as anyone else’s worst problems, even if objectively that’s not true, and pointing that out is often seen as dismissing their problems entirely.
Isn’t it enough to say that many men suffer in the sexual/romantic arena in certain ways? And acknowledge that some women suffer in certain ways, too? Without the need for saying one is better or worse than the other? I mean, I agree with ballgame’s post about female privilege and the related points that it’s difficult or impossible to say which gender has it better/worse, because it’s so difficult to weight the different items fairly, and it’s wrong to assume an answer based on personal bias. Women’s problems in dating need not be equivalently bad, and acknowledging their problems need not diminish the problems many men have that get dismissed by many feminists — I’d rather not be near-sighted and dismissive the way they can be. That would be hypocritical in my opinion since I do criticize them for it. I really hate it when most feminists abruptly dismiss men’s problems with the argument that women’s are worse. We shouldn’t do the same in reverse, and we shouldn’t say they’re equal either without some quantitative measure. We can simply acknowledge both without diminishing either.
Gunnar:
I agree with 80 percent of what you are saying. Here is my issue:
“A average woman, faces much less scarcity when it comes to intimacy and sex, than an average man does.”
While this is true, I believe an average man doesn’t face a complete scarcity. My impression is that men in the “average” range find desirable partners periodically, and less-than-desirable partners are available more frequently if they want it. These are the men who may not always have a girlfriend, but their dry spells don’t last more than a few months, certainly not a year
By comparing women “who have their pick” to men who are involuntarily celibate, you are comparing average women to below-average men.
@Kilo, those are some interesting quotes. I have long suspected that women who say they want men to share their feelings only want *certain* feelings – the ones they want to hear. When I have opened up and shared my unrestrained feelings with women, I’ve often gotten emotionally beaten up for it.
Gunnar,
that depends on what the measure of “utility” is. If the measure of utility is “motorized transport” and everyone is deriving equal amounts of utility/pleasure from “motorized transport” then, sure, the person with the Toyota is better off than the person without a car. The problem with respect to desire for intimacy and partnerships, it seems to me, is, that it’s not as easily definable as “motorized tansport” and that I’m not sure it’s fair to assume sufficiently equally structured “utility curves” (sorry for the econ slang) between people (and genders) for a fair comparison. I think the female pattern of desire is more conflicted than the male pattern of desire, which makes it *possible* (it’s a hypothetical after all) that – to remain in the motoroized transport metaphor – driving in a Toyota makes them nauseous, and that they consider being nauseous as being worse off than having the possibility of motorized transport, and thus, owning a Toyota doesn’t increase their utility *at all*.
Again, I’m not disagreeing that most women have it easier than most men when it comes to casual dating (and possibly dating), but I’m not sure that this advantage automatically translates to higher overall utility (women have it better) for them because of their more conflicted utiliy structures/patterns of desire.
“I disagree with your notion that Clarissa’s response to you “just happened to be wrong because she didn’t and couldn’t know my views”; in fact, the inability to understand and empathize with the way gender oppresses men is a profound flaw found throughout the mainstream feminist community that undermines its avowed goal of gender equality. (Hence our site, which is egalitarian and feminist critical, not “anti-feminist.”) Our patriarchal culture even frowns upon men empathizing with other men when it comes to men being oppressed by gender, so your rush to disassociate yourself from a critique that is in many ways on your side is — while quite sad, in its own way — not surprising to me at all.”
Heh – you seem to be suggesting I’m a “self-hating man”
I’m not at all. I just wish to clearly disassociate myself from ideas, like gender egalitarianism, I consider to be both politically and intellectually suspect.
I do find it very strange that you’d suggest that feminism doesn’t recognize that patriarchy also oppresses men, particularly since it was feminist thinkers that first articulated that thought. Eve Kofosky Sedgwick, for example, carefully laid out the exact ideas you’re talking about, as did Butler and, well, literally every serious feminist writer ever. Even the most radicaly French feminists like Cixous and Kristeva and Irigiray — those who would argue that basic structures like language and our relation to space are also bound up in patriarchy – would never for a moment take seriously the idea the patriarchy doesn’t also negatively impact men.
Are there some people who identify as feminists who say men cannot be oppressed? Of course. There are also people who claim to be against racism but slip easily into talk of savagery and civilization; it doesn’t mean they represent particularly clear thinkers. So I guess we do agree on a lot, but given that you are articulating an explicitly feminist critique on a site called “feminist critics” which is clearly populated exclusively by men… well, you must understand my skepticism and hesitation, yeah?
Pallaeon,
and it never struck you as odd that they didn’t want to hang out with you? I mean, I respect it if you were so into them that you still did what they asked you to do, a lot of relationships aren’t balanced. But you seem to have been aware and annoyed at the one-sided nature of the relationship without ending it… I think that’s part of what Clarissa is saying (in a bit of convoluted way): Guys don’t need to – should not – put up with women’s shit just because they’re women and sometimes, perhaps, usually, women’s shit is just that and not an encrypted way of asking you out/for sex.
@Sam
Yes, in principle you can have a utility-curve that is such that a toyota is zero improvement over no car, such that a McDonalds-meal is zero improvement over no meal, and the possibility of intimacy with the wrong guy is zero improvement over forced celibacy.
In practice, I don’t think that’s the case. Even if you *decline* a offer of intimacy, it seems reasonable to me that the knowledge that there exist people who would want intimacy with you, gives a bonus to confidence.
In principle, you could be equally worse of, despite a marked increase in offers of intimacy, but I don’t actually think women have utility-curves that one the average are shaped like this. (I’m sure *some* do) Don’t worry about the econ-speak, the mating-market-place has sufficiently many parallells to other marketplaces that the language of commerce is often useful in illuminating it.
Gunnar,
I agree that such knowledge has utility, but it’s a different category, don’t you think? That’s the kind of ego/confidence-related aspect that I referred to in my initial comment, which was, I think, also mentioned by Clarissa (“don’t be a doormat, it’s unattractive”). I agree that confidence is hard to perform when you don’t have it and that the current dating paradigm is creating a scarcity for men that is, in many ways, self-reinforcing. In *this* respect, women have it easier, they’re more aware that *someone* wants them. But, again, I think that’s a different category, and, also, given that the way sexual preferences appear to be structured in the aggregate, not just a few unattractive women are locked out of the dating market completely while it’s easier for men to adjust their performane and become more attractive, I’m not sure if the grass is objectively greener on either side. Subjectively, it clearly is – but… to give an example – who’s worse off? Me, who has trouble initiating kissing for all the lost opportunities? Or the women I’ve (in their perspective) rejected by not kissing them when they wanted me to (and thought they clearly communicated it)? Or did we both lose equally?
I’m not suggesting that at all, Nav. I’m saying that, instead of empathizing with the aspects of Daran’s post which mirrors your own situation, you made it a priority to disassociate yourself from it. (Exactly who or what you’re afraid would see you as being ‘contaminated with FC cooties’ is, I think, an interesting question.*) It’s not that you hate yourself … it’s that your reaction suggested indifference to the emotional plight of another man … which is entirely consistent with patriarchal male dominance hierarchy conditioning.
As a feminist, I’m heartened at the possibility that other feminist thinkers recognize that men are oppressed by gender. I’m not familiar with any of the writers you cite, so I’ll treat your claim with some skepticism. The feminists that I AM familiar with are writers/bloggers like Allan Johnson, Marilyn French, Barbara Ehrenreich, Marcotte, Schwyzer, Valenti, Filipovic, tekanji, McEwan, Ampersand, Noah Brand, Ozymandias, etc., many of whom I’ve interacted with over the past couple of years. I consider “male gender oppression” to be functionally equivalent to “female gender privilege,” and NONE of the people I cite will acknowledge the existence of female privilege. Many will acknowledge that men may be harmed by gender, but acknowledging that men are actually oppressed by it — that women are in fact privileged by gender in a very real sense in some important dimensions of cultural life — disrupts the simplistic and inaccurate construction that is operational in gynocentric feminist discourse: men are privileged, women are not; men are oppressors, women are not.
The typical mainstream feminist approach is best summed up at Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog.
The two active bloggers here are both male, but we’ve had a female co-blogger in the past and we do have female commenters (though they appear to be in the minority), FWIW. (We’ve done a LOT to try to promote the active participation of feminists in our discussions and I’m not sure we could do much more, as I think some of our long-standing commenters will agree.)
I don’t blame you at all for being skeptical and hesitant in your approach to us; I think that’s a healthy approach to take. I’m not oblivious to the fact that there are ‘feminist critical’ websites out there that are accurately seen to be anti-feminist and even misogynistic. I encourage you to read more of the posts here and feel free to contribute your critiques. We’ll treat you with respect; we only request that you do likewise for us.
* And, after witnessing the terrible treatment Tom Matlack received when trying to maintain a feminist-sympathetic but independent male voice in the gender discourse, not an entirely academic one.
Exactly, and I agree. In fact, what I’m saying is that that lack of scarcity is precisely why women DON’T value casual sex–because for them, it’s readily available and therefore not valuable. Sort of a social-economics equation: if it’s in ready supply, the value goes down.
@Sam Be very careful how your phrase things here, you are tiptoeing awfully close to victim blaming (would you tell a woman who is being used for sex “didn’t you think it was odd that he didn’t return your calls?”). I was not specific about the time frame I was referring to, so I admit my fault there: this occurred in high school and college. Now hindisght is twenty twenty, so after years of reflection, I’ve come to realize that I was engaging in codependent behavior and entertaining unproductive friendships. At the time, however, I was naiive and vulnerable. I did not realize that I was being taken advantage of, I just assumed that I was just wasn’t good looking enough for women to find me attractive, and I just must not be trying hard enough for people to want to hang out with me. I was also not aware of the one sided nature of things, I was just lonely and broke down into a month long depression every so often. I was completely perplexed: I was well known and respected around school, people seemed to like me, girls in relationships would ask me why I didn’t have a girlfriend, my female friends kept telling me how great I was, and whenever I asked anyone for advice they told me I had a great personality and that I’d find someone if I just kept “being myself.”
When I finally got my first kiss at the ripe age of 21, contrary to Clarissa’s claim, it was not because I “just gave A woman space to make a move on me.” I received almost no signals from her whatsoever. I just kept dancing with her and eventually leaned in to kiss her (and she became extremely clingy after that but that’s another story).
Likewise, when I got my first girlfriend at 23, she wasn’t even originally attracted to me when I first asked her out (she confirmed this herself four months in), but she became attracted to me when I brushed aside her half-hearted excuses for why she couldn’t meet up.
Please note that at no point in either post did I claim that any of the women who took advantage of me did it purposefully or with malice. I wholeheartedly believe that they were just trying to be nice, but that they were presented with the opportunity to get something for nothing, so why not? He seems happy to do it anyway.
Now regardless of whether below average women or below average men subjectively enjoy their daring experience more than the other, it’s very hard to refute that below-average to average women tend to have more power in dating than below-average to average men.
What both ultimately lack is real intimacy, regardless of sex happening or not.
Schala, what you are describing is codified and valorized in our culture as courtly love. It doesn’t go by that name anymore, but a lot of the features of it remain active in dating and relationship scripts. The whole proposing marriage on bended knee, the whole “are you man enough for me” (without a commensurate “are you women enough for me”) script are all inexplicable without this historical substratum in the culture. And that’s why you don’t see this kind of thing in just about any other culture.
The woman in your example has the possibility of going without sex, and is not going without sex. If sex makes her nauseous or is unpleasant more than no-sex, presumably she should prefer to have no sex.
Asexual people quickly learn that they can choose to not placate their sexual romantic partners, while still having romance. Albeit it reduces their chance somewhat.
I think it’s more of a “fish with water”, where the fish doesn’t notice there is or isn’t water until its gone. Average women have plenty of water pre-menopausal, why would they care about water? Average men have scarce water, and are even celebrated for not being thirsty. Why aren’t women celebrated for not being thirsty? Because they’re swimming. It’s no exploit to be a female slut, the way its rare to be a male slut (though at some count of partners, both are considered too unteachable (ie Charlie Sheen) for relationships, at least for most people with sense).
Maybe the fish who swims in water wants higher quality water, bottled water only, or whatever. But its in human nature to always want better, more, than what you got. It doesn’t make her situation worse.
Bill Gates might want 60 billion instead of 40. He’s 20 billion short. I’d be fine with a single million, living on the interests. Is he less well off than me?
@ballgame To me, the most confusing feminists are the ones who are inconsistent. Clarissa for example, though completely oblivious to the fact that women DO send mixed signals and men DO need to guesstimate these to have a reasonable dating-success, nevertheless does acknowledge female privilege in many other settings. For example, in the comments to the post you’re analyzing here she says:
This is a quote that I believe most of us here on FC would be likely to agree with, I certainly do. So she confuse me. She clearly -does- see problems in feminism, but at the same time, she’s more than willing to resort to tactics like refering to men who is guilty of nothing more than disagreeing with her as “boys” and claim they must not be getting enough sex etc.
@Pallleaon,
I’m sorry if I offended you, but I find the notion of victim blaming not too helpful in most cases. I also did not consider you a victim in the story you told, rather someone who was in a bad situation.
Yeah, I suppose everyone can agree that the usefulness of that particular advice is indeed limited.
Well, you were a good couple of years ahead of me in both respects. Interestingly, though, in the case of my first kiss, it was, I think, me who initiated the flirting, but she who initiated the kissing.
I’m not sure what below average means. I was incel for more than a decade and then I learned how to be “better with women”. Given that visual attractivity is what is most important for male attraction to women, and one’s attractivity is much harder to change than one’s performance, at least in most cases, I believe that what some here call “dating passivity” privilege is not really available to the group of women who are considered visually unattractive (by social convention). In fact, I believe that the female tendency to be less concerned with looks than men are is an advantage for all men, but particularly for those at the bottom (by social convention) – as I believe that it is easier to change one’s performance than one’s physiology.
Schala,
He may be better off, but he could quite possibly feel worse. There is no cardinal scale for utility comparison, as we’re all different people. Even the assumption of statistically significant gendered differences is a bit of a stretch, logically. The question of comparing relative harm is, for example, one of the never ending problems of taxation theory – what’s the appropriate measure for *equality* in taxation? Absolutes? Percentages? Equal relative burden (aka equal reduction in utility?). There’s a lot of theories of justice in that respect and it’s all good and well but there’s no cardinal utility, which means it’s going to be applicable and all we can hope for is to be able to transcend our perception of the greener grass on the other side by being open minded and emphatic.
For taxation, Noblesse Oblige, the society making you rich you pay back to as a matter of courtesy.
Progressive taxation with an effective ceiling on income (super taxes above that ceiling) should benefit the entire society, instead of just the 1%
Clarissa made a weird fallacious assumption in that post that because some women will express their desire explicitly without prompting, therefore a large number of women will.
I agree with her sentiment at the end, anyway, that men should view themselves as the prize, but then she seems to go further than that, advocating a complete reversal of gender roles, not balancing.
@ Sam
Well, maybe, but why do many seem to drive the Toyota anyway? I don’t see many non-religiously conservative women “holding out” for a Ferrari in lieu of a Toyota, which means that the Toyota must give them something.
That presumes that all men are drawn to conventionally attractive women. Non-conventionally attractive people of both sexes tend to date each other, for instance, and many men have a thing for obese women (as any scroll through a free porn site will tell you). Anecdotally I’ve know/seen many “ugly” women with partners, even partners more attractive than them.
That’s a fair point, victim is too strong a word, I retract my statement about “victim blaming.” And thank you for your apology.
In the case 18-40 year olds, I would strongly contest both of those assumptions. On the subject of ease of change, have you seen this comparison of pre and post makeup?
http://izismile.com/2013/03/08....._pics.html
You can achieve some stunning increases in attractiveness with makeup alone. As for losing weight, I would agree that it’s mostly comparable to the habit and discipline of increasing your confidence with one notable exception: If you have a fear of working out, or if you really dislike the activity, your results will not significantly be hampered by letting your frustration show. You can grimace, curse, and pout all you want and it, generally speaking, won’t affect your results. You also don’t tend to receive pushback about how immoral it is for you to try to lose weight.
Increasing your confidence with flirting, however, is severely hindered by letting your frustration show. In many cases, you’re basically asking guys to directly confront their fears, without letting their fears show through. Add to that the fact that many people will outright shame you if you let them know you are struggling with dating. Others will lecture you on how immoral it is to practice meeting women.
As for unattractive women being unable to tap into the passivity privilege: Neil Strauss did an experiment for the stylelife challenge. He posted a profile on craigslist with a picture of one of the most unattractive women I’ve ever seen. He said he received about 100 replies. He then posted a similar profile, but with a picture of an average looking guy – he received about 10 replies in the same amount of time.
Anecdotally, I’ve never heard a woman complain about being unable to find ANYONE who would take her on a date, it’s always been about how the guys who take her on dates aren’t good enough. I’ve known, and still know, many very unattractive women, more unattractive than I am unmasculine, who have boyfriends, and who still complain about getting hit on. I’ve never known a case of a woman who has lowered her standards out of desperation and then been rejected. I DO, on the other hand, know men, myself included, who have seriously lowered their standards out of desperation, only to be rejected.
In a slightly more objective personal account, I once accidentally posted a dating profile under “women looking for women” instead of “men looking for women” (I didn’t post a picture). A day and a half later, when I finally checked my email and noticed my mistake, I’d received three responses from women. I then moved that exact same profile to the proper category. I never received a response. Granted, this is a flawed comparison, but it does add weight to my argument.
Now for those aged 40+, I concede that men have the better deal. Assuming that a man can rise to the occasion and “get better with women,” those improvements will tend to stick with him and he’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of his labor even past his prime. With women, even makeup and plastic surgery can’t recapture her beauty after a certain point, and she will have more difficulty than the average guy of the same age.
Unfortunately the thread has gotten out of hand since the last time I read it, so maybe someone has covered this already, but…
In my experience most women will initiate romantic liaisons if the attractiveness of the man in question reaches a certain threshold. That threshold is when it becomes more dangerous he’ll get away and they’ll have no chance exceeds the risk that he won’t make a move. Only one friend of mine regularly gets female attention, and thats because he is exceptionally attractive. The female approach seems entirely based on the attractiveness gap between her and him. If he is objectively more attractive than her, she will make a move. If he is of equivalent attractiveness she won’t, because others of similar attractiveness will make their move so little is lost to the non-encounter. If he is above her attractiveness, however, she loses out by not acting. So, from a female perspective it seems most of her friends are willing to make a move if she is attracted, but to a male it seems females rarely make the first move.
Brandon, I’m skeptical about this. I’ve seen anecdotal reports by self-assessed ‘very attractive’ men who say they are always initiating (though this does not directly contradict what you’re saying). Moreover, I strongly suspect that the “objectively more attractive” judgment is not, in fact, objective, but instead is being made on the female hypergamous curve, where only a small portion of men are considered to be average-looking or better.
If I’m right about the above, then this:
… is not really contradicting what some of us are saying. Average women enjoy dating passivity privilege; average men are compelled to shoulder the significant psychic burden of constantly initiating and experiencing frequent rejection.
There is no “objectively attractive” or any objective way to measure attractiveness. While some people are considered attractive or unattractive by many people, it is not universal. When I’ve spoken with friends about which actresses and models we found attractive, there were some they found extremely attractive, while I found them average, and vice-versa. I have also spoken to women who do not find Brad Pitt to be attractive, and I never cared for the “heroin-chic” look of Angelina Jolie.
Pellaeon,
granted, makeup can have *some* effect. But it doesn’t turn people into someone else. As for the pornstar before/after collection, what is apparent is that the photographer wasn’t careful to consider that skin and powder reflect light differently. Many of the women seem to have skin problems, possibly because of all the makeup. Adjusted for lighting, I’d say that a lot of them look better without makeup. I think makeup works best accentuating features, it’s odd that heavy makeup use seems to have become the standard for an industry depicting the “most natural thing there is”. I guess that says a lot about the porn out there
That is true, I still consider it easier than changing one’s appearance, as long as it’s about physical features, not clothing or styling.
Yeah, that’s totally in line with everything I’ve seen on the matter, eg -http://jonmillward.com/blog/attraction-dating/cupid-on-trial-a-4-month-online-dating-experiment/
But that’s online. And remember that “reply” doesn’t equal reply. Most guys will send “spam” because of the specific nature of the medium. As the average quality of messages goes down, so does the incentive to reply, which, in turn, reduces the quality of messages, because the lower the expected return, the lower the incentive to invest. It’s a lemon-type market failure, and there’s no simple way around it. OKCupid actually had a post on their blog about this called “why you should never pay for online dating”, but the post got taken down after they were acquired by match. com
. It’s still out there, though, if you want to google it.
Make up itself claim to be natural-looking. That you ‘have’ to wear some to achieve a natural look.
Take an ugly woman and an ugly man into a bar/club or other dating meeting place. Ask a maximum amount of people of the other sex about having a one night stand.
Tally results.
I can guarantee she gets more.
I had ZERO people making advances and passes at me pre-transition. I’ve had a few offers since I did transition. Of unattached sex. I’m no model, and I have a penis. No problems. Still more generally “fuckable” (hereby defined as sexually attractive enough to be proposed sex) than pre-transition. I generally don’t wear make-up either. And I don’t even need confidence, or to be a size 0.
Great post Daran! I agree with many of the points you’ve made.
I think the biggest thing that Clarissa is missing is that men like Nav aren’t assuming that men aren’t allowing (or don’t believe) that women are capable of expressing their interests, but that women are expressing these interests through these subtle forms of communication. Men are expected to overtly initiate in the dating realm, but often women are initiating through these subtle means of communication, which for one reason or another, most men are not very adept at reading. Clarissa seems to believe that communication is verbal and direct, while that’s not entirely true. Studies have shown that at least as much of what is communicated from person to person is done so through non verbal means such as body language, gesturing, eye contact, and the like. I’m not talking about just in the dating realm, but rather in ALL human interactions. I’ve worked in sales for years and I’ve found this to be extremely true when communicating with customers. For example, if I say “this product is the best of it’s kind on the market,” while slouching with my arms crossed and avoiding making eye contact the recipient of that statement is going to assume I’m just telling them what they want to hear and/or lying to them, however if I make the same statement while standing up straight, not fidgeting, and making direct eye contact they’re going to believe that what I am saying is the truth. The words didn’t change, but the actions surrounding the words communicated very different intentions. To not acknowledge that this form of communication exists is not just disingenuous, it is down right wrong.
Lastly, the problem I have with most feminist dating advice I’ve seen is that it fails to acknowledge the male viewpoint as valid at all. In fact, often what they end up advocating, and what Clarissa advocates in her post, is the exact type of beliefs and behaviors that have led so many men to this state of confusion in the first place. The part in her post about men assuming women transmit their desires indirectly being false and leading to rape (I found the whole paragraph pretty offensive) and again emphasizing that men should not make a move unless a woman explicitly makes one first just continues to cycle of frustration for men who came to this state of confusion through the way they were raised in the first place. Many men are raised to respect women’s boundaries, to be polite, nonconfrontational, deferential even to the desires of women because to do the opposite could be seen as impolite at best and threatening at worst. This goes hand in hand with most feminist dating advice for men which essentially boils down to “treat her with respect, don’t impose your desires on her, acknowledge her choices, treat her like a person, and then throw in some bit about be yourself and have confidence.” That’s what the men who are asking for the advice have been doing all along! And while this advice all does have some merit, the merit it has is related to later on in the courtship process. What I mean is all of that stuff is great *after* the initial approach has been made and the two parties are trying to assess if they have similar goals for the potential relationship and if they are a compatible match.
It does not however do anything to solve the initiation paradox many men suffer from. Many men have noticed from experience that to get anywhere, they must initiate, however they have been conditioned to believe that somehow taking the initiative is disregarding the woman’s feelings, impolite, or even threatening. The problem with both the conditioning and the advice is that it ignores the male’s feelings in the matter and the environment in which they exist. If we lived in the polar opposite environment where women were expected to take the initiative than this would all be well and good. If we live in a more equal dating world where the initiation burden is shared then this would still be bad advice. In fact, it’s also contrary to the advice of respecting a woman’s feelings as it puts the onus on the man to determine her feelings when he really has no information to go on to determine what her feelings are, while sacrificing his feelings in the process. What they don’t seem to get is that by approaching (respectfully and nonthreatingly) and expressing his attraction and/or willingness to begin an interaction a man is just expressing his feelings, not disregarding hers, particularly if he believes he is responding to some sort of subtle clue. In fact, PUA’s do a much better job of balancing the “feelings conundrum” than feminists do with their concept of indicators of interest (IOIs) and how to respond to them (waiting until you receive 3 or 4 IOIs before making an overt move) while respecting everyone’s feelings. This way, a man gets to express his feelings for a woman, while making sure (or as sure as possible) he’s not overstepping his bounds or making her feel uncomfortable by waiting to make such a move until he’s received several IOIs.
Great post Steve. You make some points I was going to make myself.
On reading Clarissa’s comments again, I suspect that some of the problem may be the tendency of women to communicate partially using non-verbal cues, hints, implications and between-the-lines messages, while men tend to focus on just the words said. For many women, this non-explicitly verbalized communication is intuitive and obvious, while many men miss it entirely. This may be why Clarissa feels that women clearly express their attraction or non-attraction – leaving no need for interpretation of signals, while when I was younger I sometimes made the foolish mistake of interpreting “That sounds like fun, but I have plans this weekend – maybe another time” as meaning “That sounds like fun, but I have plans this weekend – maybe another time” rather than “I’m not into you, so don’t ask me out again.”
Schala,
well, there’s a claim that’s not backed up by reality
Yes, but that’s not exactly the appropriate comparison when it comes to possibilty to deal with the situation. I assume she will get few but more attention from men who want sex than the guy, but the guy has a better chance of improving his odds by changing his behaviour, say, become more outgoing and active, than she has, in my opinion.
Something I’m wondering about reading your comment above – when you say you get more attention post transition than before, does that mean guys who are aware of you being trans?
I gave her the same benefit of the doubt (I was “womanizer” on there) and I assumed this is the age-old misunderstanding where women think their subtle signals are “overt”.
However, that’s not what clarissa is talking about apparently. She really genuinelly means that women are OVERT – as in utterly and fully overt by male standards. I gave her the benefit of the doubt by posting a half-overt statment, and she mocked it:
So yes, she and her friend are mocking even 90% overt examples such as mine as being not overt enough, and being silly. So when she says overt, she really means overt.
In fact, when I gave Clarissa examples of what the typical woman thinks of as overt (using my female friends as examples), she called all my friends “neurotic”. She’s more of a misogynist than most overt male misogynists I know. She’s literally referring to most women on this planet as “neurotic” and that’s mind-blowing to me.
There are literally dozens of studies that also talk about how the average woman defines “overt”. Clarissa dismissed all those studies as being “pseudo-science”.
So I’m happy you’re giving her the benefit of the doubt you’d give the average woman talking about being obvious and overt with men, however clarissa is something else. She really genuinelly believes women are going around blatantly approaching, asking out men and asking them for sex (and these women are doing all of it first, without the man having had to show interest first).
And she believes no women EVER send NOT-overt signals.
I sense we might not be dealing with a rational person here… I might be wrong and she might be trolling us. Perhaps exaggerating for effect? I don’t get it, I really don’t. This is so many levels removed from objective reality I can’t believe someone can be arguing for it in any non-prank manner.
Racnad,
You might have a point there. If Clarissa was trying to say that the nonverbal cues women give is explicit communication that makes more sense than denying its existence totally. It is still problematic though because it ignores men’s position that this communication isn’t inherently obvious and requires a lot of “work” on the male part to properly recognize, interpret, and act on. She’s still diminishing a real problem many men face.
Sam,
I wouldn’t dismiss how “easy” it is for men to change their behaviors. I’m not really interested in getting into who has it better or worse, however whenever people bring up behaviors I’m reminded of something my former boss used to say. He said, “beliefs influence behaviors, behaviors influence results.” The problem for many men in the dating realm is confidence and confidence is a demonstrated ability to complete a task. It comes from experience. Therefore it is very difficult for a man who has never had any success (or marginal success) approaching women to behave confidently because he has no experience with success to influence his belief in himself in this regard. It can be quite a paradox since most men do realize that they need to be confident yet they have no idea *how* that is done. Additionally, for a lot of men trying to overcome obstacles in this arena, sheer confidence is not enough. It often also involves changes to one’s physical appearance (i.e. going to the gym, dressing better… a lot of the stuff prescribed to women trying to increase their attractiveness) as well as building out other parts of their lives (career, hobbies, interests), and confronting some nasty deep seated emotions. In short, it is not just a switch that men can flip, and in order to be successful many men need to dive deep down into their subconscious and really understand the feelings that make them tick, feelings that are not overtly apparent.
Lastly, men have a wider range of what they’d consider to be “acceptable attractiveness” than women. A woman deemed unattractive does need to put in work to get to that range, no doubt, however it can be done significantly quicker than a man who has to reprogram his entire existence. A few months working out regularly, a proper diet, some more stylish clothes, and some time spent learning how to apply makeup and an “unattractive” woman now has enough tools to generate enough interest to showcase her personality and have opportunities to get what she wants out of a relationship. Again, I’m not trying to diminish the challenges a woman faces trying to get what she wants out of the dating realm and the work that goes in to “becoming attractive” if she naturally is not. That would be unfair and would be short changing their viewpoints in the matter, which is something I accuse a lot of feminists doing to men who need help in the dating area. I’m just saying that the challenges facing each gender are very different, and to say men just need to adopt some behavioral changes doesn’t adequately depict how difficult that can be or necessarily what that process entails.
Thought so! I also thought you were being incredibly restrained with her … I mean, she was being really really shitty in her responses, which were almost a textbook example of how NOT to respond if you want to have a good faith dialog with someone. I suspect there was some element of trying to goad you into insulting her back, so she could then write you off as a troll or something, but from what I saw you successfully avoided taking the bait. Very impressive … not sure I would have had that level of patience with her.
Ballgame
I was actually not doing it for her, which is why her responses don’t matter.
I was doing it with the young man who might accidentally stumble on that page when googling queries trying to understand the confusion he is going through. This is whom I plan to have in mind from now on whenever I comment or respond to disinformation from feminists. I’m not interested in changing the feminists’s mind, I want the boy who stumbles on that discussion to get empowered to cut through the confusion.
Blog thingie:
All in all, we want to serve a double purpose for MGTOWs and future MGTOWs. We want to A) help young men who are being fed confusion by mainstream dating advice and disinformation from PUAs/feminists B) for those who do want to get laid, we want to offer a non-pua “how to get laid” methodology
About half our contributors are the celibate MGTOW kind, and the other half are the “leykis-kind” of MGTOWs with exceedingly above-average sexual lives (in terms of partner counts, one night stands etc we’re in the top 5-1% of men).
A full-ranging MGTOW embraces both the guy wanting to reach triple-digit partner counts, and the guy who wants to opt out entirely, and this is what our blog will be about. We’re Anti-pua, anti-(gynocentric)-feminist and especially anti-manosphere. It sickens me that the only alternative young men have to Clarissa type “be your psychomagically altered self and you will automagically get women throwing themselves at you” advice is to go to alternatives like PUA crap or manosphere crap. From my perspective it’s like “do I want to hang myself or shoot myself”, and I think young men deserve more choices.
Steve44
It’s important to recognize much research has been done on the subject and what’s been found is that it depends on the goals and contexts.
This is why social psychology research differentiates “short-term mating” and “long-term mating”, and each gender has differing criteria for each and which type of criteria applies when.
Men have much WIDER physical criteria for casual sex than women (i.e. a woman’s criteria gets narrower when she’s looking for sex, a man’s gets wider). The opposite happens when long-term mating is considered. Men actually have narrower physical criteria for relationships, and women the opposite, women’s criteria gets wider when considering potential partners.
TL;DR oversimplified, over-generalized version: Men would do almost anyone for a night, but prefer a beautiful woman for a partner. Women prefer handsome men for one nighters, but don’t care about looks when choosing a partner.
I think losing weight or getting very basic fashion advice (of the “don’t wear clashing colors kind”, not even remotely enough to read a magazine about fashion) is much much easier than changing behavior.
I’m awkward, shy, say inappropriate stuff, say too much (and can appear too friendly) when I’m just oversharing out of nervousness. I can’t make a move for the life of me. Changing that behavior would be pretty much impossible for me. Absent being reborn in another body.
I get division by 0 more attention from guys who don’t know, and hundreds more attention from guys (and some girls) who do know. Compared to pretty much no attention at all pre-transition.
I had a girlfriend when I was 16, who dated me obviously to help her damaged image as a druggy (kept dating pushers 10 years older than her, I was everything but, I was super clean nice almost goody two shoe, and close to her own weight (90-95 lbs at the time was mine)). She might have seen something in me, but I can’t see what. We drifted away from each other before 3 months. Never really connected, purely physical, and mostly experimental on my end. It confirms I’m probably pansexual.
We didn’t have sex for the record. My first sexual experience waited 9 more years, post-transition (and I never have or will get surgery).
I feel like there’s glass shattering in the background, AlexNovy. I made the error of talking to her directly. And I wound up biting and insulting her back (although I went for subtlety.) Kudos to you for not descending to her level.
I actually enjoy arguing stuff out with people (I think it’s an Indian thing) so my purpose was to have a conversation, maybe learn something new, maybe teach. But I guess that Clarissa’s not one of those people you can do that with.
May be off topic, but it you ever wanted an example of “elite men privilege,” here it is…
http://www.nypost.com/p/blogs/.....z2UnfnKA85
Let’s all try tweeting “I need 2 find a gf” and see how it goes.
Humans have shown an unlimited capacity to misunderstand each other. I think it’s absurd to imagine that communication is suddenly easy and obvious when its a woman communicating to a man.
Oh it’s simple really.
- When two het women misunderstand each other, this is a normal part of communication.
- When two het men misunderstand each other, this is a normal part of communication.
- When two lesbian women misunderstand each other, this is a normal part of communication.
- When two gay men misunderstand each other, this is a normal part of communication.
-When a het man and het woman misunderstand each other ITS ALL THE man’s fault!!!!! It’s impossible for misunderstandings to happen, men invent them to opress women. argggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrr
Social akwardness is a tool invented by the patriarchy to opress women through making them feel so uncomfortable they can’t function arghrhrhrhrh!!! 
Social faux pas do not exist!!!! Men pretend to be socially inept or inexperienced as a way of oppressing women through non-suaveness… and we all know all men can be super-suave at all times if they just psycho-magically turn on their super-mega-super-smoothness switch, they just choose not to in order to make women uncomfortably creeped out!!!!!!!
Man, I’m killing myself here hahaha
@Sam
I feel like there is a major disconnect in our underlying premises that needs to be addressed before we can come to anything resembling an agreement. I will try to summarize what I believe your underlying premise is, and once I’m sure that I understand your position properly, I will do my best to communicate mine:
If I understand you correctly, and please correct me where I’m wrong, you believe that a woman’s ability to achieve a satisfying sexual/dating/romantic encounter/relationship, as she defines it, is inextricably tied to her physical features. If I understand you correctly, you believe that while applying makeup, wearing sensual clothing, and decreasing body fat can improve her level of success by small degrees, ultimately, her physical features will forever limit her potential to improve her “success” by a harsh degree (unless changed by something drastic such as plastic surgery). If I understand you correctly, you also believe that a woman changing her behavior not only provides far less of a return on her investment than a man receives, but also provides little increase in her “success” period.
On another note, I apologize if I was too harsh in my previous replies. Now that I’ve had time to calm down, I am realizing that this subject is quite an emotional trigger for me.
Some other thoughts on the topic of “the friendzone.” It struck me the other day while I was contemplating your original reply to my post, that I did have some rewarding friendships with women whom I had originally wanted to date. This is not the epiphany though, the “eureka” moment was when I realized that I did not consider this friendships as “in the friend zone.”
I can’t speak to the experiences of other men, but when I think of “being in the friend zone,” I think of these one sided friendships that I referred to in my original post: “relationships” where a friendship superficially exists, but ultimately the imbalance of interest is so large that one side is consistently working overtime for the other with little to show for it… a “friendship” that ultimately does little more than drain the overworking side. The others, I just consider good friends that I’m attracted to, but I don’t experience the same sort of frustration with because I know that they are contributing equally to an actual friendship, not a farce of one.
Slight tangent: One of the things that consistently frustrates me when feminists speak about “the friendzone” is that they seem to believe that the term tends to apply to one or a few women that a guy is interested. It’s been not only my experience, but also the experience of several men I know, that “the friendzone” does not refer to a few isolated cases: instead, it tends to refer to a systematic pattern that covers the vast majority of a give man’s attempts to establish a relationship.
When I hear women speak about being stuck in “the fuckbuddy zone,” the vast majority of them give me the impression that it’s not an omnipresent pattern for them: instead, it seems to be a few isolated cases of chasing after particularly narcissistic men. Most of them seem to have solved the problem by changing the target of their affection – they advice that I tend to see women give to men. In my experience, changing which personality type I chase had no perceivable impact on the reception I received – they all fell under the pattern of the one sided “friend zone” relationships. It didn’t matter whether she was nerdy, overweight, popular, athletic, shy, outgoing, less intelligent, vulnerable, or narcissistic – they all tended to result in the same outcome.
In order for me to change the results I got, I had to spend months (technically we’re on years now, but for the sake of argument I’m sticking to when I first saw results) subjecting myself to hundreds of rejections , push myself to confront deep seated fears, and make myself vulnerable to shame and ridicule (mostly by my peers behind my back, but in a few cases to my face, and in the most hurtful cases by family members). Now I often pursue the exact same personality types, ie a wide range of women, but I’ve actually gotten dates in a few cases.
“Regarding the TV thing, I wonder if TV may actually present women as initiating more often than they do in reality, not the other way around. I don’t have any hard data on this, but there seem to be many scenes where “girl likes guy and while talking on the couch and watching TV she starts kissing him” (though not so many girl asks guy out on date scenes).
This could all be confirmation bias, but I think there’s something to it.”
I believe you are right about this.
Pellaeon,
I think “inextricably” is too hard a word, I’d say “in general”, as there is always a distribution of results. I am also, when I’m saying this, not to *all* women, but to those women at the bottom of the dehumanzing ten-point attractivity scale. My opinion is based on research I’ve once read about the different mating-choice algorithms applied by women and men. Men are, in general, much more concerned with physical features than women are, but they’re also more generous on the low end – take a male seven and a male 4, for example: they’d both date (and have sex with) all women from a 3 up. But *not* below, the 3′s a hard cutoff, and women below that threshhold will likely not not enter his consideration. On the other hand, a female 7 will be interested in 6-8s, a female 4 will be interested in male 3-5, not above and not below, but with the difference, that male 1s and 2s can make up for their perceived lack of physical attractivity by demonstrating other qualities, so they can become “a composite 4″, whereas men apparently do not as readily adjust their perceived attractivity levels based on qualities that are non-appearance related. It is only the women at the bottom of that distribution which are, I believe, particularly affected by this problem, and for whom, I believe, there is not much of a dating passivity privilege. For them, behavioral changes will not have a lot of return, and yet it *is* also the only thing they can do, similar to men at the bottom of the attractivity scale for whom the return of behavioral changes will be, I believe, higher. For women in the middle and top of the physical attractiviy distribution, I suppose the result of behavioral shifts would be less pronounced than for men of similar attractivity, but not as limited as they would be for women at the bottom of the attractivity distribution.
Will address the friendzone matter later.
“I was doing it with the young man who might accidentally stumble on that page when googling queries trying to understand the confusion he is going through. This is whom I plan to have in mind from now on whenever I comment or respond to disinformation from feminists. I’m not interested in changing the feminists’s mind, I want the boy who stumbles on that discussion to get empowered to cut through the confusion.”
I never thought of it that way but it is a great approach and I will try to use it from now on. I have lost almost all interest in trying to persuade feminists that are already familiar with most criticisms of feminism made by MRAs and other feminist sceptics. Still there are many that haven`t really been presented with the argument (at least amongst those who don`t spend a lot of time online) but those who have heard the arguments are unlikely to change their views any time soon, if ever. But persuading them is totally unnecessary. Win over everyone else and feminist activists that fail to take in the male perspective become irrelevant and loose all power. THEN a good chunk will change their views.
In my opinion male or female 1-2s are extremely rare.
If we consider that the average for both sexes is 5, 1-2s would represent not even 0.01% of people, just like IQ standard deviations and people with 20 IQ or with 180 IQ – extremely rare.
I don’t think saying “well, male 1-2s have it better than female 1-2s” amounts to much, the same way we could talk about the George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp of this world, they remain incredible exceptions, not generalizeable.
I also don’t think it’s easier for a male 1 or 2 to become a “composite 4″, unless he’s very rich. Becoming rich isn’t easy. A female 1-2 could just as easily become a “composite 4″ through plastic surgery then. Plastic surgery isn’t that easy to get (mostly pay for).
Pre-transition, I could estimate myself as having been a male 4. I was generally fit (not obese anyways), if only small boned, and small in height, with too-androgynous characteristics, but nothing like skin burns or disabilities which would plunge me at the bottom of scale.
Post-transition, I could estimate myself, when I was 120 lbs, as a female natural 8 (no make-up), now that I got weight up to 168 and back down to 140 lbs, I’d say a female 7. And if I’m known to be trans, a trans female 8-9 (compared to other trans women), or female overall 4 (as most people have prejudice towards trans women, especially regarding sex and dating, mostly dating).
I get more attention as a female-known-to-be-trans 4, than I did as a male 4. 4 is not equal in attention it seems.
This is an interesting discussion, even if I disagree with most people’s views. I certainly don’t think it’s a good idea for men to use concepts like “privilege” in this context (or in any other, really!), or to take the view that women have it better on average. Clarissa was really abrasive and imho rude but some of her points were probably valid.
It seems to me that men and women often just have very different experiences in dating and our desires, struggles and challenges are sometimes different. Beyond that, I’d tend to ignore any comparison. You can go round in circles with it for a long time but I think it’s best to embrace the experiences and challenges that crop up for you. Many women enjoy fashion, makeup, fitness etc. And surely men can enjoy the challenge of developing genuine confidence – and I do agree it’s a real challenge at times!
“take a male seven and a male 4, for example: they’d both date (and have sex with) all women from a 3 up. But *not* below, the 3’s a hard cutoff, and women below that threshhold will likely not not enter his consideration. On the other hand, a female 7 will be interested in 6-8s, a female 4 will be interested in male 3-5, not above and not below, but with the difference, that male 1s and 2s can make up for their perceived lack of physical attractivity by demonstrating other qualities, so they can become “a composite 4″, ”
Since there is no objective definition of what a female 4 or a male 6 is, by the time you make numerical ratings this granular it doesn’t make sense. There are men & women who are considered by most (but not all) people to be very attractive, not attractive or of average attractiveness. But I don’t think you’d find a complete agreement on whether specific men or women are 9s or 7s, or even 4s or 8s.
“Regarding the TV thing”…. When I was coming of age in the 80s/early 90s, depictions of single people in TV were either 1) a man & women meet each other and romance just happens, or 2) frustrated women trying to get the attention of men, all of whom seem to have lots of other single women chasing them, or 3) a man and women don’t get along, bicker & fight, then suddenly they’re making out & having sex. None of these, especially 3) had any relation to what I actually experienced. It wasn’t until Seinfeld in the mid-late 90s when I saw the dynamics of dating accurately portrayed. Before that, TV & movies rarely depicted the ambiguity in dating. There are more accurate depictions now.
SensitiveThug,
I think you are correct in stating that the challenges each gender faces are different, but not necessarily better or worse than one another. I find that those discussions to be entirely counterproductive and generally conclude with both sides saying something to the effect of “well you’ve never been a man/woman so you really have no idea what its like for a man/woman!”
That being said, I do believe women have more power to change their situation quicker than men. For men the common problem is always having to initiate and the confidence issues that are confronted with that proposition. The only way to change that is to battle those confidence demons head on. That is a long and tedious process. Any man who doesn’t initiate and doesn’t attack these demons will likely end up dateless and alone because of how society thinks the dating scene should work. Women on the other hand may not have trouble finding potential suitors, but may not actually get the suitors they want. The thing is, they have a much quicker (I’m not going to say easier) fix for this; approach the men they are interested in! There are certain pitfalls that go along with a woman taking this action. Some are the same as the pitfalls men face, and some are different, but the reality is they do have the option of to relatively quickly change their results. And, if enough women did this the entire dating system would be turned upside down and we’d have a much more egalitarian dating method where both men and women can approach. I think that end result is something that both feminists and shy guys would both like, but only women have the power to do something to enact that kind of change.
“She’s just not that into you. And when she is, no guessing and wondering will be needed.”
First off, as many have mentioned the phrase “playing hard to get” came into the lexicon for a reason. It exists. Women do it. Some of them not only don’t make their intentions clear but will “test” you and push you away to make sure you really like them.
But beyond that, I can’t tell you the number of times women told me “I assumed you had a girlfriend” or “I thought you might be gay” because I didn’t come onto them when I was apparently supposed to. The writer of this post isn’t alone in his experiences and I assume many other guys have heard this sort of thing.
So strike one for Clarissa.
A lot of time if a woman does come on strongly to a man, the guys is put off, thinking there is an ulterior motive or she’s “easy” and not long term material.
Strike two!
Finally, there is an entire “Seinfeld” episode about this called “The Phone Message.” The basis of the episode is that a woman asks George up to her place for coffee after a date and after he refuses because “caffeine keeps me up” he realizes “coffee doesn’t mean coffee — coffee means sex!”
So an entire episode was done about this by a program that’s arguably the greatest TV show ever. Strike three, Clarissa’s out!
Pellaeon,
I think you’re right about the differentiation of “friend zones”. I think the one-sidedness is an important aspect, though. One of the things that usually strike me as extremely hypocritical about feminist nice-guy-discussions is that they can only see one pattern of relationship with a guy who’s pretending to not have sexual interest and rarely even consider that women could be stringing along guys because it’s convenient for them. And between those two extremes there’s a plethora of individual cases where people have reasons to behave the way the do for their own reasons.
Of course, it’s about deep seated fears, some of which may be easier to address than others, I agree. And maybe my impression that some small changes are often enough (like adjustments to body language, posture) to get some encouraging results that help adjust the self-concept and increase the confidence, which, in turn, will create more positive results) is not as generally true as I consider it to be. And, of course, there may be people for whom changing behaviour is incredibly hard, possibly on par with changing physical features. Still, I don’t think that’s the case for most people, even most romantically challenged people.
Schala,
Well, I think that depends on the distribution of physical attractivity. I’m not sure it is a standard bell curve, I think there are a lot more ones and twos than you seem to believe. I’d say about 10-15%, but that’s just my perception.
True, physical surgery would be on par with the money aspect, but there’s a lot of other qualities that aren’t about wealth: being a good listener, being charming, funny, well dressed, etc. – all of there increase the “composite” attractivity of a man but won’t do a lot to increase the composite attractivity of a woman.
So few choices of clothing for men, I think well-dressed is way way way easier to achieve for women. And it actually expresses their personality some (suits do not, every men wears them, it means conformity, nothing else).
I don’t think “being a good listener” will get someone from across the room even consider you. Charming and funny, sure, but then he wouldn’t be a 1-2, he’d be a 9-10.
Most nice guys are good listeners, and it never got them a foot in the door. In fact, for some it put them right there in the Platonic bin.
Hello FCers,
Just wanted to join in on the discussion! I’ve long been a fan and have been reading along for at least a year or two. I also want to say that Schala brings up some very, very good points. Indeed, he/she reminds me very much of Norah Vincent’s excellent book, “Self Made Man”.
If I may, I’d like to offer a recent post of mine that directly speaks to the issues being discussed here; and I would be very interested what, if anything, all of you have to think about it as it relates to the current topic:
The Obsidian Files: Nemesis
http://obsidianraw.bravejournal.com/entry/133661
Thanks and keep up the good work!
O.
This isn’t so much the point, as Clarissa kind of has a point here.
She says “If you respect yourself” you wouldn’t want to be with women who play hard to get and be used and manipulated in a powerless position like that. She doesn’t deny women who play hard to get exist, she says you shouldn’t want to be with such women.
That perspective is actually very valid, and I happen to hold it, as do all the people at Mating Selfishness:
http://matingselfishness.wordp.....-into-you/
This is the point – Clarissa says that no such women exist. She lives in a very black and world reality. Apparently women are either A) manipulative, narcissistic and play games or B) Utterly overt and unambigious women who rip your clothes off, pin you against a wall and tell you to fuck them hard
She literally denies that most of the population as existing by denying group C, which is most mortal human beings which are well-intention-ed, but insecure and ambiguous.
Also relevant:
http://matingselfishness.wordp.....-proposal/
Well, I’m a trans woman, and I’ve “lived it” most my childhood, and some early adulthood, compared to her trying a year and a half in adulthood, but with “an exit door”, such as being able to disclose to people. I couldn’t transition until I did. I mean, I couldn’t “disclose I was a girl” the way she could.
@Schala:
All true; nevertheless, what you and Vincent do share in common was the fact that you two had up close and personal insight into what it’s like to actually “play for the other team” for an extended period of time – something the vast majority of us simply do not have.
I have also told Women in particular, that they really cannot discuss topics like pickup unless or until they’ve actually gone out and done it, AS A MAN. Otherwise, it’s little more than Keyboard Jockeying.
O.
I haven’t really done pickup though. I know what it’s like being unable to do so and being told to suck it up, man-up, and go do it anyway, though. And to have zero results if you don’t.
I’ve always said that any woman dishing out dating advice to men is by definition keyboard jockeying, by definition. In fact I have an article in the MS drafts queue that defines keyboard jockeys and says the same.
That isn’t to say that a keyboard jockey never can give good advice. If I read the stuff I wrote many, many years ago when I was a keyboard jockey, I can see that some of the advice/opinions I had were good, most however were not.
The same is true with women who’ve never been a man giving advice to men on how to date – they are keyboard jockeys.
@Schala:
Yes, again I don’t disagree; still, I maintain that you do possess a unique perspective on these matters. For example, I think you do make a highly legitimate point on the real differences between a Male 4, and a Female 4; because the sexes desire different things from each other, it is clear that the latter can and will have more dating success, however one wishes to define it, than the former, all things being equal (now of course, if the Male 4 compensates with some Game, all bets are off).
O.
“Most nice guys are good listeners, and it never got them a foot in the door. In fact, for some it put them right there in the Platonic bin.”
I just wanted to address this point specifically…
At one point Hugo Schwyzer gave dating advice…
His point was be an “active listener.”
While I think it is a great skill and can benefit one personally and in one’s work life…
He seemed to ignore the first steps…
It’s like giving an unemployed person job advice…
“Show up to the interview 5 minutes early, dress well, speak well…”
While that IS good advice, he ignores the guy who can’t even get a job interview and the attitude seems to be…
“Oh, you can’t get an interview, it must be because you have spelling errors on your resume. If you have spelling errors on your resume, it means that you will be a bad employ because you will steal. It doesn’t matter that there are CEO’s that steal millions, the employer can magically tell YOU are flawed. The real reason you can’t get an interview is because you hate the free market and employers can magically sense that…”
@AlekNovy:
100% agree with your position. Even if the advice is well-meaning, it is Keyboard Jockeying, still.
Although I must say that I find your particular critiques of Pickup interesting. Maybe we can discuss that sometime?
O.
No,
unlike PUAs I have an education and a life, and I will waste neither on arguing with people who have neither (manospherians, puas, “game” peddlers). That phase is long gone. Feel free to argue at aaron sleazy’s place. It’s the last such venue that hasn’t shut down yet. Most (like me) have moved on since we have rich lives and lifestyles offline or are entrepeneurs etc etc...(You are free to decline Osbidian’s suggestion of course, but please do so in a less insulting manner — Daran)
@AlekNovy:
Easy, star. No harm, no foul, LOL. Was just curious, because I’ve been quietly following your writings here and elsewhere on the matter, and was just curious about them is all. I support your right to feel whatever you like about Game; just was intriguied by your particular take on the whole thing.
O.
If the male 4 changes who he is to appear more confident, more charming, etc, he might have to keep up appearances during the relationship, or every time he wants a date or sex. He’s not being himself, unless heightening his value and narcissist tendencies (which are part of Game and The Rules) are part of who he is.
I can heighten my value by being sexually willing, doing stuff many wouldn’t, and being good at it. Doesn’t change who I am, since I mostly am sexually willing and curious. I just don’t do one-off stuff. This stuff is unlikely to get me a foot in the door by itself (except on BDSM sites or something), but it costs me nothing, unlike keeping up Game appearances can cost others.
Alternatively, both the male and female 4 can select only compatible people, who will not play games in any way. This probably makes dating for non-serious stuff mostly impossible, though.
@Schala:
“Alternatively, both the male and female 4 can select only compatible people, who will not play games in any way. This probably makes dating for non-serious stuff mostly impossible, though.”
O: LOL. Dating, like mating itself, and virtually all of life itself, is a game indeed, has its rules, and will always have its rules. Shaking our fists at God will not change this.
Female 4s can get action by punching above their weight, and in fact do it all the time. A simple afternoon or evening spent people watching in varied venues easily bears this out. In that Women, like all females in nature, are the more valuable sex, they possess something that most Men want. Now all things are relative of course, and a Female 4 has to understand that her chances of being able to lockdown a say, Male 7 for an LTR, is slim to none; but him doing her on the short term tip, from anything ranging from a ONS to a FWB kind of deal on the down low? Yea, she can definitely get that.
Now, compare that to the Male 4. Again, barring any kind of interventions, of which Game is one and perhaps the most pragmatic, cost effective and results oriented, his chances of punching above his weight are all but toast; the best case scenario is that he’s making a lateral move for the Female 4, otherwise, he’s gotta be willing to step down at least one point on the scale, if not several.
O.
Obsidian: Welcome to the blog.
Schala,
Being noticed from across the room probably isn’t the most important thing. Being interesting in a conversation much more so. I’ve recently talked to an incel who’s made a documentary about a year in his life, and he said he’s meeting tons of women, he just cannot relate to them romantically – at all. And while it may be difficult to change behavior – and it may be a big deal subjectively – it’s often small behavioral changes that seem to make big differences…
I wanted to comment on one specific claim about changing behaviour. It’s true that if you’re working out, you don’t have to pretend you like it. You can swear and frown and whatever, and the workouts will nevertheless improve your health and your body.
Confidence, on the other hand, might at first glance require faking it. It’s pretty hard to actually feel that you’re confident about dating if you’ve this far had no success with it. It’s pretty hard to feel confident that you’re worth loving, if this far no woman seems to have discovered this.
But there are ways to avoid that problem. What I discovered (and wish I’d known a decade earlier) is that it doesn’t so much matter *what* you’re confident about. If you aquire *actual* good skills in something or other, no matter what, then it becomes pretty natural to be confident in that area. If you can outplay Knopfler, then it doesn’t require any pretense to be confident about your playing. And while practicing the guitar, you can swear as much as you like and it’ll still work just fine.
The thing I didn’t know, is that women will respond very positively to your confidence, even if the thing you’re confident about is unrelated to dating. In my case, I happen to love the outdoor. And I was a very active everything-outdoor kinda guy from age 11.
I discovered pretty much by accident that all I needed to do was find some women interested in nature/animals/hiking (not hard, here in Norway anyway, just go to the biology-dept at Uni), do something outdoorsy with them, and after that, a very good fraction of them will consider me desirable and from that point there’s no troubles.
Basically, I discovered that if I play “pick up girls in a bar/nightclub” I was a 3, mostly due to being fucking poor at it. But that girls who’d spent some time backpacking with me, would tend to consider me a 8. The difference really was that dramatic.
For me, faking confidence would’ve never worked. But being confident that I know my way around basically anything outdoors ? Hell yeah, that’s not faking, that’s -actual- experience. My point is, you can’t really get good at dating without dating. But you -can- get confident about your outdoor-skills (or anything else) without involving anyone buy yourself.
Gunnar,
I think that’s good advice in line with what’s often said about meeting women when doing things you like.
@ Gunnar and Sam
That’s a good point, but (I’m just thinking out loud here) one problem is certain interests and skills, particularly various geeky ones, are very very heavily male dominated (and won’t be appreciated by many women) and/or are relatively solitary hobbies/skills.
I could be very good at a certain competitive video game, for instance, and sure all my geeky guy friends will think I’m a bad ass, but most women won’t care. There’s scarcity here, there’s more guys that are really really good at competitive video games than there are women who will appreciate such a skill/interest (a female example may be something like fashion design). This scarcity applies to many geek interests.
I think this is partially why geeky guys are disproportionately less successful at dating, even if they don’t fit into the socially awkward geek stereotype. The ratio of people who are into geeky stuff is very heavily skewed towards the male side.
BTW, this applies to certain female interests too, like fashion design, and it isn’t necessarily all “geeky” stuff either.
LTP,
sure, but, well, don’t you think most people have some interests that aren’t characterized by such gender spreads? And even if not, don’t you think that the whole romance aspect would warrant some effort to find such interest? I mean, it probably doesn’t have to be nail-painting, but there’s lots of stuff people do together. Choirs and musical ensembles, theatre, acting, reading clubs, some sports, hiking, jogging, dancing, of course – maybe debating. A lot of geeky girls like debating societies as a way to socialize “logically”, in my opinion. Even videogaming – why not singstar with a couple of friends in the living room instead of people somewhere online?
I mean, if your point is that it’s probably not going to work out for people with that particular inclination towards solitary entertainment if they don’t do anything about that, then, sure, you’re probably right. But I’m not sure it’s that hard to (for people without serious social anxieties) to find some hobby that’s more likely to lead to romantic encounters.
I don’t know what kind of demographics does Karaoke for fun online, but it’s probably not the hardcore gamer crowd of 18-35 mostly-men.
None of those activities you named are stuff I would do. But then, I prefer to not socialize much. Social occasions are a bother. Lots of people, noisy, don’t know how to react/act in front of new people, and boring.
I want a partner to do solitary stuff with. Who does either the same stuff (out of interest, not obligation) or on their own side most of the time. Same as my boyfriend. I’ve love if he played the MMO I play, but I can also stomach each having our own time-taking hobby and spending most time on our own, with some together-time on weekend.
@LTP:
“That’s a good point, but (I’m just thinking out loud here) one problem is certain interests and skills, particularly various geeky ones, are very very heavily male dominated (and won’t be appreciated by many women) and/or are relatively solitary hobbies/skills.”
O: BOOM!-and indeed, I recently made precisely the same point:
“As for “doing well wherever you can”, that doesn’t necessarily translate into mating currency, Nomada. Being “well wherever you can” doesn’t automatically mean that you will be able to convert that into being able to get a desirable mate. The answer is, that it *can* – which is incredibly context dependent – again, see Buss above. Those who possess more of what Women the world over desire, are in a better position to “do well wherever they can”, AND to convert this “wellness” into real mating currency out on the open dating and mating market. ”
In sum: bottomline, you gotta develop interests and the like that actually net you what you want from the ladies, be that in short or longer terms.
More here:
The Obsidian Files: Nemesis
http://obsidianraw.bravejournal.com/entry/133661
O.
I had some people on my private blog complain that you censored all comments not friendly to the PUA cult.
I thought they were exaggerating or making stuff up.
@Sam
I take your point, many do end up finding partners through other interests eventually, but I still think that some people really do struggle to find non-solitary, non-male dominated interests; it’s not as easy as you make it sound for certain personality types (that isn’t a euphemism for social anxiety or Asperger’s btw).
I guess I just thought that Gunnar wasn’t acknowledging that the outdoorsy stuff he mentioned is convenient for finding female partners, so I wanted to point out interests that were less “female friendly”.
@LTP: I agree, it’s not easy for everyone, nor is all interests suitable “ice-breakers”. But I still think that for atleast a fraction of lonely men with poor dating-success, “get confident at *SOMETHING* that you can do with women” is easier to do than “get confident at *DATING*”.
The problem with the “be confident at dating” advice is that for many of us it’s darn close to impossible to convincingly come of as confident in something we actually have very little experience and even less success with. And you cannot practice dating without dating. In contrast, you *can* practice many other skills that work well as ice-breakers without having to involve women in your practising.
Yeah, outdoors stuff works well for a multitude of reasons. It means often being just the two of you for hours or days. There’s many opportunities for taking people out of their comfort-zones, experiencing something exciting. And there’s plenty of research that shows excitement rubs of, i.e. people (both genders) tend to think “you’re exciting” even though what actually happened is “I did something exciting together with you.” It’s conventionally macho in several ways, yet *also* gives plenty opportunity to show of softer sides. Carry heavy shit. Guide. Lead. Take leadership. Yet also marvel at the beauty of a view, or spend an hour on a hill, spying on the hilarious antics of the new-born foxes on their first days in the sun and share a glass of wine by the campfire under the stars.
But perhaps more importantly, a benefit of doing something that is called something other than dating, is that there’s less downside. A “date” where no romantic feelings surface, easily feels like a failure, a fun day doing something you actually love doing, with someone nice, isn’t a failure even if at the end of the day, none of you feel anything more than friendship.
@Gunnar (Cool name!):
You make some legit points; the problem though, is the notion of going somewhere with a Woman, just the two of you, *alone*. As a rule, Women don’t get down like that, at least not early on anyway. Meeting Women in a more social, i.e., with other people around, is the optimal way to go.
If you’re the geeky type, you can hit up something like a Comic-Con or a Sci-Fi/Horror film festival or something like that. This achieves the dual aim of doing something closer to your own interests while at the same time being social with her out and about other people.
As for “dating”, I’d recommend the following:
Cafe Date Theory (The GMP Remix)
http://obsidianraw.bravejournal.com/entry/104672
Please, try it out and report back the results!
O.
That’s pretty silly, AlekNovy. You’re letting your own perspective distort your perceptions of us on this issue. We don’t censor anyone critical of PUA any more than we do anyone else. If anything, I think we’re pretty easy-going about it. If PUA were a feminist thing, for example, we wouldn’t let people call it a “cult” or call its practitioners “PUAtards.” The plain fact is, if someone engages in ad hominem attacks or insults, they’ll get hit with the ‘red pen’ at FC, pretty much regardless of who their target is (at least on gender issues).
Like Hugh Ristik and you, I think there are aspects of PUA and ‘game’ that are toxic. But then I think there are many aspects of this culture’s male gender role in dating that are pretty toxic as well. In a culture where male vulnerability and authenticity are often scorned in favor of ‘social dominance,’ I can well understand why some men would gravitate towards a ‘system’ that appears to promise a way to deal with this. My understanding of it is pretty casual and I have no idea whether it ‘works’ or not; I’ve generally assumed that your observations in this arena are more accurate than not.
You’re clearly an extraordinarily intelligent person, AlekNovy, and I greatly appreciate many of your insights. I like seeing you comment here, but when you occasionally slip into ‘ad hom’ mode or use language that’s borderline offensive, you’ll get hit with the red pen like everyone else.
Obsidian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar
@Ballgame:
Wrt AlekNovy: thanks, Man.
But, I don’t take any of what he said personally in the least, because he doesn’t know me or anything about me, or what I’m about. I just think his particular take(s) on a number of Sexual Politics-related issues is interesting and I actually agree with some of his points and arguments.
Again, thanks!
O.
>In fact, at that time in my life, if someone had told me that I was beautiful and desirable, I would have felt I was being made fun of.
This actually happened to me.
A rather depressing number of times, actually.
Gunnar made an interesting point with his post about hobbies and their usefulness in attraction. I thought the statement, “A “date” where no romantic feelings surface, easily feels like a failure, a fun day doing something you actually love doing, with someone nice, isn’t a failure even if at the end of the day, none of you feel anything more than friendship.” was an important one that should be expanded upon. Most feminist dating advice misses the underlying problem that leads men to seek dating advice in the first place. That is, men are taught from the time they are children to work hard at something you are good at in order to be financially stable enough to support a family, and to be polite, kind, and considerate of people, particularly women. These ideas aren’t inherently evil and can be a somewhat useful guide for a man trying to build his life, however they miss an important point. That point is that, whatever you pursue, it should be for yourself with your own happiness coming first and foremost.
The reason this distinction is important is because if a man grows up believing that he needs to behave a certain way with regard to the direction he takes his life he ends up conveying neediness through determining one’s self worth through the perceptions of others. Neediness is not an attractive quality and when one’s behaviors are influenced by it, it becomes apparent to women and is a turn off. And when a man who has been taught his whole life that he must fulfill certain obligations (financial stability, being a “gentleman” being examples) in order to be seen as a suitable mate and is consequently shot down for being “needy” it can be particularly damaging and confusing. After all, he’s been pursuing his career, his hobbies, building his lifestyle around what is supposed to make him and attractive mate and achieve what society deems a successful existence (starting a family, for example). So when these things don’t “work” he can feel like a complete and utter failure. His own happiness gained throughout his pursuits and endeavors is secondary to becoming what society deems successful. The end is supposed to be where the happiness comes in, and everything leading up to it is just work that must be done to achieve said happiness rather than achieving happiness throughout the entire journey. The kicker is, women are more likely to find the guy who is pursuing his dreams, who is not eschews playing it safe in favor of doing what he’s passionate about, who is not afraid to fail and is happy doing what he wants without fear of judgment from others more attractive than the guy who does everything “right.”
The reason I quoted Gunnar is that this sentiment is exactly what is expressed in his statement. He enjoys being outdoors and activities associated with that for no other reason than because that is what he enjoys doing. If a woman spends time with him doing these things and still doesn’t find him attractive, it’s not big deal because he’s happy doing something he loves anyway. But if his motivation in pursuing these activities were to use them to prove that he’s somehow an acceptable mate (adventurous, independent, tough, etc) then his interactions with women in these settings would be more likely to fall flat. And even if he did have some successes, he wouldn’t gain as much enjoyment as that would be entirely tied to the reactions of women rather than his enjoyment in pursuing the activity himself.
A lot of feminist dating advice (and a lot of dating advice in general) never addresses this problem. Feminist dating advice has the pitfall of either assuming its recipient falls into one of two camps; the clueless, severely socially anxious, and the losers (hence the advice “shower daily, wear deodorant, go to therapy, get out of your mother’s basement and get a job, etc) or those who just need a little refinement and encouragement (be yourself, be respectful, be a good listener, and the like type of advice). What they fail to realize is that these two camps are only a small portion of the men seeking this advice. The majority of them are normal guys who are successful in other aspects of life, but still not successful in dating and aren’t happy because they’re living their lives for the acceptance of others.They often don’t acknowledge that this is a real problem in society. It is the reason why the guy who loves playing the guitar growing up and gets good grades in math becomes an accountant when he grows up, works 60 hours a week, makes a good salary yet hates his job despite his talent at it because he really wants to play in a rock band but “can’t” because musicians don’t make that much money. It’s also why he’s alone while the guy who is unemployed but in a band and lives on his friend’s futon has more action than he knows what to do with. The first guy is living a lie, he’s not doing what he wants to do and is only doing what he does for acceptance, while the second guy could care less about what others think about him and is happy because he’s doing what he loves. It’s a bit of an oversimplification, I know, but it demonstrates the larger point.
In addition to the points Steve44 brings up, I do think that hanging out doing something you actually enjoy reduces another male dating-problem, namely the fact that rejection hurts. If you go on a “date”, where romance and/or intimacy is assumed to be the goal, then if neither happens you’re assumed to be rejected. Of course it could be that you rejected her, but society tends to assume that “men are always willing” (we know it’s not true, but that doesn’t stop society from assuming it) thus if intimacy -don’t- happen, it must be because you’re a looser who couldn’t cut it.
This doesn’t happen if you go visit Pulpit Rock http://www.flickr.com/search/?.....#038;s=int with a woman who subsequently fails to kiss you. Also, if you get a no when you ask, the most likely reason is that the activity suggested doesn’t appeal to her, so even here the rejection is softened.
And you can do something that I don’t think any man who’s not atleast a 9 can do for dates.
You can log on to Fitocracy (or your choice of social platform), go to some group appropriate to the activity in question and say: “I’m heading up to pulpit rock this saturday. Anyone wanna accompany me?”
I don’t think “I’m kinda alone this saturday, anyone wanna date me?” would work, instead it’d mark you as needy and patetic and thus automatically not-worthy.
“The trouble is, the only people who could possibly believe that the patent recipe will actually work for low-status men are people who aren’t low-status man.”
It doesn’t even work for them. High status men don’t just sit back and wait for warm vagina’s to jump on their penises. High status men put a lot of effort into getting women. Read about Steven Tyler:’
“When asked in an interview in Elle magazine if he was ever rejected by a woman, Tyler replies, “Never. I’m a persistent motherf**ker. I’m very sensual and very rhythm-oriented and into poetry. Women can feel that.”
Nobody is waiting around for women to desire them. Its idiotic. Even male animals are not waiting.
“To those claiming that the world of dating sucks for women just as bad as it does for men, because they’re not getting exactly what they want, either: I have to confess I really don’t have a lot of patience for this view…It is in the vast middle that women — at least, pre-menopausal women — seem to have a decided advantage, as even the female feminist writing in john’s link appears to concede. It may be that women have a greater interest in LTRs than men, but even if that’s true (and I don’t know that it is), a person’s ability to get into a LTR with a person they want is closely correlated with their ability to get into a casual one. If you have 40 suitors, you’re much more likely to connect with someone you want to spend an extended amount of time with than if you have two (or zero).”
I don’t agree with this at all. And I have always had a basic theory which is that women and men by necessity of mathematics have to have as difficult a time in dating as each other on average. This is simple math. There are equal numbers of men and women. Every single man implies a single woman. Every man who has difficulty with connecting implies a corresponding woman who has difficulty connecting. If you are saying all the women are in relationships but men are single it implies that there are a lot of women dating one man or in relationships with 1 man. In my experience the vast majority of heterosexual relationships are one man and one woman. Polyamory is the exception not the norm. I don’t understand how your argument makes any mathematical sense.
Its funny because I much less sympathetic to feminists than you are. But this is one area where I completely disagree with a lot of MRA’s and other men.
There are a huge number of women who have difficulty getting men and entering relationships. Its definitely not easier for women than men.
Where I sharply disagree with feminists is that men don’t have to initiate and the enormous criticism of men for their dating behaviour. Men are forced to initiate due to female passivity. You can’t criticize someone for doing something if your not willing to step up to the plate and do it yourself.
“So I guess we do agree on a lot, but given that you are articulating an explicitly feminist critique on a site called “feminist critics” which is clearly populated exclusively by men… well, you must understand my skepticism and hesitation, yeah?”
I don’t. I’ll ask you one question: Why do you care what other people think? Maybe because your not anonymous and there could be reprisals. But basically your whole comment tells me that your really worried to see your name used in a context you don’t identify with.
“Eve Kofosky Sedgwick, for example, carefully laid out the exact ideas you’re talking about, as did Butler and, well, literally every serious feminist writer ever. Even the most radicaly French feminists like Cixous and Kristeva and Irigiray”
I am not sure anyone can argue with you about any of those writers. I haven’t read a single one. But why even bring them up and you haven’t quoted anything from any one of them. So there is nothing to argue with. But we aren’t talking about them anyways. We are talking about what you wrote and Clarissa’s response.
[I'm not going to bump or temporarily moderate your comments here for this, but FTR we strongly discourage the posting of multiple consecutive comments in the NoH threads unless significant time has passed (like 12 hours). I did bump one of your comments to the RP thread for an entirely different reason, FWIW. Also, it would be helpful in the future if you would spell out who you're quoting or addressing.—ballgame]
When you factor in feminine hypergamy, the mathematical basis for the imbalance becomes clearer, assman. Even leaving aside polyamory (which, after all, can be either overt or covert), you could have ‘sexually elite’ men (men who are high status and/or very physically attractive and/or exceptionally gifted interpersonally) engaging in serial monogamy with a large number of women with very little pause between one partner and the next, while average men would have occasional relationships but with long dry spells in between, with pre-menopausal women of at least average attractiveness having fewer partners than elite men but more than average men.
Under such a scenario, you would expect to find more women complaining about men’s reluctance to commit to a long term relationship (or talking about the ‘hard work’ of moving a relationship ‘to the next level’) because they are disproportionately dealing with men at the upper end of the scale who have many more options dating-wise and may be reluctant to foreswear having relationships with other women. Clarisse Thorne and others have suggested that this is true in comments here.
ballgame, I think I understand your theory on feminine hypergamy, but do you have any evidence that supports the theory beyond the OK Cupid poll in that post? I think this rather weakly supports the theory when considered against the ‘common wisdom’ that women don’t date for looks. The different distributions of physical attractiveness might not actually result in different distributions of overall attractiveness or dating appeal. Do any of the many studies that survey number of sexual partners people have had in their lives publish the distribution of that number within gender group?
@ Desipis
It also is conventional wisdom that women feel they have to “settle” more than men, which could only be true if women had at least some hypergamous tendencies.
Of course, I think that most men have, to some degree, hypergamous tendencies when it comes to looks at least (that is, men tend to want to date women “above” them in attractiveness), it’s just that because men are in the active role in the dating script (and women in the gatekeeper role), these preferences aren’t able to fulfilled very much.
Great question, desipis. I don’t have “hard” evidence, but I do see cultural phenomena that are consistent with feminine hypergamy. The fact that it’s entirely possible for many women to have an active romantic life without ever initiating (either for dating or sex) can be logically seen as partially due to feminine hypergamy, as can the fact that heterosexual prostitution is largely about men paying and women selling. Neither of these things proves the existence of feminine hypergamy, but they can be at least partially explained by it if you accept the notion that men and women have roughly comparable sex drives.
I have not come across such a survey, but I’d love to look at one if anybody else has and can post a link!
Just a reminder, LTP, that when I use the term “hypergamous,” I’m not referring to the idea that people of both sexes find the most attractive people to be the most attractive (which after all is a tautology). Given a choice, everyone would prefer to date the people they find the hottest, all other things being equal. I’m referring specifically to the phenomenon of rating average people to be below average, which is something that (hetero) women appear to do and (hetero) men don’t.
Some caveats: I don’t think feminine hypergamy is “fixed” but can vary in intensity in different cultures. Also, it’s not clear how much men’s preference for pre-menopausal women tilts the scales here.
Your limited hypergamy definition differs from the usual, for example Paul Elam’s:
The term is associated with MR/antifeminist circles, and implies a vague, albeit strong, condemnation of women’s relationship choices. However, what foodstuff you use to catch the wandering
feminist fliesis no concern of mine.[Please, no vilifying language. —ballgame]
Leaving aside the “better deal themselves” phrase for the moment, Jackso, that definition is definitely not what “hypergamy” refers to when we use the term here. “Hypergamy” (both here and elsewhere) refers specifically to female mate preference and is unrelated to “moral constraints or social prohibition.” A woman can be full of “moral constraints” and obey all social mores and still be “hypergamous” both by the specific definition used here (i.e. she rates average men as subpar) and by the more common definition (is looking to marry above her class).
Paul’s definition sounds more like a sort of generalized ‘female supremacy’-type attitude, which is different (although I could certainly see how ‘female supremacists’/anti-male bigots would likely look down at average males and would therefore tend to be hypergamous if they were heterosexual).
The final edit of your comment suggests that Paul was specifically referring to women’s mating behavior with the “better deal themselves” phrase, but this does not seem to me to be a tendency associated only with women or necessarily connected to the concept of hypergamy.
@assman: It’s not a mathemathical certanity that women and men must have the same troubles finding a partner. For example it’s possible (and plausible) that a few men have no troubles finding many partners, while many men have troubles finding even one.
I don’t have hard numbers for that for dating — but I do for children and for marriage, and both seem like reasonable proxies. In both cases, there are significantly more men than women who have zero children and zero marriages.
The reason, of course, is that there’s -also- more men who are married twice or more, or who have children with 2+ women than vice versa.
A simplified example illustrates. Imagine a society of 2 women and 2 men. The women both (one after the other) marry the same man and get a child by the same man, the other man remains single. In this society 100% of the women get married and 100% of the women get children — yet the same number for men is 50%.
@kilo I think you’re precicely right. I’ve kept following the comment-thread at Clarissas, and she just keeps making more and more ridicolous statements, by now she’s basically arrived at “the world is flat”. It does not seem possible that she actually believes her own claims at this point, so her actual goal must be something else.
Example from a recent comment: “Consent is always verbal among humans. Because humans are verbal. You will get all this when you grow up.”
This is patently absurd, I don’t think you can actually believe that — that consent is -always- verbal among humans. I don’t even think as much as 5% of the consent among humans is verbal, not even if we limit the statement to consent to sex which was the topic.
Dating game feminism really irks me.
Ladies, don’t do that.
I think I may be the female equivalent of the sort of guy-without-game y’all are describing. I have actually asked out a guy I was interested in exactly once, and even though I was pretty sure he was going to say yes I had to spend a week psyching myself up to do it. After finally asking I felt physically drained and shaken. The thought of letting a guy know I’m interested in him makes me feel exposed, and I panic like an agoraphobe in the desert.
I’m bad at social signals–both interpreting and sending them. I only learned recently that, if you enjoyed your first date with a guy, you’re expected to send him a follow-up text saying “That was really fun. We should do that again sometime.” I don’t know how to flirt. A few times I’ve realized after the fact that a guy was flirting with me and I shut him down without meaning to by not flirting back.
I get asked out about once or twice a year. Maybe twice in five years have I gotten the impression that a guy liked me enough that I could have started a relationship if I wanted.
From my experience, I have 2 points to add to this discussion:
1 – I expect that a man at my same level of social-skills/attractiveness, who was as passive as I am, would get no dates at all.
2 – That being said, women *do* need social skills. A shy, socially anxious girl will have much less success than an outgoing one. A socially smooth woman knows how to be “actively passive” and to pursue a man without necessarily telling him she likes him in so many words. Because I don’t do that, the odds of finding a guy I “fit” with are slim.
3 – On top of that, I can’t shake the irrational feeling that if I did ask out a guy, I would be something of a failure *even if he said yes* because I should have been attractive enough for him to pursue. My roommate’s brothers used to make fun of the girls who brought them cookies and call them “desperate.” I am, ironically, desperate not to seem desperate. I know that if I got over this hang-up I could be happier and more successful, but sometimes you can’t just *get over* hangups. They’re part of your psychological makeup, which is why I’m sympathetic to guys who can’t bring themselves to take on the initiator role.
Great points, Stella. Welcome to the blog.
@stella: I’m sad that you feel unattractive if a guy you are interested in doesn’t take on the initiator role. Bringing cookies is pathetic regardless of the situation. I remember considering hiring a woman for my team until she brought us cookies. We felt it was a weird and desperate move & didn’t pursue her further. I think that a woman can make a move (minus the cookies) on a guy she’s interested in and feel empowered whether or not he is interested and responds accordingly. It doesn’t matter how attractive you are – some people are more introverted than others and it’s usually the more extraverted one that makes a move, regardless the gender. I’ve been a relationship for over ten years now & I have a headhunting company, so I tend to measure relationships based on my experience with the latter. People are people & if attraction is there it will be expressed in one way or another. If someone plays games of the hard-to-get variety they are just not worth your time. This is what my sister (Clarissa) has been trying to convey. Not sure her point has really been understood though.
I realize I’m repeating what has been said earlier, but the problem is not that Clarissa was misunderstood, Sister. The problem is she simply doesn’t grasp the situation that most men find themselves in, and instead of listening to their very reasonable attempts to explain, she dismissed and insulted them … repeatedly.
That’s not actually true, but let’s take it as true for the sake of argument. The problem is that ‘expressing attraction’ is not the same as ‘unambiguously expressing attraction’. Attraction can vary widely in intensity — even for the same person at different times — so when you couple that variable with the variable of how clear/ambiguous that expression is, you end up with the frustrating fog that initiators have to deal with when those initiators (i.e. men) a) are trying to avoid being rejected, and b) trying to avoid harassing (or being seen as harassing) someone who isn’t interested in them sexually.
To take a very simple example, “I think you’re cute!” could be an expression of sexual interest … or it could be a reassuring ego stroke from a caring but platonic friend. It is neither “playing hard to get” nor is it an unambiguous overture to either go on a date or to have sex. I suspect it is precisely this kind of expression of interest that constitutes a substantial majority of the kinds of communication men have to interpret (assuming they’re fortunate enough to receive expressions of interest at all) which Clarissa blithely ignores by asserting that women either unambiguously make their intentions known or are simply ‘playing hard to get.’
@Gunnar Tveiten:”For example it’s possible (and plausible) that a few men have no troubles finding many partners, while many men have troubles finding even one.”
This would mean there is more standard deviation between men than women but the averages would be the same. The man with better prospects would have any easier time finding a mate than any of his partners and has partners would in turn have an easier time than men with worse prospects. I am willing to acknowledge there is more deviation for men than women but I don’t think there is a lot more. Which implies that there are more men than women at the lower end of the totem pole but not a lot more. Similarly there are more men than women at the higher end of the totem pole.
“I don’t have hard numbers for that for dating — but I do for children and for marriage, and both seem like reasonable proxies. In both cases, there are significantly more men than women who have zero children and zero marriages.”
The number of never married men/never married women is 25.6 vs 32.6. So your are right that there is a significant difference. But not a large difference.
I’m guessing you switched your figures here (i.e. “never married men” = 32.6, not 25.6), assman. Could you cite your source?
@ballgame: “I’m guessing you switched your figures here (i.e. “never married men” = 32.6, not 25.6), assman. Could you cite your source?”
Correct.
http://www.census.gov/populati.....A1-all.csv
All: I’ve moved the ‘Sister digression’ comments to the RP thread. I realize in some cases comments were a mix of responses to the developing Sister imbroglio and on-topic comments related to the post; sorry for the inconvenience of breaking up the thread in some instances here.
I don’t own a cell phone, I don’t text. I might send something on a messenger or on skype (not voice or video, just text), but not automatically.
Even if “everyone” owns cell phones, I don’t think it should be viewed as bad form or a lack of social skills to not treat it like a short leash that *forces you* to have certain interactions (reply in 5 minutes, or you’re dead/dying).
@Stella,
You have my sympathies. We’ve all been there at some point. I don’t think I’ve ever felt physically or shaken from asking a girl out, but I’m still not as comfortable with it as I believe I should be. Most girls I’ve been with, including my current girlfriend, pursued me in the beginning more than I pursued her. To this day, if a girl gives me an “in”, I can take it from there, but I still can’t go in cold.
I hope that your discomfort in this area improves as the years go by. It does for most people. May I ask how old you are? If you’re still young, you shouldn’t worry too much. Our culture overemphasizes how much fun you can (nay, must!) have in our twenties, especially our early twenties, and underemphasizes it elsewhere.
As a general rule, action is always preferable to inaction. If you feel like you’ve gone too far at some point, and put too much on the table, you can always consciously, intentionally dial it back afterward. Far better than to be tormented afterward by unintended inaction.
Thank you for saying this, because not many women will admit it. At least, I agree with you on the “social skills” and passivity part. (I put it in quotes because it implies conforming to the norms of the Anglo sex/dating culture that uniquely overemphasizes aggression, disposability, and indifference, is a basic life skill along the lines of saying please and thank you and not burping in public. That’s bullshit.) Like all people of low self-confidence, you’re probably underselling your attractiveness.
Of course.
A girl asking me out or giving me a clear signal makes her inherently more attractive to me. Conversely, a girl hanging on to every last inch of plausible deniability she can, I wouldn’t go for even if it turned out she wanted it, unless she was Scarlett Johansson. Because she’s officially pissed me off. (Only if she’s the cripplingly shy type could I understand and cut her slack; otherwise, she’s just clinging to her privilege.)
I can only speak for myself and not all other men. But I bet my viewpoint is quite common, just subsumed, because too much of our culture is beholden to old-fashioned, bloviating men whose time has passed, and certain vindictive women who think other women initiating (or even being too approachable) undercuts their value and so they try to shame them and us. Look to the Internet, where anonymity affords us a chance to be honest, and you’ll see what the opinion of men of our generation is. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Along the same lines, if I’m attracted to a girl, I’m attracted to her. “How much” I am has never been the deciding factor on whether I pursue her; her approachability and the likelihood of rejection were. Always always.
They’re assholes. Seriously, fuck them. A gesture like that from a well-meaning stranger might be jarring, but keep that shit private and don’t publicly shame them. This culture where sincerity is mocked and your coolness is determined by how many want you who you in turn don’t want in return is fucking toxic to the core. (Make no mistake; your roommate’s brothers didn’t pick a random topic to joke about, though they may have pretended to. They were advertising this very fact as a way to boost their social status.)
I sincerely hope they and their female counterparts have contracted herpes, are mired in student debt, and have an accidental child who hates them.
As for the latter, lol, I think every desperate person is more desperate not to seem desperate than they are for affection. That’s our culture for you. I hope you find someone soon.
@assman,
I agree with pretty much every word of this.
As I said here:
http://www.genderratic.com/p/3.....ment-82909
You cannot expect things from people that they are incapable of giving. This discussion pretty much confirms that.
Disclaimer: there are exceptions, nawalt blah, blah yak.
Wow, Quaaludes, I remember that comment. Blood from a turnip indeed.