Is the actual content available someplace other than twitter? Not a site I’m willing to connect to.
YouTuber Anna Akana’s synopsis:
I found it here:
Oh fun, your link shows someone replying to argue the point that ACTUALLY women are being needlessly paranoid about male violence. So I guess men are the real victims of everything after all!
Thank you.
It’s one data point, but very heartfelt for them, very well-expressed, and very sobering for the rest of us. And I believe the author is right that their personal single data point is a nearly universal experience, at least in Western culture. Other cultures will differ in detail but are likely hardly any better.
Yeah, I can easily believe it. It’s related to something that I’ve always somehow felt that I as a cisgender (white, ordinary, short, middle-aged, middle-class) woman have: what I think of as “harmlessness privilege”.
I can walk around acting weird by staring at plants or insects in public or picking up and throwing away pieces of litter or offering a passing comment or smile to a random stranger, and nobody is ever scared of me. Nobody ever worries that they have to be careful around me because I might be dangerous. I can smile at a playgroundfull of toddlers or compliment a salesclerk’s earrings or buy a soda for the person next to me at the reproductive-rights rally, and nobody ever thinks “uh-oh, I hope this person isn’t going to get creepy or hostile”.
Yes, there are ways in which being a woman is definitely disprivileged, but when it comes to people in general not “keeping their guard up around me”, I’ve got it made in the shade.
Continuing the train of thought: Traditionally, intergenerational contact was part of the counter-pressure against social isolation. Young men behaved nicely to old women, and old women helped smooth their social interactions with young women, and this helped young men fit in as part of society.
Nowadays, in online dating, people are interacting solely with the demographic in which they’re trying to find a relationship. There is zero general social cameraderie or approval from a broader cross-section of society to oil the gears of the dating mechanism.
As a kid and young adult I loved interacting with old folks of any gender. They liked me because I would listen to them, and I was genuinely interested in what they had to say. Now that I’m nearing geezerhood myself, I enjoy listening to the kids I work with and most of them seem to enjoy listening to me. Most of the older women I talked to as a young adult couldn’t believe the women weren’t beating down my door. Probably if they’d seen my trying to ask out someone my age they would have given me a good talking to, and they would have seen why my door was in no danger of being beaten down.
I feel like this is something that works nice in theory because it sounds very inclusive and progressive. In practice, it probably doesn’t really help one socialize or “get laid”. From my formative “meeting girls” years in my teens and 20s, my observation was that we tended to exist in a world of our own that did not include small children or older generations.
Then again, maybe that’s the part of the problem.
Absolutely. For me, my “chatting up” is 99% the same as normal smalltalk, so I can be improving my “game” all of the time with anyone*. Wish I had known that when I was young.
But, the fact is, and the reason why women can sometimes be surprised that Joe Ordinary didn’t have his pick of dates, is because a large proportion of us live, work and/or socialize in a very mono-gendered environment. Not directly from choice but from the kind of work we do, what we’ve studied and our hobbies. So, in many cases, it is not a deliberate choice to not speak more regularly to the other gender, on the contrary, it takes a deliberate choice to make it happen.
* Before anyone gets angry, firstly note the scare quotes.
And secondly, I’m not saying I thought women were alien creatures that warranted different rules of conversation. I thought flirting warranted different rules of conversation, because that’s how it often is in fiction.
Yes, I think it is, although of course it’s not your fault or the fault of any individual. And of course it’s sociologically pretty unrealistic to think that modern societies are likely to return to the world of multigenerational dances, husking bees, weekly churchgoing etc. to facilitate dating efforts.
And also of course, those IRL environments were problematic in their own ways, from their limited-size dating pools to their racial and class prejudices and so forth. I’m just saying that they did often make it easier for somewhat awkward young people to avoid being socially isolated and feeling deeply cut off from the possibility of dating and romance.
(It’s no accident that quite a few modern young people from cultures where arranged marriage was ubiquitous until very recently are still relying on some of its practices in their dating lives. There are distinct advantages to having essentially the whole older generation in your social circle working as your “wingman” to foster your relationship success. As an acquaintance of mine from such a culture once put it, “Your parents are not out to get you”: if you could have a group of people, who loved you deeply and knew you very well, working to help you meet and socialize with a variety of potential partners that they thought could make you happy, wouldn’t you take them up on it?)
I’m currently reading A Suitable Boy so this is timely! In my working life, I worked with lots of South Asians, and all those I knew who got married while I knew them had arranged or semi-arranged marriages. They seemed to work ok. One guy, though, his parents had him flying all over the world, and he chose a woman, I feel, strictly for looks. When I’d see them at social functions, she always seemed slightly unhappy.
Hmm - one time my grandmother, a generally sweet old lady, confidentially advised me, “Don’t marry a shiksa like your brother”. I was 14 at the time.
I did not take this advice despite her attempt to help me “fit in as part of society”, and have no regrets. 
Heh. My husband’s bubbe was distraught that her only two grandchildren both married shiksas. She didn’t want to meet me at first. I can’t tell if she got over it or if the dementia just took away her ability to hold on to the grudge. My husband loved her and was hurt by her reaction, but he responded with compassion, understanding what her faith traditions meant to her as a Holocaust survivor.
I think as rapidly as social mores have changed over the last few generations, young people have good cause to distrust the dating advice of their elders. That doesn’t mean there’s no benefit in talking, just maybe not as much concrete guidance as some might imagine.
Ms. P’s Grandma was happy to see her marry me; her exact words were “it’s about time”. I’m sure that if anyone had referred to me as a shaygetz in her presence she would have let them have it.
My parents refused to believe that I was being rejected for dates as a teenager. There was a girl at church who everyone knew I had a crush on but wasn’t interested; my parents just continued to insist I hadn’t asked her out.
This may also be parental bias. “I think my son is great, so everyone else must think so as well.” I had a tough awakening way back in the day when my mom would tell me I looked like a certain movie star and then people were like “nuh-uh.”
Yeah, parents aren’t terribly objective about their kids. But I couldn’t help noticing your phrasing. You say “everyone knew” you had a crush on this girl, but your parents “continued to insist” you ask her out. Does that mean you never asked her out? Did you have some reason to believe, beyond the fact that she supposedly knew about your crush and didn’t ask you out, that if you did ask her out she would say no?
No, I actually did ask her out. She was nice about it, and we remained friends. My parents just couldn’t believe I got turned down.
Ah, OK then. Carry on. 
The problem I see with this woman’s proposal of fighting toxic masculinity by letting down the armor is that the ubiquity of the armor adds to its necessity. Men have become so used to women’s self protective lack of intimacy that a woman who dropped the armor would be seen as being actively interested in intimacy, likely causing the man to assume that she was interested in him romantically.