No, people are saying that problematic men have problems. Guys like us, who respect women, listen to what they have to say, and treat them as equals… we don’t have problems, right?
I dunno, i had a co-worker who was a pretty decent guy, and interacted with women as people, but who had a lot of trouble dating. Of course, i don’t think he followed any of the advice we gave him (mostly about how to meet people, the tldr version is, “do stuff you actually enjoy but where you’ll be socializing with people”) but honestly, i think his major issue was that he was short and slight. And women are as superficial as men in what they find sexually attractive. Short slight men have the same kind of problems that fat women have, i think. He also had some anger issues that probably scared away potential partners. (i remember him getting really mad about something involving the elevator buttons. And… He was right that they were somehow inconvenient, but also, it was elevator buttons, and the elevator worked.)
I think life can be difficult for horny young men who aren’t very attractive, especially if they are straight.
Of course, I’ve attended the weddings of other short, slight men. It’s not like it’s a sexual death sentence. But there are classes of people, including men, who were dealt a bad hand in relationships.
I mean, I had major trouble dating too until I was in my early 20s, but that was because I was shy and awkward and nerdy and terrible at reading social cues. It had nothing to do with women in general, men in general or society in general - I was just a dork. It was 100% on me.
I got better; or at least, I started attracting women who had a thing for dorks.
Change the word “men” to “people”. Recognize that a majority of, especially young, people are horny a fair fraction of the time. And I suspect the “difficult” is slightly different but more in specifics than in magnitude.
Of course that is the way it has generally always been: “the attractiveness inequality problem.”
And “attractive” can carry a lot more than physical features.
Thing is that less educated unskilled men used to have a bigger pool of women who they thought were attractive who also found them attractive, and now less so, no matter how good looking and tall they are.
True for other groups too but that group is the root of the male inequality problem.
Are less physically attractive men also iced out more than before even when highly skilled, and/or educated/higher SES? Probably also true. The nature of the dating app marketplace has already been discussed.
Having problems isn’t inequality.
Having unique problems isn’t inequality.
Do you think that that’s partly because modern online visual saturation (not just porn) is nudging men towards more rigidly conformist and selective views on what women they’re supposed to find attractive? And telling them that they ought to be embarrassed about being with a woman who’s not “hot enough” for them?
Because ISTM that the general toxicity of the online environment is shafting men from both ends: men are being told that it’s really important for them to be tall, buff, attractive, groomed, etc., and also being told that they’re kind of pathetic if they “settle for” a woman who isn’t conventionally hot-looking.
I do not think so.
My assessment is more the demographic mismatch of more highly educated women who do not find the less skilled less educated men attractive while increasingly more men are falling into the less skilled/educated group (neither college nor learning a trade). The remaining non college educated unskilled women are also no longer feeling they must partner up and are increasingly passing over these men too.
Don’t they? Studies suggest that more educated women are increasingly pairing with less educated men:
There’s some truth to that, but I do notice a difference in how society responds to those people.
When women have trouble finding partners, they get sympathy that they can’t have it all in life, and it’s not their fault that all the good men are taken. When men can’t find partners, they get blamed for buying in to society’s standards, and that their expectation are unrealistic.
When women choose not to pair up, they get encouragement like “you go girl”, and “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. When men choose not to have partners, they get ridiculed for following movements like the manosphere and MGTOW.
You must be a man. Women who can’t find a man (and admit that they want to) are told it’s their fault for not looking hot enough. Or it’s their fault for pursuing a career instead of catering to men. Or…
The specific criticisms are different, but if either sex admits they are losing the dating game, they are demeaned for it.
Note from your first cite:
For men, there is no evidence that they are more likely to partner with highly educated women. Rather, they are found to be living single more often.
So yes some women are “partnering down” rather than remaining single (and I’d like to see if that is “down” in terms of income as well - I suspect they are not marrying unskilled men but men with trades and good incomes, at least on par with their own) but relative to the pool of men, not so many?
In terms of the parenthetical - they are not partnering with the unskilled but with those just a bit less highly educated than they are:
the likelihood that a highly educated woman is living with a highly educated partner strongly declined when compared to the rising likelihood that she is living with a medium educated partner.
The low educated men are without a chair in the game of musical chairs:
If anything, for low educated men, women’s increased advantage in education is associated with a lower chance to partner “up”.
And the highly educated men are slow to partner, as they apparently can afford to be picky
highly educated men show a declining tendency to be living with a partner of any level of educational attainment. This finding could be explained by a decreasing inclination among highly educated men to commit to any partner, as they are in high demand and are in the position to wait and see whether a more attractive partner comes along
I am a man, and I haven’t heard women blamed for their singleness as you describe, although any comments like that wouldn’t be directed at me. I have heard the “all the good men are taken”, but not recently.
If women do get blamed for “not looking hot enough”, would you consider that a condemnation of them, or of men for being shallow and only caring about hotness?
I mean, to some extent it’s both, but the woman who is lonely is definitely blamed
I do agree that it’s more socially acceptable for women to be single than in the past. A woman who is single by choice isn’t put down as “an old maid”. I think men have always been allowed to be single to some extent, and i think that’s still true. But maybe men demean other men for being single, that’s something i wouldn’t know.
But if you (woman) admit to wanting a man, then it’s your fault.
I mean… except for all the traditional ridiculing of unmarried women as “bitter old maids”, and all the contemporary finger-wagging at women for being too reckless with their biological clock, and devoting too much time to career advancement during their most fertile years? And that’s not to mention all the well-poisoning from the “manosphere” gleefully dunking on single women for “hitting the wall”, as described previously in this thread. Along with all the complaints that it’s women’s own fault for unrealistically expecting all partners to be tall and financially successful and not bald, etc. etc. etc.
Do they, though? I know there are definitely some responses like that, but AFAICT the vast majority of the vast literature that’s being devoted to men’s struggles with dating and relationships nowadays attributes them to much more complex and nuanced reasons:
Etc., etc., etc. I think the whole discussion for both genders about “why you/we can’t get dates” is a lot more ambivalent and diverse than the simple binary distinction you’re trying to draw here.
This generalization has more merit than the previous one, ISTM. I agree that the residual effects of second-wave feminism, where being able to be independent and fulfilled in life without a man was portrayed as a positive thing for women, aren’t as widely mirrored in attitudes toward male independence and self-fulfillment.
As @puzzlegal notes, women do definitely still get judged for remaining unmarried. But I think it’s fair to say that we have more space in modern culture than men do to see that as an achievement in its own right, rather than just a personal failure.
Ah. Your last cite.
Because they’re increasingly marrying men without higher education who land in high income brackets. … “They’ve begun marrying men who did not go to college but still seem to be doing quite well economically — maybe folks who own a small business or are an expert technician,” Goldman explained.
Again the less skilled men are screwed.
As are the less educated women, from the same article immediately after what you quoted:
Oh yes.
Fewer of them, but they’d apparently rather stay single than settle for an unskilled uneducated partner. Because there is no shortage of those men. The shortage is of
the pool of eligible bachelors with similar education and earnings above the national median has sharply dwindled. In the 1930 cohort, 73 to 75 percent of men without college degrees fit this description. Today, only 35 percent do.
Men without college degrees and no trade are not attractive to them because they also don’t have money.
They used to call them “confirmed bachelors”, but I thought that was just code for “gay”.
You’re leaving out the fact that “men without college degrees” in general are a much smaller part of the overall demographic than they were in 1930. In 1940, only about 6% of men over 25 had a bachelor’s degree; in 2024, it was 37%.
This is also kind of overlooking the question of how much, and in which demographics, working-class people in previous generations actually wanted to get married, as opposed to being pressured or forced into it by social conventions (especially in the case of premarital pregnancies). It used to be a social truism that women wanted to get married much more than men did (again, not surprising given the social stigma of old-maidhood). And that a girl would really have to work (unless she was exceptionally beautiful and/or rich) to be attractive and appealing enough that a man would be interested in marrying her.
What if the social reality these days is the other way around, and women on average are simply more likely to prefer singlehood than men are? Why should anybody be expected to “settle for” a partnered life that makes them less happy than a single life, just to improve the chances of pairing for the people who do really want partners?