You think that as long as both men and women are being raped, and on top of that being forced to live with their rapist, it’s perfectly fine that people are being raped?
Well, it’s unfair and inherently unjust in that you are forcing two people to enter into a lifelong, life-altering contract against their will. So there’s that.
Also it’s not like it’s going to solve the problem as the whole point of arranged marriages is to strengthen the power and economic bonds between two families. No one is going to want to arrange a marriage with a broke loser.
Yeah, exactly this. My parents had an arranged marriage (it wasn’t forced exactly, but there was a lot of cultural pressure to go through with it) as did many of their generation, and let’s just say that I am really, really not a fan of arranged marriages. In my experience, it really does kind of go hand in hand with a lot of dysfunctional treatment of relationships, and being forced to be married to someone can involve a lot of dysfunctional power dynamics. (It doesn’t have to, of course, any more than a given single young man has to become an incel, but it definitely makes an atmosphere in which this kind of thing can easily happen.)
I guess the whoosh just whooshed on past into the ether. Oh well.
I’m not remotely fine with it; I’d be very much against it. But it would be equal.
I knew you didn’t intend that as a serious suggestion. But a lot of societies have arranged or partially arranged marriages, and i sometimes wonder if that’s something we do right.
It depends on who’s doing the arranging. If a 40-year-old man pays the parents of a 15-year-old to “arrange” a marriage between them - something that happens fairly often in some societies - would you call it equal?
No, unless 40-year-old women were paying the parents of young men for “arranged” marriages, too.
I think it might be more complex than that in (using the gaming analogy) a lot of people don’t really understand the game or how to develop the skills to be competitive at it. Or they simply don’t have what it takes to be invited to play in it.
It’s also possible a lot of young men aren’t really interested in forming a long-term committed relationship. If going by the internet is anything, I think the message that a lot of young men get these days is they should be focusing 110% on making money (which usually involves some variation of having your nose buried in a laptop for hours a day).
Progressive sensibilities of this board aside, there is definitely a perception by a lot of young men that marriage isn’t something worth pursuing. The narrative goes something like this - a woman is ultimately only interested in him for his money (regardless of how much she makes). And there’s a high chance that at some point she is going to get bored and cheat on you while you’re out making money to support her. There’s usually a whole misogynistic slant to it as well.
I find it a bit strange that so many young men seem to have these problems well into adulthood. I feel like this is the sort of shit that I (like most men of my generation) sort of figured out from middle school through college, maybe into their 20s a bit.
I don’t know how much we should care what strangers think of us. For most of history, encountering non-hostile strangers would have been a rare event, so it’s plausible most people are worrying unnecessarily. But that doesn’t mean they can just turn if off at will. If only it were that easy to get rid of negative emotions!
If it bothers your beloved, you surely should care about that, though. Do you think she might have asked you about the restaurant staff because it did bother her, but she felt awkward saying so?
It shouldn’t matter, but I suspect that subconsciously, seeing that other people are attracted to one’s partner makes them more attractive to you. Besides that, no one should be ‘letting themselves go’ just because they have a partner, and the reactions of others are a way of gauging that.
Is that what you sew, costumes?
If you realised you’d accidentally been rude to the restaurant staff or made them uncomfortable somehow, would you care?
I wasn’t talking about strangers in my post, but other kids at school who I had to see every day, plus acquaintances and so on. I did other things to try and fit in: avoided talking about my interests - which meant I hardly talked at all - tried to avoid using long words, pretended to find tests hard when everyone else was complaining about them. It didn’t work. I’m sure this kind of thing doesn’t work as a dating strategy, either.
My point was that one reason men have been easy marks for PUAs and redpillers and so on is that society was often not giving them accurate or helpful advice, about dating or in general. On the one hand we have feminists telling men it’s wrong to approach women, in pretty much any location, and colleges giving students the highly impractical advice that they should get verbal consent for each advance in physical intimacy. On the other, we have well-intentioned dating advice that won’t admit being short makes dating harder for a man, and insists nice guys don’t finish last, without mentioning that most women prefer more assertive, confident men, and it is possible to develop those traits without turning into an asshole.
These stories were about sharing serious emotions like grief with long term partners. I mentioned them as an example of bad advice given to men, but it’s fairly likely they were just outliers.
Yeah, I agree. They do need enough honest feedback to know what to work on, though.
Interesting. Most of the comments are disagreeing with it, though. One pointed out that only one of the movies mentioned was a box office success. I thought this one was relevant to the thread:
In the very old days. Arranged marriages haven’t been common here in England for several centuries.
Yeah. If young men were modelling themselves on this, I don’t think we’d be too worried either for them or about them.
Perhaps we could test this by looking at countries with wars - Ukraine and Israel. Are men there more likely to have the traits you listed?
Yeah, I agree.
Why would you want to adopt some other culture’s idea of masculinity rather than (a positive) one that comes from your own?
You can do some things in a right-handed or left-handed way, and most people prefer one or the other, but can choose to do the opposite when necessary. As far as we know, it’s a preference that people are born with, though it can be modified by the environment. Gender is a lot more complicated, but men and women naturally tend to be different in certain ways, this impacts and is impacted by the gender roles in a given society, and we recognise a subset of these differences as masculinity and femininity.
Nah. We have a relationship built on trust, open and honest communication, and a love of Spirit Halloween. We discussed the issue at length. We agreed to disagree- she thinks the solution is not to be “sloppy” in front of restaurant staff. I think the solution is for her to make a conscious effort not to care what strangers think.
Mostly. I also sewed felt Spongebob Squarepants, Patrick Star and Plankton stuffed dolls for my niece.
You would have to be more specific. In general, if I have to interact with strangers I try to treat them as I would have them treat me.
I have always found it excellent advice to be sure you have enthusiastic consent, verbal or otherwise, before making any such advance. At the end of a first date for example, I would slowly lean in to kiss her giving her ample time to express consent or refusal. I do this at each stage to be sure. The worst that has happened (yes, these things really happened) is that one woman grew frustrated with my hand moving slowly and said “Are you going to grab my boob or not? We only have a few hours!” Another woman, similarly frustrated, grabbed my hand and placed it firmly on the area I had been asking consent to touch.
Moving forward without waiting for a clear sign of consent can and does cause all kinds of problems.
What do you mean by “nice guys”? I have found that most men who describe themselves that way present themselves to women as friends. They make no romantic or sexual overtures. They then get very angry when women do not ‘reward’ them with a romantic or sexual relationship. I like to think of myself as a nice guy. If I was interested in a woman, I would tell her so. I have told myself many times “Faint heart never won fair maiden”. If the woman in question was already a friend, I would preface my declaration of romantic feelings with a short and honest speech about treasuring our friendship, not wanting to damage it, but wondering if we were missing out. If she said she was interested only in friendship, I tried not to take it too hard and to keep being a friend. These ‘nice guys’ are usually much closer to incels than they are to actual nice guys.
I’m not sure “society” is giving them any advice or ever has. Of course there is noise out there and bad advice always has been a constant probably since advice was given. Individuals pontificate. The issue is that the playing field is different, in many ways, not that the pop culture advice is newly bad.
Meh. They may get that. They have to choose to listen to that though above all the bad advice of all sorts.
Good thing that is not what most do.
Here we come to the crux: why adopt any model of imposed gender characteristics, be it my father’s era, or anyone else’s? I am a man. I do my best to be a good person, a good husband, a good father, a trusted colleague, good at my job, a reliable friend, a helpful person. Whatever I do in pursuit of those goals in what a man of today does as positive virtues. I admire who my dad was. He was a stereotype WW2 era guy. Tough. A boxer. A tough guy. Stoic. He was a man of his era. I don’t aspire to be him. I am a man if my era and I define what “being a man” is for myself, by just trying to be the best I can be, within the context of my time.
Agree with this. I use to sometimes meet young men (before I got married) who were ‘nice’ because they were socially awkward and had no idea that women were about 95% just human like them. They usually turned out to not be actually nice, but simply fearful and awkward. Under the veneer they often seethed with anger and frustration.
Actually-nice people are comfortable in their own skin and are interested in people of any gender for their own sake, not for the sole hope of gratification of lust.
I’m pretty sure this is an exaggeration created by people who don’t really believe in consent. I was once prepping a presentation for my reunion class in the same “back room” as a group of actors prepping for “consent training” for incoming first year students. I asked them about that, and they laughed, and said that no, consent was typically physical, not verbal, and that requesting consent can be very sexy. I also talked to my son after his incoming class had similar training, and he agreed with what the actor said, and said he thought it was mostly pretty good, except for the sexist assumption of generally presenting the guy as likely to ignore that step.
I mean, I’m sure there is bad advice out there, too. But the focus on consent is, imho, a huge advance since my undergraduate days.
How much of that is true, and how much is a stereotype? It used to be that men who expressed romantic interest in a friend were accused of faking the friendship just to get in her pants. Now you accuse them of being not bold enough. Is there any evidence to back up either assumption?
Also, does either story really help anybody? Reads to me like “damned if they do, damned if they don’t”.
If you are serious about this, that there’s a “masculine way” and a “feminine way” to do things, i think you are factually incorrect.
I think there are a large number of traits that show some sexual dimorphism. The average man is taller, has less body fat, and more muscle mass than the average woman. For almost all of those traits, the dispersions overlap. There are pairs of men and women, who aren’t wild outliers, but where the women is taller and leaner than the man. There are a tiny number of traits where there’s very little overlap (eg, amount of testosterone) and a huge number of traits where the sexes have essentially identical dispersion (eg, blood type).
So when it comes to " ways to do stuff", men and women often do stuff identically. And when there’s a way that works better for short people, there will be overlap in who chooses which style.
That is, i think masculinity and femininity are just regions on the spectrum (of any trait) and individual people fall all over that spectrum.
So i think it’s harmful to try to pigeonhole people into the whole kit and kaboodle of masculinity and femininity.
We’ve had a few threads on ‘nice guys’. My search skills are weak. but I will try to find some.
I probably read them at the time. That was somewhat what inspired my post; accustations that nice guys were just pretending to be nice.
Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Again, why does it have to be all one thing, or the other? It’s possible to like someone, and lust for them. I think they should go together more often than not, rather than one as a smokescreen for the other.
Does this mean I can stop searching? As I said, my search skills stink and it is taking me forever.
They should, and they often do. But not always. I was commenting about that type of young male who is trying very hard to appear nice in order to try to get a woman into bed, but scratch the surface and weird shit comes up. Has happened to me on occasion.