Young men and relationships

In My Humble Opinion
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Wikipediasez:

A few pull quotes from pre-20th century:

Opponents of women’s entry into institutions of higher learning argued that education was too great a physical burden on women.

Other antifeminists opposed women’s entry into the labor force, their right to join unions, to sit on juries, or to obtain birth control and control of their sexuality.

WP has some more recent info on anti-ERA and antiabortion agitation in the 70’s, and it’s hard to forget Rush Limbaugh’s evocation of the “femiNazi” in the 80’s and 90’s, or Gamergate more recently.

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I think that is perhaps perhaps perceived by some but actually occurs rarely outside of high school.

Let me try to clarify.

There is this allegedly large group of men who hate women. My belief is that most of those people are failing at life in general and resentful in general.

There is a larger group of men not being selected by women who they would want to partner with. They are not necessarily losers in life in other ways, but they do not have the combination of features that attract women they are attracted to. That was the first part of this thread: the mismatch, more educated, wealthier, and powerful women, often of a less traditionally conservative mindset, to relatively fewer as highly educated men, so who do these women pick when they are ready and interested in partnering? What offsets what?

The article is interesting. I am not sure that men on “incel” forums who are responding to a broad advertised survey request, with a total n of 199 in the UK, are a good representative sample of the group we are discussing. But interesting anyway.

Of course. Whether for the fling with a “bad boy” or because of dysfunctional family history. There are all sorts.

I’ve lost track. What’s the disagreement here again? As far as “masculinity” goes - meh. Plenty of models for maleness of all sorts and the ones with biggest impacts on both boys and girls are the ones closest to us in real life growing up. Family and friends both. As a father I had zero concern about being a good male model; I had huge concern about being a good human being model. I think the first took care of itself if I succeeded at the second. In our family men cook do dishes read bedtime stories and pack lunches with bad jokes sometimes included. And men try to teach tenacity. And they debate and set rules. So do women in my family. Each in specific flavors maybe. My boys and my girl are good humans and are clearly men and a woman.

Incels are not incels because of discussions calling out men who behave in stereotyped toxic ways. This society does not in general demonize being male.

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Yup. There have been backlashes to feminism ever since there’s been feminism.

We can see that phenomenon even prior to the late-19th-c women’s rights movement that SunUp mentioned.

For example, in the 18th century there were several influential social reformers in Europe and North America who advocated for civil rights and social equality for women. Some North American colonial laws allowed women (specifically, some subset of women) to vote. But as the possibility of women’s rights became more of a reality in revolutionary France and the early federal US, reactionary forces pushed harder against it. For example, the New Jersey state constitution adopted in 1776 allowed women to vote, a provision that was repealed in 1807.

It always happens like that: the most virulent and powerful backlashes generally occur in response to the most significant advances. Just as US white nationalism surged in response to the realization that an American Black man really could become the US President, US misogyny has been surging in response to the realization that a high proportion of women really are able to live without needing to be socially or economically subordinate to a man. And that a lot of women are lowering the cutoff on what they’re willing to put up with in their lives for the sake of attaining male approval.

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To paraphrase another saying, for people who are used to being the dominant group, lack of submissiveness feels like demonization.

What’s making the misogynists feel threatened is not the prospect of women outright attacking or oppressing men, because those things aren’t happening to any meaningful extent at the societal level. What’s making them nervous is the realization that women are genuinely achieving significantly more power and autonomy, with more access to education and careers and social acceptance in their own right. That does indeed spell doom—not for men as human beings or for men as males, but for men as the automatically dominant group in society and recognized authorities within their family structures.

When male dominance in society is being challenged and rejected on a large scale, a lot of the men who’ve been socialized to feel that dominance is an integral part of their male identity are naturally going to feel instinctively that it’s males who are being challenged and rejected.

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It seems like a bad idea to roll back gains women have made with respect to getting treated equally just because some incels are threatening violence.

It’s that really the solution you want @DemonTree ?

Appeasement and pandering are short term solutions.

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Reddit kept pushing a community called 2XChromosomes until I muted it. Last I saw they were talking about a Korean movement to avoid any kind of dating, marriage, or sex with men.

I haven’t read the discussion here; that was before I came back to the forum. What I saw was a lot of women on Twitter who said most bears aren’t interested in attacking you, but didn’t extend the same argument to men.

I mean that until recently, it was mostly old guys who had the problematic attitudes. Now it’s young ones. That is far more worrying for the future.

Yes. I think this is by far the biggest predictor of lack of success in dating, way beyond superficial factors like income.

Nonsense. I’ve lived through years of men being blamed and attacked for talking about this online. I’m tired of all the gaslighting.

It’s better than ‘let’s blame white Christian men because we always blame white Christian men’, and because it’s the safe choice that won’t get you accused of some kind of prejudice. :unamused:

It spells doom, not for men as human beings, but for men as mates. Or so they feel. If women desire higher status men - and people here seem to agree on that - then raising the status of women genuinely makes it harder for men to date. It doesn’t seem unreasonable for men to be unhappy about that, even if most of their proposed solutions are horrible and authoritarian.

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Online is like Alice’s Restaurant: you can find anything you like there. Real world. There is a real world, most people live in it. At least some of the time. And if they don’t, well that may be part of their problem?

Even online, places I see, like here, men who are looking for support usually get it. Men playing incel misogynistic shit get little leash, true.

Not all, not most, but if you don’t think there is an issue in this world with resentment that the world was becoming less default theirs for some who feel others are moving past them, then you are very far out of the reality I see.

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Who’s “they”?

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That is happening a lot in Japan. wiki

These men also aren’t easily defined, but there are many Japanese who believe people in this group are losers rather than the more messy picture including men who have decided they simply don’t want relationship for any number of reasons, to those who have tried and given up, and many other factors.

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Interestingly one of the first suggested related threads to this one is this one:

From 2006. Nineteen freakin years ago. The trend is not a new one. The conversation there is pretty representative. Lots of support and empathy for men of our community in the position of being involuntarily unmatched. Some who are still here. None of them feeling that the appropriate reaction for them was to pull women down.

Yeah there are forums of men who attack woman and blame “Chads”, who think violence is a justified response even, and groups of assholes in other forums and likely those who bully anyone who is vulnerable, including those who share their being romantically lonely. But if you see it frequently then you are in a different world than I see every day.

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That’s a bit different from what I’m referring to. I was referring to men who still date, but simply have no interest in moving beyond superficial sexual relationships. So really sort of the opposite of a “herbivore man”.

But I think they are all sort of related in that they all seem to be overcorrections to not being able to form healthy, long-term ideally sexual) relationships with women as equals.

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These are online movements. That’s where these men are finding each other, creating various misogynist ideologies, and being radicalised. I remember this subculture of atheist and feminist blogs, and they were very harsh towards men who were unsuccessful at dating, accusing them of being Nice Guys™, acting entitled etc. it’s rather plausible they pushed men towards creating their own misogynistic forums.

I don’t think it’s a factor anymore, though. Now these groups have become established, they are self sustaining. Plenty of young men to recruit who haven’t even tried dating yet.

How this relates to the larger real life situation, I’m not quite sure. Being online is no longer a niche thing; everyone under 80 is now on social media, able to be influenced in one way or another. But as your stats showed, the fall in marriages is mostly a switch to cohabitation, so the decline in dating among young people is probably the real story here.

I think you are assuming that because this factor explains some things, it must explain everything. But it’s at least as likely that men who feel they are disadvantaged for other reasons (like race and religion), are the most resentful of women gaining status relative to them.

It also comes across as collective blame for whole groups based on nothing but demographic factors - and the people being blamed rightly object to that. I think this kind of ‘explanation’ actually contributes to the problem: everyone resents being stereotyped or held collectively responsible for something they haven’t done, and they resent it all the more when they feel they being attacked with no evidence, simply because they are considered acceptable targets.

Yes, this is a phenomenon that has developed over many years. I don’t think people on this forum have always been so sympathetic, but it’s not a feminist community or blog, either. There’s a reason I stopped reading them back then.

I meant the ‘manosphere’ collectively - incels, red pillers, men’s rights advocates etc.

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You seem to be reacting to being able to find these groups on line as signifying that they are growing or large. It is a faulty logic

A reasonable point: everyone wants a group under them on the ladder. There was a reason that the most vicious racists in the South after the Civil War were often not the wealthiest most powerful whites but the poorest least powerful ones. And why an establishment group of immigrants often pulls the ladder up behind them.

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Were they harsh toward all men unsuccessful at dating, or only towards those who did act as if being superficially nice to a woman meant that they were therefore entitled to have sex with her?

I think that very many women have run into such men. If you’ve never done so, you’ve been lucky. And it goes way back before the internet – there were memes, long before they were called memes, about the men who felt that because they’d paid for dinners the women who they’d fed were required to “put out”.

I suppose somebody could go research which forums came first. It’s not going to be me. But misognyism is far older than the internet, and once forums came along why do you think it wouldn’t have shown up on them on its own?

How are they getting to cohabitation without something serving the functions of dating, even if it’s not called that or not done as it was in 1950?

That, unfortunately, is a point. Being discriminated against is no guarantee that the discriminatee won’t want to discriminate against somebody else. It’s all too common a reaction, and why divide and conquer techniques work so well in politics; to the serious detriment of nearly everybody and the advancement of a handful of manipulators. Some of whom I suspect are running those forums, and some of whom are certainly running the setups that push them at people on social media.

Not most men, then.

Maybe, as you object to putting men down because they’re male, don’t call it the “manosphere”?

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Nitpick: I think the agreement here on that claim is limited. Women wanting higher-status men is not some kind of universal immutable truth about women or relationships: it’s basically a historical side effect of traditional patriarchal male supremacism in society.

Of course it’s traditionally been the case in patriarchal societies that when women aren’t allowed or expected to advance themselves socioeconomically as independent economic actors, women tend to focus instead on advancing themselves by marriage with higher-status men. If “marrying up” is your only available career path for fulfilling any personal ambitions you may have for attaining increased wealth, prestige, power, etc., then naturally you’re likely to place high importance on marrying up.

And as usual, social expectations tend to persist—for a while—as cultural stereotypes even when they no longer reflect economic realities. The stereotype of a man needing to out-earn “his woman” in order to be adequately “manly” does still have resonance with many people, men and women alike. But more and more people are questioning and rejecting it, and will continue to do so.

Part of the problem in the meantime, of course, is that socioeconomic changes have made it easier for people to forget just how shitty many aspects of the traditional patriarchal system were for men. As usual, when things change in society, dissatisfied people concentrate on the aspects that got worse and ignore the ones that got better.

A non-high-status man of today, struggling to find lower-status women to date, may feel resentful about women’s increased economic autonomy and decreased incentive to date him. But he’s forgetting that “back in the day”, he might well have been expected to help support other women in his family, not just his wife. Widowed and spinster (or divorced or deserted) mothers, mothers-in-law, aunts, sisters, daughters, orphaned nieces or cousins, chronic invalids in any degree of connection, you name it.

In the era of near-universal female economic dependence, men’s breadwinner status may have made it easier for them to readily attract mates, but it also came with a lot more potential responsibilities to women other than their mates. But, again, these compensatory aspects tend to get overlooked when people get stuck into their grumbling.

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I see no evidence of that. If anything the evidence is against it, women find high status men attractive when they aren’t in position of power too. And in regards to issues that have nothing to do with tradition or male supremacism. Women don’t find, say, music stars attractive because our society is run by musicians.

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Agreeing with Kimstu. And adding that “high status” means different things to different people. It doesn’t always mean ‘having lots of money’ or ‘having a job considered high-status by the overall culture’. It can mean such things as ‘highly respected within the specific social circle for honesty/kindness/fixing things/farming well/always coming through when really needed/etc.’

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Technically, I am an incel. Albeit a 49yr old one.

I’m very interested in being a “nice guy” and in fact I am currently single. I cook, clean, read stories etc.

Since my divorce (ok, I am not all nice!) I have been looking for a “nice girl” to compliment my relationship skillset. So far not succesfully.

I’m reasonably masculine, I have a beard, hike mountains, I am fairly intelligent and well travelled. But it’s not like I think I deserve fawning attention from all the single ladies I meet.

I thouroughly agree with you that “good human being” is the rôle both my ex-wife and myself try to play as examples to both my son and daughter.

Though I don’t get much of a chance these days myself, “really romantic” is a skill I plan to teach my son.

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Nominally the latter, but in practice they assumed all men complaining about lack of dating success belonged to this group.

Lucky to be weird and unattractive and therefore ignored by the majority of men. It’s better in some ways, I suppose.

Should I believe and empathise with other women when they talk about their bad experiences with men? Yes, obviously. But then there’s no reason I wouldn’t do the same for men when they complain about their own dating woes.

That’s a fair point. Men who are unsuccessful at dating have always existed; it was probably inevitable that the internet would allow them to find each other and form communities. Was it inevitable those communities would be so toxic? (AIUI these groups are not about helping men to date, but rather telling each other that it’s hopeless and they should give up.) I don’t know, but alienating men who were sympathetic to feminism wasn’t a smart move. It’s a small example of the whole polarisation issue: if your choices are to hang out with a group who are unsympathetic towards your problems and treat you as an acceptable target by virtue of your demographics, or a group that sympathises and blames other people, you’re probably going to chose the latter, even if you’d otherwise fit in better with the first group.

This would be Zoomers who aren’t really old enough to be getting married yet, many of whom apparently aren’t even trying to date.

Or against members of the group who did the discriminating, if they get the chance.

Yeah, not most men.

I think everyone knows what ‘manosphere’ refers to. Is there another name for it?

Hah, these ‘trad’ idiots I see today claim to want a traditional wife who will do all the housework and childcare and focus on pleasing her husband, but they also call women gold diggers if they want a man who earns enough to support them to stay home and do that stuff. Forget about female relatives, they don’t even want to support their own wives!

Sure, status is not just money or job title, and different people care more about different aspects of it. I think that’s partly what @DSeid was getting at with his ‘power combine’. It has to be status within some social circle, though - by definition it can’t be an individual judgement.

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Yes, it’s a small example of the whole polarization issue which has been rampant in every place you can possibly look since the Internet. I think you have diagnosed the root cause. And it’s not “feminism” or “lack of masculine role models”, it’s something much broader.

As for “herbivore men” and others who choose not to date, i think that’s the result of less social pressure to date, and more freedom for people on the asexual/aromantic spectrum to live their lives according to their desires.