That is such utter nonsense that I don’t know where to start on it.
Technically, you are an incel in the original meaning of the word. That’s not what it means now, any more than “computer” now means a human who does mathematics.
And you are a nice guy without quotes, caps, or ™.
Not gonna say that never happens. I am gonna say that I strongly suspect the percentage of women who behave like that is no greater than the percentage of men who actually behave to women as “unfeeling, selfish, cruel, manipulative, or self-absorbed” while trying to claim to be otherwise. Why should the men be allowed to grumble about the former and be sympathized with if they expand it to all women, but the women not be allowed to grumble about the latter, even while specifying that we’re not expanding it to all men, without being accused of its being the fault of women that men behave like that?
In other words, dating is tricky for everybody; and people of any gender, trying to date people of any gender, are likely to run into some jerks. Reacting to this by assuming that everyone or nearly everyone of the desired gender is a jerk, instead of by realizing that any group of humans of significant size is going to contain some jerks, a few really evil people, some good people and a few extraordinarily good people, is a problem. And it’s a problem that makes the overall situation worse, as well as making the chances of the person making such assumptions much worse.
For real–it’s an approach that doesn’t allow for systemic inequalities, but only heroes and villains. It makes a cogent analysis completely impossible.
First I don’t think many of us old men have the self awareness I have. Most of us take offense at any statement that their success is not completely the result of their hard work and/“gifts”.
Second, the patriarchy is alive and well. It is less specifically in the middle, but very alive in working class jobs, and in C suites. The advantages of maleness are not so subtle there. How many women does it take to change a light bulb? None. No need when you have a glass ceiling.
Third. Yes, boys are being outcompeted by girls in education. No, education pedagogy is not focused on how girls learn in preference to how boys learn, and I don’t really see a consistent difference honestly.
Yes it is hard to have to jobs that you pretty much could just have gotten before, certainly in preference to a woman, now not being as big of a part of the economy, and not having the education to compete for many of the jobs that are a bigger part.
Of course they should be allowed to grumble, and so should the men, because
Unfortunately it seems like individuals of both groups sometimes generalize. Or react badly to hearing complaints from members of the other group.
My WAG is that there are nice guys who actually have lots of strengths who are very poor at getting those strengths on display in venues that lead to romance. Jerks I suspect do better at marketing themselves. So the nice guys do see jerks having relationships, and the nice women do experience lots of jerks who think they are nice when they are actually mostly jerks.
"It is shocking that for years after receiving reports of sexual assault, Hinge continued to allow Stephen Matthews access to its platforms and actively facilitated his abuse,” said Laura Wolf, the attorney representing the woman whose police report led to the arrest. … Matthews’ case shows that even as these apps have made it easier for us to connect with a seemingly endless pool of potential lovers, they have also made it easier for people who commit sexual abuse to reach a seemingly endless number of potential targets. … attacks facilitated by dating apps happened faster and were more violent than when the perpetrator met the victim through other means. They also found that perpetrators who use dating apps are more likely to target vulnerable people.
Predators are scarily good at marketing sometimes.
As I mentioned previously, we did grow up with at least a post Vietnam war 70s/80s media image of “masculinity” (with just a touch of latent homophobia). But we also became mostly defined as a sort of apathetic slovenly-dressed “slacker”. Much of Gen-X film and television seemed to deconstruct traditional notions of “masculinity”, “marriage”, “education”, “work”, and other traditional institutions without replacing them with much besides sarcasm.
Millennials seemed to take it a step further as being perceived as “failing to launch”, but with the added burden of being helicopter-parented so as not to have gain the sense of independence and self-reliance of Gen-X.
The point is that as far back as the early 90s, I remember people bemoaning (perhaps not inaccurately) the fact that young men weren’t developing the skills needed to succeed in the real world and were instead living in a state of perpetual adolescence like a character in a Seth Rogan film).
The patriarchy is alive and well. Trans people tell me the change in their status when they transitioned was enormous and instantly obvious.
A friend tells of a trans women who was in a large work phone meeting. She made a suggestion that she thought was a really important step forward, and no one even acknowledged it. Finally, in frustration, she used her “male” voice, and said, “i think Saundra’s idea was really good”. Suddenly, everyone discussed it and they adopted it shortly thereafter.
This is a single anecdote, but it’s consistent with a huge range of experience. And white men don’t have to “prove” themselves in the way other people do. They are looked at as individuals, not as a representative of their group.
As for the past … The misogyny of my 50s-era uncle was, itself, part of a backlash to the advances women made during WWII. Suddenly, Rosie the riveter was threatening the jobs of men. There’s a reason he said that the worst insult he knew was to tell a woman she was a tomboy.
Are there young men today who are struggling to find jobs, who are poor, who lack valuable connections, who struggled in school? Of course. Would they be better off of they were always and uniformly favored over women for jobs? Sure. Is that a good solution? I don’t think so.
I agree with all of this. I have been dating the same woman for roughly the past decade. I have had a nine to five job at a company for the past few years. I currently make half her yearly salary. For many years after we started dating, I was living below the poverty line. When we eat at restaurants, the server always gives me the check.
When she bought her last car, she wanted me to come along. I have never owned a car. I have never even had a driver’s license. Even though she made it clear that she was the one buying the car, the salesmen talked to me.
Those are just two examples OTTOMH. The patriarchy is indeed alive and well.
Okay. Just read a joke that only works because the death of patriarchy is greatly exaggerated:
Woman screeches car into the driveway, runs into the house excitedly screaming “honey, pack your bags! I just won the lottery!” “Wow! Great! Swim suit or ski clothes?” I don’t care. Just get out!
That has been my experience. I certainly knew the patriarchy was real and pervasive, but I don’t think I really grasped how much I personally benefitted from it until I started experiencing life as a woman.
I was never very masculine, or “one of the guys”, so I had this attitude that the patriarchy was something that helped other men much more than it did me. But as a woman, I am talked down to, ignored, and demeaned much more than I was when I was a man. I realized that the patriarchy is something that all men inevitably benefit from, regardless of who they are.
A major reason I have become so cynical about political correctness is how little left-wing groups like feminists care about the connotations of and misunderstandings caused by terms they came up with.
This isn’t a single sex group, or even nearly so. One-sided or unfair comments have been challenged, not reinforced.
When my daughter was a baby, I followed forums for mothers, and there were an awful lot of women complaining about how useless their husbands and partners were (which made me feel very grateful mine was supportive). I don’t know if they were toxic per se, but it’s very easy to develop an echo chamber. When I look at reddit, it keeps pushing a subreddit called 2XChromosomes, in which 90% of the posts seem to be women complaining about how awful men are, with hundreds or thousands of comments agreeing and reinforcing those views. Any pushback gets downvoted to oblivion. IMO this kind of thing makes participants less happy on average.
You’re taking it too literally; no animal metaphor would stand up to much scrutiny.
I think the biggest advantage of maleness is that men can easily have it all: work a corporate job with long hours, and still have a family, with a wife to be primary parent. In a previous job I had, the regional manager was a woman, and when she moved on to new job, she talked about how hard it had been juggling kids and work.
The focus on sitting still and following instructions, on coursework over exams, on theory over practice, on collaboration over competition tends to benefit girls. It’s not done out of nefarious motives, but I’m sure it would have been called out and addressed long ago if it boys weren’t seen as a privileged group.
I tried asking my (millennial) husband about his experience, and he said he was too nerdy as a teen and didn’t really think about being masculine, or role models or whatever. Actually, he said when people list role models they are probably making them up just to answer the question, which is something I hadn’t considered.
We’re elder millennials anyway, so didn’t get the helicopter parenting. I played in the woods a lot as a kid, both with friends and alone, and my husband used to cycle alone into the city, and catch the train to meet up with friends as a teen. I hope we can give our daughter a decent amount of freedom; it’s hard when the culture doesn’t support it.
I’ve had my suggestions go ignored at work until a man advocated for them. But it’s hard to know how much of that is sexism, and how much is me lacking social capital, or not being assertive enough. It’s all anecdote and not data.
But this is kind of my point. It’s easy for a man to recognise he had an advantage if he grew up in a time when men were expected and encouraged to have careers, while women were expected to get married and have kids, and had all kinds of obstacles if they wanted something different, and there was still formal legal discrimination against women. (And as @DSeid said, a lot of those men still don’t recognise this, or think it was fine.)
It’s not so easy to see when ‘the patriarchy’ just means women aren’t listened to in meetings, and what legal discrimination exists is in favour of women. And that’s because there has been real progress! I’ve heard horrible stories of sexism in the workplace from older women, and I just haven’t encountered anything like that. It’s good to recognise that things have improved, even if they’re still not perfect.
I actually like this, I think getting out of dealing with salesmen is a benefit of being a woman. Avoid the hard sell and still get to make the decision.
My sister’s first husband, the father of my beloved niece, was a terrible father. Now that he and my sister were married and had their own place, he wanted to keep living like a teenager- paty, drink, buy a flashy car etc. When they divorced, he did not ask for custody. If he asked for visitation rights, I never heard about it. When my sister and niece moved to Florida, he never called or visited. You get the idea.
My sister’s second husband had a son from his previous marriage. He truly loved his son. He was unwilling to set rules or enforce discipline of any kind. I had that problem for a brief while with my niece. Then, my therapist said “How many people have you known who have been horrificially abused by their parents but still have conflicted feelings about them? Do you really think that she will stop loving you for givi rng her a stern talking to and a time out?” I, my Mom (she owned and operated a state run day care center for over a decade and is an expert on kids) and especially my sister tried to convince him his son needed discipline. The boy knew he could get away with murder and acted accordingly.
This is without getting into the many ways my own father failed as a parent.
So, when a woman says her husband or partner is a bad father I believe her.
The ability and inability to stay in one’s seat and follow instruction is not particularly gendered. Nor is there a gender difference in coursework vs exams. Girls do cognitively mature a bit earlier, I’ll grant. I also am not aware of a national or global trend to value coursework more and exams less. Or theory over practice. That was big about two decades ago but faded out. Maybe you have seen something local to you but your generalizing it is unfounded.
If the nature of school including staying in the seat and following instructions favors girls, then it always has.
School advantages girls simply because age for age girls are cognitively and emotionally more mature.
If you need an even playing field you need to start boys later maybe? Teachers here, thoughts?
And the general level of assertiveness is also culturally learned. I am assertive in meetings. Likely that behavior was easier for me to develop and have positive outcomes from due to being a man and its concordance with positive male stereotypes.
But you weren’t bothered by the connotations I immediately saw in incel groups sneering at “herbivores”?
You don’t actually need to hang out in single sex groups. But again, I’ve been part of single sex discussions that weren’t at all like what you’re describing.
Were they saying their specific partners were useless, or that men in general were?
As yours was supportive, did you come into the forum to say that he was?
Did you try to find a forum for women with mostly supportive husbands?
I’d really advise stopping looking at reddit; or at least stopping clicking on anything they push at you. If you click on these things, sure, that’s what they’re going to show you more of.
I’m pointing out that they don’t know anywhere near as much about biology as they think that they do.
And the predator subtext still holds.
People make up a whole lot of things on surveys, or when questioned by people doing studies or articles.
Nothing new about that. Way back when I was about 20, Life magazine (I think it was Life) did an article about Hippies! Living! On Communes! They went to a commune and interviewed some – one of whom told them point blank that they lied a lot to interviewers (they’d apparently had multiple people showing up asking them, for publication, just what the hell they were doing). The magazine printed that comment – and then went on to print other things they’d been told with no sign whatsoever that they had any doubts about the truth of the other answers.
Me, I’d have been furious. And would have bought somewhere else.
I can shut down a hard sell well enough on my own. And how are you avoiding it, if not by avoiding finding out what you need to know about the car? You’re still going to have to listen to the fool rattle on to the wrong person, while he’s ignoring what you specifically want out of the car and therefore not providing that information.
