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How Societal Gender Norms Harm Dating Expectations
Posts
The worst thing about TRP is that in superficial ways it actually works. If your goal is meeting women and getting laid, then it will probably help you do that. The trouble is that it will also dump a pile of terrible ideas and misogyny into your brain. But what gets people is that it is initially effective. It doesn't tell you to be yourself, or to wait for women to approach you, etc. It tells you to be aggressive, confident, and that will take a guy far. Far enough anyways.
So what I've noticed is that there doesn't seem to be a..... non-misogynistic alternative? What I often find is that feminist advice will be along the lines of being yourself, respecting women and their boundaries. And this is good, and it comes from a good place of respecting and caring for women in a society that has deep issues on the subject. The catch is that I find most of that advice to not only be unhelpful, but actively detrimental in terms actually getting a guy in on the action (so to speak). And I think that’s legitimately a bad thing, because people will do what works. And if they don’t get good advice from people who actually respect women they’ll get it from those who do not.
I’m not certain if I’ve framed this right but hopefully the gist of it is here. I got to thinking about this while in the other thread on the subject of respecting NOs and boundaries and such. And I couldn’t help thinking that it was great advice for how to make women comfortable and absolutely terrible advice if I was a shy younger guy desperate to meet a girl. The reality we want doesn’t match the reality we have.
What.
This is what porn's for isn't it?
I'm 30
What’s wrong with playing a numbers game?
Also, I’d say that yes, no one is responsible to provide you with sexual release. But in the event that you can’t get it you should at least be able to buy it. To go completely without is just cruel.
Not just sex, but the closeness and companionship that comes with it. The whole thing is a package that fills a very essential human need. I know everyone is different but personally I found the loneliness crippling and the idea of being unwanted unbearable, just to go along with the sexual frustration.
It most certainly is not. Will you die without it? Will you become unhinged without it? No, none of those things are true. Yes, if you have a strong enough sex drive or need for intimacy, it sucks going without it, but you can do without, you just dont want to. It's just your stupid reptile brain trying to get you to spread your genes around.
Yeah, thats YOUR problem, not the rest of the worlds. Thats YOUR need for validation, it's not up to society to deal with you desperatly trying to fulfill it.
I also live in a small town and have little prospect to leave for some place where I might could find someone else I'd like.
By this logic, I should function perfectly in solitary confinement as long as I’m given food or water. It won’t literally kill me, after all.
I feel like you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition.
Just because you really, really want something, does not mean you need it.
And all the media reinforcing the idea how being alone is bad, that not having sex is horrible, and how anyone alone is shown as either a sad and miserable, or just weird and pathetic, works to encourage people to do unhealthy (to them, or others) things to seek companionship.
Did you miss the "Unhinged" part? Having other people around is a human right. However, having them form bonds with you is NOT. No one owes you companionship, or, frankly, anything other than keeping you alive. If you cant obtain that like a regular person, thats your problem.
Strange.
I only found a partner at 28 when I realised dying alone wasn't attractive to me, and so I had to.
I was perfectly fine up until then.
Am still perfectly fine.
I dated a bit when I was in my teens and early 20's, discovered that both regular sex and having another person around all the time was enormously overrated, and havent bothered since. I'm perfectly fine with dying alone, I cant imagine having someone else there makes any difference.
Is there a point here? Beyond “life sucks and then you die”? Personally, I’m good. I got what I was after in this regard. So I’m unsure if this is like, a pep talk for a theoretical lonely guy or what.
Like, yes. Humans can technically have food and water and live. Fuck, technically we can be vegetables and be sustained by machines. But what makes life worth living is far more than that.
Ah man I’ve done that small town thing. Is no fun when you’re single, my god.
I just seriously despute having sex or having a partner is necessary.
I may change my mind next month though.
Probably not.
...
I should probably walk this back a bit.
Having a partner wasn't necessary until it was for me.
Still dispute the sex thing though.
Yeah, but you were going on about necessity like you're somehow guaranteed anything beyond subsistence minimum. You mentioned that there's no "alternative" to the current misogynist way of attracting someone, like that was ever a guarantee. Fact is, a lot of people are tired of being treated like meat, and are rejecting the agressive way these things are usually done. There might not be an alternative, because there's not supposed to be one.
Honestly it wasn't even that bad before I got involved with her because I had never been in love before and didn't know what I had been missing (maybe sex will be the same to me once I have it with someone I love). Now that I do know what I've been missing but don't feel like I have any other options my general mood and motivation to get anything done have taken a severe hit.
Hello.
Don't do this.
Someone asked if it was really a need and I answered from my personal experience. I can’t speak to yours, so apologies there; but from my experience and the experiences of my peers I can extrapolate that for a not insignificant number of humans view it as a need. I don’t think telling people to suck it up is going to help any.
And that’s exactly what I meant in my post at the top of the page. I don’t doubt you mean well, and not wanting to be treated like meat is more than valid. But if I was a young dude looking for advice and I saw this I’d write it off instantly. Why should we let mysogyists have the monopoly on that shit?
Sex is pretty great for people who are into it.
I went without it for nearly ten years after my first experience, basically the absolute height of my hormones, and I'm doing just fine. It's not required to have a good, healthy, fun life, even if you have a strong libido. People who want kids survive not having kids, too.
I do absolutely believe that we as a culture need to un-train all this nonsense that makes it so hard for some of us to be genuine and to accept or reject genuine interest with grace and kindness. That part of culture is toxic and absurd, especially when you look at how wildly it has varied over the centuries, with women being thought of as sex maniacs at times instead of placed on a pedestal like they are now.
I'm well aware how young men think, I used to be one as well. It's like your brain is drowning, to the point that desperation overrides everything else. But actually having sex, and realizing just how massively overhyped it is, made me realize that the standard way of doing things is absolutely insane. We cant let half-faded memories of our teenage years and the skewed lens of pop culture determine personal bonds anymore. The harsh truth is, sex just isnt the most important thing in the world, and should not be treated as such.
(BTW I think you meant to say "trans man" there.)
It's exacerbated by one aspect of American masculinity where straight men are not typically encouraged to accept physical affection or emotional intimacy from other men. There have been multiple studies that observed that widows tend to fare better emotionally than widowers because elderly women tend to have stronger social networks while elderly men lumped all of their emotional needs on their (now deceased) wives and now have nowhere to turn to. It comes up in discussions of emotional labor, of middle-aged male suicide, in every in-depth study of male psychology I've ever read:
Straight American men, in general, expect their female sexual partners to provide a disproportionate share of physical affection and emotional intimacy.
You can see how this expectation fuels male sexual pursuits by looking at Incel communities... commonly, men aren't just looking for sex, they're looking for a Girlfriend with a capital G to fulfill all their intimacy needs. Sex becomes a proxy for emotional intimacy. This increases the urgency, the pressure on men to pursue sexual partners.
We need to fix that, not just for the women who feel overburdened by that emotional labor, but for the men who are suffering (and - no exaggeration - dying) from chronic loneliness.
Meanwhile, heterosexual masculinity is still judged by their ability to pursue and bed women. I remember being so deeply ashamed of being a virgin that I literally did not tell the first girl I had sex with until after we'd done the deed, because I felt like there was too much risk of rejection. Even in otherwise feminist, progressive communities you can see that particular insult come up a lot: joking about MRAs being neckbeard virgins or otherwise insulting them based not on their morals but on their (real or purported) lack of attractiveness towards women. This too increases the urgency and pressure on men to prove their sexual prowess.
If we waved a magic wand and somehow eliminated these unfair expectations, we might reduce, perhaps drastically, the need for men to have sex and the entitlement some men express towards female bodies...
...but I don't think long periods of celibacy would become palatable to everybody. We know long-term sexual deprivation can be painful. We know that from the experiences of gay men who go through so-called conversion therapy. We can see it in the struggles of people who have good reasons to be celibate (say, pedophilia) or bad reasons (they ascribe to a religion in which being gay is wrong). In people who try to suppress strong sexual desires, an aversive-obsessive complex similar to anorexia can emerge.
But I've noticed there's been this weird pendulum swing recently in progressive circles where, when the topic of the male libido comes up, we suddenly become gritty conservatives. Luckily, Sadgasm gave the perfect example of this!
Notice how Sadgasm jumped straight to:
1) It's your own fault ("just plain not being able to attract anyone without acting like an agressive creep and playing a numbers game.")
2) Nobody owes you anything. ("You're not guaranteed sexual release.")
I don't abide this line of argument when it comes from conservatives on literally any other topic, so I'm not going to abide it here. It's a derail.
Nobody owes you a job, and there is a lot of unhealthy social baggage tied up in unemployment, and maybe you're doing something wrong with your job search... but none of that changes the fact that long-term unemployment fucking sucks!
Nobody owes you a promotion, and maybe in the grande scheme of things your job title really doesn't matter that much, and maybe you're doing something wrong when asking for that raise... but none of that changes the fact that getting passed over for a promotion again and again fucking sucks!
Acknowledging that a situation is shitty doesn't mean that you're entitled to trample the rights and well-being of others to fix it. It doesn't mean that it's anybody else's responsibility. It doesn't mean that other people don't have it shittier.
When we respond to men who express sexual frustration by telling them either "it's your own fault, cowboy up and fix it" or "have you maybe tried not wanting sex so much?" what we are implicitly telling men is that we only want to hear about the male libido when it fits a certain box. The box changes a little bit from one community to the next: maybe the box is the the marital procreative role of a Christian husband, or the bedpost notching of a misogynist fratboy, or the consent-mindful mutual pleasure of progressive feminist communities.
But in every case the box includes one important criterion: we only want to hear about the male libido when its successful. The definition of "success" might vary, but the deep-seated entanglement of "masculinity" with "success" never changes.
We are implicitly telling them that feeling frustrated, vulnerable, defeated, are emasculating.
Men need to be able to hear each others' frustrations with empathy. We need to be able to say "I hear you and I understand." It doesn't justify harassment, stalking, or rape. It doesn't justify acting hostile to women who reject us or acting entitled to women. But we need to stop pretending that it doesn't hurt.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And not everyone is you. This is the same problem that came up when you started shitting on another poster over their dietary choices.
What you're doing is taking your atypical experience, that is you being "fine" (which I would contest and I think you're making a normative statement here not an empirical one) with being without human companionship at all, and stating that this is how everyone is or should be. And this position reads more like someone trying to sound like they are too cool for relationships than it is any kind of productive argument towards changing the underlying dynamics that shape the dating process. It's nice that you're "too cool" for other people but a desire to have relationships with other people isn't abnormal.
And I can't remember the last time in several years I had physical contact with another human being outside of hugging family members at holidays, or even the slightest flirtation with anyone, and I'm kind of fucked up as a result of that! People are different!
I don't blame anyone but myself, but you can't just say it doesn't fuck anyone up being denied one of the basic facets of human existence most people get and most media takes into account.
If you want to interpret it that way, fine, but that wasnt my point. I was saying that neither sex nor relationships are absolute necesseties, and people thinking they are is why dating culture is so toxic now. People think they cant survive without it so they resort to ridiculous extremes.
This loses some of it's bite when you seem to define "ridiculous extremes" as simply being outgoing. And by the way you seem to be defining necessity then one's "absolute basic necessities" would be met by being placed in a cylinder of sufficient volume in which air, water, and protein gruel are pumped in from birth until death.
It's difficult not to interpret your position as putting forward an image of being "too cool" for a human relationship when you are very clearly arguing that someone who feels the need for a relationship is inherently inferior.
For the majority of people, these things are necessities. I don't know if anyone here invalidated your assertion that you, personally, are happy/content without these things, I suspect that on this forum most of us would accept that as a real possibility.
But you are putting forth that since it works for you it must be an acceptable for anyone else, especially in the manner you are asserting this is misdirected hostility at best.
A couple of the members here are asexual or have publicly put forth that they suspect they might be. You saying your cool living with an approximation of that lifestyle and saying that we should be too doesn't exactly have the authority of Moses coming down off the mountain.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
It's not simply being "Outgoing", an entire industry has sprouted up around how to Jedi mind trick women into sleeping with you, it's fucking ridiculous!
No, the worst thing about Red Pill goosery is equating women with chattel, primarily because 1) she didn't sleep with me and 2) she took a lot of money in the divorce.
I think the point is that if it didn't work, it wouldn't matter how goosey it was or wasn't, because it would die an ignominious death.
I'm not asexual though, so either I'm atypical in some other way, or everyone except me is wrong.
Okay, in retrospect, maybe the former is a bit more likely.
I disagree with the idea of it working, even superficially. It works like Scientology or Amway works.
And even if it did not work, it still propagates a certain toxic world view that encourages harasment, abuse, rape apologia and even rape itself.
It works in the sense that the very first things they tell you are about working on your self and your confidence. Specifically start exercising, eat healthy, try to find a job and hobbies which satisfy you etc.
The misogynistic rhetoric comes after and isn't inherently tied into the previous advice. And generally for guys who feel like they are having trouble attracting the opposite sex that advice is likely to work because it means they will look better, feel better, and be more confident. Which is the hook for that community.
It’s the more dangerous type of lie: the kind with bits of truth in it. It’s absolutely terrible, please don’t mistake me there, but it does have those bits of truth in there. The bits about confidence, assertiveness, persistence, taking care of yourself and presenting yourself: those are things that will actually help someone get what they’re after. The nasty part is that since that part works it’s easy to swallow the rest...
Assertiveness makes people push others into things they are not comfortable with.
Persistence makes people ignore it when they are told no.
Yes, they can help you get what you want, but that is not always a good thing.
Especially when those ideas are tied to otherwise toxic culture where abusive behaviour is shown as romantic, and "no" is treated as "keep asking me".
In a vacuum all these things may be ok, but the culture around them make me very leery of them when used in the context of romance, especially by men.