The New Battle of the Sexes: How the (Unintended) Consequences of Feminism Made Both Men and Women Pickier in Dating

sjscott80 · 2010-10-05T17:04:54+00:00

Hello everyone, thank you so much for all of the comments and feedback on my earlier post on why modern men are angry in the dating world. I really appreciated it.

I'm a former US journalist now in Israel who now writes a blog covering a variety of topics including dating, economics, and the Middle East. Until I found this subgroup on Reddit, I had always felt that few other people felt similarly to my views on modern dating. It's nice to see that I am not alone in my observations.

So, as a result, I wanted to submit my lengthy essay going beyond my prior article on "angry men." It covers the complicated relationships between men and women today in a variety of areas.

I certainly do not want to spam this group -- I just thought that you guys (and gals) would appreciate further fodder for discussion on this particular topic. As I'm sure many other writers here feel, it is always nice to see one's hard work garnering such interesting feedback and discussion.

Of course, feel free to vote up or down on the article as you see fit. I just wanted to submit another essay that you may or may not find interesting. I look forward to more discussion! And, again, thank you so much.

iamphocine · 2010-10-05T19:45:13+00:00

Damn, it’s bullshit like this that makes me fume. Riddled with vast generalizations, supported by pop media at best, apocrypha at worst, the things this guy is saying insult my intelligence. I don’t even know where to begin.

The ridiculous, over-used and frankly absurd metaphor of men and women as camps embattled against each other, looking to “win” (…what? love? sex?) makes me sneer. It’s obtuse to think that all men and women are opposed so binarily. This opening metaphor sets the tone for a piece entirely without shade of meaning or subtlety of thought. There have always been smart women. The fact that today women are capable of being more successful in career and education does not mean that all women are successful. The percentage of women that “graduated from Harvard and worked on Wall Street” is staggeringly low, compared to the number of men doing those things. To assert unequivocally that women “aren’t dating” because they all want to “date up” but can’t, is an over-generalization at best. To say that all women want “saviors” but can’t find them because all men are slobs who only want to fuck and play video games is damaging and tiresome.

There have always been dumb men, there aren’t more of them today. There have always been successful men, and there aren’t that many less of them. There have always been dumb-jokes about men, there have always been sex-jokes about women. The fundamental shift, if there is any, is in the acceptability of women moving freely into different social spheres. The fact that they can now do so assuredly affects the way women and men relate on a romantic level, but assuredly in ways more complicated and thought-provoking than the clichés and platitudes we’ve been fed here.

I’m so tired of the “Madonna-Whore” complex I could fall asleep on it. Yes, men who sleep around are players, women who sleep around are sluts. Yawn. Tell me something new, and don’t go drawing feeble connections between that pop-culture pervader and whatever your lame hypothesis is. The way the writer assumes all men are just looking to get laid and all women are looking to tie some shameful bachelor down lacks all nuance.

He allows for no intelligence in the emotional realm, no agency in the way humans love one another. We are cattle being led around by the nose stuck into the muck of pop psychology and gender stereotypes, and do not know hoooow to looooove, and must follow the rigid rules of engagement in order to satisfy our mysteeeerious inner urges. Quick, I need to bang some chick.

TL;DR Allow for nuance, emotional intelligence. Stop spreading bullshit.

JayTS · 2010-10-05T19:58:27+00:00

This is the most objective and, imo, accurate article I've seen in MensRights. I love this subreddit, because I can read articles that cover topics that are considered politically incorrect but have lots of merit. Many, though, only blame women and feminism. I like that this article shows that, while the feminist movement is responsible for many of the shift societal norms, it is the unintended consequences and the way both genders are reacting to them that are causing negative side effects of the feminist movement.

jmnugent · 2010-10-05T17:28:10+00:00

I dont normally browse the MensRights subreddit,... But i have to say the linked article is pretty awesome. It covers a variety of different issues/aspects of the dating arena, all of which play a roll in creating the dating realities we deal with as a society today. As a 37yr old single guy... It really hits theproverbial nail on the head... And describes my frustrations with dating almost to a perfect "T".

AnnArchist · 2010-10-05T18:31:22+00:00

Feminism and the legal climate it has created is much to blame for my desire to never marry.

sjscott80 · 2010-10-05T18:45:30+00:00

Wow that article made a ton of sense to me and my "grew up in the 80s, marriage doesn't make risk/reward sense, personal independence" background

MagicSPA · 2010-10-05T22:25:03+00:00

Great article. Explains a Helluva lot.

Slep · 2010-10-06T07:14:13+00:00

I tried to read the whole article but when I got to

The ease with which men can obtain sex is another reason for the lackluster dating scene. Men, as a result of women’s liberation, can now have sex with women who are just as promiscuous as they are. Why buy the cow when the milk is free? In fact, an unintended consequence of feminism has been to remove any motivation for men to get married.

I had to stop out of rage. All men only marry women so that they have a locked-in fuck budy? Wat? I don't even....ಠ_ಠ

chterrible · 2010-10-07T22:56:48+00:00

I have a hard time imagining how exposure to different hormones in the womb and (insert various factors playing in to formation of the sex and gender of a person) splits us humans into million-year old juxtaposed evolutionary tracks. Does sex/gender really make us THAT different?

sjscott80 · 2010-10-05T21:13:11+00:00

How do I know this? I read online-dating articles all the time

This is where I stopped. So this guy is qualified to talk about the consequences of feminism because he reads online-dating articles?

He should learn about biases. I'm going to guess that the articles he reads are written by disgruntled single people. This is a selection bias. Happy couples don't blog about their relationships to the extent that unhappy singled people do.

sjscott80 · 2010-10-05T22:21:14+00:00

Good article. I agree with 90% of it and think very similarly to you. However, I do think you're missing a crucial piece of logic.

Please let me know if you're interested in my thoughts so I know it's worth my time typing them out.

sjscott80 · 2010-10-05T18:36:56+00:00

the two armies have stopped moving. They have completely separated from each other, sitting motionless while staring at each other across a no-man’s land of loneliness and broken hearts.

Very poetic.

hamstertamer · 2010-10-05T22:25:41+00:00

Unintended? Not really.

janetasiri · 2010-10-05T22:49:54+00:00

society founded the institution of marriage to get men to stay with the children

Actually, the idea of marriage and monogamy came about once human beings started making valuable items, and men wanted to make sure that when they died their possessions passed on to their own blood, not someone else's kids.

sjscott80 · 2010-10-05T23:20:06+00:00

By the way, I just wanted to let all readers know that I welcome "letters to the editor," "guests posts," and whatnot. I would love for my blog to be a forum for all opinions as long as they are intelligently written.

In fact, I always prioritize letters and guests posts for publication when they take the opposite view of one of our writers. As a former journalist, I always want the website to be balanced. So, if anyone -- pro or con --would want to write a good response, my e-mail is listed in the upper left-hand corner of the website.

What can I say? I love good debate and discussion like that which I see here on Reddit.

esulcer · 2010-10-07T02:59:20+00:00

Bitches be crazy

sjscott80 · 2010-10-05T19:44:29+00:00

What is this? A dumbed-down Cliffs Notes version of the last 200 posts in this subreddit?

As for women looking for higher earning husbands - it's changing. And rapidly. 1/3rd of wives earn more than their husbands, up almost 10% in 2 years! 63.5% of women and 61.2% of men also claim to be very comfortable with this arrangement.

Kuonji · 2010-10-05T19:19:10+00:00

Women wanted men who would provide resources, and men wanted fer tile women who would bear and raise their chil dren. Women date up; men date beauty. Forty years of fem i nism can not change these sub con scious attitudes.

Ask most feminists and they will STAUNCHLY disagree with this.

Hyperbola_0 · 2010-10-05T20:18:13+00:00

One of the best articles I read.. ever.

afterhoursparts · 2010-10-05T21:28:58+00:00

I'm going to have to down vote this. One because I really didn't care for some of your generalizations. I'd like to see scientific data that marriage between man and a woman have become genetically ingrained.

Marriage is evolutionarily speaking a very new thing, and mostly was used for the barter and exchange of property between families, not necessarily to correct a problem with over population; at least I've never heard any anthropological data to suggest that was it's purpose.

Secondly, and this is anecdotal, but it did influence my disappointment with this article. A vast majority of men these days, are useless. Like I said, this is anecdotal, so let me get into this:

I'm in my mid twenties, and I've noticed, explicitly with other guys my age, the motivation to raise a family and provide simply is not there. Point to consequences of a hyperactive feminist movement before and during the 90's during our formative years, point to the compulsory school system and it's drawn out effects over several generations, point to mis-characterizations of young people by media while we were growing up, blame the entertainment industry, blame Iraq claiming a lot of us as we graduated high school, blame the economy for tanking as we graduated college. I don't care, men my age have been working towards obsolescence, and I don't think they've noticed.

2010-10-05T21:59:01+00:00

If only we could go back to the days where women sat at home and took valium and men went out to work their youth away for the pleasure of "providing" for his house-bound wife.

Damn, those were good times.

darien_gap · 2010-10-06T02:13:43+00:00

Interesting theme (evolving gender norms and evolutionary psych are personal interests of mine)... but this essay contains many erroneous conclusions from what appears to be a largely misinformed armchair observer. The author points to some things that are happening and assumes they are root causes, when in reality, they are the fairly well-understood effects of our culture migrating from an agrarian/rural to a knowledge-based, urbanized economy that favors fewer children with higher education (i.e., quality over quantity of offspring). There is PLENTY of evidence-based explanation for why the birth rate drops in developed countries, and it has virtually nothing to do with the reasons the author cited as causes, when they are merely well-understood correlates. Because these trajectories are well understood, demographers' and sociologists' predictions about the future of gender roles are likely to be pretty accurate, and very interesting stuff to the lay public. But only if one studies what is really going on, whereas this essay waves some red flags about tertiary effects while completely missing the underlying dynamics that are driving the observed changes.

But much worse than merely getting almost everything wrong, this essay paints a very negative picture about a situation that is becoming much better, albeit different than the way our parents and grandparents lived. Naturally, societal adjustment takes time and it can be confusing to navigate a world of evolving norms, but whatever, that's how evolution works, and when it comes to sex and reproducing, things are very self-correcting over time, so relax... couples will continue to find each other and meet their mutual relationship needs. There are much bigger problems out there to worry about.

Title	The New Battle of the Sexes: How the (Unintended) Consequences of Feminism Made Both Men and Women Pickier in Dating
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	40
Comments	77
Date	October 5, 2010 4:59 PM UTC (15 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/dn65z/the_new_battle_of_the_sexes_how_the_unintended/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/the-new-battle-of-the-sexes-how-the-unintended.1047071 https://theredarchive.com/post/1047071

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