This is something I'm just curious to see thoughts on. It's something that's been kind of nagging at me for years, but that NPR talk about "pathetic men" got me consciously thinking about it.

For pretty much my entire life, I've seen expressions of this social expectation for men to be "interesting". Funny thing is, I feel like this pressure used to come more from the right. We had beer commercials marketed to men with "The most interesting man in the world". Some of the first criticisms of toxic masculinity I saw in media were men who adopted bad behavior under the guise of being "interesting" for women (Example: Kevin Bacon's character in the film Super (spoiler warning) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EET138PjQnc). Pick-up artistry focused a lot on how to be interesting.

And in just another way that it feels like the political spectrum has turned on its head... now it seems like the left is constantly criticizing men for failing to be interesting. For not having enough personality or for not having hobbies that women find interesting. Failing to be interesting was slipped edgeways alongside other criticisms of men in that NPR talk. Meanwhile, any cultural messaging that says its ok to be boring as a guy, for example to stay out of trouble and have a work-chores-video games daily routine, doesn't make you a bad person seems to come from the right side of the culture war.

No matter what time period or where on the political spectrum it's coming from, not only is being uninteresting presented as being adjacent to or part of being a loser. But pretty often it's presented in a way that subtly implies it to be a moral failing. Something worthy of condemnation. Something you really need to fix about yourself if you're guilty of it. But only for men. Never once in my life have I seen women criticized in the same manner for being... "uninteresting".

And for all the vistas of gender discourse we have these days, examining seemingly everything from every angle... I have never seen this usage of the word interesting put under any examination whatsoever. I've never seen anyone attempt to explain what they mean by it when they say "interesting" in this context.

And the way its used feels like... code. Like a dogwhistle. Like the word is carrying a lot of weight, expressing things that would not be received well if they were expressed more clearly, and the people saying it know this. It's never a criticism that's dropped on its own. It's always a supplement, thrown in with other more clearly expressed criticisms, which always become the focus of debate because they offer something more clearly defined to respond to. While "interesting" just hangs out there unanswered, doing all this work.

I have spent the last couple hours trying, and I honestly cannot imagine what an ethical defense of condemning someone for being uninteresting would look like.

I think maybe it's time we drag this shadow demon that's been hiding in the dark corners of our gender language out into the sunlight.

I did some basic searches to see if I could find any discussion on this, and I couldn't find anything. All that turned up was academic and opinion pieces about toxic masculinity, and fragile men overreacting to criticism. So I went to chatgpt out of curiousity to see what it would say. It actually gave a pretty decent response that may be useful to the discussion, but I know people get... uhh... weird about AI usage. So I'll hold off and edit it in if people comment that I should go ahead and share it.