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I like the suggestion that we concern ourselvrs more with the quality of men's internal lives, but I do worry we're still objectifying men as 'the problem'.
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Seriously. We can't just call men "the problem". We have to address the problems men are having in their social lives and in dating. Men are not being given a fair shot to bring their best selves.
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It'll stop once it stops being a problem. FTA:
He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise or did so resentfully.
I mean, we're not just talking about the ability to communicate (which is important), but the basic ability to empathize. If men (in general) are unwilling to even consider the female point of view, is it any wonder why women have a difficult time dating? This isn't happening in a vacuum; there are real reasons why this is happening.
Boys refusing to do an exercise about imagining a day as the other gender represents a social problem, not a men problem. High school boys who refuse to imagine themselves as someone else were taught to be resistant to that idea, and not only by men but society as a whole.
Think of the structural issues which have caused this to be the case. Blaming men for not achieving an externally defined target isn't going to help anyone.
Hate the game, not the player.
You couldn't be more in your own echo chamber. If other men are telling you woman also act the same way as some men and also have issues and you refuse to see another position or point of view you are the problem.
I would hesitate to draw conclusions from something like that. Both me and a lot of the other men I know just flat out skipped basically every assignment like that if it didn't give enough points to be worth the effort, from middle school up through college.
Beyond that, it just seems like a shitty assignment as a whole. Because either a) it's done under an assumption that their day as the opposite sex would be spontaneous, and thus would have very few relevant differences from their normal days (and we can easily guess those differences) or b) it's done under an assumption of having always been the opposite sex, in which case it would just be an exercise in the butterfly effect, since huge amounts of things would be different, to the point that any generic hypothetical day would work.
All this is to say, it's a prime assignment for skipping
You take one cherry-picked anecdote and then generalize that to the entire population. You are the problem.
Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added.
I like the quote above about this topic but it does still seem like men are the problem. The problem is that we as a society haven't taught those skills and worse yet reinforce the opposite. We should be concerned with men's internal lives and mold them to fit into modern society
A big part is diminishing religiosity. There is little point in getting married if you aren't religious. Thanks to progress made by LGBT couples, most of the legal benefits of marriage are shared by domestic partnerships. Traditionalists on the left and the right make a big deal of this, but it is of negligible factual importance.
I don't think most people who get married do it for religious reasons or even to start a family in the US anymore. People do it since they see it a formal a commitment and want to announce their love in public.
That only covers one angle, if people do it for religious reasons, not if they don't do it because of religion. I'm not getting married, and the religious connotations of even a secular wedding is a significant chunk of why.
There's also a million legal reasons to get married... If there weren't, same sex marriage would probably have never made it to the Supreme Court. Everything from insurance coverage, employment benefits, credit rating, child custody, transfer of property following death, medical decisions, and a bunch of other very secular, very important benefits are conferred via legal marriage.
Is there any way to adapt this better for polyamorous people? I have poly friends that got around it by choosing a primary partner and marrying them, but that seems like a bad solution in the long term.
I don't think that is going to be happening for a long time. It took decades for gays and lesbians. The marrying of a primary partner is the best solution so far.
I'm pretty sure it's pretty clear that the slight increase in domestic partnerships over marriage does not shore up the declining marriage rates.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The most recent wave of commenters have tended to position themselves as iconoclasts speaking hard truths: Two-parent families often result in better outcomes for kids, writes Megan McArdle, in The Washington Post, but “for various reasons,” she goes on, this “is too often left unsaid” — even though policy wonks, and the pundits who trumpet their ideas, have been telling (straight) people to get married for the sake of their children for decades.
But harping on people to get married from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today.
Ms. Camino, for her part, has dabbled in dating since her partner left, but hasn’t yet met anyone who shares her values, someone who’s funny and — she hesitates to use the word “feminist” — but a man who won’t just roll his eyes and say something about being on her period whenever she voices an opinion.
The in-depth interviews, he said, “were even more dispiriting.” For a variety of reasons — mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships — it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.
Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,” he added.
The behaviors were ubiquitous enough that Ms. Inhorn compiled a sort of taxonomy of cads, such as the “Alpha males” who “want to be challenged by work, not by their partners” or the “Polyamorous men” who claim “that their multiple attachments to women are all ‘committed.’” Her breakdown — table 1.1 in the book — reads like a rigorous academic version of all the complaints you’ve ever heard from your single female friends.
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I feel like at least in Europe a lot of people see marriage as an outdated concept.
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It always does on mensliberation. Just got to get used to it and plan on it
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