Men's Liberation @lemmy.ca dumples @kbin.social 12mo ago

Opinion | Why Aren’t More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like.

www.nytimes.com Opinion | Why Aren’t More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like.

Harping on people to get married from up in the ivory tower fails to engage with reality of life in the dating trenches.

Feminism @beehaw.org spaduf @slrpnk.net 12mo ago

www.nytimes.com /2023/11/11/opinion/marriage-women-men-dating.html

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67 comments

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'.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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.
  
  This is hilariously delusional. Delete this post.

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