So over in the Men’s Rights subreddit, the fellas are doing their best to address the burning Men’s Right issue of “date inequality,” or, as one recent poster put the question,“Hey feminists. How come men are still expected to pay for dates?”
I’m pretty sure that feminists aren’t the ones expecting men to pay for dates, so I’m not sure why feminists should be held to account for something they’re not doing, but in any case, the Men’s Rightsers don’t seem much interested in hearing explanations from feminists. No, they’re rather offer their own theories.
Enter a new convert to Men’s Rightsism called MrKocha, who enlists the aid of SCIENCE to offer his own explanation of this terrible date injustice:
I see a lot of problems with every day inequality between the sexes in mate interaction in various areas.
Attention, human female. Initiating mate interaction protocol.
First being, the average female has vastly different motivations in her mate selection. How much is nature vs nurture is up for debate, but I tend towards believing millions of years of evolution probably have left a significant mark there.
Huh. What are the odds that these millions of years of evolution just happen to line up with whatever regressive assertions about women — sorry, females — this dude is about to make?
Anyway her mate choice process often involves looking for signs of genetic fitness in male (attractive appearance, displayed dominance socially or physically, risk taking, higher social status), and weighing this against his ability to invest in her long term future: such as pay her dinner/bills). Paying for dinner displays two things: one a willingness to self sacrifice for women, and two the financial resources to continue to do so.
Let’s see. Human beings for the majority of their existence on this planet were hunters and gatherers. Even if we assume that men mainly did the hunting and women mainly did the gathering, the gathered food made up the bulk of the diet. So really, men on dates should expect women to bring them large salads in return for the carcass of a small mammal.
The second part of the problem is women also have a significantly stronger in group bias, to the point where considering points of view don’t immediately benefit females is actively more difficult.
Uh, I think you accidentally the sentence there.
The process of asking women to merely consider in the name of equality, whether there are social solutions to reduce inequalities between the sexes in mate selection scenarios commonly triggers a strong negative emotional response, that her ‘turf’ is under attack and whoever presents such a question is a threat.
Really? Lots of women have no fucking problem whatsoever with paying for dinner.
How women deal with this varies tremendously. Some experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance, denial, and explain away inequalities with whatever rationalization provides the most reassuring emotional responses.
Wait, are we talking about women or about MRAs now?
Some project their outgroup hatred upon whoever voices the opinion by attacking the individual with petty, poorly thought out attacks on their character.
He must be talking about MRAs, right?
Others, immediately jump miles past the idea of social equality being a noble (if potentially impossible goal), to the issue of consent, making accusations that somehow even considering the idea of more equality in gender relations is an attempt to violate consent of female mate choice? (MY CHOICE! DISCUSSION IS RAPEFUL!)
Um, how did we get from talking about dinner to talking about rape? Is he really suggesting that women have literally accused him of rape because he suggested they pay for their own dinner?
And finally, there do seem to a minority of women who are able to consider the issue rationally, even if it admittedly, challenges her immediate self interests and might be harder than other subjects to think about?
Wow, some women — albeit a minority — somehow manage not to be spiteful, narcissistic children! What a generous assessment of half the human race.
How to tackle the issue, when women potentially have 4 times the amount of in group preference, reinforced by feminist doctrine and a potential biological preference towards the behavior?
How is “getting dudes to pay for dinner” part of feminist doctrine exactly? I’m pretty sure The Rules isn’t a feminist manifesto.
All I can say is to continue to challenge any social doctrine that reinforces in group bias of women and praise women when they display the ability to think outside the spectrum of their immediate self interest even if ultimately there isn’t much other benefit to you?
Who’s a good woman for thinking outside the spectrum of her immediate self-interest? You’re a good woman for thinking outside the spectrum of your immediate self-interest!
Always try to keep in mind, that the negative responses, are basically a reflection of why the question is a valid one in the first place.
Exactly. Whenever women recoil in horror at some astoundingly misogynistic thing you’ve said, that just means you’re totally right!
In a followup comment, MrKocha returns to the notion that women love throwing around rape accusations, not only at men who argue with them about paying for dinner but at “sexually inexperienced men” generally. It’s bad enough that women aren’t attracted to these men, he argues, but
the amount of shame, condescension and hostility thrown their way is quite impressive.
It can range anywhere from rape accusations to golden ones like “I hope you never find someone and stay alone forever!”
Fun fact: each and every man on the planet earth, no matter how sexually experienced, was once a virgin. Somehow most of them managed to garner themselves a certain amount of sexual experience without being accused of rape and/or having women express the opinion that they should remain alone forever.
Assuming that McKocha is speaking from experience here, and assuming also (because I’m already disturbed enough by his comments) that the bit about the rape accusations is internet hyperbole, what exactly is causing all these women to get so angry at him?
I don’t think it’s the sexual inexperience. I think that maybe, possibly, it might be the fact that he obviously hates women?
Just a wild guess.
MrKocha started up a whole thread of his own to further discuss his scientific hypotheses about the human female and her mate choices. It’s called Females Oppressing Female Mate Choice. Because these evil females who put down sexually inexperienced men are also oppressing females who might choose to mate with these men!
Thanks to AgainstMensRights for clueing me in to the wonderfulness of MrKocha — here and here.
LBT – giggling now. 🙂
Dates! Orphan Black on the couch, snuggling kitties. House cleaning/staging. MLS listings.
And yeah, occasionally we go out somewhere that actually costs money, but who pays for what is a question that people are obviously going to approach differently when they’re trying to put two incomes toward mutual goals.
“Um, how did we get from talking about dinner to talking about rape?”
I interpreted the first bit about ‘dating equality’ or whatever the fuck he wrote as talking about rape. I may be wrong, but it is quite typical of these types of argument.
The idea is this: let’s say this guy really wants to have sex with a woman. But oh! the woman doesn’t want anything to do with you (it must be because of her biologically evolved avoidance of assholes). What’s the solution to this unfair conundrum?!
Now here’s the Men’s Human Rights solution: they should meet half way! Let’s say the guy wants to have sex with her 20 times, well she should accept 10 times in the name of social justice. (Why won’t the UN address their human rights concerns? Censorship!)
Humans are, at core, a cultural animal, and that makes it really hard to make claims about our biology.
Here’s the thing: if something is all natural with no cultural or individual variations, you don’t have to have all sorts of elaborate social customs propping it up, and it should be the same in all cultures for all people in all time periods. Otherwise, there might be biological biases, but they are clearly not absolute, and it may be hard to prove they exist.
For example, I think it is likely (and if my high school psych class is right, there is evidence behind this) that there are strong biological biases behind fear of snakes and spiders, for good biological reasons. I.e., we are primed to be afraid of spiders and snakes. But it clearly is not 100%, as my black-widow owning pre-major advisor proved.
I also can’t speak to cultural effects on how likely people are to be scared of snakes and spiders, but I imagine culture could be quite powerful.
So claiming that “People are naturally afraid of spiders and snakes, and if you aren’t, that proves that modern culture has corrupted you! Or maybe you are just pretending,” doesn’t make any sense. So why do people act like “People are naturally [my personal idea of gender relations] and if this isn’t happening, that’s because people are in denial!”
As well, if women’s preferences were set in stone, why do they complain about them so much? Maybe they think that they can change it? But wouldn’t that mean that there is a cultural aspect and it isn’t “all natural”? But then why should we change it in the direction they want?
Okay, I’ve read this thing twice and I still can’t figure out what that guy’s going on about. He doesn’t like paying for a woman’s meal? Ok then, just don’t. There’s no law saying the man has to pay.
And the pseudo-intellectual voice he’s writing in is painful. “Mate choice process.” Ugh.
wordsp1nner – Because MAN LOGIC™ says that everything and nothing has to make sense, so long as the end goal is “ME ON TOP, SHE ON BOTTOM”?
… innuendo totally not intended.
Alice,
Uh huh. You really expect me to believe that?
On further thought, the phrase “as a crutch” seems ableist, so please mentally replace that phrase in my last post with “as a flying buttress.”
See what I did there? It’s funner to write, and I made you say “butt” in your head. See? I did it again.
Butt.
Also, I find it hard to take MrKola up there as a reliable narrator when it comes to his description of discussions with women. Honestly, he sounds like the type who thinks it’s totally okay to try to “Reason and Logic” someone into sleeping with him. Consent probably got brought up in a very different manner than he seems to understand.
wordsp1nner – *shifts eyes* >_> <_<
No comment.
Actually, I like soft, cute, empathetic guys who look like 90s Trent Reznor and respect my boundaries. But nope, please continue to tell me what my preferences are.
RE: MaudeLL
Let’s say the guy wants to have sex with her 20 times, well she should accept 10 times in the name of social justice.
My rapist was actually of this type. EQUALITY! (Until he decided that I wasn’t holding up my end of the 50%…)
@Quaker
Also, from what I have studied (which is limited enough that I could be wrong), the dichotomy nature/nurture doesn’t make any sense anymore.
I think that we are completely the product of evolution. However, we have evolved as social animal with high brain plasticity, so behaviour is not necessarily preprogrammed per se. Instead, we are ‘programmed’ to adapt to our social environment. This whole gendered evolution doesn’t make much sense either, it’s not like the mother’s DNA only reaches daughters and vice versa (except for Goldsperm, who only has male ancestors).
It’s not crazy to posit that behaviour is evolved and deeply ingrained, the only problem is that we have know way of isolating ‘innate’ stuff. Maybe we can have people who have never had any human contact as controls for the great experiment of evo psych? Oh right, living without human contact isn’t very, uh… natural.
It can be fun for some to make up cute fanfic based in the Pleistocene to justify their beliefs, but as far as falsifiability goes, it’s pretty crap.
@Tulgey, butts butts butts!
http://youtu.be/t9eksJXSMZ4
(Puppy butts)
On the topic of bodily integrity and consent, there was this very beautiful children’s book that someone read to be as a child that FREAKED ME OUT. It was The Rainbow Fish, if you want to look it up.
Anyway, the story is that there is a fish with rainbow sparkly scales who doesn’t have any friends. But then zie* decides zie wants friends, and can’t make friends until zie GIVES AWAY HIS SCALES so now everyone has one special scale.
Which is, okay, I get now that its trying to teach kids to share. But scales are not a possession–they are a part of your body–and the point I got from that book was if you are in any way special everyone will hate you until you get rid of whatever makes you special. Also, you should give away parts of your body if people are jealous.
*I have no idea of the fish’s gender.
@LBT
Oh damn, I’m sorry. I’ve had similar experiences with a rapist and other sexual manipulators. They just want to make sure to twist things where saying no is portrayed as a selfish move.
*shudder*
I’m with MaudeLL on this, I think dude means that women should “compromise” on sex because it’s not fair that men go on all these dates where they want sex and it doesn’t happen and blah blah something about alphas and I mean it’s not like men choose partners based on looks or anything.
Statements aren’t questions?
Proper punctuation is misandry.
This totally explains the two dot ellipsis.
This guy actually gets dates?
Using Incorrect grammar and Spelling is a Political statement against a feminist Tyrannies?
its THE only way to defet the Feminsit conspeerasee..
omg i THIK that feminsit reefers to the evel ov HEARD CHEIRS becuz feminSIT oh no
It’s okay, MaudeLL. He’s gone and in a much better place now. Just really wish I’d known what bullshit that stuff was BEFORE he got to me.
RE: wordsp1nner
Oh man, I remember that book. I liked it as a kid, but hey, I liked a lot of questionable shit. And honestly, the lesson in it combined pretty creepily with the stuff I mentioned above. EQUALITY!
Ally – Teachers are the ones who teach you about grammar, right? And almost all teachers are female—the male ones happen to be huge manginas anyways, so they count as females too. And everyone knows that feminism is about FEEEEEEEEMALE SUPERIORITY. And because all of the teachers are females or manginas, they stand to benefit for the GYNOCRACY that is already here and yet to come!!!11eleven1!! And because they are the ones who watch our kids for six or seven hours a day (if not more!), they’re the prime brainwashing agents of the FEMINAZI AGENDA. AND THEY TEACH YOU GRAMMAR!!!11!!
So incorrect grammar and spelling is a sign that you know what they’re doing and that you won’t fall for their tricks. (Conspiracy-theory) MAN LOGIC™!