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.
YESSSSS
Alice — I think it was this thread…for CSS. I recommend w3c schools, and can help you if you need it. I loathe JS, but love jQuery, so you may want to start there. And WP has a good stepping into PHP sort of code behind it. Other than PHP idk so server side code though, so I can’ the lip on the rest. Totally game for CSS questions though, as FemBorg might show, I LOVE it.
“can’ the lip”? Really autocorrect?
“Can’t help”
still trying .sorry
Argenti – I’ve been using w3c schools for teaching myself HTML (which is REALLY useful; that and my previous experience with BBCode on forums allowed me to get the hang of coding my comments here and my blog posts on my blog). I’m thinking of learning JS because even though I heard that’s like hell on earth, it’s still a good skill set to learn.
So I’ve noticed on the CSS thing. 😛
PHP. I’ll put that on my list.
Codecademy is also a great place to learn the basics of web development tools like jQuery and JavaScript. That’s how I gained a better understanding of JavaScript’s object-oriented programming architecture.
Also, Alice, if you feel like it, please learn Ruby. It’s such a lovely language, and it’s pretty damn useful as well. (Just look up JRuby for an example.)
If you learn Ruby, you can try building websites with Ruby on Rails, which is terribly difficult to work with because of its convention-over-configuration design (you’ll learn the meaning of that the hard way if you ever try developing a website in RoR). But it’s also pretty nice because it can build solid web applications in a very short time. Almost everything is already done for you. And while Ruby is obviously essential to know, you can actually make an large chunk of a web application with only a rudimentary knowledge of Ruby. If that weren’t true, then I’d be fired from my previous job very quickly. =P
I DIT IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
See I can learn if I put my mind to it and focus!
Success!
Now you’ll get eaten by the blockquote monster like everyone does. 😉
Ally – Hm, that would be pretty interesting to learn too.
Haha, part of the reason I’m trying to teach myself code is so that I can have a wider skillset. As of right now, my only useful skill is word processing. 😛
(I can speak Cantonese too, but not that well, so I’m not putting that on a resume.)
JavaScript might be a bit rough to deal with on its own (and at times completely nonsensical), but having a good understanding of it will also help you understand the how’s and why’s of actually implementing it with jQuery. And yes, jQuery is love.
kittehs – Just hope that the blockquote monster isn’t planning to go on an acid trip. 😉
Then you have to beware the URL monster. *nodnod*
Here’s one example of a nice thing about Ruby. If you want to print out the string “My name is Alice” using Ruby and Java (an older and much more difficult language similar to Ruby in regards to architecture), this is how you would do it in Ruby:
print "My name is Alice"
In Java, that same thing would be this:
class PrintOutString {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("My name is Alice");
}
}
Yech.
This is a very simple example and you probably won’t write code that simple as a more experienced programmer, but more often than not Ruby is that much easier than Java in all other respects, too.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
@Auggziliary “Ive been dating a guy for 2+ years, and our dates are literally just driving around town and looking at stuff, and stopping for food occasionally.”
That’s what my guy and I do on most dates too. I thought it was because we are old and boring. That’s what you get when you really, genuinely like the person you are dating, I guess. The fun comes from the company, not the activity.
I was going to say I would like to see what they say about this . I think circumcision is one of the injustices against males they rave against.Some go so far as to compare it to female genital mutilation .Which is far more barbaric and only serves the purpose of removing her ability to have pleasure in sex .
(not to start a debate but for what is worth I’m in favor of restricting circumcision of minor males to medically necessary only .I believe its an antiquated practice done now mostly for asthetic/ cultural reasons and any benefits are marginal at best )
Oh ma God ya’ll are scaring me to death .What the hell is the “blockquote ” monster?
Yeah, Argenti’s suggestions are really good. I’ll add that a knowledge of some SQL database such as MySQL is super helpful, and you can put that to use when you’re trying to do more sophisticated stuff with a WordPress website. NoSQL databases like MongoDB and CouchDB are also nice, from what I’ve heard, although I don’t know if they can work with WP.
Ally – Reminds me of when I used to look at my brother’s coding when he was learning BASIC a year ago; that one was apparently ALSO ridiculously simple.
I wish I could actually take an actual class now.
Ally – I’ll have to look into it. I’m going to have to find some time over break to learn this stuff, but in the end, I’ll be better off for knowing. *nod* That and it’ll be useful when I install Linux on my laptop as soon as it fully goes bonkers.
Oh and by the way thanks Kttehserf for lending me a hand. I appreciate that.
RE: Kittehs
What IS it with so many persons-getting-married that they insist on making people wear overpriced, unflattering, not-their-style-at-all, useless-ever-after and fecking uncomfortable clothes?
I never got this. But then, me and hubby’s wedding cost only a couple hundred dollars. I didn’t even wear a TUX, how could I expect people to wear $200 shoes?
RE: lana
I had a guy tell me one time that his wife turning him down for sex was “sexual harassment.” I have seen other guys (mostly married) call it “theft.”
I have encountered a version of that. It was pretty awful, and shock of all shocks, led to a lot of rape in that relationship! He wasn’t Christian, though. He actually had very low opinions of religious people.
Lana – This is the blockquote monster at its worst (invoking on purpose, so this doesn’t count towards my “blockquote at my comment” score):