I think the problem is that we (people in general) are not being socialized enough. Back when I was dating a lot, I met lots of women in various contexts – classes, bus or subway rides, work-out routines, etc. – where the women were able to observe me over time and interact as they chose. We got used to each other, and the invitation was zero sweat – it was natural. With one exception, none of the women I dated seemed the least bit scared (of me or anything), and they had no reason to be. Even the one woman who was scared had no reason to be, and I will discuss her in a bit.
My point is, though, that the women I dated were self-assured and fully tuned in to the vibes I was sending. They had a radar that knew exactly what to do with me (either positive or otherwise). And they got that, as far as I could tell, from growing up around people, from learning to trust their feelings and instincts, and from generally good self-esteem. The woman I dated who was scared of me, on the other hand, dated me because she was scared, and the fear turned her on and excited her. I was nice because I’m basically just an angel in human form, but her history was pretty bleak. She lacked the trust in her own intuitions that would have protected her.
The pandemic was an exclamation point to a trend of increasing isolation. In my opinion, this trend is not accidental; it was intentionally fostered and supported by an elite class that has gradually hoarded all the wealth and is desperately afraid people will come together and throw off the yoke. But a side-effect, one might say, or maybe it is the absolutely most powerful and intentional effect (I’m not sure) was that it has made making friends difficult, and dating… more difficult. The romantic connection is earth-moving, and anybody wanting to prevent class challenges knows that very well.
I’m not denying that asking people you don’t know out, or accepting invitations, can be scary and always has been, and I am keenly aware of the risks men pose, as a category, to women. But I think the solution is overall self-esteem that allows you to trust your instincts plus some sort of social setting that makes it possible for people to know each other a little bit before they take the risk. If that’s too much to ask, then meet in a well-lit, public place, independently, and start getting to know each other. If you fear someone and it turns you on, you need to take a good hard look at where that might be leading you. If you regard someone ignoring your signals as attractively persistent, again, that should be a strong warning about your instincts being dysfunctional.
(I see that I never even mentioned feminism as a cause or solution. I don’t think it is, except to the extent that feminism did encourage women to look at and trust their own feelings and observations (as opposed to their training as the second sex), and it did expose the shocking extent to which women were, and are, subjected to violence. In my opinion those are purely positive.)
You make a lot of really good points. I completely agree, an increasing lack of socialization is a huge contributor as well, and the Covid isolation continues to affect most people, at least from what I experience.
Gather the hackers! Take down The Apps! Get people IRL again! Where's Anonymous when you need em?
Right. The suggestion I keep seeing, that men should approach unknown women and ask them out, is all wrong in my opinion, unless they're seeing them in a place designated for that (i.e., speed dating or some sort of match-making event). All a guy knows about a woman on first glance is that he likes her looks or style (and granted, a lot of info gets packed into looks and style, but still); and the woman has that glance and the additional info that the guy has nerve/self-confidence enough to ask. I'd be scared of either side of that equation - except for the rare times when I'm not, because chemistry can be very powerful, right?
Indeed it can be powerful. But yeah, generally speaking, I wouldn't typically be all that interested in someone who wanted to go out with me based only on the fact that they liked my appearance. I mean, it can be and often is, of course, a motivator to approach someone to get to know them and see if you're compatible in the first place. But this similar dating app strategy where a lot of men just mass-swipe to cast a wide net just makes a lot of women feel similarly... unnoticed. That's how I felt using Tindr back in the day, anyway. I wrote a comment about it on Ozy's original essay. In person, getting to know people organically first, is the way.
That’s what I was intending, with a nod to my own experienced reality, that sometimes something in that initial interaction, however brief, trumps everything.
"The suggestion I keep seeing, that men should approach unknown women and ask them out, is all wrong in my opinion, unless they're seeing them in a place designated for that (i.e., speed dating or some sort of match-making event)."
Tove K. on Wood From Eden has a whole essay about how women have to be unpleasant all the time now, because we have discarded the rules about times and places where approaches may be expected and where that sort of behaviour is unseemly. https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/confessions-from-an-unpleasant-woman
Her point is well made. It's funny, but not in the ha ha way, that the conclusion is the need to be unpleasant "all the time" and that the predicate (where there is a likelihood of casual sex) can get lost. There is essentially zero chance of casual sex on Substack, for example, but we still have to be careful in any approach. That's too bad, maybe, but it's the times we live in.
I read this thinking I'd disagree entirety, but then I saw old-me in that description of how to be unpleasant so quickly. It's exactly the "man-repellant armor" I talked about wearing in an old post about holding doors open for women. Only after I moved out of the city did I manage to feel like I could discard it all. There was a huge difference between my experiences where I used to live and where I do now — and it's why, when talking about *the woods* specifically, I was so perplexed by how so many women would choose the bear. Did the ones who say that ever actually go into the woods on a regular basis? Because in my experience: men in the woods, bears in the city. All day long. I never want to walk around downtown Minneapolis (or mostly any of its neighborhoods, tbh) alone ever again, no matter how hard the sun is shining, lol.
I think I'll write a follow-up analyzing these differences more. Because there's a huge cultural component to this sometimes, too. And racial, but no one wants to talk about that (remember the lady who filmed how many men catcalled her walking down the street and how she got called a racist for posting it because most of the men don't it to her were not white — neither was she, but I guess that was beyond their point). Meanwhile, I live in a more racially diverse place now, and encounter far fewer creeps in daily life. So it's not just racial, but I think very cultural in many cases.
" and it (feminism) did expose the shocking extent to which women were, and are, subjected to violence."
During the second wave a prominent feminist (Erin Pizzey) set up the first shelter for women in the UK. As women came in and shared their stories it soon became clear that they were also violent, and that in most violent households the violence is reciprocal - often with one partner or the other initiating the latest row, and both of them essentially addicted to the confrontational component of their relationship. Violence was the language they spoke, and so they naturally chose partners who spoke the same language. Further studies totally backed this up.
So Erin decided to expand her shelters to accommodate abused men too (I mean in separate shelters). It wasn't long before her fellow feminists threw her out of her own organisation, attacked her and eventually drove her into exile outside of the UK after killing her dog and making bomb threats (the police were opening her mail by this point).
The point being.... feminism is built upon a Threat Narrative (men oppress women) and a Male Power Fantasy (men act, women are acted upon) which is completely detached from reality.... but at the same time plugs directly into the brain stem of both men and women because both sexes are gynocentric in nature and naturally protective of women, and keenly aware of men's superior strength (in a basic caveman sense).
Feminism has been so successful precisely because humans will always cheer for any cause that purports to protect and provide for women at men's expense ("he for she") - even if that cause has been hijacked by demented ideologues and a thousand self serving agendas.
And so now that feminism has re-written our history and become the default treatise on all things gender related it is tearing society apart. Not just dating, but everything. If feminism (patriarchy theory) was true then men are indeed women's oppressors (enemy) and no woman should go near men, let alone date them!
It is traumatising for young women to be told the men they are hard wired to seek protection and security from (as well as sex and intimate relationships) are their enemy. And it is just as traumatising for young men to be told the urge they have to protect and provide for women (and have sex and intimate relationships with) is in fact the urge to rape and oppress women - an urge they must suppress for their entire lives.
I think we have almost forgotten that for most of history (prior to feminism) we never thought like this. We knew that men and women are the most loyal allies and the most stupendous partnership imaginable - and that all the squabbles and gripes were inconsequential compared to this formidable bond and mutual admiration that we shared. Men were a gift to women and vice versa. Not enemies, as feminists claim!
Feminism has taken the most dysfunctional aspects of male and female behaviour and psychology and redefined them as the default setting. The only way to heal the rift between men and women, end the gender wars and save civilisation from sliding down the toilet is to dismantle feminism wave by wave and throw the entire thing into a dumpster to be buried in concrete for a million years.
I saw somebody posting about aunties coming back. I also endorse that sort of matchmaking. Anything that actually involves knowledge of personality and some sort of learning dynamic might be a good thing.
Both my parents’ and my marriages came out of blind dates. In both of our cases, a close friend met someone serendipitously who would be a good match and set up the introduction. When someone knows you well, it works!
I've only been on one back when I was 21 and it was so bad I swore them off forever 😂 but yeah, you get the right people who really know you to set you up, and it could work great!
Ah, Schrodinger's Rapist, we meet again. How I've missed you so. Oddly enough, I was just wondering a few minutes ago if we were going to see a modern updated postscript to that Lirpa article from 15 years ago. Well, never let anyone tell you God doesn't exist.
There's an easy temptation to label the SR essay and Phaedra Starling as the apotheosis of the stereotypical Internet Feminist (tm), a ball of equal parts smug gender-studies terminology and quivering emotion, all of it glued together by a misandry that she assures us isn't a real thing even as she problematizes the entitlement of, I dunno, men converting oxygen into carbon dioxide or something. That being said, as I've aged out of the person I used to be 15 years ago, I've found the act of attempting to at least model other people's distasteful arguments in good faith to be a useful intellectual exercise, if nothing else.
And I've found that I no longer hate Phaedra, at least not really. I would prefer that her anxiety and the particular mindset with which she views the world and people like me not exist, but given that we don't live in that world, I can't fault her for writing the things I would probably write if I was in her shoes and had lived her life. I was a (mildly) bullied kid, whispery and slight of frame and clad in second-generation immigrant skin; I'm something of an expert in finding strangers scary myself. There was a part of me that instinctively rejected her description of random nondescript men as the worst category of criminal, the way we'd all been told in those school assemblies that judging people by their immutable biological characteristics was ipso facto wrong. But there was also a part of me, human and scared and trying to be One Of The Good Guys, that saw the truth in a fundamentally frightened human trying to transmute the flame of her fear into a torch to light others' way, and what did it matter if we were separated by gender and also she hated my guts? Sometimes you have to respect the game and give credit where credit is due, and I've never seen any other feminist essay expertly wriggle between the cracks in the hearts of men that otherwise would have been happy to dismiss internet feminism as just those wacky childless cat ladies doing their hijinks. Turns out sometimes men can be vulnerable, emotional, and willing to listen to women. Who knew?
The next point has been made by others before me, but it bears repeating.
Years later, there's a certain schadenfreude in the wake of Schrodinger's Rapist and all the similarly toned pieces and clapbacks, namely the inconvenient observation that at the end of the day, regardless of the number of Tumblr notes, the men most likely to take the requisite psychic damage from being labeled Schrodinger's Rapist were by definition the men most likely to care what women thought; the sensitive men most likely to be Good Allies against toxic masculinity; the men most likely to actually feel bad for violating a woman's boundaries; the men most likely to be in the fifty-nine out of sixty and not the one. There are likely at least a couple of self-aware women out there that live with the knowledge that Schrodinger's Rapist probably meaningfully removed a nonzero number of Good Men from the dating pool who would have listened to their concerns, been there for them, and pledged to support them, disproportionately leaving behind the scumbags who had less of a proclivity to worry about being labeled toxic or creepy or reckoning with their structural privilege. As someone who suffered a nontrivial amount of anguish around the concept of Schrodinger's Rapist, an infohazard if there ever was one that actively degraded my ability to interact normally with the female population after I read it (and I thought I was doing the right things, natch!), I suppose I should appreciate the irony. Mean feminist tries to pwn the menz, ends up making things worse for women everywhere! Ha ha!
But mostly, I am just saddened at the way things turned out, at the many banal and terrifying ways men hurt women and the many banal and terrifying ways women hurt men in response. Whatever joy I get from seeing Mean Tumblr Feminists get egg on their face won't bring back the years I lost questioning my self and my masculinity on a deeper level, and it also won't comfort any of the other men and women out there who gave the best years of their lives to fearing and loathing people that never deserved it. I'm reminded of that quote Dylann Roof allegedly gave after being arrested for the Charleston church mass shooting, admitting that many of the people he'd killed in cold blood would likely have helped him if he'd asked. How many of us, deep down, are willing to admit that if we were to talk to a man or a woman we'd hate purely because of their gender, that they would probably help us if we'd only asked too?
At the end of the day, I certainly have my own concerns about the way feminism deals with men's concerns, men's fears, men's deep-seated inner lives. But there's also no getting around the fact that that feminism or no feminism, pain or no pain, all we can do is try our best. No one else is going to do that for us.
"the men most likely to take the requisite psychic damage from being labeled Schrodinger's Rapist were by definition the men most likely to care what women thought; the sensitive men most likely to be Good Allies against toxic masculinity; the men most likely to actually feel bad for violating a woman's boundaries; the men most likely to be in the fifty-nine out of sixty and not the one."
This is, IIUC, the main point Scott Aaronson was trying to make in the blog comment that infamously (if you are an extreme nerd) got him piled on a decade ago:
Thank you for sharing that. Wow. I actually wasn't familiar with that, having mostly exited that section of the online world by 2014. He so perfectly illustrates what so many men have said above and elsewhere (the comments on Brennan's post contain many similar thoughtful comments).
It would help if professors and parents and talking heads and the internet didn't just spew complete and absolute utter lies about rape statistics. The chance of getting actually raped by a stranger are incredibly, incredibly tiny. All of the stats you commonly see on the advocate sites are completely false. I wrote a paper on this way back in high school looking into the actual research and it's just utter trash. If you are a normal person who isn't a prostitute or someone who does things like pass out on the sidewalk after you shoot up with heroin, the chances are so small as to be unworth ever giving it a second thought. It actually infuriates me how these fake statistics just get repeated over and over.
And your chances of getting your ass beat by a stranger, if you're a guy, are about 500x as likely as that a woman in normal circumstances getting stranger raped.
Anyway, now I'm pissed off lol. Nice piece though. From one boy crazy since 3rd grade chick to another.
It reminds me of gun statistics from a particular organization I find deeply dishonest, Everytown for Gun Safety. They claim an absurdly high number of school and mass shootings each year, but if you look at their criteria, a veteran shooting himself in his vehicle in the parking of of a school at night when no one is there counts as a "school shooting." An unrelated shooting between adults and nothing to do whatsoever with the school or students within a certain radius of a school counts as a "school shooting." The dishonesty in these widely-circulated statistics is maddening.
"And your chances of getting your ass beat by a stranger, if you're a guy, are about 500x as likely as that a woman in normal circumstances getting stranger raped."
And that part. The standard answer is always, "well, who's doing the ass beating?" as if it's suddenly a victimless crime when it happens to men.
I hate dishonest statistics. We have too many school shootings without exaggerating the numbers, which serves to break down trust rather than inspire new converts
I actually have a piece I've been working on, which very much aligns with what you've described here, about how normal "practice" with dating and relationships used to happen in the olden-days of the 90s. Back before everyone turned weird and asocial, which always depended on friend groups and consiglieres to help smooth things out. Your friend asks his friend if he thinks you're cute and then reports back to you. His friend asks your friend if you want to meet at the water fountain and kiss. That's normal. It's called practicing and graceful ways of dealing with rejection and learning courage and practicing and failing and trying again (or triumphing!). I feel like kids don't do this nowadays, at least based on everything I read. Instead it's all either walk up to a total stranger (which has never been a great idea) or go online and advertise your picture to jump straight to meeting for sex. No wonder they're all weird and anxious.
I am with you in spirit, I think sexual assault statistics are exaggerated. Just commenting to point out that “I met a guy online/at the coffee shop, went on a date with him, and he raped me” would fall under acquaintance rape, not stranger rape. “Rape by strangers is rare so it’s ok to go home with that guy from Tinder/the party” is illogical-those are the situations that are dangerous. What’s relatively rare is rape by a stranger who jumps out of the bushes, breaks into your house, etc.
You still have a responsibility to say no, though. What this seems to be talking about is girls who feel pressured to have sex, give in, feel bad about it the next day, and call it rape. That’s not rape, it’s just a bad decision and entirely the girl’s fault (assuming it wasn’t the female who was the sex initiator). It’s awkward, but you have to communicate and advocate for your needs and desires!
The woman that Lirpa quotes says that one is six men commit sexual assault so therefore one in six men are rapists. This is a statistical sleight of hand that bothers me. Sexual assault in the UK is defined as “unwanted touching in a sexual manner” which includes lots of things that are not rape, even if they are unwanted.
There is no way in hell I would date Brennan. This constant analysing and fear is a sign of a very emotionally unstable person, and anyone dating her would be getting a metric shitload of drama - as would anyone befriending her.
Just as most women have at some time dated the arsehole (disagreeable narcissist), most men have at some point dated the BPD chick (alternately agreeable/disagreeable neurotic). In both cases they love-bomb and the sex is great and you spend about three weeks convinced this is the Greatest Romance of All Time. And then they stab you.
Don't put your dick in crazy, or your pussy on it. It's never worth it.
Oh, thank you for reminding me, because I was just about to swap a few things around to make it more clear and then fully forgot why I logged into my desktop lol. My memory is garbage, too, although for other reasons.
There's a pretty fantastic concept I ran across many years ago, it's called "the asshole filter."
The concept is simple: If you tell people "the only way to contact me is to break a rule," you will only be contacted by rule-breakers. This is a special case of the general principle that you cannot reduce the amount of harm in the world by enacting a rule that will only be obeyed by the people who aren't causing the harm. (See also: Gun control)
The example given in the essay that introduced this concept was a department head who told people to email his department's general contact address with any requests. What ends up happening is that people keep emailing him directly in order to get him to personally handle their requests, and on average the individual people he interacts with are ruder, more entitled, generally worse people to deal with than the people he was dealing with before he established the rule. Because the rule-following people are following the rule, he now exclusively comes into contact with assholes. He has set up an asshole filter.
It's not hard to map this onto the female experience. At an absolute minimum, the stranger who talks to you weights his desire to talk to you higher than he weighs your apparent non-desire to talk to him. This means the average respect for boundaries among people who talk to you is lower than the average respect for boundaries among all men. The effect of broadcasting a rule that creates stronger boundaries for yourself does not increase the amount of respect for your boundaries. It lowers the average level of respect for boundaries of the people who do interact with you. If you don't understand that the people who interact with you are a sample of men who you have specifically selected for their lack of respect for your boundaries, you might come to the wrong conclusion that men are more dangerous on average than they actually are. Maybe even to the point where you'll say stupid things like "I'd rather encounter a bear than a man in the woods."
The other effect of the asshole filter is resentment among rule-followers. If the department head still keeps handling requests that come into their personal email box, and those requests get better handling than the requests of those who obeyed the rule and ran their requests through the department's general address, the people who find out about this are gonna be *pissed*, and will probably modify their attitude about respecting the rules of that department.
When you have guys saying "I've exhausted my personal network, online dating is a hellhole, you're not allowed to talk to women in public, where am I supposed to meet women?" they start getting blackpilled really quick when they hear somebody go "I got five phone numbers in the grocery store last week." And that's how you end up with graphs of political alignment over time where men make a sudden and enormous lurch to the right starting in the 2010s.
My other thought about this issue is the concept of "revealed preferences."
I've told a few different people - You claim to have a legitimate fear of violence underlying every interaction you have with half of the entire world population. You live in a country where it's legal to carry a firearm. Why don't you?
Absent a pretty massive change in society, carrying a firearm is by far the easiest thing a woman can do to take ownership of her personal safety, which she claims is at sufficient risk wherever she goes as to create a constant sense of anxiety. So why not do that?
"Revealed preferences" is economics-speak for "actions speak louder than words." No matter how much these people are afraid of being attacked by random men, they haven't actually done anything to prepare for it. There are a few ways you can look at this -
* Victimhood is prestigious within the progressive sphere, and claiming an ever-present fear of men establishes a victimhood status without needing to actually be victimized. Being prepared to prevent victimhood would diminish victimhood status, and is thus avoided.
* Firearms are right-coded, and thus strongly taboo for anyone who wishes not to be mistaken for right-wing, and this taboo is stronger than whatever they actually believe their level of risk to be
* Misandry is fashionable within the progressive sphere, and claiming an ever-present fear of men is more about being fashionable than about conveying a real truth of the female experience. (This is my primary explanation of the "choose the bear" phenomenon.)
Any way you slice it, revealed preferences tell us that the schroedinger's rapist discourse has pretty much nothing to do with any legitimate fear of men.
You don't even have to go as far as getting a firearm--mace works too.
Funnily enough, my husband is still in that insists I carry mace around anytime I go somewhere alone. This is probably because he has been mugged before. I don't personally feel any fear or need for the mace.
But I agree that if someone is afraid like that, they should take steps to protect themselves. The problem is that the women who are neurotically afraid of being raped are often the kind of person to go to a man's house alone and... Not say "no" to anything. Even if they had a gun they wouldn't use it.
My husband wants me to take mace to a concert I'm going to alone in awhile. That's only because it's in a state that won't let me take one of his guns, lol. He always tries to get me to take a gun when I go camping alone, too. I never have. I'd rather get bear spray. I'm not afraid of men in the woods, only bears (and venomous snakes and ticks). Woodsy men are the best type in my experience. But honestly I just don't want to carry a gun until I'm trained better. I'm a pretty good shot, but only at shooting ranges. I'm afraid of being disarmed without proper training. So I'll wait to get my CCP until then.
Re: the gun thing being right-coded, it is so funny(?) to me that, when I lived in Minneapolis, I would occasionally learn that one of my lefty friends actually did own a firearm or even conceal-carry, but they rarely told anyone for fear of looking like a rightwinger. I was going to tell you that the feminist friend I referred to in the story actually had one, but then I remembered she's why I know you, so you probably already knew that, lol.
This is a great essay. I can’t say I’ve read the original offering by Starling, but I can only say as a man that it is very hard to date a person where you start below 0 for some of your more major, immutable traits.
If you’re a woman dating men, seeing them as -2 instead of just 0 (I don’t know this man, I’ll make no assumptions best I can until I do know him more) is problematic.
I have been on dates with many women like this and I can feel it. I can feel how I have to prove myself to be neither bad nor good because I’m already starting at bad because of my gender.
I’ve been on dates too where the woman just sees me as a neutral person. Maybe we will vibe. Maybe not. I’ll never understand truly what it means to be a woman and fear these types of bodily harm by men — but I can say as a man with some degree of emotional intelligence (look at me! lol) it is incredibly easy to tell and it sucks. It sucks she has the need to carry her armor, it sucks also to have an uphill battle just to prove you’re a person. Trauma is horrible.
These women who feel this way toward men are at a disadvantage when dating- why would I date a person who suspects me of being a creep when they don’t even know me when I could date someone who just doesn’t assume things about me as a trauma response?
While it is valid for many women to feel this way toward men (I’ve met many women who have had horrid experiences via horrible men), it nonetheless is palpable to men and that’s hard too.
I'm of the very eldest of the zoomers (but haven't dated since prior to the pandemic). I remember wanting to ask out girls in person but couldn't muster it for the following reasons:
1. I always thought, "Isn't it sort of vulgar to ask a stranger out without ever even speaking to them?" It feels like you'll be perceived as only having judged their looks to be good. This feels creepy. Looking back, I just thought these girls looked cool, interesting, or nice, which are all perfectly acceptable reasons to ask someone out.
2. If the solution to #1 is to talk to them first and then ask them out-- it now feels like you're gaming their politeness to hold a brief conversation before you ask them out (which you had decided to do before speaking to them). I hate when random people accost me, even moreso when their intentions are not immediately clear, and I never felt comfortable doing this to girls. When you assume the girl is just living her life and doesn't want to be bothered, this feels even creepier and pick-up-artisty than #1.
3. The worst is if you actually know the girl somehow. I would hate to strike out but create a situation where the girl is now perennially uncomfortable because she has to see me in class/work every week. It also feels like you're at risk of invalidating any positive interaction you've had; if you had previously worked well together, would she now assume you had nefarious intentions the entire time? If you were close enough to be considered friends, you don't want to be thought of as one of those guys who was just lying in wait until they could make their move. #3 is especially damaging because you suspect you'll be thought of as a creep or predator and your reputation might even be affected. No one wants to be that guy in some girls story.
I'm sure it's somewhat aided by the desire to avoid rejection, like Brennan suggests. For the most part, though, I feel like I was stopped mostly by concerns for how the girl might feel. I never wanted to ruin someone's day, or create a scenario where a classmate feels nervous to come to class. I think it might be sensationalist to say "feminism ruined dating" but maybe it ruined asking people out.
I missed huge chunks of third-wave feminism I guess.
I heard that some women are always afraid of men, but I didn’t identify with it, either. I just assumed there are some women who have had much worse experiences than me and felt bad about that, tried to be sensitive about it, and left it at that. I don’t think I realized it had permeated the culture to convince women to ignore their own experiences and embrace this perspective or even perpetuate it.
I rejected my mother’s admonitions to not go to the store after dark because I might be attacked in the parking lot. It irritated me that I was supposed to be free and equal yet at the same time cower in my home, not going to get the mint chocolate chip ice cream I wanted because it’s dark and scary and men do bad things. I didn’t believe it was 100% safe out there, but I also knew the likelihood of me getting attacked was low, so much so that the ice cream was worth the risk.
I assume my mom’s instincts came from being conditioned to think women were just too weak. She was pretty progressive for her time and place, but still a product of some aggressively religious conservative values. So it really bothers me that the very framework (feminism) that ensured I could embrace my own agency is now spreading fears that prevent women from embracing theirs.
I think a lot of us who were actively involved in that mostly-online part of the movement didn't even realize what was happening until it happened, ourselves. I did call out a lot of behavior I saw as unproductive or unfeminist or too "women are weak" in their messaging, but even then it was mostly a day-to-day reaction thing than it was a "what will this mean for the future?" kind of analysis. It's very interesting looking back! I'm a little more tuned in now to what the present might mean for the future.
Given how common male violence against women is it’s not unreasonable for men to start at a -2 rating vs 0. If anything the most rational thing to do is not pursue and enter into romantic relationships with me. Doesn’t matter if it’s stranger rape or rape from someone that’s familiar. This is worthless splitting of hairs to make men feel better. Why do the so called good men feel threatened by women’s defensiveness if they’ve got nothing to hide? And even so, men are not entitled to have relationships with women because Loneliness. Oh no the horror of loneliness. 😒
Interesting that you'd dismiss the well-known and constantly-discussed epidemic of loneliness (which presently exists in every demographic.) Do you really sincerely deny it's a problem, or was that just an excuse to slide in the "entitlement" strawman?
Man, has it really been fifteen years since Schroedinger's Rapist? That would have been only two years after I finished college, then. Dang. Hard to think of an essay that's colored the public discourse this century more.
I remember feeling somewhat enlightened by it when I read it (and also somewhat annoyed, lol), but in retrospect it really does seem like a dead-end in social progress. Even if one in sixty men *is* a rapist, that means more than ninety-eight percent of men *aren't* rapists (and of course even most rapists fail to rape nearly all of the people they encounter), so living your life in constant fear of that is...hardly rational. It was never really clear to me, either, what "good" (i.e., "non-raping") men were supposed to do with this info, either. I can continue to do zero rapes, but it's not like I can do anything to prevent all other men from being rapists.
Add in the fact that, were this essay about any group that *wasn't* men ("I'm not saying all ____s are violent criminals, but..."), the author would have been dismissed as a Nazi, and...well, I guess that's how we ended up with the nihilistic, zero-sum politics we're all stuck with now. Thanks, Sterling!
These things differ vastly per location. Once someone complained to me about fourth-wave feminism is extremely distrustful of men, and I replied that he is living 3 hours of driving from Berkeley College which has always been the hotbed of radicalism. There are places way, way more chill than that.
BTW Internet dating is working as long as people are not stupid about it, put their phones down, sit down to a computer and log in to a relevant website.
The lack of agency of younger women is absolutely noticable, even in my neck of Europe, though perhaps young men have the same issue expressed differently.
We organize BDSM munches where nothing happens, people just talk. People who are touched or something can talk to the caretakers. Several young women asked us that caretakers should notice if they feel uncomfortable TALKING with someone and intervent.
This is not simply fear but the lack of adulting, social skills.
First, I lol'd quite a bit reading this. Second, I appreciate how you wove together fear of rape with the lack of agency that has been grafted onto women by other women in the name of feminism. I still remember discussing the Ansari episode with women in a feminist online space, and I was chided for asking why she couldn't just have left. It wasn't a useful question, apparently. Feminism seems to be about disempowerment selectively used as a mechanism to get what we want, with the deepest irony. I don't think we should be going around afraid of sexual violence in the most liberated society in history. Recently I've taken to bringing up how American women are the most liberated women have been in human history (along with Western Europe) and that if women want to see a real patriarchy they should go to South Asia....only to be met with "oh well it's all relative". Bitch, no. First, it literally is safer for women here relative to other countries, that's how comparison works. Second, since there is a degree of difference, it should matter when evaluating one's situation. I just...cannot.
Yes.
I think the problem is that we (people in general) are not being socialized enough. Back when I was dating a lot, I met lots of women in various contexts – classes, bus or subway rides, work-out routines, etc. – where the women were able to observe me over time and interact as they chose. We got used to each other, and the invitation was zero sweat – it was natural. With one exception, none of the women I dated seemed the least bit scared (of me or anything), and they had no reason to be. Even the one woman who was scared had no reason to be, and I will discuss her in a bit.
My point is, though, that the women I dated were self-assured and fully tuned in to the vibes I was sending. They had a radar that knew exactly what to do with me (either positive or otherwise). And they got that, as far as I could tell, from growing up around people, from learning to trust their feelings and instincts, and from generally good self-esteem. The woman I dated who was scared of me, on the other hand, dated me because she was scared, and the fear turned her on and excited her. I was nice because I’m basically just an angel in human form, but her history was pretty bleak. She lacked the trust in her own intuitions that would have protected her.
The pandemic was an exclamation point to a trend of increasing isolation. In my opinion, this trend is not accidental; it was intentionally fostered and supported by an elite class that has gradually hoarded all the wealth and is desperately afraid people will come together and throw off the yoke. But a side-effect, one might say, or maybe it is the absolutely most powerful and intentional effect (I’m not sure) was that it has made making friends difficult, and dating… more difficult. The romantic connection is earth-moving, and anybody wanting to prevent class challenges knows that very well.
I’m not denying that asking people you don’t know out, or accepting invitations, can be scary and always has been, and I am keenly aware of the risks men pose, as a category, to women. But I think the solution is overall self-esteem that allows you to trust your instincts plus some sort of social setting that makes it possible for people to know each other a little bit before they take the risk. If that’s too much to ask, then meet in a well-lit, public place, independently, and start getting to know each other. If you fear someone and it turns you on, you need to take a good hard look at where that might be leading you. If you regard someone ignoring your signals as attractively persistent, again, that should be a strong warning about your instincts being dysfunctional.
(I see that I never even mentioned feminism as a cause or solution. I don’t think it is, except to the extent that feminism did encourage women to look at and trust their own feelings and observations (as opposed to their training as the second sex), and it did expose the shocking extent to which women were, and are, subjected to violence. In my opinion those are purely positive.)
You make a lot of really good points. I completely agree, an increasing lack of socialization is a huge contributor as well, and the Covid isolation continues to affect most people, at least from what I experience.
Gather the hackers! Take down The Apps! Get people IRL again! Where's Anonymous when you need em?
Right. The suggestion I keep seeing, that men should approach unknown women and ask them out, is all wrong in my opinion, unless they're seeing them in a place designated for that (i.e., speed dating or some sort of match-making event). All a guy knows about a woman on first glance is that he likes her looks or style (and granted, a lot of info gets packed into looks and style, but still); and the woman has that glance and the additional info that the guy has nerve/self-confidence enough to ask. I'd be scared of either side of that equation - except for the rare times when I'm not, because chemistry can be very powerful, right?
Indeed it can be powerful. But yeah, generally speaking, I wouldn't typically be all that interested in someone who wanted to go out with me based only on the fact that they liked my appearance. I mean, it can be and often is, of course, a motivator to approach someone to get to know them and see if you're compatible in the first place. But this similar dating app strategy where a lot of men just mass-swipe to cast a wide net just makes a lot of women feel similarly... unnoticed. That's how I felt using Tindr back in the day, anyway. I wrote a comment about it on Ozy's original essay. In person, getting to know people organically first, is the way.
That’s what I was intending, with a nod to my own experienced reality, that sometimes something in that initial interaction, however brief, trumps everything.
Definitely. And it would be a shame for that little bit of magic to completely disappear, too.
"The suggestion I keep seeing, that men should approach unknown women and ask them out, is all wrong in my opinion, unless they're seeing them in a place designated for that (i.e., speed dating or some sort of match-making event)."
Tove K. on Wood From Eden has a whole essay about how women have to be unpleasant all the time now, because we have discarded the rules about times and places where approaches may be expected and where that sort of behaviour is unseemly. https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/confessions-from-an-unpleasant-woman
Her point is well made. It's funny, but not in the ha ha way, that the conclusion is the need to be unpleasant "all the time" and that the predicate (where there is a likelihood of casual sex) can get lost. There is essentially zero chance of casual sex on Substack, for example, but we still have to be careful in any approach. That's too bad, maybe, but it's the times we live in.
I read this thinking I'd disagree entirety, but then I saw old-me in that description of how to be unpleasant so quickly. It's exactly the "man-repellant armor" I talked about wearing in an old post about holding doors open for women. Only after I moved out of the city did I manage to feel like I could discard it all. There was a huge difference between my experiences where I used to live and where I do now — and it's why, when talking about *the woods* specifically, I was so perplexed by how so many women would choose the bear. Did the ones who say that ever actually go into the woods on a regular basis? Because in my experience: men in the woods, bears in the city. All day long. I never want to walk around downtown Minneapolis (or mostly any of its neighborhoods, tbh) alone ever again, no matter how hard the sun is shining, lol.
I think I'll write a follow-up analyzing these differences more. Because there's a huge cultural component to this sometimes, too. And racial, but no one wants to talk about that (remember the lady who filmed how many men catcalled her walking down the street and how she got called a racist for posting it because most of the men don't it to her were not white — neither was she, but I guess that was beyond their point). Meanwhile, I live in a more racially diverse place now, and encounter far fewer creeps in daily life. So it's not just racial, but I think very cultural in many cases.
https://lirpa.substack.com/p/revisiting-the-idea-of-men-holding
The post I was referencing where I explain it a little more.
You may like another of Tove's essays, where she talks about her experiences in Damascus: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/making-sense-of-honor-culture
One of the reasons why some cultures are better than others.
" and it (feminism) did expose the shocking extent to which women were, and are, subjected to violence."
During the second wave a prominent feminist (Erin Pizzey) set up the first shelter for women in the UK. As women came in and shared their stories it soon became clear that they were also violent, and that in most violent households the violence is reciprocal - often with one partner or the other initiating the latest row, and both of them essentially addicted to the confrontational component of their relationship. Violence was the language they spoke, and so they naturally chose partners who spoke the same language. Further studies totally backed this up.
So Erin decided to expand her shelters to accommodate abused men too (I mean in separate shelters). It wasn't long before her fellow feminists threw her out of her own organisation, attacked her and eventually drove her into exile outside of the UK after killing her dog and making bomb threats (the police were opening her mail by this point).
The point being.... feminism is built upon a Threat Narrative (men oppress women) and a Male Power Fantasy (men act, women are acted upon) which is completely detached from reality.... but at the same time plugs directly into the brain stem of both men and women because both sexes are gynocentric in nature and naturally protective of women, and keenly aware of men's superior strength (in a basic caveman sense).
Feminism has been so successful precisely because humans will always cheer for any cause that purports to protect and provide for women at men's expense ("he for she") - even if that cause has been hijacked by demented ideologues and a thousand self serving agendas.
And so now that feminism has re-written our history and become the default treatise on all things gender related it is tearing society apart. Not just dating, but everything. If feminism (patriarchy theory) was true then men are indeed women's oppressors (enemy) and no woman should go near men, let alone date them!
It is traumatising for young women to be told the men they are hard wired to seek protection and security from (as well as sex and intimate relationships) are their enemy. And it is just as traumatising for young men to be told the urge they have to protect and provide for women (and have sex and intimate relationships with) is in fact the urge to rape and oppress women - an urge they must suppress for their entire lives.
I think we have almost forgotten that for most of history (prior to feminism) we never thought like this. We knew that men and women are the most loyal allies and the most stupendous partnership imaginable - and that all the squabbles and gripes were inconsequential compared to this formidable bond and mutual admiration that we shared. Men were a gift to women and vice versa. Not enemies, as feminists claim!
Feminism has taken the most dysfunctional aspects of male and female behaviour and psychology and redefined them as the default setting. The only way to heal the rift between men and women, end the gender wars and save civilisation from sliding down the toilet is to dismantle feminism wave by wave and throw the entire thing into a dumpster to be buried in concrete for a million years.
Blind dates need to come back in fashion, too. They often work!
I saw somebody posting about aunties coming back. I also endorse that sort of matchmaking. Anything that actually involves knowledge of personality and some sort of learning dynamic might be a good thing.
Both my parents’ and my marriages came out of blind dates. In both of our cases, a close friend met someone serendipitously who would be a good match and set up the introduction. When someone knows you well, it works!
I've only been on one back when I was 21 and it was so bad I swore them off forever 😂 but yeah, you get the right people who really know you to set you up, and it could work great!
Ah, Schrodinger's Rapist, we meet again. How I've missed you so. Oddly enough, I was just wondering a few minutes ago if we were going to see a modern updated postscript to that Lirpa article from 15 years ago. Well, never let anyone tell you God doesn't exist.
There's an easy temptation to label the SR essay and Phaedra Starling as the apotheosis of the stereotypical Internet Feminist (tm), a ball of equal parts smug gender-studies terminology and quivering emotion, all of it glued together by a misandry that she assures us isn't a real thing even as she problematizes the entitlement of, I dunno, men converting oxygen into carbon dioxide or something. That being said, as I've aged out of the person I used to be 15 years ago, I've found the act of attempting to at least model other people's distasteful arguments in good faith to be a useful intellectual exercise, if nothing else.
And I've found that I no longer hate Phaedra, at least not really. I would prefer that her anxiety and the particular mindset with which she views the world and people like me not exist, but given that we don't live in that world, I can't fault her for writing the things I would probably write if I was in her shoes and had lived her life. I was a (mildly) bullied kid, whispery and slight of frame and clad in second-generation immigrant skin; I'm something of an expert in finding strangers scary myself. There was a part of me that instinctively rejected her description of random nondescript men as the worst category of criminal, the way we'd all been told in those school assemblies that judging people by their immutable biological characteristics was ipso facto wrong. But there was also a part of me, human and scared and trying to be One Of The Good Guys, that saw the truth in a fundamentally frightened human trying to transmute the flame of her fear into a torch to light others' way, and what did it matter if we were separated by gender and also she hated my guts? Sometimes you have to respect the game and give credit where credit is due, and I've never seen any other feminist essay expertly wriggle between the cracks in the hearts of men that otherwise would have been happy to dismiss internet feminism as just those wacky childless cat ladies doing their hijinks. Turns out sometimes men can be vulnerable, emotional, and willing to listen to women. Who knew?
The next point has been made by others before me, but it bears repeating.
Years later, there's a certain schadenfreude in the wake of Schrodinger's Rapist and all the similarly toned pieces and clapbacks, namely the inconvenient observation that at the end of the day, regardless of the number of Tumblr notes, the men most likely to take the requisite psychic damage from being labeled Schrodinger's Rapist were by definition the men most likely to care what women thought; the sensitive men most likely to be Good Allies against toxic masculinity; the men most likely to actually feel bad for violating a woman's boundaries; the men most likely to be in the fifty-nine out of sixty and not the one. There are likely at least a couple of self-aware women out there that live with the knowledge that Schrodinger's Rapist probably meaningfully removed a nonzero number of Good Men from the dating pool who would have listened to their concerns, been there for them, and pledged to support them, disproportionately leaving behind the scumbags who had less of a proclivity to worry about being labeled toxic or creepy or reckoning with their structural privilege. As someone who suffered a nontrivial amount of anguish around the concept of Schrodinger's Rapist, an infohazard if there ever was one that actively degraded my ability to interact normally with the female population after I read it (and I thought I was doing the right things, natch!), I suppose I should appreciate the irony. Mean feminist tries to pwn the menz, ends up making things worse for women everywhere! Ha ha!
But mostly, I am just saddened at the way things turned out, at the many banal and terrifying ways men hurt women and the many banal and terrifying ways women hurt men in response. Whatever joy I get from seeing Mean Tumblr Feminists get egg on their face won't bring back the years I lost questioning my self and my masculinity on a deeper level, and it also won't comfort any of the other men and women out there who gave the best years of their lives to fearing and loathing people that never deserved it. I'm reminded of that quote Dylann Roof allegedly gave after being arrested for the Charleston church mass shooting, admitting that many of the people he'd killed in cold blood would likely have helped him if he'd asked. How many of us, deep down, are willing to admit that if we were to talk to a man or a woman we'd hate purely because of their gender, that they would probably help us if we'd only asked too?
At the end of the day, I certainly have my own concerns about the way feminism deals with men's concerns, men's fears, men's deep-seated inner lives. But there's also no getting around the fact that that feminism or no feminism, pain or no pain, all we can do is try our best. No one else is going to do that for us.
Yes. Especially:
"the men most likely to take the requisite psychic damage from being labeled Schrodinger's Rapist were by definition the men most likely to care what women thought; the sensitive men most likely to be Good Allies against toxic masculinity; the men most likely to actually feel bad for violating a woman's boundaries; the men most likely to be in the fifty-nine out of sixty and not the one."
This is, IIUC, the main point Scott Aaronson was trying to make in the blog comment that infamously (if you are an extreme nerd) got him piled on a decade ago:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664
Thank you for sharing that. Wow. I actually wasn't familiar with that, having mostly exited that section of the online world by 2014. He so perfectly illustrates what so many men have said above and elsewhere (the comments on Brennan's post contain many similar thoughtful comments).
You should read Scott Alexander's post about this if you haven't seen it yet: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/
And also this retrospective thread from goblinodds: https://x.com/goblinodds/status/1627203632612638722
It would help if professors and parents and talking heads and the internet didn't just spew complete and absolute utter lies about rape statistics. The chance of getting actually raped by a stranger are incredibly, incredibly tiny. All of the stats you commonly see on the advocate sites are completely false. I wrote a paper on this way back in high school looking into the actual research and it's just utter trash. If you are a normal person who isn't a prostitute or someone who does things like pass out on the sidewalk after you shoot up with heroin, the chances are so small as to be unworth ever giving it a second thought. It actually infuriates me how these fake statistics just get repeated over and over.
And your chances of getting your ass beat by a stranger, if you're a guy, are about 500x as likely as that a woman in normal circumstances getting stranger raped.
Anyway, now I'm pissed off lol. Nice piece though. From one boy crazy since 3rd grade chick to another.
It reminds me of gun statistics from a particular organization I find deeply dishonest, Everytown for Gun Safety. They claim an absurdly high number of school and mass shootings each year, but if you look at their criteria, a veteran shooting himself in his vehicle in the parking of of a school at night when no one is there counts as a "school shooting." An unrelated shooting between adults and nothing to do whatsoever with the school or students within a certain radius of a school counts as a "school shooting." The dishonesty in these widely-circulated statistics is maddening.
"And your chances of getting your ass beat by a stranger, if you're a guy, are about 500x as likely as that a woman in normal circumstances getting stranger raped."
And that part. The standard answer is always, "well, who's doing the ass beating?" as if it's suddenly a victimless crime when it happens to men.
I hate dishonest statistics. We have too many school shootings without exaggerating the numbers, which serves to break down trust rather than inspire new converts
Exactly! It's really infuriating.
(I hope Jackie has forgiven me for stealing her boyfriend for 3 days)
I actually have a piece I've been working on, which very much aligns with what you've described here, about how normal "practice" with dating and relationships used to happen in the olden-days of the 90s. Back before everyone turned weird and asocial, which always depended on friend groups and consiglieres to help smooth things out. Your friend asks his friend if he thinks you're cute and then reports back to you. His friend asks your friend if you want to meet at the water fountain and kiss. That's normal. It's called practicing and graceful ways of dealing with rejection and learning courage and practicing and failing and trying again (or triumphing!). I feel like kids don't do this nowadays, at least based on everything I read. Instead it's all either walk up to a total stranger (which has never been a great idea) or go online and advertise your picture to jump straight to meeting for sex. No wonder they're all weird and anxious.
I'm looking forward to reading it when you're finished! IRL dating and socializing needs to make a major comeback.
I am with you in spirit, I think sexual assault statistics are exaggerated. Just commenting to point out that “I met a guy online/at the coffee shop, went on a date with him, and he raped me” would fall under acquaintance rape, not stranger rape. “Rape by strangers is rare so it’s ok to go home with that guy from Tinder/the party” is illogical-those are the situations that are dangerous. What’s relatively rare is rape by a stranger who jumps out of the bushes, breaks into your house, etc.
You still have a responsibility to say no, though. What this seems to be talking about is girls who feel pressured to have sex, give in, feel bad about it the next day, and call it rape. That’s not rape, it’s just a bad decision and entirely the girl’s fault (assuming it wasn’t the female who was the sex initiator). It’s awkward, but you have to communicate and advocate for your needs and desires!
The woman that Lirpa quotes says that one is six men commit sexual assault so therefore one in six men are rapists. This is a statistical sleight of hand that bothers me. Sexual assault in the UK is defined as “unwanted touching in a sexual manner” which includes lots of things that are not rape, even if they are unwanted.
There is no way in hell I would date Brennan. This constant analysing and fear is a sign of a very emotionally unstable person, and anyone dating her would be getting a metric shitload of drama - as would anyone befriending her.
Just as most women have at some time dated the arsehole (disagreeable narcissist), most men have at some point dated the BPD chick (alternately agreeable/disagreeable neurotic). In both cases they love-bomb and the sex is great and you spend about three weeks convinced this is the Greatest Romance of All Time. And then they stab you.
Don't put your dick in crazy, or your pussy on it. It's never worth it.
I think you might be referring to Starling, the author of SR, not Brennan!
Probably. The piece has so many quotes and is commenting on others’ back and forth so I got confused. I've had several concussions in my life.
Oh, thank you for reminding me, because I was just about to swap a few things around to make it more clear and then fully forgot why I logged into my desktop lol. My memory is garbage, too, although for other reasons.
There's a pretty fantastic concept I ran across many years ago, it's called "the asshole filter."
The concept is simple: If you tell people "the only way to contact me is to break a rule," you will only be contacted by rule-breakers. This is a special case of the general principle that you cannot reduce the amount of harm in the world by enacting a rule that will only be obeyed by the people who aren't causing the harm. (See also: Gun control)
The example given in the essay that introduced this concept was a department head who told people to email his department's general contact address with any requests. What ends up happening is that people keep emailing him directly in order to get him to personally handle their requests, and on average the individual people he interacts with are ruder, more entitled, generally worse people to deal with than the people he was dealing with before he established the rule. Because the rule-following people are following the rule, he now exclusively comes into contact with assholes. He has set up an asshole filter.
It's not hard to map this onto the female experience. At an absolute minimum, the stranger who talks to you weights his desire to talk to you higher than he weighs your apparent non-desire to talk to him. This means the average respect for boundaries among people who talk to you is lower than the average respect for boundaries among all men. The effect of broadcasting a rule that creates stronger boundaries for yourself does not increase the amount of respect for your boundaries. It lowers the average level of respect for boundaries of the people who do interact with you. If you don't understand that the people who interact with you are a sample of men who you have specifically selected for their lack of respect for your boundaries, you might come to the wrong conclusion that men are more dangerous on average than they actually are. Maybe even to the point where you'll say stupid things like "I'd rather encounter a bear than a man in the woods."
The other effect of the asshole filter is resentment among rule-followers. If the department head still keeps handling requests that come into their personal email box, and those requests get better handling than the requests of those who obeyed the rule and ran their requests through the department's general address, the people who find out about this are gonna be *pissed*, and will probably modify their attitude about respecting the rules of that department.
When you have guys saying "I've exhausted my personal network, online dating is a hellhole, you're not allowed to talk to women in public, where am I supposed to meet women?" they start getting blackpilled really quick when they hear somebody go "I got five phone numbers in the grocery store last week." And that's how you end up with graphs of political alignment over time where men make a sudden and enormous lurch to the right starting in the 2010s.
My other thought about this issue is the concept of "revealed preferences."
I've told a few different people - You claim to have a legitimate fear of violence underlying every interaction you have with half of the entire world population. You live in a country where it's legal to carry a firearm. Why don't you?
Absent a pretty massive change in society, carrying a firearm is by far the easiest thing a woman can do to take ownership of her personal safety, which she claims is at sufficient risk wherever she goes as to create a constant sense of anxiety. So why not do that?
"Revealed preferences" is economics-speak for "actions speak louder than words." No matter how much these people are afraid of being attacked by random men, they haven't actually done anything to prepare for it. There are a few ways you can look at this -
* Victimhood is prestigious within the progressive sphere, and claiming an ever-present fear of men establishes a victimhood status without needing to actually be victimized. Being prepared to prevent victimhood would diminish victimhood status, and is thus avoided.
* Firearms are right-coded, and thus strongly taboo for anyone who wishes not to be mistaken for right-wing, and this taboo is stronger than whatever they actually believe their level of risk to be
* Misandry is fashionable within the progressive sphere, and claiming an ever-present fear of men is more about being fashionable than about conveying a real truth of the female experience. (This is my primary explanation of the "choose the bear" phenomenon.)
Any way you slice it, revealed preferences tell us that the schroedinger's rapist discourse has pretty much nothing to do with any legitimate fear of men.
You don't even have to go as far as getting a firearm--mace works too.
Funnily enough, my husband is still in that insists I carry mace around anytime I go somewhere alone. This is probably because he has been mugged before. I don't personally feel any fear or need for the mace.
But I agree that if someone is afraid like that, they should take steps to protect themselves. The problem is that the women who are neurotically afraid of being raped are often the kind of person to go to a man's house alone and... Not say "no" to anything. Even if they had a gun they wouldn't use it.
*my husband is the one that
My husband wants me to take mace to a concert I'm going to alone in awhile. That's only because it's in a state that won't let me take one of his guns, lol. He always tries to get me to take a gun when I go camping alone, too. I never have. I'd rather get bear spray. I'm not afraid of men in the woods, only bears (and venomous snakes and ticks). Woodsy men are the best type in my experience. But honestly I just don't want to carry a gun until I'm trained better. I'm a pretty good shot, but only at shooting ranges. I'm afraid of being disarmed without proper training. So I'll wait to get my CCP until then.
Re: the gun thing being right-coded, it is so funny(?) to me that, when I lived in Minneapolis, I would occasionally learn that one of my lefty friends actually did own a firearm or even conceal-carry, but they rarely told anyone for fear of looking like a rightwinger. I was going to tell you that the feminist friend I referred to in the story actually had one, but then I remembered she's why I know you, so you probably already knew that, lol.
I actually had no idea she owned a gun that's hilarious
Last I heard, hubby wanted her to get rid of it after they had kids, but I never asked if she ended up doing it.
This has to be one of the most thoughtful and intelligent things someone has said on the matter. Thoughtful.
This is a great essay. I can’t say I’ve read the original offering by Starling, but I can only say as a man that it is very hard to date a person where you start below 0 for some of your more major, immutable traits.
If you’re a woman dating men, seeing them as -2 instead of just 0 (I don’t know this man, I’ll make no assumptions best I can until I do know him more) is problematic.
I have been on dates with many women like this and I can feel it. I can feel how I have to prove myself to be neither bad nor good because I’m already starting at bad because of my gender.
I’ve been on dates too where the woman just sees me as a neutral person. Maybe we will vibe. Maybe not. I’ll never understand truly what it means to be a woman and fear these types of bodily harm by men — but I can say as a man with some degree of emotional intelligence (look at me! lol) it is incredibly easy to tell and it sucks. It sucks she has the need to carry her armor, it sucks also to have an uphill battle just to prove you’re a person. Trauma is horrible.
These women who feel this way toward men are at a disadvantage when dating- why would I date a person who suspects me of being a creep when they don’t even know me when I could date someone who just doesn’t assume things about me as a trauma response?
While it is valid for many women to feel this way toward men (I’ve met many women who have had horrid experiences via horrible men), it nonetheless is palpable to men and that’s hard too.
It’s hard out here in these streets.
Great article, thank you.
I'm of the very eldest of the zoomers (but haven't dated since prior to the pandemic). I remember wanting to ask out girls in person but couldn't muster it for the following reasons:
1. I always thought, "Isn't it sort of vulgar to ask a stranger out without ever even speaking to them?" It feels like you'll be perceived as only having judged their looks to be good. This feels creepy. Looking back, I just thought these girls looked cool, interesting, or nice, which are all perfectly acceptable reasons to ask someone out.
2. If the solution to #1 is to talk to them first and then ask them out-- it now feels like you're gaming their politeness to hold a brief conversation before you ask them out (which you had decided to do before speaking to them). I hate when random people accost me, even moreso when their intentions are not immediately clear, and I never felt comfortable doing this to girls. When you assume the girl is just living her life and doesn't want to be bothered, this feels even creepier and pick-up-artisty than #1.
3. The worst is if you actually know the girl somehow. I would hate to strike out but create a situation where the girl is now perennially uncomfortable because she has to see me in class/work every week. It also feels like you're at risk of invalidating any positive interaction you've had; if you had previously worked well together, would she now assume you had nefarious intentions the entire time? If you were close enough to be considered friends, you don't want to be thought of as one of those guys who was just lying in wait until they could make their move. #3 is especially damaging because you suspect you'll be thought of as a creep or predator and your reputation might even be affected. No one wants to be that guy in some girls story.
I'm sure it's somewhat aided by the desire to avoid rejection, like Brennan suggests. For the most part, though, I feel like I was stopped mostly by concerns for how the girl might feel. I never wanted to ruin someone's day, or create a scenario where a classmate feels nervous to come to class. I think it might be sensationalist to say "feminism ruined dating" but maybe it ruined asking people out.
I missed huge chunks of third-wave feminism I guess.
I heard that some women are always afraid of men, but I didn’t identify with it, either. I just assumed there are some women who have had much worse experiences than me and felt bad about that, tried to be sensitive about it, and left it at that. I don’t think I realized it had permeated the culture to convince women to ignore their own experiences and embrace this perspective or even perpetuate it.
I rejected my mother’s admonitions to not go to the store after dark because I might be attacked in the parking lot. It irritated me that I was supposed to be free and equal yet at the same time cower in my home, not going to get the mint chocolate chip ice cream I wanted because it’s dark and scary and men do bad things. I didn’t believe it was 100% safe out there, but I also knew the likelihood of me getting attacked was low, so much so that the ice cream was worth the risk.
I assume my mom’s instincts came from being conditioned to think women were just too weak. She was pretty progressive for her time and place, but still a product of some aggressively religious conservative values. So it really bothers me that the very framework (feminism) that ensured I could embrace my own agency is now spreading fears that prevent women from embracing theirs.
Thanks for the essay!
I think a lot of us who were actively involved in that mostly-online part of the movement didn't even realize what was happening until it happened, ourselves. I did call out a lot of behavior I saw as unproductive or unfeminist or too "women are weak" in their messaging, but even then it was mostly a day-to-day reaction thing than it was a "what will this mean for the future?" kind of analysis. It's very interesting looking back! I'm a little more tuned in now to what the present might mean for the future.
Given how common male violence against women is it’s not unreasonable for men to start at a -2 rating vs 0. If anything the most rational thing to do is not pursue and enter into romantic relationships with me. Doesn’t matter if it’s stranger rape or rape from someone that’s familiar. This is worthless splitting of hairs to make men feel better. Why do the so called good men feel threatened by women’s defensiveness if they’ve got nothing to hide? And even so, men are not entitled to have relationships with women because Loneliness. Oh no the horror of loneliness. 😒
Interesting that you'd dismiss the well-known and constantly-discussed epidemic of loneliness (which presently exists in every demographic.) Do you really sincerely deny it's a problem, or was that just an excuse to slide in the "entitlement" strawman?
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf
Man, has it really been fifteen years since Schroedinger's Rapist? That would have been only two years after I finished college, then. Dang. Hard to think of an essay that's colored the public discourse this century more.
I remember feeling somewhat enlightened by it when I read it (and also somewhat annoyed, lol), but in retrospect it really does seem like a dead-end in social progress. Even if one in sixty men *is* a rapist, that means more than ninety-eight percent of men *aren't* rapists (and of course even most rapists fail to rape nearly all of the people they encounter), so living your life in constant fear of that is...hardly rational. It was never really clear to me, either, what "good" (i.e., "non-raping") men were supposed to do with this info, either. I can continue to do zero rapes, but it's not like I can do anything to prevent all other men from being rapists.
Add in the fact that, were this essay about any group that *wasn't* men ("I'm not saying all ____s are violent criminals, but..."), the author would have been dismissed as a Nazi, and...well, I guess that's how we ended up with the nihilistic, zero-sum politics we're all stuck with now. Thanks, Sterling!
Good read.
Happy to be the 69th like.
...nice.
She sounds so reasonable. Just don't ask about evidence.
https://youtu.be/-pdCDq_MTj4?si=2f_uiD1soPSZvVLd
These things differ vastly per location. Once someone complained to me about fourth-wave feminism is extremely distrustful of men, and I replied that he is living 3 hours of driving from Berkeley College which has always been the hotbed of radicalism. There are places way, way more chill than that.
BTW Internet dating is working as long as people are not stupid about it, put their phones down, sit down to a computer and log in to a relevant website.
The lack of agency of younger women is absolutely noticable, even in my neck of Europe, though perhaps young men have the same issue expressed differently.
We organize BDSM munches where nothing happens, people just talk. People who are touched or something can talk to the caretakers. Several young women asked us that caretakers should notice if they feel uncomfortable TALKING with someone and intervent.
This is not simply fear but the lack of adulting, social skills.
First, I lol'd quite a bit reading this. Second, I appreciate how you wove together fear of rape with the lack of agency that has been grafted onto women by other women in the name of feminism. I still remember discussing the Ansari episode with women in a feminist online space, and I was chided for asking why she couldn't just have left. It wasn't a useful question, apparently. Feminism seems to be about disempowerment selectively used as a mechanism to get what we want, with the deepest irony. I don't think we should be going around afraid of sexual violence in the most liberated society in history. Recently I've taken to bringing up how American women are the most liberated women have been in human history (along with Western Europe) and that if women want to see a real patriarchy they should go to South Asia....only to be met with "oh well it's all relative". Bitch, no. First, it literally is safer for women here relative to other countries, that's how comparison works. Second, since there is a degree of difference, it should matter when evaluating one's situation. I just...cannot.