It can be an eye-rolling, head-shaking, face-palming affair when journalists decide to use their forums as a personal catharsis medium. They have a tendency to consider their personal travails, which are commonplace to most people, as elevated experiences that are in need of detailing for the public. Getting laid off is worse for them, shopping expenses affect them more, or housing challenges are personally more significant.
The most insufferable might be the interpersonal affairs they experience and then detail for readers as if they are experiencing something few others endure. What is commonplace is that when experiencing the dismaying minefield of dating, these self-absorbed writers not only feel they are uniquely affected, but the challenges they face are projected onto the male gender as a whole. It is equal parts tiresome and amusing to behold.
Over at Vice News, Ashley Fike reports that women are not just facing frustration in the dating realm; they are done with dating entirely. That is a sweeping declaration, but she has reason to reach this conclusion. There is a common problem that apparently ALL women face – “mankeeping.”
This coined term describes, by my reading of things, that women are frustrated that they are expected to partake in a relationship. Mankeeping, we are told, is the burdensome effort of tending to your male counterpart.
Mankeeping describes the emotional labor women end up doing in heterosexual relationships. It goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress. Interpreting his moods. Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else.
Umm, call me old school in my thinking, but what I’m reading there are the basic platforms of being in a relationship. And sorry, but when you describe the challenge of “interpreting moods” and craving through the minefield of feelings, there is not a man on the planet who has not experienced this from women since…forever.
But just to get the real sense of how fractured the approach to relationships is with Ms. Fike, one pull quote sums up everything. After describing the arduous task of dealing with a partner’s feelings, she gives this line: “All of it unpaid.”
Excuse me. You have some sort of expectation of financial compensation in a relationship?! This alone indicates that the issues being laid out in this published couch session are not attributed to males. And as is common practice, “experts” are trucked in to support the daft positions being taken. We get told that men are having a hard time forming male friendships these days. It is not simply a trend, of course. It is an “epidemic.”
The root of the issue is tied to what experts are calling the male loneliness epidemic. As more men report having fewer close friendships, romantic partners are expected to pick up the slack. Instead of processing with friends, many men offload everything onto the woman they’re dating. She becomes his entire emotional infrastructure.
This is where we are granted all the permission to stop reading further. What has been the complaint heard from women about men, for generations? That males are closed up, do not share their feelings freely, and shut off from their emotions. Now we are told that this is actually taking place, and the women who have long demanded emotional outpouring from their partners are now aggrieved that they have to deal with the effects they called for.
This is hardly an isolated instance of oblivious approaches to relationships. Earlier, we had Jean Garnett in the New York Times delivering more dire reports from the social front lines, with fatalism starting immediately with her headline: The Trouble With Wanting Men.
It probably already is indicated, but it still needs to be said; what is to follow is an exercise in making all the wrong choices in men, and then blaming the negative results on the men. Garnett starts with a date she was on, hoping it would lead to some desired relationship experiences, but then received a text from her potential paramour one day:
“I was really looking forward to seeing you again,” he texted me the following week, around lunchtime, “but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low :(.”
Okay, you clearly were with a man who is a hamster. Any man who “can’t even” due to dealing with anxiety and cannot make time for you should be seen as a welcomed bullet dodged. But Garnett allows this meek mook to be emblematic of all men. She then commiserated with her friends about the fraught opportunities out there for them.
We were four women at a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan; we knew what show we were in, and we couldn’t help but wonder, in a smug, chauvinistic way: Where were the men who could handle hard stuff?
At the risk of being accused of man-splaining, allow me to first suggest you will not find men who can handle things in a vegan restaurant. The writer also has described the “problem” she faces in the dating circles – Heterofatalism. Then she goes on to unintentionally describe that the problem she is facing is one she has cultivated herself. As she bemoans that the men she encounters are mousy and dispassionate, she admits she seeks out these very types, as she describes her preferred male archetype.
A passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a “good guy.” He tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of “men,” and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man, and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him.
She cannot fathom why she cannot secure a bold man who desires her in a heterosexual manner, all while targeting men who should foster embarrassment about being straight?!?! You are setting yourself up for failure before you are even seated at the restaurant table, but then she turns this assured disaster onto males in general.
When you seek out males who need to bypass their masculine traits, you cannot be surprised to be left with those who are less than passionate with you and are incapable of rising above an anxiety episode to meet for a second date.
What we have on display are women who have bought into the feminist dogma of the past few generations, decrying masculinity on numerous levels and citing traditional behavior and mores as “toxic.” The result is you are left with a dating pool of socially neutered beta-males, those conditioned to avoid the very traits that make them distinctly male. You cannot then carp and moan that the guys you have left to choose from behave exactly in the manner demanded of them.
What is really taking place in these cases is that these women need to deny that they actually crave the very male facets they voice displeasure with in public. You cannot demand that men become interpersonal geldings and then express surprise when you encounter a shell of a man who cannot bring himself to express desire, let alone have the bravery to risk violating the faux social guardrails placed on relationships over the years.
These are females who created the environment on paper of renovated masculinity, but when faced with the reality of their forced result, they are dismayed with what that means for their dating fortunes. Making men play by your feminine rules means you enter a losing dating game. Blaming men for your poor choice is itself another in a string of poor choices.
