A working class early 20’s man I was talking to recently was educating me about how the men and women he knows meet, and how guys see it as “the hunt”—the whole purpose of which is “to score.” I asked what typically happens after a guy “scores,” and he said there are three options: 1) You keep trying to have sex with them—“which is usually what happens”; 2) You get into a more serious relationship—“where the sex and the intimate times don’t really matter as much—it’s more about just spending time”; or 3) you just don’t call her again “because you got what you wanted in the first place…. Just knowing the fact that, you know, you got what you wanted without any consequences or anything.” He says that for most guys, once they’ve “got past that point,” they “put another notch on their bedpost,” declare victory, and move on. Sure, women complain “Oh, why can’t they be sensitive, why can’t they be this.” And yes, the young man acknowledged,  it’s deplorable when men just try to score. Still, he shrugged it off by saying that “that’s how a lot of guys are…. that’s just how it is really.”
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That’s just how it is really. Since when did we as a society start having such low expectations of men? Whenever someone pines for the “gentleman” of yore—the man who would actually “court” a woman and straightforwardly say “I’m going to marry that girl”—someone usually feels obliged to note that “those men were products of a different generation”: like the men from the Great Depression or World War II, they were that way because of the unusually hard times they experienced. Us young men today are somehow necessarily different—we supposedly take longer to mature and (for some reason) get to use “emerging adulthood” as an excuse for our immaturity. The way everyone from sociologists to John Smith talks, you’d think it’s an incontrovertible fact that young men in the 21st century are just looking for sex—“that’s just how it really is.”
Societies have always had difficulty disciplining men’s sexual desires. But many of them have at least tried. Sure, it’s difficult—but remind me again of why us “guys” today get to be so immature and why we as a society have decided that we’re powerless to even try to discipline men’s sexual desires? Why is the old model of courtship, where a man wooed a woman not just with a view toward sex but also toward lifelong marriage—remind me again why that model is of course archaic?
Categories: Dating, Mating, Hooking Up, Marriage
As the mother of a boy I’ll just say we women need all the help we can get disciplining and channeling male energies into productive places. If everybody around us was telling my son it doesn’t matter if he acts right my job would be impossible.
Courting and child-rearing used to be a creative process.
Courting and seduction and bonding needs to be fun again, a way to express yourself.
It’s just one way of responding to the disrespect of feminism and the denial of gender roles and the denial of male necessity.
Have you seen Roissy’s blog? It’s for men, about how to give women what they want and escape with your dignity. It seems to be begging for some sort of climax of feminism (faked is fine) to go back to healthy relationships, but until then, may as well give women what they want and move on.