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Pertaining to the discussion down-thread on the subject of young men and women disliking each other:
The New York Times just published the latest iteration in what feels like a semiannual analysis of dating after 60. The article itself contains the usual "no-duh" realities (old people come with baggage, the machinery doesn't function like it used to) and far-reaching copes (it'll be the best sex of your life, less drama involved), but of particular interest this time around is the unusual tenor of the comment section.
I always enjoy reading these articles and their comments despite (or rather, because of) having a ways to go until becoming a member of the relevant age bracket. The typical reader reaction usually involves stories of finding love late in life, rediscovering the joy of intimacy, meeting new and interesting people to treasure their remaining time with, etc. But man, whether it's a generational shift or a sudden change in attitudes, the elders are much more unhappy this time around. Most of the top comments describe a vehement dislike and/or disgust of the opposite sex, all in a single direction: these women simply hate dudes. Here are some representative excerpts:
"...after a lifetime of having sex with men who have no clue about women's bodies and how to please them, old men waving their bottles of little blue pills and complaining about their 'needs' are not appealing. I'd rather go out for lunch and take in the latest exhibit at a museum with my female friends. They are far more interesting."
"Men need to feel intellectually superior to women and I got sick of playing dumb a long time ago."
"The LAST thing I want is to have someone else to take care of. I enjoy solitude. There is a huge difference between being alone and being lonely."
"75% of domestic violence is committed against women. A third of female murders in 2021 were by their intimate partner. No, not all men. But statistics matter. And they show that women have a lot more to lose in opening their hearts and homes to a man."
"I'm in my 50s and this is already true. The men are fine, but my women friends? They are traveling, learning, reading, exploring. If there was a pill I could take to become a lesbian I'd swallow it so fast...."
"I am appalled by the first photograph in the article which shows a man’s hand around the woman’s neck, even though his thumb is on her cheek. I think it was a thoughtless choice and I am willing to bet that many abused women relived trauma when seeing it."
"Statistically, men are far more likely to leave their wives when the woman gets a cancer diagnosis."
This is the rhetoric that younger generations are hearing from their parents and grandparents. Lifetimes spent with and for another person, only to openly resent those decades of effort late in life. With the hysteria of "sexual assault" at the other end of the spectrum, both independent sexuality and committed intimate relationships are massively disincentivized (or at least, that's how it looks to someone just beginning to figure out the structure of their life). The only guarantee of a lifetime of happiness, it seems, is to stay free of interpersonal bitterness, free of legal and social humiliation, free of sacrificing your own interests for someone who hates you; to live an entire life alone.
How do you convince a 22-year-old of either sex that their perception is mistaken, that there is value in seeking committed relationships with another person?
I know it’s sort of pointless to expect even relatively grounded arguments to be found in such a comment section, but still, I can’t help but virtually don my fedora as a garbage human dudebro and notice some gems like:
• The implication that you as a woman are completely safe from domestic violence in a lesbian relationship (as far as I know, the opposite is in fact true on average, not to mention the higher levels of emotional blackmail, drama and manipulation that lesbian relationships entail on average)
• The assumption that forming a relationship with a man of your age automatically entails you having to take care of him (it doesn’t even occur on the radar that it may also happen the other way around?)
• The idea that 75% of domestic violence is committed against women (this sounds rather fishy; maybe it’s true in the case of childless cohabiting partners, or households where a single mother and her children cohabit with a new man – a scenario which, as far as I know, carries the highest average risk to women of domestic abuse, and coincidentally also is a situation these women voluntarily enter; I mean, I’m sure it’s not standard practice on the part of sneaky, manipulative, shitty men to invite single mothers and their children to live under his roof)
• The unstated assumption that women on average do know men’s bodies and how to please them, but not the other way around (questionable at best)
• The assumption that single older men would never in a million years visit museums, travel, read, hang out with their bros and have hobbies in general (I mean…really??)
Back when MGTOW online forums were not yet nuked and purged, I used to check them out after reading shrill complaints about them on the normie internet, and while some of the content did appear unhinged and extreme, I don’t remember ever coming across such utter bullshit like this.
I've heard incredibly conflicting takes on this. I once heard that lesbian relationships reported the highest rates of domestic violence compared to gay or straight relationships. But then I heard someone else say that this statistic had been widely misrepresented: it was that lesbians were most likely to report having experienced domestic violence, without disambiguating the sex of the aggressor i.e. many lesbians reported having been victims of domestic violence at the hands of a male aggressor. If it's really the former situation, do you have any stats?
How does a lesbian get into a situation where she's domestically abused by a man? Is that even common? I'm pretty sure lesbian couples don't usually invite any men to live under the same roof with them. Or?
#3 is difficult to take seriously, to be honest. #1 are scenarios that (hopefully) are specifically not ones taking place in the context of a romantic cohabiting relationship, which the original article is about.
Agreed, calling yourself a lesbian when you date men as well as women (maybe only date men) is stupid. Nonetheless, if the lesbian demographic includes many women who've been in (or currently are in) romantic relationships with men, that could potentially bias survey results in such a way to give a misleading impression of how common women-on-women domestic abuse is. The person conducting the survey might well assume that a person who identifies as a lesbian and claims to have experienced domestic abuse at the hands of a romantic partner has been victimised by a woman - indeed, this is a completely reasonable assumption given the standard definitions of the words "lesbian" and "woman". But just because that assumption is reasonable, doesn't mean there aren't people using those words in a nonstandard way which will bias the results. (Blood donor clinics and other medical practitioners already do this to route around the men who will give very different answers to the questions "are you gay?" and "have you had anal sex with a man in the past year?")
What you'd ideally want to do is design surveys in such a way that the results can't possibly be misinterpreted, like:
Q: In the past five years, have you been in one or more romantic relationships with:
Q: In the past five years, have you experienced domestic abuse by
Of course, inevitably you would get people failing to report domestic abuse because the perpetrator was non-binary, or inflated numbers for female perpetrators of domestic violence because some respondents were victimised by trans women and interpreted male/female to mean "gender" rather than "sex". It's turtles all the way down.
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