Livre d'Or

Wow, this is super-interesting, thank you so much for engaging. It's totally cool by me that the places we disagree are more interesting than the places we agree, that's how I approach blog commenting myself. And absolutely, fraught and not simple like most things! I do agree that sadness, even genuinely felt rather than feigned, can be used to manipulate people, and that women are more prone to be manipulated that way. And it's a really useful point about social approval outside the bubble, for men who resent women for the fact that they, men, are lonely.

I think some of where you're coming from starts to edge into area which in my experience is ridiculously explosive: where women's discussions about safety crash into men's discussions about loneliness. I first noticed this when the viral Schroedinger's rapist post broke, and it happened again on a big scale with the Elevatorgate thing in the skeptical community. In these instances I heavily blame men for being massively inappropriate; whether you're angry or unhappy about not having a girlfriend, the time to express those emotions is emphatically not in the middle of a discussion about harassment or rape. And I can well believe that happens in one-to-one discussions as well as giant internet fights. Part of my aim in making this post was to contribute to a virtual space positively for talking about being lonely, because sometimes demarcating a positive context for a behaviour is more effective than telling people not to do the thing in the inappropriate context.

Perhaps those things can't be disentangled, though? I mean, my preferred approach is to favour romantic relationships naturally developing out of friendships and social circles, rather than fixating on making An Approach to a stranger. But at some point men have to ask women if they want to pursue things in a romantic/sexual direction and that is always going to happen against a background of women's experiences of men who fail to respect consent. Frankly, if men are unaware of that background, or if their only response to knowing about it is to complain that it's unfair to be suspected, then yes, they need to do a lot of work before they are going to be reasonable people to date.

Definitely not women's responsibility to fix men's emotions around the way the patriarchy fucks up the dating scene. (Having sex with sad lonely men doesn't work and is also a bad idea and a completely unreasonable expectation on women!) To put it a bit glibly, what I want to do is fix the patriarchy, not fix men's emotions due to being hurt by the patriarchy, if you see what I mean. Or at least, not fix it, but do something that contributes incrementally towards making the world a better place.

I don't think the answer is "being nicer" if being nicer means women doing yet more free emotional labour for men. But it's possible that the thing I do want counts as being nicer, because I basically always want to have more empathy for people with different life experiences from me. So I want to understand more about what is hurting men and what they think might help, which is perhaps a way of being nicer than just snarking the whiny entitled Nice Guys.

I think much of feminism is kind of awful at dealing with mental health, yes, but is there any social movement at all that's good at dealing with mental health? Apart from, well, mental health activism? It's not like sexism is great at tackling male suicide, indeed I would say that sexism bears a lot of responsibility for creating a society damaging to men's mental health.