The Frustration of Expressing Masculine Emotions

A blog colleague recently posted an extremely well-expressed break up note. I don’t know if he actually sent it the note to his ex. Perhaps he only wrote for his blog. He posts anonymously, by the way. You can read the whole note here but I’ll be quoting the most relevant quotes in this post.

If your goal was to reconcile with me, repeating the usual pattern of ruining a perfect night by rejecting me wasn’t the smart thing to do. I don’t know what I’ve done with words or with actions that made you believe my response to tonight’s rejection would be anything but negative. Did you take my kindness for weakness or something?

I’ve read books on this stuff. Rejection piles up. Our fight started 8 days ago because, after that wonderful date, you said, “I’m not feeling it” at bedtime. You didn’t want to have sex then, and it pissed me off. The best way to reconcile was not to repeat the exact same thing again last night.

My first reaction was “that’s a lot of butthurt going on.” But on consideration of this bloggers age and life experience – quite similar to mine – I mentally retracted my first reaction and replaced it with “He makes a lot of sense”. As both the blogger and I went through the 80s and 90s, we experienced the full cultural typhoon of “men should be more in touch with their emotions.” We were expected to be sensitive, new age guys (SNAGs)

Machismo was ridiculed and the phrase “don’t be so macho” was heard often. Of course, the hypocritical irony of this era was when Ms Magazine published a photo of a nearly naked Burt Reynolds as a centerfold, a la Playboy. [Thanks to commenter Zorro, I have to change this to Cosmopolitan magazine. It was not Ms Magazine] Reynolds was the sex symbol of the day and he was certainly the opposite of the SNAG. Too many guys growing up in that period of social history transformed themselves into SNAGs.

This blogger is angry because he was rejected sexually from a woman with whom he had some heavy emotional investment. He expressed is anger in an excellent and eloquent way. He’s not whining, he’s expressing his frustration with that situation as a way of dealing with it in an emotionally healthy way. He’s not being insulting. He’s not being critical of all women. But there is definite anger is in his words. Good for him.

Our society has a real problem with masculine anger. When that anger is manifested as physical violence, it gets serious attention. The public, especially women, assume that if one man expresses his anger through violence, all men will do the same. So, ordinary guys feel the pressure to suppress their anger.

Sometimes a guy erupts in strong verbal anger that inevitably ends up on the Internet. Certain male spaces are a perfect place to express that anger. Reddit has several subreddits where a man can vent his spleen about women, sex, relationships, society, whatever. Here’s a classic example. Because the anger stands out so much, all the words from other guys around the rant mostly go unnoticed. There could be 10,000 thoughtful and reasonable comments or blog posts, but it’s the angry ones that get shared around the ‘Net with the typical man-shaming remarks. It’s extraordinarily predictable.

Online Dating… The Phony Profile

This post is a quick one.

I haven’t stopped online dating. In fact, I’ve upgraded my membership to both PoF and Ourtime (I’m 52, no apologies given).

Looking at the Viewed Me list in Plenty of Fish, here are the first eight dames who have.

Spot the fake profile/photo. This… is online dating.

Text Charisma Example

A reader saved a text conversation with a woman he met via Tinder. The very long graphic below shows some key elements to successful texting with the relationship goal being a really short, sexual relationship.

As you read the transcript, look for the following from him:

• Escalation
• Conversation theme
• Consistent frame
• Verbal confidence

She’s no slouch in this text-based tête-à-tête.

Tinder is a wonder to behold. However, the reader later stated that he does much better with simply approaching women out in public and that he no longer uses Tinder.

#gamergate (Yup, it fits here)

Note: This is an unfolding story. Anytime 4chan is involved, the origin of things can get murky. Even if 4chan started it, this story has picked up serious momentum and the attention of the mainstream media.

As an oldster, video games and I go a long way back. In my youth, our family actually owned an Atari gaming console. It had one game: Pong. It was an idle distraction for Private Boy and his older brother. More sophisticated games could be found in video arcades and those were busy places. I spent quite a few quarters in such places, particular at the game room on Massachusetts Avenue next to the Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, MA. I noticed that some of the MIT kids from up the road were totally into such games and their conversations were all about technology that I simply couldn’t fathom. This was the beginning of gaming culture.

Going forward, I played some Doom on a PC, some Team Fortress, and later some Call of Duty on a Playstation. Enjoyable and a distraction, but I didn’t jump into the gamer culture. But I was aware of it because of my ex’s youngest son was quite the online video gamer and I asked him lots of questions while I watched him play some really cool first-person shooters. I overheard the audio as digital characters ruthlessly murdered each other. Good times.

There’s a stereotype of video gamers in that they tend to be younger men, socially awkward, white, heterosexual, and generally bereft of female attention. The female attention is the key element to the stereotype because it represents an exploitable emotional vulnerability. Demented female Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) moved in to maliciously exploit gamer guys in order to advance a cultural ideology. These puritanical scolds immediately started pushing their ideology with shame, anger, threats; all the usual tricks used by Internet bullies.

Even though SJWs are mentally ill and have a pathological hatred for gamer guys, they had a degree of success. Enough White knight gamers and game journalists fell for the manipulation and at least one high-profile SJW was actually taken seriously. Behold the power of ladyparts on guys who normally don’t get female attention. This is emotional exploitation of the highest order. “I don’t like guy gamers but in order to impose my ideological control on them, I’ll hold my nose and wade into their filth”.

But when ethical lines regarding trading sex for influence were crossed, the gamer community took a stand and basically told the SJWs and the gamer media who supported the SJWs to fuck off with #gamergate #notmyshield. Now the lines are drawn. White knights and SJWs on one side, informed gamers who hate being told what to do on the the other. The informed gamers are also not all white, male, and heterosexual. Oh, the conundrum; it turns out that gamers are not a monolith of white, cis-het scum.

I’m following this whole thing because I know that the SJWs continually try to influence normal and natural attraction and dating between the sexes. There’s a SJW-oriented dating advisor who floats around the Evan Marc Katz blog. In comments, he pushes back with political correctness against the sound and correct advice the EMK dispenses. EMK had to deliver a return comment smackdown at some point. That’s just one example. Every time a guy hears “you should be attracted to…”, there’s a SJW at work, either directly or indirectly through the politically correct media. Attraction isn’t a choice.

SJWs will always be needling the culture in order to fulfill an ideological agenda. Fortunately, they are operating in the context of a relatively free market capitalistic system. Financial profit will determine successful gaming content. That same profit will also determine the successful approach to attraction and dating advice. This makes SJWs seethe with rage and I rather enjoy that.

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