Men Aren’t Listening Anymore. By Abstractruth. Rant time!

You have probably noticed that young men have pretty much lost interest in serious dating. Oh, they will have sex when it is presented to them, they aren’t crazy. But in terms of a lifetime commitment and family, it’s not really possible to convince most thirty-something guys to get engaged, and marriage is right out of the question. The restaurants are full of single or divorced women, all glammed up and sitting around together, but there is a greater chance of an encounter with Halley’s Comet than a single guy walking up to them. …

For years we did listen, actually until about seven or eight years ago.

We listened through the ’80s, the ’90s, and the early 2000s, and then things began to change. We were dragged into Human Resources training and told we had to answer for scumbags like Harvey Weinstein and all the “sensitive” actors and Hollywood types that we knew were scumbags all along — and who were, incidentally, celebrated by women. We were told that we had to answer for Bill Clinton, when most men with even an ounce of testosterone despised the guy. The whole parade of #MeToo was apparently a shock to liberals, and especially liberal women, but there wasn’t a conservative guy on earth who couldn’t see these scumbags coming from miles away. Big shock that Hollywood producers, rock stars, politicians and celebrities might actually take advantage of a woman.

We listened as decent, hardworking men were lumped in with fictional characters like Don Draper, and we were told that somehow a sliver of revolting advertising guys from Manhattan represented all men. We listened through corporate diversity seminars that explained to us that when Neal grabbed Barb’s butt in the elevator, this was a bad thing. Thanks for the clarification. We listened as we were now expected to answer for creeps in New York and Los Angeles newsrooms and politicians who were sexting pictures of their weenies to their staffers, as though the rest of us had been consulted beforehand and somehow approved the plan.

 

 

We listened to all the lectures in college about toxic masculinity, which eventually seemed to encompass everything from men breathing oxygen to hiding in the garage. We listened while we were told that using rational argument was “mansplaining,” that “math was racist,” and abortion was “health care.” We heard all about the male gaze, so we stopped looking.

We listened as we were told that women wanted to be judged equally in the workplace, except when they didn’t. Disagreement was fragility, attraction was objectification, and somehow lack of attention was discrimination. Opening the door for a woman was paternalistic, but not opening it was rude.

Society was broken and it was our fault. Men were immature or boring and too conservative. Men were privileged or they were scrubs. Men were dangerous or men were too weak. Men needed to communicate, or they were too opinionated. Men were too dominant and too passive, too interested in women and insufficiently interested in women, too masculine and somehow not masculine enough. After a while the contradictions became funny, and eventually the women saying these things began to sound every bit as stupid as the things they were saying.

And so we stopped. We not only stopped listening, we stopped arguing. When you brought your beta-male friend over to the house to talk about the issues of the day, we left the room. When you put the Bravo network on, we didn’t even bother asking whether we could watch something less vomitous; we just went upstairs. When we came downstairs and Rachel Maddow was on, we went to bed because we had work in the morning. …

The reason we listened for a while is because there were scumbags out there. In fact, there used to be a whole system for the screening of scumbags. There were chaperones, there was the uncomfortable ritual of the boyfriend meeting the parents, and there was the probing father asking how this purple-haired dipshit intended to make a living. None of this was foolproof, of course, but there were traditional screening methods developed over generations because, as it turns out, parents who have been alive for fifty years might actually know something that their twenty-two-year-old daughter doesn’t. …

The truth of the matter is that we’re not angry. We just don’t care anymore. Your story has become tiresome. Millions of women have come onto social media asking men to come back, to approach them, to re-engage, to marry them, to start families, but we’re smarter than Charlie Brown and we’re not running toward the football again. …

 

 

Sure, there are women out there who will privately tell you that they don’t agree with feminism, or at least with what it has become. This is where we have lost all patience.  …

You don’t get to spend twenty years quietly disagreeing with a culture that treats masculinity as a defective condition and then suddenly ask why your son doesn’t want to marry. You don’t get to tell your husband privately that you appreciate what he does while remaining silent as the broader culture bashes men like him. You don’t get to watch your sons struggle in school with teachers who plainly dislike boys and then say that somebody needs to do something about boys. You are the somebody. Get off your ass. This is where we have lost all patience. …

And don’t bother us when you come to bed, because we have work in the morning.

Sisters are doing it for themselves … because no one else wants to.