Role of Initiative

“Men who don’t court women” – what do? So runs the complaint in a column in one of Sweden’s most upstanding newspapers. Apparently, women are having a rough go at it at finding love and dating. Who’da thunk.

A common complaint I’ve heard, and heard allusions to, echoes the column’s premise. Men don’t take initiative any more. And the men that are yet prone to do… often fall somewhat short on the follow-up. It seems, at an unfortunately polarized glance that the foundations for finding love have been broken, and the men and women desperate to find themselves drifting, caught in the flow before a new status quo can settle.

Needless to say, this debate will be fraught with subjective uncertainties. We will be talking about people, in general, and the interaction between men and women in particular. #NotAllMen and #NotAllWomen are both disclaimers important in any conversation that only really can be generalized through extrapolations, anecdotes and personal experiences.

Women are tired (or so they sound) of the “fuckboys”. The irresponsible man-children that strut around like roosters of the show, stuck in echoes of a past best left rotting. Men feel unfairly treated and give up, since the new structural framework cannot compete with the people who disregard it. Dating, it seems like, sucks for everyone involved.

Why tho? Why should exploring other people to try and find a keeper be such a horror show?

Back in the days of 19-diggidy-two, men asked women out. They went on a number of dates. Got pregnant, had to marry, and spent the rest of their lives either quietly hating each other or loudly loving one another. For the social construct of a society, this was great! For the people involved, less so. Not least for the women, who were fought over, competed over, and dehumanized to a trophy that some cock-sure motherfucker brought home at the end of the day to lock away in an ivory tower where the woman was supposed to make pancakes, clean, and rut like a brood mare every day for the rest of her life.

Back in the 60’s and 70’s, some came to the revolutionary conclusion that that wasn’t very humane. It wasn’t very equal. So we escalated feminism another gear.

We’ll let that train keep hauling along its natural course of development for about 50 years until we reach the 2010’s. When it turned out that a lot of men, older men primarily but not exclusively, have been treating women like sextoys while our feminist train is still on its way to the next stop. We found this appalling. Because it was. So we punished, hounded, tarred and feathered the pricks we could scrape together. We did the same to some who, it turned out, maybe hadn’t been pricks, but the wisdom of the crowds, by now thirsty for blood, didn’t care. If the hounding was done in the name of female ratification, it didn’t matter terribly if a few “innocent” men got caught in the grinder. All the better to show these patriarchs what’s what.

The end results have been astounding. In a very short span of societal development, in the minds of a large margin of the male population (in Sweden at least), women are no longer objects or conquests. In fact, feminism and #metoo have been so successful that a very vocal opposition has scuttled out of the woodwork to wage war against societal progress. You just know you’re successful when your enemies make themselves apparent. These past ten years, with #metoo acting as a ketchup-effect in the matter, have schooled a generation of men who were brought up with the malformed romantic notions of Disney into people who, by and large, take female equality for granted. Even if their behaviour often leave something to be desired, it is no longer a controversial idea that women are in fact not objects or conquests or trophies, but equals.

I see this as an absolute success!

Naturally, the field is absolutely riddled with statistical outliers. Minority population groups who weren’t around when the epitome of male gallantry, Prince Charming, kissed a corpse, and have subsequently been left out of either the onslaught of the feminism train or #metoo, who occasionally proceed with no little amount of barbarity. Or, we have the old vanguard, the social powers of the old regime, who staunchly defend their condescending behaviour as a foundational principle of a solid national spirit. These remnants exist, still. And their obvious existence, how glaringly they stand out in our society, is a testament to the success of the swift re-education in the span of a single generation.

Only now, in the wake of this success, do women seem to realise that not only are they shedding the shackles of the past, but have also seemed to misplaced the benefits. For you cannot be fought for, struggled for, simpered for, if you’re your own person whose scorn or dismissal, or simply privacy and integrity, is to be unquestioningly respected.

The men who have taken the tenets of equality to heart, and learned to re-evaluate their behaviour in the wake of #metoo, are inevitably less likely to sue for your attention. You’re a busy woman. You came here with friends of your own. You do not want to be bothered by some schmo. You are woman enough not to be belittled, and you are self-sufficient enough to buy your own drinks. And worst of all, since harassment rests in the eyes of the beholder, there is no telling if just a simple smile across the room will make you feel uncomfortable. Give you flashbacks and awaken associations unintended. Which would be unacceptable. These lessons will invariably lower the rates of expressed attention from the people who have learned them. While the men who have not taken the lessons of the past decades to heart, can ravage along with an even greater competitive advantage than they previously had.

Ladies; your knights in shining armour and with girded loins, ready to leap off their stallions to sweep you off your feet, have relinquished their serfs and no longer have time to polish their breastplates. The rugged explorers with their tropical shirts unbuttoned will no longer come swinging from a jungle vine, because they all have nine-to-fives these days, because it turned out that no one would shag them if they didn’t have an investment in the housing market. Your days of being damsels are over.

The solution is simple. Emancipation from being a thing to be conquered arms you with a shovel. The same shovel that men have had since the beginning. Used to dig for their sweethearts through layers and layers of rejection and dismissal and risk of being offensive. Your successes of emancipation have taught some men to be sparing with their digging. To be cautious of it, and rightly so, because they’ve dug too deep and too greedily for too long.

But now, you have shovels too! You’ve earned them. Time to get digging…

/Sebastian Lindberg 14/2-2023

The Disparity of Dating Dynamics

This week, we’re going to try something a little different. I’m having a hard time… engaging the warp drive, as it were. Putting rubber to road; inserting the fuel rods; climbing into the ring; getting started. I know the destination, I know the goal, I know the pieces, but I also know the pitfalls and traps along the way. And while I don’t have a particular problem walking the plank, this week we’ll be doing it together.

Piece No. 1: Feminism. The notion that people should be considered equals regardless of gender. A philosophically decent proposition which I agree with, but have a hard time politically allying myself with due to the misandrist winds blowing from its political camp. As is made obvious by, for example, the pervasiveness of sexist terrorist notions such as the SCUM manifest still being debated. Yes; political feminism still can’t quite agree whether or not performing violent mutilation upon random men is a decent way to overthrow the patriarchy… Makes it kinda hard to sign your name on the dotted line, that sort of rhetoric does…

Piece No. 2: #metoo. The well justified watershed moment where centuries of practise and decades of examples of sexual abuse against (primarily) women was brought to light and illuminated the sexual predatory of (primarily) men in the upper echelons of society. While there were a few hit-n-misses when the going got hot, with some false accusations and flimsy hearings in the court of public opinion, the movement hacked and slashed its way through the ideals of masculine sexual aggression. Heads rolled. Most of them warranted. Some, perhaps, not so much.

Piece No. 3: Consent is key. As the #metoo movement reaped restitution through corporate corridors, penthouse paradises, college campuses, and the salons of suburbia, the West rallied around the gospel of Consent. In this freshly shaped reality where sexual assault/harassment was shaped more by experience and less by act, expressed and verbal Consent became key to safeguard every sexual and/or romantic interaction. Swedish political mavericks even managed to enshrined Consent into Law, implying that any sexually aligned act, from flirting to fucking, required a legal receipt of consent. Consent is key, as it should be, even if some judicial applications swiftly become dumb if looked at them for more than five minutes.

Piece No. 4: The aftermath. Men (as the main perpetrators prosecuted during #metoo) were shook. Look, nearly no one wants to commit sexual assault or harassment. There’re always exceptions, but men as a general rule do not want to. Those that were already mindful were validated in their debilitating caution. Those that had bought into the myths and ideals of male assertion and aggression got their world view rattled. Some re-evaluated their lives. Some rejected the change as a passing media frenzy. But to many, the #metoo movement made it apparent that sexual and romantic aspirations and interactions were a mine field that they had never really considered before. And when the legal prerogative landed solely on the reception and not the delivery, no amount of honest or good intentions matter. Only the perception with which the advance was received. And that makes any advance, essentially, a land mine.

Piece No. 5: Dating. Have you ever tried online dating? No? You’ve managed to avoid that hellscape? Well, good for you, la-di-da. If you’re one of the lukcy ones, in short; no one seems happy with it. Sadly though, it seems to be the only practisable way of engaging with new people in the hopes of successfully matching. Women complain that there’re only feckless trolls and one-night-standers cruising the dating pool depths. Men complain that it’s a sellers market, and they have to apply the same aggressive tactics that turned abhorrent post-#metoo to even stand a chance against the veritable torrent of men seeking companionship. In the Tinder Swindler we met women, caught in the Disney-esque malware dream of being swept off their tiny little feet by millionaires, who encountered the exact market researched dating-success that online dating promotes: Glamorous predators and charlatans. Regardless of who’s at fault, it is safe to say that there’s a wide discrepancy between what’s on the menu and what’s looked for. Between what’s wanted and what’s promoted. With what people say they want and what people encourage.

Do you see the red line running through these five pieces? Ideals of equality, exposed maltreatment, attempted re-education, insecurity as result, and lingering expectations that punish progression. Threaded through by the apparent mal-alignment between traditional expectations and revolutionary emancipation. Men are expected to take charge and aggressively pursue, but with a double edged sword of sexual harassment to impale themselves with. Women still expect to be courted and fought for, but also to be safely warded against unwanted and overly intent attention. And these two models don’t produce healthy results on their own, much less in concert with one another. Something has to change.

The Assembly: Love, romance, lasting intimate relationships, looks like many different things to many different people. Even more so if one is to open the can of sexual and gender non-conformity. But the prevailing liberal wind spells equality above all else. And if people (men and women and everyone else) are to be considered equals, then we need realign not just the legal system but also the dating dynamics.

If men (as the main offenders exposed by the #metoo-movement) are to come away from the old dominant fairy tales that they’ve been fed with (thanks Disney…), and construct new, healthier behavioural patterns, they(we) need to step back a little. Halt, catch fire, write ourselves a new program, new role models, new fairy tales, that better reflect an equal society. Less aggression, less tenacity, and less toxic notions of “scoring” or “winning hearts”.

If women are to earn the equal treatment they desire (and deserve), then it rests upon them to also take some equal responsibility. Not least of which with how men and women (et.al.) interact. Because right now, the men that dread the notion of unintentionally becoming sexual offenders have been disincentivized to take initiative, while those that don’t give a rats ass if they make women feel uncomfortable or violated are left alone active on the field. And if women don’t meet the prior half-way, they will be left exclusively with the latter.

No woman is a princess (statistically) to joust for.

No woman is a prize to be hard fought over and conquered.

No woman is a goddess to be worshipped.

These toxic ideas must be purged. Not just from the men that believe in them, but also from the women who live by them. And just as men have to stop treating the dating scene like a field of commercialist conquest where they’re supposed to razzle and dazzle and compete for the attention of women, so too do women have to start shedding the dream that they’re just there to look pretty and be swept off their feet, and instead act on their own volition. Otherwise, we will never ever be able to meet somewhere in the middle. As equals.

/Sebastian Lindberg 3/5-2022