On March 1st, 2010 I bought a grey 2010 Mazda 6. I did not need to purchase a car at the time, but I wanted to replace my 2004 Chevy Cavalier and I had the money. So I came up with a list of cars and a list of features and I spent a month test driving automobiles. I tried the Hyundai Genesis Sedan, Genesis Coupe, and the old and new Sonata. I drove a couple Honda Accords. I drove a Subaru Outback. I tested a Ford Fusion and sat in a Taurus, but refused to drive it. I drove a Chevy Impala and sat in, but refused to drive, a Malibu. At that point my desire to purchase a new car was eclipsed by my lack of desire to purchase the cars I’d test driven, so I seriously considered just not buying a car.
Then I test-drove the 2010 Mazda 6. That was a Saturday. On Monday I was signing the paperwork to purchase a new car. It’s more than a year and a half later and every time I get into my car I’m happy I bought it.
Let’s say that hadn’t happened. Let’s say that I drove the Cavalier another year, then decided that I wanted to buy a new car. Chances are extremely good that I would have been able to write the preceding paragraphs and change the three instances of “2010” to “2011” and everything would otherwise be exactly the same.
Let’s take a hypothetical.
On March 1st, 2010 I got married. I’d been dating a girl since 2004 and it was a good relationship. We just hadn’t been in the right place financially or emotionally to get married. Finally everything was right and we decided to make it happen.
We’ve been married for more than a year and a half and I wake up every morning the happiest guy in the world.
Let’s say that hadn’t happened. Let’s say that I decided in March of last year that, no, marriage wasn’t right. What are the odds she’d have hung on for another year? Or what if I’d said, “I want to get married, but not to you?” There are plenty of fish I the sea, after all. And I’m a great guy, any woman would be lucky to have me.
These two scenarios are so very different that there’s almost no reason to even comment on them, right? It’s absurd that I even brought them up, especially that follow-on paragraph for scenario two.
The problem is that there is a segment of the population that doesn’t actually seem to understand that these are two totally different statements. This, I believe, is one of the core reasons we’re getting all the, “What’s the matter with men?” articles. We’ve decided that finding a partner is the same thing as buying a car. What we haven’t figured out is that there is a factory out there somewhere that is perfectly capable of producing a brand-new 2011 Mazda 6 that’s functionally the same as the brand-new 2010 Mazda 6 I purchased last year. So if I wait I can still get a car. Hell, I might even get a car with a couple more features or better gas mileage.
There is not, however, a factory out there that’s producing 2011 model-year potential spouses. If there is, it’s got terrible QA. You might find that your 2011 dating prospects are significantly better than your 2010 prospects. You might also find out that 2011 is a wasteland and 2010 was a bumper crop you really should have appreciated.[1]
Ultimately, the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles only exist if a man is interchangeable with a Mazda 6. It’s an absurd concept on its face, but we have decided to agree that people are commodities in a lot of other areas, so it’s easy enough to just write the article as the commoditization of humans is true and assume no one will ask any difficult questions. Fortunately for the writers of those articles, very few people will. The intended audience of the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles aren’t actually the men-who-don’t-exist, after all. The intended audience is women who want something to point to and say, “That’s why I’m single,” and the various culture warriors in the arena of gender politics.
Potential mates are not new cars. If we’re going to speak of them in terms of anything made in a factory, they’re used cars. Some people you meet are the car that was garage kept and only driven to the store on Saturday. Some are high-mileage road warriors driven 50,000 miles a year. Some have flood damage, some were in bad accidents. Some have obvious signs of damage, others were so well repaired cosmetically that the problems won’t manifest until long after you’ve driven off the lot. Even the best used car has a door ding or two and a few miles on the odometer.
My grey 2010 Mazda 6, in short, was once identical to a whole lot of other 2010 Mazda 6s. Over the last year and eight months it has become a unique vehicle precisely because of what it’s gone through while I sat in the driver’s seat. Or, in the case of that one door ding, what happened while it sat in the parking garage at my Irving office.
This, I supposed, makes it seem like everything gets worse with age. I don’t actually think that. I, personally, believe that I am a much better person and a much better potential mate than I was at any point in the past. This is the fundamental difference between a human and a car. Cars are inert. They cannot grow, they cannot repair themselves. From the moment a car leaves the production line it is on an inexorable march to broken-down obsolescence. I am neither broken-down nor obsolete.
I’ve also noticed that as I get older my conception of who is most attractive has gotten older with me. By this I mean that were you to take someone I thought was drop-dead gorgeous in high school and put her in the same room as me, I’d probably find her drop-dead gorgeous now, assuming that she retained the basic physical characteristics she possessed back in the day.[2] If you then took someone who is the spitting image of her at 16 and had her walk in to the room, I’d probably say, “Wow, she looks so young.” Then I’d make some crack about how I feel old or the kids these days or something.
I believe this is an attitude known as “normal.” I’ve never “played the field.” I have no urge to go pick up 22 year-olds at a bar. My ideal woman is someone close to my own age who possesses intelligence and maturity and is attractive to me. This, in theory, should not be too much to ask. I mean, there have to be a crapload of single women out there between, say, 27 and 33 who are looking for a guy like me.
At the very least, I’m given to understand that there are whole herds of them, meeting to bitch about creepers and immature douchebags who sit in their mother’s basement playing XBOX 360 and who totally want them to be their mother. So here’s a fascinating question: why haven’t I run in to these kaffeeklatsches of dissatisfied women looking for the mythical guy just like me?
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The answer to this question is as simple as it is not profitable to write a thousand or two words about in magazines. It’s really fucking hard to meet people these days. This probably seems counter intuitive. I, after all, am friends with people from the other side of the country I’ve never met.[3] I have friends who live in Ireland and California and Denver and Dallas that I could contact right now for free and say, “Hey. How you doin’?” I have active accounts on two dating sites, Facebook, Twitter, Meetup, and probably several places I’ve forgotten about.[4] I am, in short, socially connected.
For me, however, most of this social media is sound and fury, signifying nothing. When it gets right down to it, I don’t put a lot of effort in to meeting new people. Most of the time I’m at work, doing things with friends and acquaintances, or just kinda hanging out. If I go out it’s for some sort of purpose and I rarely, like, talk to women.
So the answer to the question, “Where are all the men like me?” is pretty simple. We’re probably busy. Or, at the least, we’re being social somewhere those women who desperately want to me us aren’t.
Or, y’know, those women are just expecting us to show up where they already are.
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There’s one other aspect to this that totally gets missed. Jessa actually touched on something I was thinking of in the comments on my post from yesterday:
With men, perhaps after "finding themselves" some women are overestimating their own perfection and expecting the men they date to be as perfect as they perceive themselves to be? Or in "finding themselves" they forgot to learn that real-life love doesn't look like storybook/fantasy love, where things aren't as lovely and perfect?
I have to offer some barely supported conjecture here. Bear with me. And if I’m off base, please, someone let me know.
Women – as best I can tell from popular entertainments, reading the comments on a random sampling of Facebook photos, and imagined dialog from episodes of Sex and the City that I’ve never seen – engage in a sort of closed loop of self-reinforcing mutual admiration. Basically, women look at pictures posted by their friends on Facebook and comment with things like, “ZOMG, you’re so pretty. Love you!” or they sit around, lamenting their status as single women and say things like, “Any man would be lucky to have you,” to each other. This is not really a problem in any real sense. Still, it can have some potentially negative ramifications.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I’m pretty sure there are a lot of women out there who are hearing the, “You’re so pretty and amazing,” message from their girlfriends and are not hearing that message from men because, well, they’re not. Self-confidence is a good thing. Unrealistic expectations are a bad thing. That’s all I’m trying to say here.
Actually, there’s another aspect to it, too. Take someone who has a more-or-less realistic self-image. Say that she’s a 39 year-old woman writing about a great relationship she backed out of ten years ago in The Atlantic. Not that I have any particular individual in mind or anything.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this woman was realistically self-aware at 28 when she decided to break off an otherwise actually great relationship just to find herself. She basically decided to invest in herself. That might have actually been a bad investment.
Allow me to draw an analogy: You own a $150,000 house. The house is perfectly serviceable and you like your house just fine. One day you’re standing in your kitchen and you think, “I need a new kitchen.” You decide that you don’t just want a new kitchen, but you want a kitchen with every awesome new everything and you want a kitchen that will add value to your house. So you go out and spend $30,000 on a new kitchen with granite countertops and genuine mahogany cabinetry and, like, solid gold backsplashes and whatnot. The day after the last worker leaves you find out you’re getting transferred to the other side of the country, so you have to sell your house and move.
You had a $150,000 house and you just invested $30,000 in a new kitchen. That means that you can sell your house for $180,000, right? Well, no, actually. Chances are that you’re going to get something closer to $165,000 and you’re just going to have to eat the rest. Hell, if you decided to put that kitchen in back in 2007 and the market collapsed while you were having it installed you might be lucky to get $150,000 for the house, hand-carved granite countertops and platinum sink fixtures and all.[5]
All of which is to say, if you know nothing is going to make you happier than an awesome new kitchen, go buy one. But if you’re going to get one, do it for you, not as a future investment. And know you might regret it. And if you’re listing your house at $180,000 and all your friends are saying, “Ha! People should be lining up to pay you $190,000 for this house. Look at how beautiful your stove is!” but no one is looking at your house at all and the guy down the street sold his for $140,000 and your former next-door neighbor sold hers for $155,000 and none of the similar houses in your zip code are listed for more than $170,000, maybe you need to find a real estate agent who will smack you upside the head.
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Let’s take a minute to look at this from a different perspective. Let’s say that we live in a world where absolutely 100% of the population does want to marry eventually. Let’s also say, for the sake of argument, that it’s possible for everyone who wants to get married to find someone to marry. This isn’t actually entirely realistic, but it’s not actually entirely off base.
A subset of the population, however, says, “I don’t want to get married just yet.” This is a perfectly acceptable thing and completely understandable. The problem is, though, the longer you wait the harder it is to meet someone. All those people you could have married at 30 might have gotten married by the time you’re 40. Or they’ve gotten married and divorced and don’t want to go through that again. Or they opted out of the system entirely. Or they have kids and you’re still all, “No fucking way, man. I’m no parent.” Or, well, they got fat and ugly. Shit happens, yo.
If we take away the ever-so-convenient moralizing and the applied labels and their attendant value judgments, everyone who wants to get married and could get married but decides to wait does so for one of two basic reasons. Either they’re scared or they’re being selfish. It is also possible for them to be both scared and selfish.
This is the absolute, honest truth of the matter: the woman who says, “I don’t want to get married until I have achieved my career goals,” is no different than the man who says, “I don’t want to get married until I get tired of having sex with strangers I meet at bars.” Both say, “I won’t get married until I have gotten what I want out of life.” And if the woman ends up saying, “I should have married [random guy] because he made me happier than being Vice President of New Product Development,” she’s in exactly the same place as if the man finds himself saying, “I’ve had a lot of meaningless sex and I feel like I’ve wasted the last ten years of my life trying to get it.”
That driven, independent, career minded woman who is “putting her personal life on hold” might be doing something completely different on the surface than that womanizing cad, but at the end of the day they’ve both decided to take themselves out of the marriage pool. Sure, we might say that she’s doing it for “the right reasons” and he’s doing it for “the wrong reasons,” but they’re both doing the same thing. The rest is commentary, with the added bonus of ever-so-convenient moralizing.
There’s a dirty little secret that the above narrative always ignores when it’s used in the, “Where have all the men gone?” articles. Plenty of men are primarily focusing on their careers right now. Plenty of women are going out to bars looking for a dude for just tonight.
We can’t have that secondary narrative, though, because it gets in the way of our other favorite gender narrative. Men want sex, after all, while women begrudgingly give sex to, y’know, get something. So if a woman is on a career track to the halls of power, the reasoning goes, she won’t need a man. The only reason any woman gets married and has sex, after all, is to get the security of having a man.
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And here we are, back at the beginning. Marriage, as it turns out, has always been a commodity. It used to be pretty blatant. Men literally exchanged their daughters for money or goods or influence or alliance. Women were literally used to create additional laborers if they were poor or additional heirs to be married off for advantage if they were royalty. The men had to be strong and capable of working long hours or hunting or fighting just to survive. The women, then, had to be capable of doing all the stuff around the house, the so-called “household arts.”[6]
The commoditization of gender, then, came about because the man needed to be strong and capable enough to provide and/or defend. The woman needed to be compliant and resilient enough to make lots of babies. Modern societies don’t need that anymore. When the big fights are boardroom negotiations men and women are equals. When preparing dinner involves going to the supermarket for prepackaged ingredients or meals or picking up the phone and calling the pizza place no one needs to spend an entire day cooking.
We, in short, live in a society where we can be fat and lazy and still be clean and prosperous. And that goes for people from the lowest rung to the highest.[7] There was a time when being fat was considered an amazing thing because it meant that the person had food and the leisure to eat without having to prepare it. Now people who are in good shape are increasingly considered amazing, since it means that the person in question has the time to prepare healthy meals and the time to work out, instead of only having time to grab a doughnut and coffee on the way to sit in front of a computer all day.
Yet we still have this idea that the man has to be the provider and the woman has to be provided to. We still have this idea that the role of the woman is to use sex to get her man, who only wants her for sex and procreation. This is a completely unnecessary attitude in modern life. Yet it still stubbornly hangs on.
All those people who are running around asking, “Where have all the men gone?” an blaming feminism for destroying men need to shut the fuck up. It’s a dumb question and an even dumber conclusion. The question needs to become, “What should men and women expect of each other in a modern, post-feminist world?”
Because believe you me, speaking as a man, I know that I, personally, haven’t gone anywhere, even if you keep telling me that I don’t exist.
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[1]In absolute terms, the late 2011 model-year Geds is a way better option than any previous Geds. I suspect the 2012 model year Geds will be even better. But there’s no telling what the future holds, so maybe the 2013 model year Geds will be an emotional wreck that makes 2008 Geds look like a model of balanced and sane thought.
[2]I’d rather not spell this one out in excruciating detail, but I’m sure you, my reader, gets what I’m going for here. There are some people who age well and some who age poorly. Amongst women who can be said to have “aged well,” the ones who are now my age are far more attractive to me than they would be if I met their teenaged selves.
[3]Michael Mock refers to these as “imaginary friends.” That amuses me to no end and I shamelessly stole it from him.
[4]I am not on LinkedIn. I do not understand LinkedIn. Also, too, I was never on Myspace or Friendster and I haven’t quite figured out why I’d want to be on Google+.
[5]In the interests of full disclosure: just in case it’s not entirely obvious, I have no idea what would go in to a $30,000 kitchen remodel. I do, however, know that people spend that much on kitchens.
[6]Whether this is an equitable distribution of responsibilities is a discussion for another day. But, in general, in a world where all the work was done with hard manual labor and without appliances and machinery, simply preparing a meal required an entire day’s work. Someone literally needed to be at home making that happen from sunup to sundown.
[7]For the record, this is just poetically illustrating a point.
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