A polar vortex has descended across much of North America, meaning that many of the readers of this blog — and also me — have been feeling pretty chilly lately. So I thought I would brighten your day, and mine, by sharing some reflections on cross-gender friendships.
Life for women consists mostly of sitting around waiting for men to give them gifts, so it’s no wonder men want o get in on the action!
By David Futrelle
The angry misogynists who call themselves Men Going Their Own Way like to think of themselves as gender nonconformists of a sort, refusing to give in to what they see as intense social pressure to settle down and become husbands and providers — even if such pressure doesn’t actually amount to more than occasional naggy questions from relatives and coworkers about why they’re not married, and even though the overwhelming majority of married women themselves work.
Now, I don’t consider myself an expert on dating, but after spending a couple of hours looking through an assortment of messages that weird and confused would-be-suitors have sent to women online, and which have subsequently been posted to Reddit’s CreepyPMs and BadWomensAnatomy subreddits, it’s become clear that at the very least I am more of an expert than these guys.
Director Bryan Singer — best known for The Usual Suspects and a succession of X-Men movies — has been dogged for decades by rumors, and then outright accusations, that he preys on underage boys. On Tuesday, The Atlantic dropped a massive, extensively researched piece offering the details of some of these accusations, including the stories of four men who have never come forward before.
Last year, weirdo online pastor “Coach” Dave Daubenmire caused a bit of a stir after he warned men not to give in to the devilish temptation of masturbation, because when a man jerks himself off he’s, well, jerking off a man, and even though that man is himself, it’s still totally gay.
Over in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, the regulars were recently lamenting that the women of today just aren’t as feminine as the lovely ladies of the past — obviously a terribly pressing issue for men who have “gone their own way” away from women and don’t care about them any more, nuh-uh, but somehow end up talking about them all day every day.
Most people recognize it’s wrong for someone to impose their sexual fetishes on people without their consent — whether the fetishist in question is a boorish dom who demands that women to treat him with the sort of exaggerated deference that no one is obligated to provide anybody unless they’ve agreed to do so as their sub, or if he’s an outright sexual predator like Louis CK coercing younger female comedians into watching him masturbate.
Is Netflix’s Bird Box — set in a world in which the only way to defeat evil is to literally never look at it — just a post-apocalyptic horror flick with a premise that’s equal parts terrifying and ridiculous? A sort of mashup of A Quiet Place and The Happening that’s nowhere near as compelling as the former but still a decided improvement over the latter?
Love works in mysterious ways! A couple of days ago, a lovelorn — or at least horny — young Redditor spammed every relevant subreddit he could think of — from r/relationships to r/AmITheAsshole — with a post asking for advice on a very particular romantic dilemma he found himself in.