Thank you for sharing. It is definitely underappreciated how the patriarchy simultaneously oppresses and privileges men. I'm sorry if you've had bad experiences with online dog-piling, but I'll note that understanding intersectional feminism has been important for my own personal understanding of my gender and the ways it negatively impacts my life (or positively for that matter). I think dog-piling is universal and a product of unhealthy discourse and the way online spaces erases nuance.
The female part of the patriarchy (a word I hate) is not to be underestimated. The idea that men should be more in touch with their emotions is nothing but a narrative, reality is exactly opposite to it.
Women do not select for emotional men. They select for status, wealth, attractiveness. Only when those qualities are met FIRST, perhaps you may also share some feelings here and there, but do keep that shit in check.
The above sounds brutal and primitive, but every social study and dating research confirms it. And it makes perfect sense as it 100% aligns with biological incentives, as much as we want to deny those.
Friend, I tell you truthfully that you are buying into a conspiracy theory, propagated by people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, which is not a true reflection of reality.
Men shouldn't be in touch with their emotions to attract women - they should be in touch with their emotions for their own well being.
The idea you're expressing is called hypergamy, and it's more of a caricature of human courtship than anything. There are women who are attracted to status and women who are looking for someone with emotional sophistication and there are millions of other things they might look for. They aren't robots; they don't behave in unison.
The other idea you're touching on is evolutionary psychology, the idea that human behavior stems from certain knowable evolutionary pressures. This makes sense at first glance but it ends up being a way for people to dehumanize others and use scientific language to justify the belief that a certain group of people are robots operating under a known ruleset. It's a rationalization of prejudice.
Evolutionary pressures are so vague and difficult to know, and sexual selection in particular, that you can justify anything with this framework. Try this on for size; "women disproportionately bear the cost of childbirth, so they're incentivized to select for partners with a high degree of emotional maturity, because these partners are more likely to attend to their needs during pregnancy, withstand the often traumatic stress of parenting an infant, and to be caring parents who will pass on these high-value traits to their male offspring." Is that any less sound an argument than that they select for high social status, or physical strength, or what have you?
I'd really encourage you to look into criticisms of these ideas. Unfortunately I don't have a lot to offer as far as places you may start, I've routed through my browser history and turned up a couple things that might interest you:
No, I'm not an incel, as that it was you seem to imply. I'm happily in a relationship for 15 years. I'm not on board with characters like Tate and Jordanson, they opportunistically exploit a symptom: a total lack of care or interest in men's wellbeing.
"Men shouldn't be in touch with their emotions to attract women - they should be in touch with their emotions for their own well being."
And the point of this discussion, what started it, is that they can't. Those feelings are ignored, dismissed and ridiculed.
I'm glad to hear you aren't an incel, and you have my sincere congratulations on 15 years of marriage, that's wonderful. I 100% agree with you about Tate & Peterson.
I think it would be worth considering that the ideas you were describing are axiomatic in incel ideology. If you dug through some Andrew Tate videos, you wouldn't have any trouble finding him make the same case as you've made. The crossroads here is, once one observes these critiques of masculinity - do you accept them fatalistically, attributing them to some indelible aspect of biology (this is the Peterson route), or do you seek to change it? Do you place the blame on women (the incel route), or do you observe that there is a power structure (the patriarchy) that is simultaneously oppressing and privileging both men and women in different ways, so that they both enforce the rules of the patriarchy on one another?
There is a problem here, absolutely, we're on the same page there. But it doesn't stem from biology, it is a set of social constructs and expectations; artifices created by humans and which can be abolished by humans, no more immutable than the concept of the divine right of kings.
I agree with the person who said that men should be in touch with their emotions for their own well being.
The relationship that one has with oneself shouldn’t be dependent on others ‘ignoring/dismissing/ridiculing’ them. Then it is a relationship they have with the outside world.
