: You realize this sucks for everyone else too, right?
I read an awful New York Times article today. It was a hot take by a woman complaining about how feeble men are these days and how they have too many mental health issues, such as “anxiety,” to make dating worth the effort.
I shouldn’t have read it—such articles are my kryptonite—but I did, and now that I have, I feel compelled to point out that nobody would tolerate it if the Times ran a gender-reversed article where a man complained about how vapid and Instagram-obsessed is modern woman. The problem isn’t (just) the sexism; the problem is that the generalization is not true. You do not get to issue unilateral diagnoses about the problems with modern dating on the basis of saltiness. Nor should we, as consumers, accept it when media outlets launder caustic gender-war propaganda and regressive ideas about masculinity under the pretext of edgy feminism.
In the article and the comments section (which I also should not have read), we see a tour of typical cognitive failure modes: the just-world phenomenon (if others are suffering, they probably did something to deserve it), the external locus of control (hell is other people), confirmation bias. Along with a few MVPs who see through the bullshit.
It’s OK to be frustrated with the state of the modern dating market—I certainly am, and I’m not even in it—but if you think the fault lies only with men or women then you aren’t looking closely enough. In my view, the feeble men described in the Times article and the Instagram-addicted straw women imagined by misogynists on the other side are really two sides of a larger undercurrent of anxiety and hypermoralism in society at large. Young people (age ≤ 45) are under immense pressure to perform “perfection,” both in terms of character (never say something offensive, never be the toxic friend) and the cultivation of a glossy personal aesthetic (that’s Instagram). Even if you run the gauntlet of dating and marriage and make it to parenthood, Instagram (and friends who talk about Instagram—your bespoke social-media diet can only do so much to help) will remind you of impossible healthy parenting trends such as homemade cereal and expensive family vacations that you cannot afford. All of this is a recipe for intractable anxiety and endless status games. Please, can we start from the assumption that others are struggling every bit as much as I am before laying all the blame at their feet?