Today a friend posted about the phenomenon of men on Facebook who seem to only have attractive women on their friends lists.
Here was my take:
In my opinion this really comes down to being a symptom of a greater issue: men want to feel entitled to women without doing the work on themselves.
How many of these men do you think are hiring even a single one of these women on their friends lists to take them through meaningful coaching work? How many men’s coaches do you think they’re working with at all? But instead of facing themselves (and realizing, even at the most basic level, what a creeper their online presence makes them look like), they would rather avoid their inner emptiness and simply distract themselves with the content of the “goddesses” they’re fetishizing. Hey, doing inner work is hard! Much easier to just leave “wow stunning” on all their yoga pics and send multiple PMs out in a numbers game of desperation hoping that maybe one woman will reply and give them some attention.
A major issue I see with the masculine these days (especially the cishet white upper/middle-class masculine) is that he has spent so long as society’s default setting that he feels no need to put in any work. Up until recently, he could coast by on mediocrity, be assured of sustainable (if unfulfilling) employment, feel entitled to “get the girl” as he does in every movie just by being a nice guy, and live out the American dream having put almost no thought into it. He has been the voice on every tv station, the member on every advisory board, the hero of every movie, and every US president except one. Have you ever watched tv and counted how many white men you see as opposed to people of other demographics? Did you know that statistically, men feel a room is half full with women when they actually only make up 17%, and that at 33% they actually perceive there to be MORE women than men? It’s chilling. But we grow up with it, so we don’t notice it, until we do.
The advent of social media was revolutionary in that it gave almost everyone a voice – if you could afford a smartphone, you could build a platform. All of a sudden black women, trans folk, members of other communities were gaining ground because their communities actually want representation, and now straight white men are losing their footing as the default voice in all situations. This is why white supremacists are in the streets chanting “You will not replace us.”
And before social media, men could turn on the tv or flip through a Victoria’s Secret catalogue or download some porn and women would be there before them, scantily clad and apparently pleasing, and they wouldn’t talk back. Now, while women have often still been socialized to look like a Victoria’s Secret model whenever possible, there’s a way to interact with those images. And the women in them are not having it. Your favorite pornstars read your tweets at them and shame you for your bad politics. Girls on Tinder start Tumblr accounts full of screenshots of bad male behavior. Instagram models will hunt down your wives, girlfriends, and moms to show them your sexual harassment comments.
The feminine has a voice now. She doesn’t have to rely on creepy patriarchal casting couch photographers like Terry Richardson to have a career – she has 100k instagram followers and brands who want to pay her to show their designs on her account. She knows other women in tech have her back if an investor sexually harasses her at a pitch meeting. Brock Turner may have gotten off with a months-long sentence for raping an unconscious woman because a male judge saw his younger self in him, but Starbucks baristas will be writing “Rapist” on his coffee cups for as long as he continues to look like his mugshot. Women collectively have come together to say “This is not ok, and there will be consequences from now on.”
And men don’t like that, because they’ve gotten used to being lazy and still getting everything they want.
The point is, if you wanted to be doing the work, you’d be doing it. If you want to continue to throw pebbles at the ocean of beautiful women on social media who receive hundreds of messages from men each day, then that’s what you’ll continue to do. It’s entirely up to you when you decide to start understanding the concept of value and doing the work to be able to actually offer one of these women a positive masculine presence so that your love life can happen in real time and not on your computer screen.
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