Why do they need to be male-only to solve the male loneliness epidemic? Why can't men socialize in public spaces in a way that isn't offensive to others?
I say this as a former dude who has spent the vast, vast, vast majority of my life as a man, socializing with men and not-men, in public. I have never had a single issue.
They need to be male only spaces because introducing women to the space fundamentally changes the social dynamic among the men, especially the single men
I have seen this ever since the moment me and my friends hit puberty in high school, to this very day. When a group of men is hanging out they are more relaxed. The moment a woman is in the space the vibe changes
This is a good point.
I am a married man. As a woman, my wife cannot give me guy time - hence I love to hang out with my friends (who are all guys) - and I cannot give her girl time - hence she loves to hang out with her friends (who are all girls).
The only women I am happy to be friendly with are colleagues (in a professional manner), family and ladies that my wife and I are friends with.
A lot of people baulk at this sort of arrangement/tolerance - but I bet it's quite common.
You've really never had an attractive member of the opposite sex show up and the girls/guys get all competitive? I'm wondering how that's possible, it happened multiple times a week - a day even - to me in high school and college. I guess always being in mixed groups meant it was always subtly in play.
5 dudes chilling is a different dynamic than 3 guys 2 girls. People who keep insisting it's about some weird need for men to be offensive don't seem to have ever observed basic gender dynamics.(not saying you are, other responders)
You'll note that most people saying this stuff are being extremely non-specific about what it means. My impression is that a lot of what they want to do would be offensive to lots of guys as well. Essentially they want a space to act in a way that women would feel quite threatened by. Not that mixed groups don't already have that as an issue.
You couldnt be more wrong in your guessing. The answer lies in games all women play with both men and women constantly, never being truly honest with words, expecting men to pick up meaning between lines, predict their emotions and so on and on. We have enough shit in our lives already, no need to add more.
Its frustrating and tiring experience for all men, thus the need to vent out somewhere else where these dynamics dont play out semi constantly.
I am pretty sure women see it similarly in reverse although details in dynamics are very different.
As a man I don't recognize that game playing as something all women do. It's just not something I've experienced in my relationships platonic or otherwise with women. Maybe it's a Europe vs. America thing (edit: from your other comments, you seem to be in Europe so not that) or something personal to you and your experience but it sounds very 'incel-adjacent'.
Yep, there's always a strong element of "what opinions, motherfucker" goose comic in these discussions. And we always end up at "tell me you're an incel without telling me you're an incel"
What I've learned is that as an outsider, a group is less likely to be a threat to me (I'm male) if there's at least one women there. Maybe that's because attention is then directed inwards, and that, in turn, might cause the relaxed feeling at the inside to diminish.
Practically every culture on earth (except ours as of 10 minutes ago) had some sort of place for single-sex bonding, which suggests there’s something important to it. Traditional cultures aren’t incel, to the contrary it’s only in modern cultures that mass-scale failures of relations between the sexes seem to arise.
As for bjj, the scenario of the instructor dating a female student and breaking up the gym in the ensuing fallout is a well-deserved trope by now. There are women at my gym and you can make it work if everyone’s bending over backwards to be professional, but it’s obviously Different.
Every culture that treated women equally? Or were there male only spaces because women were seen at 2nd (or 3rd tier people, below the pets?)
I trained at a gym where that scenario happened, people were already leaving because the teacher was an ass in general, played favorites with the male students and created at cliquey environment.
There really isn't anything women can't handle in front of men. Thinking you have some dark thing that cant be said in front of women or that you need to change how you behave is odd and exclusive to you.
No culture treats men and women equally-- they differ in how they treat men and women differently. Just today in my progressive coastal startup, for example, there was a proposal to set up a dedicated ERG for the women employees. In a company where people are routinely pulling 60-80 hour weeks, it was considered a plausible priority to take time aside to especially ensure that the women were feeling comfortable.
Whether or not this proposal is a good idea is not even the point: the point is that it was considered plausible, and hence that not even coastal progressives actually think it desirable to treat men and women equally.
I'm not making any claims about what anyone can or can't handle. I'm simply observing that just about every mixed group ends up adopting female norms of communication. I'm not even saying that's necessarily a bad thing for a mixed group, I think it's to some extent natural and healthy in social settings. In fact taboos that proscribe the ways men may speak in the presence of women are also quite common cross-culturally. But the fact that there is a difference remains.
I used to feel the same way as you but then I discovered I was wasn't really getting on well in female dominated groups after-all. It's all smiles and pleasantries on the surface but you're not one of them and aren't part of their gossip, but can quickly become the subject of it. If they really are trusting you with their gossip and speculations about other members then perhaps you truly can assimilate. There's also talking about sex which women do with each other far more readily than with men.
With my current close friends I get included in far more gossip than I care to be and know the intimate details of past partners, kinks, fantasies etc.
Sigh. Perhaps it's sometimes ok to discount <6% of the male population for the sake of conversational brevity? Are you implying that homosexual men are suffering by not having women at the clubs? They have other reasons to not have women in their spaces. What does your little snarky comment add to the conversation?
Yes, that's true. But I don't know that you're actually scoring a point here, because I do believe that if you take a group of all gay men, and introduce a woman, the group dynamic will change. Not the same change as when you have a group of straight men, or a group of mixed straight and gay men, but it'll change.
And on top of that, I've heard some gay men complain about straight women in their spaces. That's just another example of this phenomenon.
> If you lose the ability to be a normal person whenever
That depends on what "normal" is, and I don't think you or I get to define it.
I mostly hang out in mixed-gender groups, but I absolutely have seen the difference in vibe others in this thread have noted, when I'm hanging out with a group of just other men. Especially when compared to a mixed group that has both single men and single women.
> men are putting these strange rules and requirements on their own selves
I wouldn't call it a "rule" so much as a "phenomenon". It just seems to kinda happen. Not always, and not in every mixed-gender group, but it does happen. I don't think anyone is making up or following any kind of "rules", and I can't control group dynamics or behavior on my own.
> I don't think that's a society issue. I think that's a you issue.
I think this discussion would be more productive without thinly-veiled ad hominem attacks.
The person you're replying to seems to have constructed this elaborate scenario in their head where they're "one of the good ones" and is somewhere between unwilling and incapable of imagining men wanting to spend time with just other men some of the time. Apparently someone wanting this must be lonely, incapable of socializing with women, and offensive to others as a default.
This says a lot about that person, that they can't imagine men socializing any other way. I think they're making excuses for their own bad behavior.
I don't think race matters but clearly culture does. Ukranian or Somali spaces would not be what they are if just anyone could go. Even having to speak English or explain things to outsiders changes the dynamics entirely.
I guess that's true. Seems like loneliness is increased by people's habits of seeking sex, and seeking to talk about sex, and their expectations that others will do that.
Homies that want to smash change to chad mode and suddenly don't want to talk that gay homie shit around the girls. You'd be threatening each other with sloppy toppy, a girl will join and 1-2 guys will instantly turn into businessmen to impress her.
No. It’s a human issue. Some women with a female version of the you problem make the male you problem worse. Why some places can’t be man-free or woman-free to get biology and game theory out of the way?
A mixed group works different socially than a male only group.
That's not because the men are socially incompetent. It's because it's a fundamentally different social situation. Even when everyone is an elite socializer.
I'm afraid you may be the one who needs to learn more about socializing.
So you are automatically assuming men are the offenders. This is very much a constructed prejudice. Did you ever consider that men want men-only spaces to avoid being accused and talked down to? While I never visited a mens only place, I totally understand why that would be the rule at some of them.
Sometimes men just want to hang out with other men. I’m a straight man who usually gets along better with women than men, but I still also like spending time with just other men as well. It’s just different. I have no doubt that my presence in a group of women changes the dynamic.
There needs to be some place men can just spend time with other men. Yes, it’s a problem if those men only places become important to business or politics such that it disadvantages women, but there’s got to be something else instead, then.
Women should also have places where they can be together without men.
And there should be a majority of places where men and women can spend time equally.
> There needs to be some place men can just spend time with other men.
This is literally anytime, anywhere though. Do just not meet up with their friends? You can go to dinner, get drinks, go hiking, play sports, bike, ski, sunbathe, play videogames and many more things in single-sex groups without raising an eyebrow. The real classic for men of a certain persuasion from a western cultural POV is golf right?
I think there's some strange cultural hangup I'm missing where the entire place needs to be single-sex.
Then just don't go? I personally prefer mixed gender spaces but I can understand why some people might prefer single gender spaces. It doesn't mean they necessarily have "an issue".
Because men and women are different and have mixed and single sex spaces have radically different norms and interaction styles. Given that all respectable mixed institutions default to female interaction styles this is profoundly alienating for men.
If one has never spent any time in all male spaces or has and thinks that men are defective women, like the average male therapist or counsellor this may not be obvious.
Spot on. This is immediately evident at Primary School level, whereby normative female behaviour for that age is seen as the ideal. As psychologist Michael Thompson puts it “Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools. Boys are treated like defective girls".
In the US by the 8th grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A and B grades compared to 31 percent of boys. More tellingly, Boys account for 71 percent of all school suspensions. The gap remains through high school and in college, with females representing nearly 60 percent of all college graduates.
“If you treat girls as the gold standards and boys as defective girls, that’s going to be demoralizing,” Thompson says. “What do elementary and junior high girls always say about boys their age? ‘You are so immature.’ If that’s the norm, then this system is just rigged against the boys.”
There's a wonderful bit in a 2013 Time article which illustrates that this predominant viewpoint is often indelibly coded on the (majority female) teaching staff, to the grave detriment of the male students:
//Peg Tyre’s The Trouble With Boys illustrates the point. She tells the story of a third-grader in Southern California named Justin who loved Star Wars, pirates, wars and weapons. An alarmed teacher summoned his parents to school to discuss a picture the 8-year-old had drawn of a sword fight — which included several decapitated heads. The teacher expressed “concern” about Justin’s “values.” The father, astonished by the teacher’s repugnance for a typical boy drawing, wondered if his son could ever win the approval of someone who had so little sympathy for the child’s imagination.
...
If boys are constantly subject to disapproval for their interests and enthusiasms, they are likely to become disengaged and lag further behind//
Have you ever seen teenage boys? A lot of them are basically quasi-feral owing to the newly elevated levels of testosterone unleashed on their brains which are still a long way from being fully baked.
I don't know that "girls" remains the gold standard so much as girls are more able to conform to broader behavioral expectations. This is not to say teenage girls are immune from hormonal-driven behavior issues, but it manifests in different ways. I have a 13-yo daughter and let me tell you it's no walk in the park. But it's absolutely not a surprise to me that boys account for the majority of problematic behavior.
This sounds right. It's not like girls are being deemed "the gold standard." Instead, there's an existing set of behavioral expectations, as you put it, and girls (for whatever reasons) just happen to have an easier time conforming to these expectations.
If societal expectations are things like: kindness, respect, agreeableness, calmness, paying attention, not talking back, not fighting, and so on... and girls tend to conform to these while boys tend not to, that doesn't necessarily indicate a conspiracy against boys.
And so what? Given the display of men's feelings w.r.t. to "mixed groups", I (heterosexual male) get the ick about some people here... For me most of it is about the space/relationship where certain things should happen, but I guess scientific misogyny is a thing too.
I know of an older woman (has grandkids) who smokes cigars at the cigar shop I smoke at. The discussions with "The Boys" are different when she's around.
I say this as a former dude who has spent the vast, vast, vast majority of my life as a man, socializing with men and not-men, in public. I have never had a single issue.