[edit: I thank everyone for their comments and time. A lot of very interesting opinions and view points. Unfortunately also a lot of things that went away from the actual answer. So I’m thinking maybe this thread can be closed without deleting it?]
The more I hear people talk about it who aren’t cis-het men, the more I hear criticism about the concept. But so far, I’ve only heard people say that it’s stupid, that it’s not a thing, that it’s men’s own fault etc. But I’ve yet to understand where that criticism comes from. I don’t want to start a discussion on whether or not it’s real or not. I just want to understand where the critics are coming from.
Is that the case, because they are men, or because they are afraid?
Piggybacking on this comment: it’s incredibly rare for men to get approached, it’s incredibly common for women to get approached.
Both of these situations have downsides, but right now we are talking about men, so let’s ignore the downsides for women right now.
If you are the one who has to approach somebody if you want to start up any kind of relationship (from casual acquaintance to friend, to romantic relationship), that means you will be on the receiving end of rejection, by definition. If you are in the “approaching” role, and you’d reject somebody, you just don’t approach them. So by definition, it’s quite rare when being approached that you are rejected by the person who approached you.
So while women have to reject a lot of approaches they don’t want, men get rejected quite often. A socially inept woman is a wallflower, a socially inept man is a creep.
If you have been rejected too often (and maybe too harshly), this might easily turn into a sour grapes situation (“I can’t do social interaction, so I don’t want social interaction”) due to fear of rejection.
What you are raising is a very delicate subject but let’s call it what it is: dating sucks. No matter your gender, there’s hurdles, it’s just really hard to find someone who’s putting effort in. If you’re a woman, it’s because lots of people matching you will be absolute garbage. A friend showed me who was writing her and most of it was weird and creepy. If you’re a man, it’s hard to find someone who wants to write with you period. And any other genders deal with an equally limited dating pool.
It makes sense, it’s statistics, mathematically plausible, but damn it sucks. Unfortunately I think we are at the point where these conversation are bound to get eroded by inflammatory rhetoric. So these nuanced discussions are things for the future.
Totally, dating sucks for all genders, no question about that. The issues are just different and pretty much mirrored.
Yeah, that’s exactly it.
That’s also not wrong.
Tbh, I think the most important thing (not only in regards to dating but in regards to society at large) is to counter the individualization trend. It just makes people very lonely in general. It separates young men from resources needed to develop into more socially acceptable people, it separates people from their support groups in general and it just makes things really hard for everyone who’s not perfectly well adjusted for the individualist life style.