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This was an interesting pair of articles and I'd strongly agree with the idea of offering better training on all of these fronts.

That said, I think a reject / avoid women that are not interested in adopting the norm of affirmative consent is going to be a tough pill to swallow, especially in communities where it is less common and there teaching communication norms about sex will likely be resisted in school boards and the like.

I'd argue there's ways to teach boys and men to be much better communicators while making incremental progress to shifting norms. That said, I think there's an advantage to offering a mix of trainings on this manner, some pushing new norms harder the better to influence the overall culture.

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My girlfriend actually read this over and thought that calling it a "red flag" was too harsh as well since it was so normalized. At least in my experience, if you exhibit good communication, the person you're pursuing, even if they aren't trained in doing so as well, will mimic it too or feel more comfortable to do it. It's really about people who stubbornly don't like the idea.

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I know this isn't the main point of the articles - and I don't know if you have an answer, I'm just thinking out loud - but I wonder if anyone has done a write up or exploration on how the manosphere/PUA crowd has shifted over the last ten years or so. I feel like I followed it fairly closely and recognized a lot of the main players around 2015/16, when I guess it was more youtube-centric and gamergate was the big focus. But I'm not on tiktok and didn't know anything about Andrew Tate until he started blowing up in the news, so while I didn't doubt these guys were still around, I don't really have a good sense for if their messages/tactics/gripes/favorite disinfo stats have changed with new platforms and new figureheads.

Ultimately it doesn't really matter as the core misogyny is the same and the solutions you've laid out are the same, just something that came to mind as I was reading. Thanks for the write up!

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Really good points Darrell. I think the one thing we need to layer on, in our society, is to allow men to show vulnerability and talk about it. Reiterate that having feelings and expressing them is normal, healthy, and doesn’t need to be done covertly.

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Great summary and potential solutions, this is a great resource to save and share

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