Oh Larissa, I saw the title of your article from the Forbes homepage and just knew this article, and my ability to comment on it, was going to make my day.
You did a good job trying to take a balanced approach with your article, you really did, but I also suspect consciously or subconsciously you also wanted to know what people like me thought, or else why post this on Forbes?
One word: emotional porn.
I am a man and I freely admit that the growing availability of pornographic images on the internet has really screwed up a lot of men on and their ability to have relationships. Most men (and I include myself in this category) did not learn about sex through experimentation with our first girlfriend, instead we saw it done 100 times every which way on the internet before we even had a crack at it. That affects you, but at some level, we also know it’s not right. We know that the women are acting, that they are fake (in both body and their temperament), and that in the end porn is nothing more than fantasy, pure and simple. We don’t expect women in reality to be like that. But it’s not like this for emotional porn.
Emotional porn can be summed up as every BS romantic comedy/Twilight/English Patient type story ever made. Like the porn aimed at men, they are fantasy steeped in sexuality. Women grow up bombarded from this at an early age and the fiction of the men portrayed in those is just as unrealistic as the bleach blond porn star with fake boobs. The difference is women are never ever told that this type of porn is wrong. In fact to them it’s what reality should be – and no man in the world can ever hope to meet these expectations. This why a lot of women are single, and why the ones in relationships all seem unhappy. Imagine if men thought that imagery porn was how reality should be, and that we should only be with a girl if she looked like Jenna Jameson, and put out like she does also. We would all be single and miserable and complaining that no girl was, “meeting our expectations.”
A few lines in your article Larissa show how institutionalized this acceptance of a beyond-realistic standard is. The classist part which another commenter already pointed out is part of it, but so is the way you summarily dismiss “most men” as not being suitable partners. Wait a second why aren’t they suitable? Can I ask you a question, do you like the movie “Sleepless in Seattle”? Because that is one of the most damaging movies for an entire generation of more women. Look at the premise of that movie: Meg Ryan dumps “Walter” for Tom Hanks because Walter doesn’t “do it for her.” If you recall in this movie Walter was good looking, nice, successful, smart, kind, considerate, and genuinely cared for Meg, BUT THAT WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH. This movie basically says that if your guy has every one of those qualities, DO NOT SETTLE for him!!! Dump him for some stranger you don’t even know……… Seriously????!!!! Multiply this by 100 and then we wonder why women in their 20’s and 30’s are in the situation they are in. They have been damaged to an extreme degree by decades of emotional porn, the same as if some man would be damaged if they had watched imagery porn for the first 20 years of their life and throughout it all thought it was ok and acceptable and that it was how life should be… Pretentiousness towards men and degradation of men is now the new norm among women.” And like that man, they will not really get better until they accept this and seek help or self-healing. If think I’m overblowing this and that my opinions are simply sexist then I highly encourage you to read “Self-made Man.” It’s by a lesbian author who pretended to be a man for a year. She was blown away by the pretentiousness of heterosexual women when on the dating scene. It’s quite interesting.
So what are the answers to this? I do know that as a man I have no desire to date most women who grew up under the culture of emotional porn. They are not worth the effort, sorry but true. Even a drop dead attractive girl, after speaking with them a few minutes and sensing the wannabe Sex-in-the-City/”Rules” affinity in them, I quickly try to exit the scene. I recently took stock of my 9 best friends + me (so 10 total) and our relationships. We are all doing well, have decent jobs in law, graphic design, government, etc, many make around six figures, we exercise and none of us is obese, we have hobbies and interests outside of work, and none of my us accepts or condones cheating. I think we are all around decent guys and here is how we have handled this situation: half of us have married foreign women. Some the guys met while at university, others while working overseas, and even on the internet.
Here is my answer —- Men: The world is wide open to you. There are at least 1 billion women in your age bracket all over the globe who are awesome, lack the layer of damage 20 years of emotional porn has caused, and who will love you for you are. You can find many of them right here in the US too because of our natural melting-pot immigration culture. Don’t limit yourself just to domestic women.
Women: All the best… Seriously. I wish you well and hope you get better soon.
man that shiit just hit my soul. I'm dealing with something similar in regards to the woman I'm dealing with. She wants so much from me, but she's not offering me much in return.
