Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful reply, Solong.
1) I disagree that men have an advantage in many industrialized countries. In fact male advantage can be an illusion.
. Women live longer
. Modern Women have total reproductive control.
If the man wants the child, she can have an abortion. If he doesn't want the child, she can have it against his wishes. They have birth control pills and IUDs, so intelligent women can choose when they get pregnant.
. Men are mostly in jail, not women.
. Men are mostly homeless, not women.
. Most college graduates now are women, not men.
. Divorce courts and government offices often favor women for child custody, child payments, alimony, and welfare.
. Rape and sexual assault laws turn the burden of proof on it's head, where men are often considered GUILTY, until proven innocent.
A man can be arrested and his reputation ruined on a woman's false accusation alone. And even when a woman is found to have lied and committed perjury, she can go unpunished.
. Men are often doing the dangerous and dirty work, not women.
I could go on and on, but my point is that overall and in reality, women have an often unacknowledged advantage.
Up until this point in the thread we were discussing the advantages and disadvantages of men vs women in the context of dating, pick-ups, relationships, romance etc…or at least that is the topic I was discussing and understood you to be discussing. Now you have brought up a wide range of other contexts - aging and mortality rates, treatment by the justice system(s), homelessness, education and so forth. These are all perfectly good topics, and we could certainly discuss them. I agree with some of what you say, but not all of it, and I could bring up other ways and contexts to make a case that men have it better in life in general. However, with all due respect, I'm going to refrain from taking up those diverse issues. I don't have the time to go into all of those topics at any useful level, nor does this seem like a good place to do it. Perhaps someone else here would like to discuss them, but I'm going to stick to the relationship etc context.
The one thing you say in the part of your post I quote above that bears rather directly on relationships is this:
Modern Women have total reproductive control.
If the man wants the child, she can have an abortion. If he doesn't want the child, she can have it against his wishes. They have birth control pills and IUDs, so intelligent women can choose when they get pregnant.
Fairly accurate as far as it goes, but if you think women have the advantage or better situation re reproduction, I would suggest you try really hard to imagine 1-what it is like to have a menstrual cycle complete with PMS and cramping and emotional jags every month for around 40 years, through all of which you are expected to carry out your roles at work, at home, as a parent and an SO; 2 - going through the intense biological and emotional/psychological changes of a pregnancy; 3 - freaking giving birth...maybe a difficult delivery such as a C-section or a forceps one…maybe even a still-birth (if your imagination fails you on this one, and it probably does, try going through a delivery with a woman you love as her labor coach...even just watching and "supporting" her will probably be one of the most stressful experiences of your life); 4 - enduring deep postpartum depression while trying to master the major new life skill of parenting; and 5 - seeing a large part of what has given you confidence/self-worth and brought you attention as a sexual being for your whole adult life disappear in a short period of time during menopause. Still think women have it better in the context of reproduction? Really...seriously? Wanna trade places with one of them?
How about after the children are born and growing up? Notice the difference in stigmatization by family, friends and society of a father who abandons his children and leaves the mother the job of single parenting versus that heaped on the very very rare mother who does the same. Who has more options in this all too common real life situation?
And many men FAIL to use their few advantages when they get older because they are trapped in a traditional marriage, paying for their kid's college, or unhealthy. If you are a single 45+ man with money and in good health, yeah, you could do some things that a single 45 year old woman can't, but not much.
I was talking to a single 45ish woman the other day that discovered the joy of anal sex. It's her hook to keep guys. She has three or so 20 something year old boyfriends that enjoy meeting her. Plenty of young men will have NSA sex with older women, and some will even pay her. Would they marry her? Probably not.
Sure, there are sexually active MILFs and cougars and such out there partying away (I know some too), but they are clearly way in the minority compared to men. You can look at the statistics (7.6% of married men in the US have a spouse 10 or more years their junior; the same number for married American women is 1.6%, about 5x less!) or just go out on the street and observe age differences in couples. And it is not just about age; notice how many not-so-attractive (or downright ugly) men are with cute/sexy women versus the opposite situation. The numbers are overwhelmingly asymmetric.
But she is not paying money for her young boyfriends either, while 40 something guys are often paying for the pleasure of 20 something women.
This comment puzzles me. You make it sound like men are somehow at a disadvantage because they have the p4p ***option***, at any level between purchasing a full sex life to occasionally treating themselves with an erotic luxury experience to simply satisfying the physical craving when their usual np4p partner is unavailable for some practical reason. This option is close to non-existent for women, especially women of ordinary financial means. In a place like Tokyo, which surely has one of the, perhaps the, most extensive and diverse commercial sex scene in the world and on a site like TAG, it seems amazing to me to regard the p4p option to be anything other than a huge asymmetry in favor of men.
Imagine a world in which both men and women were allowed to eat food that they prepared for themselves but in which it was only allowed or practical for women to eat in restaurants or order take-out meals etc. Would you be saying, "Men are lucky; the poor women; they are often paying someone else to provide them with meals"? I doubt it!
2) On your third point, about looking at relationships from an adversarial perspective, I would disagree a bit.
Many women do in fact view men like an adversary. They feel that they must "win" in the relationship and that the situation must be to their benefit. He needs to be taking care of them in some way, otherwise he is not needed and/or they are unhappy.
Furthermore, many women will attempt to "play innocent". They will have a guy think she is an innocent good girl, and then do very devilish and sneaky things behind his back.
A man turning a blind eye to such common views and games played by women, can very much be setting himself to be taken advantage of. Some years ago, I had no qualms about dating married women (I try to avoid them now). The things they would do were just shocking and the husband would have no clue whatsoever. Like meet up with 3 guys in a hotel room, have "no holes barred" sex for 2 hours, then go home to cook dinner. And I mean do things sexually with other men, that she would NEVER do with the husband. A woman can get her sexual needs satisfied outside the relationship, so that she can use withholding sex as a weapon AGAINST her husband or boyfriend that she is living with.
Women have a kind of stealthy power and advantage that a wise man should never underestimate.
This is probably the most significant way in which we differ. What you describe is simply not my experience in my now 50 years of rather diverse relationships with women of many sorts; there is hardly any at all common sort of man-woman emotional and physical connections that I have not experienced. (I should have some sort of celebration to mark the 5 decades of wonderful good times!) I have run into the sorts of adversarial and self-interested behavior from women you describe above, but it has been very much the exception to the pattern of being "kind, loving, giving, frequently willing to put my happiness ahead of her own etc", as I described it in my previous post to this thread.
I assume that your view is shaped by your own experiences and am led to wonder why they differ so much from my own. You might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that I am simply naive and blind to the trickery and "very devilish and sneaky things" being done "behind my back" by my partners. However, I very much doubt that that is the case because I am generally very good at "reading people" and understanding when I am being conned; in fact I routinely make money, quite a bit, based on those skills. Maybe I have just been luckier than you; I do tend to be absurdly lucky. Or maybe different sorts of women attract me and/or are attracted to me. Or maybe, as I suggested in my previous post, it is a matter of self-fulfilling expectations…which are powerful influences on interactions of all sorts with other people in my experience. Whatever the explanation, I'm very happy that I have been treated poorly by women so very rarely and feel sorry for guys whose experiences are otherwise; it must make the world a far bleaker place.
-Ww
