SUNDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2024

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time watching YouTube videos focused on the current relations between men and women and I can’t help but wonder if they’re in crisis, especially in the US. The recent election there highlights this divide, with a clear victory for Harris among women and an even clearer landslide for Trump among men. Statistics show that an increasing number of heterosexual people in developed countries are choosing to live alone, and this wish to remain single has happened to both women and men. None of this is at all surprising for me having watched a cluster of videos hosted by men, often between the ages of twenty-five and forty, who seem extremely bitter and who consider males to be the oppressed gender nowadays in a culture with double standards that discriminate against them. The root cause of this, they argue, is feminism, which has upturned traditional views of male and female gender roles to the detriment of both sexes.

I’ve watched at least twenty of these male videos over the last few weeks, since the YouTube algorithms tend to flood you with almost identical videos as suggestions once you’ve watched even one video on a theme (whether this is because people really prefer to be in an echo chamber or whether YouTube merely assumes this, I have no idea). The angry male hosts use clips from YouTube videos made by women as evidence for their claims, women who seem unhappy and equally bitter, angry that men are ignoring or disrespecting them or using them purely for sexual gratification and then ‘ghosting’ them. These women also feel that modern men are wary of any kind of lasting relationship or sometimes even close contact. Although I have to admit to the guilty secret that I find these YouTube videos by both men and women rather entertaining, I come away from them a little depressed that relations have soured so much and become so confrontational.

I realise this may just reflect the dysfunctional nature of much of social media in encouraging extreme positions and pushing people towards them, and when I watch couples in restaurants and shops in real life, I see few signs of this conflict, so perhaps it’s all a storm in a YouTube teacup. I also realise that I’m stepping way beyond my area of experience in writing about this issue since I’m old and know nothing about the modern dating scene. Moreover, I’m a gay man, and I accept I would feel annoyed if I read a straight person pontificating about gay culture and lifestyle. So I hope I’m not being presumptuous in raising this topic, but ultimately it affects everyone in our society, whatever their sexuality, and in my opinion needs to be discussed openly.

The complaints of the male protagonists in their videos are manifold. The first is that modern women want to have their cake and eat it. For example, they say that women want equal pay and education and career prospects, but still insist that men pay for meals in restaurants, buy them gifts and flowers, propose marriage on one knee with an expensive engagement ring in hand, and generally treat them with old-fashioned gallantry. Secondly, they state that women criticise men for being superficial since they judge women purely on their looks, but then show videos in which female hosts make it clear that they would never even consider dating a man who was too short, and especially if he is shorter than themselves. Thirdly, they believe that many women regard men as a meal ticket, both in the early stages of dating and during a marriage, and bleed the man dry if the marriage ends up in divorce. Fourthly, they state that they are afraid of being accused of harassment if they come on to a woman but then show videos in which women criticise them for being too timid to approach them, labelling such men as unmanly. Perhaps most worrying of all, these male hosts claim that they are concerned about facing charges of assault if sex takes place, especially after alcohol.

They put a lot of this down to the Princess phenomenon, where modern young women want to be treated like princesses and believe that they deserve only the crème de la crème of the men on the dating scene, leading to a situation where the vast majority of women are chasing the same top 5% of rich, handsome guys. This makes women open to exploitation by these desirable males, who use and discard them because there are plenty more fish in the sea, and there’s always another fish which is keen to be hooked. The more relaxed attitudes to sex and the greater openness about it mean that it tends to happen more quickly and more readily in a relationship than in the past, often on the first date. Many YouTube male hosts are unhappy about this new sexual freedom extending to women, and are especially critical of events like hen nights or all-girl vacations where casual sex might take place away from their steady male partner. Finally, older, divorced men, especially those who are active in men’s groups, rail against custody laws which they say always favour the woman and alimony laws which they feel discriminate against them as husbands even in situations where their ex-wife earns the same salary as them or more.

I’ll turn to these arguments one by one to question how justified I feel they are. First, I generally agree that in a situation where the man and the woman are earning roughly the same amount of money, it only seems fair that they share the costs of dating, and I suspect this splitting of the bill is more common nowadays among young people, but I admit I have no evidence to support this idea. When this doesn’t happen, I suspect it is often the man who insists that he should pick up the tab because he feels his masculinity is undermined if the woman pays or they go Dutch. At the same time, I think many women enjoy, or sometimes even need, the boost of feeling special, which takes concrete form in gifts of chocolates and flowers. This may sound like an imbalance in favour of women, but we shouldn’t forget that statistics show that they still earn less than men throughout the world, often for the same work. In my opinion, a good compromise could be that a realistic budget is set to which both partners can contribute equally, but psychological and cultural factors clearly play a huge role in what happens on the ground and may prevent this.

I broadly agree with those men who say that a woman rejecting a man solely on account of his height is little different from a man rejecting a woman because her breasts aren’t large enough. However, we cannot deny that we all have our own tastes in romantic partners and it seems perverse to deliberately go against them, but there is a difference between making something a factor guiding our choice and having an inflexible determination to date only our ideal man or woman. It remains true, though, that women are still much more likely to be judged by their appearance, even in the modern world, although the pressure on young men to be buff and have muscles and a six-pack is growing stronger all the time. Perhaps we should blame dating apps for much of this, since they encourage this objectification of the human being. I also think that both men and women are sometimes loath to give up traditional masculine and feminine roles and the physical stereotypes they foster. When men are not muscular and buff and do not behave in a ‘masculine’ way, the YouTube videos of some of the women show that they think of these modern, sensitive men as wusses and reject them. Despite all the social changes, at heart many of them are still looking for a ‘real man’.

As for their claim that many women are gold diggers, I have no sympathy with the male hosts. Yes, a few of the female videos are hosted by women who want to be wined and dined in luxury and are shallow and materialistic, but equally there are sugar daddies who will use their wealth to exploit women. Don’t judge everyone by the bad apples. Problems around things such as divorce, alimony and custody are due more to shortcomings in the law. Laws always lag behind reality and issues such as divorce, alimony and custody need updating in a world which is very different from the traditional 1950s world of man at work earning the corn while wife stays at home and looks after the house (a reality which was often far from true – both my parents needed to work to make enough money to run a family). Surely no one wants to go back to the laws that backed up this model: a world in which women often had to stay in unhappy marriages because they could literally be on the street in the case of divorce. The law and the practice of the law still needs to catch up with these social and economic realities of modern relationships, I feel, although making them fair to both partners in a more diverse world seems a Herculean task.

Regarding harassment and assault, this seems to have become a minefield, with salacious cases in the mass media of celebrities and top people getting dragged through the mud in the gutter press. We can only do our best to deal with these claims and counterclaims since so often it becomes the word of one person against that of another, which becomes a hideous problem when the assault becomes an accusation of rape. The greater readiness of women to report rape, assault and harassment is surely a positive step forward, but in a society as litigious as the US, I can understand why men have become very wary. And despite the greater transparency that now exists, I suspect that we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg and most assault remains hidden. So ultimately although I understand why men are nervous, I think it’s very unfair to put the burden for correcting this on women.      

If you watched only YouTube videos and had no access to other media, it would be easy to assume that the Princess phenomenon was rife. The women in the videos that the men use as evidence against them are mostly spoilt, neurotic, wannabe divas who believe that the world owes them a living just for being gorgeous. But there have always been spoilt prima donnas just as there have always been men who treat women badly, but to what extent this exists outside of this weird, narcissistic, exhibitionist online world I have no idea. We have to ask how much of what we are talking about is a symptom of a greater selfishness in a society based on consumer capitalism where everything becomes a product to be sold or bartered. In the YouTube videos I’ve watched by both men and women, there is an underlying instrumentalism, an attitude of ‘What’s in it for me?’ and very little consideration of the other person. And if some of the women I see are little princesses, some of the men are unreconstructed chauvinists wailing against feminism and the modern social and sexual world.

The effects of these changes in mores could fill a library of books, so a paragraph seems woefully inadequate. Briefly, it does seem that women have changed faster and farther than men in the sense that ladettes and girls’ nights out mimic a certain type of male behaviour whereas the alleged feminisation of men that these YouTube hosts disapprove of has been much more marginal or perhaps just less publicly visible. But for all the publicity around ladette culture, it certainly seems true that the old double standard of men being studs and women being sluts is alive and well. More generally, confusion about gender and gender roles seems more prominent nowadays as the endless arguments in the media about the trans movement show. Again, though, we must ask: how much of this is real at grass roots level and how much is a media fabrication?

I have listened to thoughtful online hosts, both women and men, who argue that the ultimate result of all the trends I’m discussing here is a glut of single, available women who want a long-term relationship but are unwilling to compromise on standards and end up feeling lonely and frustrated. This is somewhat stereotypical, but I think women have always tended to think more long-term in term of partners and relationships and therefore do tend to set higher standards than their menfolk (whether this is due to biological imperatives as the evolutionary psychologists believe or the result of their social and economic vulnerability is irrelevant) so I suspect there is nothing new about this tendency for women in general to want higher-level men who will provide for a family.

Overall, I feel that some of the grievances of these male YouTube hosts have some  substance to them. However, when they become a desire to go back to a past that perhaps never existed and certainly can’t be replicated, I think these men need to question and change their way of thinking. Blaming it all on what they label ‘feminism’ seems little more than a convenient scapegoat. Society is struggling to cope with massive changes in sexual and gender behaviour, and even if some of this is overstated in the media, many of these issues are real and rooted in larger social and technological changes and therefore perhaps cannot be solved, but only ameliorated.