reggin_bolas said:
DarthVolod said:
This guy can't see the forest through the trees ... the reason why men are turning to video games and porn is because they offer a superior experience to traditional education and relationships. It's all about incentives...
Why care about school when the education system predomincantly caters to female students (little physical activity, emphasis on manners and tact in a sterile environment where so much as mentioning something not PC will get you suspended or expelled). This is not to mention college where female only scholarships and a female centric education system are running men out of higher education in droves to the point where way less than half of the students in a majority of campuses are men, and that number is shrinking.
Let's compare pornography to a traditional relationship ....
Pornography is free, it caters to any fantasy you can think of, can be used on demand when the man feels like using it, and it will not reject a man (rejection being something that men suffer from which women never have to worry about due to the social norms/expectation that a man initiates in all matters of romance).
Let's not forget the other advantages of not being in a relationship ... financial savings (since men are expected to pay for everything), not having to deal with the emotions and outbursts of a partner, no fear of being accused of sexual assault or having an unwanted pregnancy, and the list goes on. There is also the key advantage of pornography in that it offers variety whereas traditional relationships lock you in with one partner which, many would argue, goes against a man's biology as promiscuity was a part of a man's experience in nature.
This is not to say that pornography fulfills all of a man's needs and replaces a relationship entirely as it cannot offer any form of companionship or tactile human contact. This may change in the future though with the creation of sophisticated sex dolls or whatever.
Pornography and video games offer an alternative that is, in many ways, superior to traditional relationships and schools. The answer here is not to fight against them but rather to find ways to make schools and traditional relationships a better deal for men. This will, naturally, be easier to do with schools as changing relationships would require a social movement or something like that.
I did like that Zimbardo at least had a nugget of truth buried in the article when he describes media as presenting men as fat slobs only interested in sex. If you create a culture that detests men then don't be surprised when men reject that culture and cast aside traditional institutions like school and marriage.
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Interesting and accurate analysis in most parts. I think there's a refuge to be had in games and porn as you say. I found it easier to be happy when I played games than in social situations. I wasn't popular in school and had few friends. That rejection hurt but the games never hurt. It just made me feel happy. Same thing with relationships. When I was married I'd play lot of Baldur's Gate. The gaming romances were so much more emotionally exciting.
You are very correct when it comes to rejection. It hurts to be rejected when you want sex. It bruises the male ego so much and women just don't seem to understand this.
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Female and male rejection are so fundamentally different from each other that neither sex can truly comprehend the other's experience. Men have to put themselves out there and risk direct overt rejection from a woman. Many, myself included in the past, struggle with this, and other men avoid relationships entirely because of it. Even with adequate self-esteem, it is still a psychologically traumatic experience to be rejected.
Women never have to fear overt rejection. They experience rejection when they go out on a Friday night all dressed up with their girlfriends looking for men, and end up coming home to an empty bed as no man found her sufficiently attractive and/or they did not want to face overt rejection by approaching her. I would argue this is still rejection, but it lacks the overt incident of actually being rejected; thus she can always tell herself that there were just no worthy men to ask her out. A man can not do this, he took a chance on a woman he was interested in, and that woman told him, often bluntly, that he was undesirable.
Personally, I would prefer the experience of a woman. It is better to be an object of sexual desire than a man that has to "prove his worth" to a woman via his status, wealth, education, confidence, charm, humor, assertiveness etc. all while facing direct and psychologically harmful rejection.
Yes, I said object of desire as most men are merely interested in women for sexual contact and some basic form of companionship. Women are interested in men for the equally base reason of going after the man's wealth and maybe some basic level of companionship. Neither sex is truly interested in the other as people or ends in and of themselves. There are exceptions, but on a primal biological level, this is nearly always the case.
