I'm Changing Messaging on the Whole Women's Standards Thing

More and more men are arguing women’s standards are over-inflated. Does it help to argue against that… or should we be aiding guys to sidestep those standards?

Meta post here.

Something's been bugging me for a few years now, feeling like this shift is occurring in the men's space and I'm not keeping my thumb on it totally accurately. After I did two posts on standards last week, I mulled it over over Christmas weekend and I think this whole thing about standards is actually it -- and that we need to make a bit of a course correct here.

For years we've had more and more men drifting onto the site complaining women's standards are too high or that women "aren't worth the work" to get. What began as a trickle became a deluge... then a tidal wave.

Initially, I treated these guys as a nuisance.

I placed them in the same category as feminists telling us we should die or guys telling us pickup is wrong because it's manipulation or that premarital sex is wrong because it hurts women or goes against God's law or what have you.

Then as more and more of the 'too high standards guys' appeared, I just continued treating them that way because I was already in that habit.

They'd come back, claiming it didn't matter what I was saying; if I didn't agree with them I just "didn't get it."

Again, everybody with a strong belief system does this: feminists say we don't get it when we don't accept the patriarchy, "pickup is wrong" folks say we don't get it when we tell them it's not wrong, etc. It's a world views thing.

Yet at the same time, I've watched the seduction space slowly but steadily decline, even as the number of men declaring women's standards are too damn high and women aren't worth the work has exploded.

I've started to realize that unless I can speak to those guys, in a language that clicks with them, I am going to fail to serve what has over time become the majority of men out there, most of whom are frustrated, lonely, and feeling helpless. Arguing with them over whether women's standards are or aren't too high doesn't accomplish that.

So I had a good think, and I realized we need to switch around how we are coming at things a bit here.