One of the elements that feminism has brought about is greater sexual freedom for women; in turn this has brought an even greater sexual freedom for males. Males are motivated by sex with partners possessing desirable traits. Experience, quality, and compatibility will determine the period of time that the male will want to repeat his experience with any one woman.
Additionally, most heterosexual men who had a loving mother have at least some desire to be a husband or a long-term primary partner in a female's life. While men have a significantly longer biological timeframe to find a long-term mate, beyond a certain point in their life they are not inclined to continue restarting the search after a certain number of dates once they believe that they have found the most desirable partner.
Choosing a Good Man
In 2013 the popular dating site OkCupid experimented with an app that set up people on blind dates. On launch day, they temporarily removed all user photos from the site, calling it “Love Is Blind Day.” They kept track of user activity, however, and found that although there were fewer new conversations started per hour, people responded to first messages 44 percent more often. Women were also more receptive to their dates when they used the blind date app. Women generally reported having a good time on their dates regardless of the attraction level of their partner. Interestingly, women reported having a slightly better time on dates with the less good-looking men. In contrast, when photos were available those same men could not get their foot in the door—only 10 percent of women rated as “much hotter” than the men messaging them would reply back to a given message, versus 45 percent of women who would reply when the men were more attractive than them.3
Although there is an imbalance of quality men to second-rate guys, there is still a cache of quality men who are being overlooked by women. They are the less flashy men with substance (a solid business plan). They are the ones who don't look the part even though they play it. They walk the walk but don't talk the talk—their marketing strategy is passive. While advances from well-rounded men looking for long-term relationships are not every woman's desire, women should still consider how their rejection will affect men's approaches to relationships. Sure, you can tell yourself that he will get over it and move on, but that is the message men are conditioned to exude. The reality is that these men will not stay that way for long. As the popular phrase goes, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Therefore males, as humans, will adjust their approach to meet their ends.
Why is this important? If there is no reinforcement incentive for those men who are trying hard and who do take relationships seriously, then women will remove the demand for these men and eventually the supply will dwindle. Women should find a way to reward the sincere attempts from men with something more than affable regard, such as helping him develop something he's lacking (confidence, style, etc.) or giving him more insight about women so he will be a better man for the next woman. We are suggesting some women teach men other ways to develop and sustain relationships. If you are going to have a friend with benefits (FWB), consider actually being their friend and not just someone to have sex with. If enough women whom a man desires tell him in one form or another that they do not want a long-term relationship with him—and more importantly the reasons why not—then he is more likely to adjust his approach to change that response.
The competitive nature of men who have made the conscious decision to pursue an honest relationship with a woman with the intent of growing a sustainable and enduring relationship is the very key to bringing the quality ratio of males and females back into balance. But men need to know the next steps to take. As women achieve higher levels of education, professional success, and financial status, it should follow that they demand that men raise themselves as well. However, women must also encourage men to do more, to reach higher, to work harder in school, and to make more time for people in the real world, rather than video games and porn. Women must therefore be willing to be supportive and collaborative, and recognize that men being men (responsibly) is a good thing.
TWENTY-ONE
What the Media Can Do
As mentioned in Chapter 8, young men spend on average forty-four hours in front of a screen for every half-hour they spend in one-on-one conversation with their fathers; so perhaps it's no wonder that in our survey, when we asked, “What factors contribute to motivational problems in young men?” nearly two-thirds of participants said, “Conflicting messages from media, institutions, parents, and peers about acceptable male behavior.”
It would be nice to think that the advertisement, press, and entertainment industries would be willing to portray men in a more positive light, but it'll be hard for them to move away from the predictable stereotypes as long as they keep making good money from casting men as duds. Pressure to change will need to come from the outside, which will only happen when people are willing to recognize that gender biases affect men, too, and how desperately young men need more positive male role models to look up to in the media.
One of the simplest things to raise public awareness is to show the male versions of well-known feminist material and messages. For example, what if there were a reverse Bechdel Test that rated the portrayal of men in movies, such as a “MacGyver Test,” named after the popular television adventure series, that a film or television show passes if it meets any of these criteria regarding its male characters:
Movie does not require the absence of the mother for the father to be portrayed as a competent dad.
Honest hard-working man is in a successful or leadership position and/or is not a chump.
Female protagonist shows interest in male protagonist before he is the hero.
Male protagonist solves problems in creative ways, and only uses violence as a last resort to accomplish his goals or mission.
We imagine it would be a short list. Another measurable feature to keep track of on the side may be the number of male characters that die versus the number of female characters that die or the number of male characters that die so a female character can live.
The more men and women get a genuinely better understanding of what it's like to be in the other's position, the easier it will be for them to appreciate where the other is coming from. Another way to do this is by swapping the male and female roles in movies and TV shows, and then reexamining the plots. For example, let's reverse the roles of the “fearless” Princess Anna and the “rugged” iceman Kristoff in the Academy Award-winning animated children's movie, Frozen. In the movie Anna's older sister, Elsa, banishes herself from their castle because she can't control her magical ability to produce ice and snow with her hands. Anna sets out to find her sister and bring her home. Initially Anna is offered assistance by the smooth talking Prince Hans, whom she immediately falls in love with. But who ends up helping her? The penniless iceman Kristoff, whose sled and reindeer Anna decides she can use for her own agenda—never mind if he needs it (she doesn't ask). After nearly getting him killed, destroying his sled, and finally rescuing Elsa, Anna and Kristoff go their separate ways. It is only after Prince Hans proves himself to be evil, and Olaf—the dopey snowman sidekick—says to Anna that Kristoff would be a good match that Anna even bothers to consider him.
Now imagine a movie where a prince felt entitled to use a hardworking woman whose only possessions are her sled and reindeer, which she uses to eke out a living, to go rescue his brother, and after she voluntarily busts her butt to help him he goes back to his life without a second thought. The politically correct folk would be horrified by Kristoff's behavior; audiences would be up in arms! We would think, “Why can't he get his act together?” Yet that thought doesn't even cross our minds while watching Frozen. Instead we think Anna is quirky and adventurous. By the way, Frozen does not pass the MacGyver Test.
Make Better Dating Sites
Aside from poor grammar and lack of content in messages, the number one gripe women have when it comes to online dating is that their in-bo
xes become filled with generic copy-and-paste messages from men they're just not that interested in. On the other hand, one of men's major issues with online dating beyond not getting dates is the number of messages they have to send in order to engage in conversation. It's a war of attrition. The solution? Make a woman-friendly dating app that lets women choose.
Of course, this app would cater toward heterosexual couples. Yet it would transform the way men and women approach each other. A recent Nielsen survey found that men are twice as likely as women to use social media for dating,1 yet they are half as likely as women to ask for assistance in creating or reviewing their profile.2 It's not a coincidence that women spend more time on their profiles—they are the ones being pursued.
The main reason why young men use apps like Tinder (which uses GPS technology and matches users based on appearance) is because there's less to lose with regard to time and money spent to get a date, yet the amount of rejection is about the same as other dating sites. But if women had to make the first move, rejection for men would drop to zero, and they'd probably spend more time working on their profiles to make them more representative and interesting. It could be argued that men would then embellish their profiles in different ways to make them more appealing, but the people who are going to misrepresent themselves are going to do it no matter what dating site they're using. The point of having a new structure like this would be to allow women to have more control over the online dating process and not be so overwhelmed with random and aimless attempts. Plus, it would open up the opportunity for men to focus on stimulating discussion because they know that there is already some level of attraction to build upon.
People are just getting busier, and they have less time and patience to go out of their way to meet someone who may or may not be a good fit. Women especially are looking for middle ground in the dating arena. As attitudes become more positive toward online dating, there will need to be a greater variety of ways that people can meet and connect with each other. If only women were allowed to initiate first contact, it would change the entire dating game. But the big question is, would anyone use it? Are women willing to write the first message, and are men willing to receive it?
Another idea is to simply expand on already existing social networks, which some sites are starting to capitalize on. In the near future, Namisha Parthasarathy, a young British app designer and Stanford alumna, is set to release a new dating app called One Degree, which will create more meaningful connections by introducing people who have mutual friends. “The concept,” she says, “is that the likelihood of people treating each other poorly is lesser because there are extended friend circles involved and also . . . friends are a good vetting process.”3
What the Porn Industry Can Do
The average porn video is almost twenty minutes long. If you run an online porn website, especially a free one, consider running a fifteen-second ad on safer sex practices before every video; it would take up only about 1 percent of the entire video's length. Then, if users want to skip ads, ask them to pay a fee, which would potentially generate revenue for you from those who choose to go straight to the video.
Something else porn sites could do is to challenge users to revolutionize the industry. Just as entrepreneur Bill Gates put forth a multi-million-dollar challenge for inventors to create a condom people would actually want to use,4 major porn sites could do something similar, challenging users to change the way people consume porn to make it more satisfying, therapeutic, artistic, or even educational.
At the very least, porn sites should clearly post resources that users can easily refer to if they suffer from porn addiction—much the same way casinos offer resources for people who have gambling addictions.
What the Gaming Industry Can Do
In her 2012 TED Talk, cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier said that game developers need to harness the “nutritious” aspects of gaming and create a new kind of game that is irresistible but has elements that stimulate and develop the brain in positive ways.5 The biggest challenge will be convincing companies to take the risk by deviating from a profitable formula.
Game companies currently make a lot of money by keeping up with the subscription base while changing the content as little as possible, so it would be surprising to see game developers go outside sports, violence, and first-person shooter games. Yet it would be a welcome change to see games that bridged the gap between fantasy and reality so that users can enjoy playing the games while improving real-life abilities or contributing to something beyond themselves. Right now the industry is poised to make these changes.
In Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal discusses the power of crowdsourcing, making the observation that successful crowdsourcing projects are structured like a good multiplayer game. One example she uses is the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009. Essentially, many members of the British Parliament, or MPs, had been filing illegal expense claims that added up to millions of pounds sterling, including frivolous charges like 32,000 (more than 50,000 at today's rates) for personal gardening expenses and 1,645 (nearly 2,600) for a “floating duck island.”
The government released the expense forms in an unsorted collection of more than a million electronically scanned documents. The Guardian, which had been covering the scandal, knew it didn't have enough manpower to sort through the mess, so it hired Simon Willison, a software developer, to design a website where anyone could examine the documents for incriminating details. With his help, the Guardian launched a site called Investigate Your MP's Expenses, the world's first massive multiplayer investigative journalism project. After just three days, more than 20,000 people had sifted through 170,000 documents. Investigate Your MP's Expenses also had a remarkable 56 percent visitor participation rate.
The investigation prompted the resignation of dozens of MPs, plus legal action, including suspensions and prosecutions. Ultimately, it led to widespread political reform.6
Though it may appear to be a suggestion not unlike Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood boys that whitewashing a fence is fun, imagine the kind of force gamers would become if every gamer dedicated just 1 percent of his gaming time—30 million collective hours a week—to make a real-world impact like Investigate Your MP's Expenses. Considering Wikipedia represents roughly 100 million hours of human thought, hypothetically 15.6 Wikipedia-size projects could be accomplished every year if each gamer invested that 1 percent into a crowdsourcing project. Who wouldn't want to get in on that?
CONCLUSION
Our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrast, also of varying tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked one sort only, what effect would he make? He must be able to employ them together and blend them. And we too must accept the good and bad that coexist in our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one side is no less necessary to us than the other.
—Michel de Montaigne, sixteenth-century French writer
Several nineteenth-century experiments showed that if a frog is put in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately leap out, but if it is placed in cold water that is heated gradually, it will not realize the danger and will be cooked to death.1 Our future depends on the decisions made today, and this book is about checking the “temperature” of our environment, observing the effects it has on individuals, and the implications it has for the future.
If the trends we've discussed in this book continue, what will happen is unclear, but our culture loses something important when we, as a population, are less able to think critically, delay gratification, or define and achieve meaningful personal and social goals. Technology especially needs to be embraced, but how we embrace it will make the difference between healthy and unhealthy human interaction.
In our increasingly fluid and interconnected world, one has to wonder who the game-changers and industry disruptors will be twenty years from now. Going forward, some of the questions we should be asking ourselves are: How will we rela
te to other humans as technology, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality become more sophisticated and lifelike? Will technological developments be used to make us more connected, or, as Sherry Turkle says, will these things “take us places that we don't want to go?”2 How can we utilize the tech and entertainment geniuses of today to create systems that will shape the world of tomorrow into a better place, creating real-life heroes, not just virtual ones?
It's just as important to understand the unintended negative consequences as well as the positive potentials of technology to remake civilization. That new awareness should enable the following generations to have a greater sense of their personal responsibility in using them. In addition, it is imperative that companies have a better, fuller understanding of what they are producing. Our worldwide obsession with technology is gaining speed, and we need to learn how to coexist with it so that we do not lose our autonomy or humanness.
Most people will agree that there's something missing in young men's worlds, and just by sheer numbers it is clear there are many activities young men are not pursuing and skills they are not developing in lieu of living their lives in virtual reality. When a person spends the vast majority of their time on any one thing they run the risk of becoming one-dimensional. Perhaps the young men whose parents are willing to support their son's addictive screen habits will end up like Japan's “herbivorous” hikikomori males, who isolate themselves from the world and life's pleasures, but for the less financially insulated we may see fewer getting degrees, and a rise in fatherlessness and unemployment not unlike the gender imbalances minority and poorer communities have experienced for the last few decades. Additionally, the trajectory of low-income males will worsen if they are unable to find work. Their chances of ending up in trouble with the law may increase, as will the likelihood of their female counterparts ending up as single mothers in poverty.
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