Reddit mentions of Women & Shame: Reaching Out, Speaking Truths and Building Connection

That was a pretty disappointing debate for me. Some good points were made, but there seemed to be a lot of hand-waving and naked assertions all around. Which I suppose is understandable, given the time constraints and there being five participants.

Some points of contention for me:

• Economy of sex. I understand the attraction of modelling sex and relationships on a societal scale in economic terms, but I'm not convinced that we can draw any meaningful conclusions about the motivations of individual participants from these models. Women say they're not happy with the dating scene, and so do men, so there's definitely something wrong. But who's the consumer in this case and what is the product? The video hedged that women want sex too, and then proceeded to cast men as more or less unilateral "consumers". Women, on the other hand were cast as sole (or main) "consumers" of relationships and emotional connection. This seemed wholly unfair to either sex, and really bothered me.
  
  
• I found the bit about porn and how it affects women's behaviour and men's expectations to be, again, ridiculously one-sided and very shallow. Our evolving understanding of sexuality is a result of continuous discourse on what stimulates us, how we process pleasure and what forms of engagement are societally permissible. To a large extent I'd argue that porn is a reflection of this evolution, and not the principal driver of it. Casting women as receptors of social influence, and men as projectors is again a disservice to us all. This, coming from a man who is fairly vanilla sexually, and has been friends with very open women for most of his life. I'd say that some women seem to be quite enthusiastic givers to receptive males.
  
  
• Stay at home dads. I agreed with quite a few points made about what stands in the way of it, but couldn't identify with either the pro or anti-SAHD positions expressed in this video. On the one hand I found the shrink's dismissal of it poorly justified. On the other, I think that fully supported fatherhood shares all the problems that motherhood has, and perhaps a few more. Are women today raised in a way that would make them feel responsible for the continued well-being of their husband? A majority of divorces are initiated by women, so would it be a a good bet for a man to hedge his future on a stable relationship? Going beyond the economic factors, the panel completely missed the opportunity to talk about what expectations are to be put on housekeeper husbands. In her research on women and shame Brene Brown found that perfection in housekeeping is a powerful shaming strategy used against women. And in my experience many women have ridiculously high expectations of, say, cleaning around the house, order etc. Most guys are much more tolerant of messiness. Do we start inflicting the same shame on men, so that women will be happy to keep a stay at home husband? How about free time? There is a lot of negativity towards women who'll spend their time at home watching daytime TV, but at it's nothing compared to "He's a gamer deadbeat, drop his ass and find a real man".
  
  Anyway, thanks for linking to this /u/schnuffs. I hope it starts an interesting debate here. Before I leave, here's an interesting article about masculinity by a guy who used to be heavily invested in the PUA community, but has moved away from it, and gives dating/relationship advice from a slightly different perspective these days. I'd be interested to read what FeMRA debates has to say about it.