Humanities & Cultures

I think a good model for a dating community would be the /r/daddit subreddit. Here’s men communicating emotions in a male-oriented space, getting helpful support and feedback from a welcoming community.

I think this is a very salient point. Most of the positive male content on social media are people in long term committed relationships with their partner, and are focused on how they uplift and adore their partner. Or conversely, it's men helping other men to do things like lift heavy things and put them back down again. Helping others at the expense of yourself, your time, your emotional energy, etc. is what is often celebrated in men's spaces. Women are allowed to celebrate themselves, their strength and their struggles in a way that is rarely afforded to men, likely because of power imbalances laid out by the author.

The criticism tends to mostly occur in spaces where masculinity is equated with some form of sexism or bigotry or flaunting of power. The sexism part and the imbalance of power with regards to gender is what makes writing about dating and romantic feelings so tricky. Some topics would become off limits for fear of being associated with toxic behavior - a woman writing about sexual promiscuity might be celebrated for embracing feminism, sex worker rights, and so on, whereas a straight man writing about sexual promiscuity would likely be labeled a womanizer. Similarly, complaining about the toxic behavior of men is often allowed (although it sure garners a lot of highly engaged male responses) or even celebrated when it's done tactfully enough, whereas criticism of toxic behavior of women in dating by a straight man would be much more widely criticized and quickly labeled as incel behavior.

It leaves a really small needle to thread, or an exceptionally verbose and emotionally intelligent individual to thread it. Whereas a woman might get away with more generalizations about toxic male behavior and have it generally understood to not be a statement which is intended to represent all male behavior, a man decrying a similar pattern would likely have to spend a few paragraphs talking about imbalances of power in gender dynamics and make it clear that pointing out this behavior is not meant to represent an opinion which applies to all women they encounter. It's a lot of emotional bandwidth and labor to need to perform in order to share relationship woes and stories which seems like a rather high cost of entry to me.