A friend of mine on another site gave me this article that I would love for all to see as well. This is also for those that just date and think men
have it easy. Its about a lesbian that disguises herself as a male to see how easy they have it.
The following is the most amazing book - I would say that this is the best piece of non-fiction ever written by a woman (a young lesbian) who decided
that men had all the best opportunities and decided to dress and "live" like a man - and discovered how utterly powerless men really are:
www.guardian.co.uk...
She tried dating and all I can say is it EXACTLY mirrors every guy's experiences, EVER:
I thought dating was going to be the fun part, the easiest part. Certainly as a man I had romantic access to far more women than I ever did as a
lesbian.
...dating one of the hardest of [my] experiences,
For these women, men as a subspecies - not the particular men with whom they had been involved - were to blame for the wreck of a relationship and the
psychic damage it had done them. It's hardly surprising, then, that in this atmosphere, as a single man dating women, I often felt attacked, judged,
on the defensive.
Many of my dates - even the more passive ones - did most of the talking. I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute,
mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and co-workers they hated, childhoods
they were loath to remember yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam. Listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy.
Weren't people supposed to be on their best behaviour on first dates? Weren't they supposed to at least pretend an interest in the other person, out
of politeness if nothing else?
Certainly that's what I was doing, making polite conversation. So much so that I never expected to hear from these people again. I was boring myself.
...These women wanted to be wooed by language. They weren't going to meet a strange man without measuring him first, and they weren't going to waste
a meal or even a cup of coffee on a suitor who couldn't be bothered to craft a few lines beforehand. I was happy to oblige. It was rare, most of them
told me, for a man to write at such length, much less to write with consideration and investment.
For a little contrast, I went on a few dates with men as a woman during the course of my time as Ned. The men I met on the internet, and then
subsequently in person, didn't require this epistolary preamble, nor did they offer it. They were eager to meet as soon as possible, usually, I
found, because they wanted to see what I looked like. Their feelings or fantasies would be based on that far more than, or perhaps to the exclusion
of, anything I might write to them. On dates with men I felt physically appraised in a way that I never did by women, and, while this made me more
sympathetic to the suspicions women were bringing to their dates with Ned, it had the opposite effect, too. Somehow men's seeming imposition of a
superficial standard of beauty felt less intrusive, less harsh, than the character appraisals of women.
Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colours
and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it. But I began to feel very sympathetic
toward heterosexual men - the pressure to be a world-bestriding colossus is an immensely heavy burden to bear, and trying to be a sensitive new age
guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. Expectation, expectation, expectation was the leitmotif of [my] dating life.
If you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in
theory, nor will you quit
