Money, Sex, "Dating" and Gender Stuff

Here is a rare instance where people didn't hate on me for comparing dating and prostitution on Hacker News. It has 42 points and a very nice reply to it.

I tripped across it not long ago while looking for something else and made a note of it. I think I didn't find what I was looking for.

I believe I was looking for a comment by me stating rather bluntiy that I think of dating as essentially a polite form of prostitution abd so i have a "no dating policy."

One person, probably a guy, was ugly to me and called me neurotic or said I had strange ideas about dating or something like that. Someone else linked to my Google profile where there was a photo of me and implied that "She's extraordinarily beautiful and that may explain her weirdo ideas.", I think without outright saying "She's beautiful."

And it occurred to me all these years later that my observations and opinions about dating typically went over poorly on Hacker News because it's an overwhelmingly male forum and I posted as openly female and people took it like some kind of personal attack. 

I'm quick like that. I just need a few years to grasp the obvious.

It was never my intention to attack men or make them feel criticized and I don't really know why people didn't engage me in good faith and ask what I was TRYING to say because that probably didn't mean to most people whatever I was going for. I was the highest ranked woman there long before I made the leaderboard and periodically did get high praise for my contributions to difficult discussions about gendered topics, such as this discussion about rape, so little ninny that I am, I IMAGINE people should have just said some polite version of "Sweetie, we know you're retarded and we don't think you mean that how it sounds to us."

Anyway, I've been wondering ever since I made a note of the first link above what I might say to MEN to explain what's in it for them to see dating through my eyes. 

While facing a divorce but not yet divorced, I was told by people on Cyburbia -- which I viewed as a circle of friends at the time -- that I would need to ditch my "no dating policy" post divorce and I never did. 

I came up with my "no dating policy" in my teens which was a very long time ago and my brain says I was sixteen and ALSO says it was after a few dates with guys I wouldn't have met until I was seventeen and I can't find any means to sort that out.

So I'm in high school and I had this awesome English teacher who was almost certainly a gay woman with short hair and no makeup whom I named STAR teacher which was entirely MY decision with ZERO rules about whom I could pick or why. I was named STAR student because I had the highest SAT score -- that's an American college entrance exam test -- of my graduating class and managed to be in the top ten percent GPA (grade point average) in spite of an undiagnosed medical condition causing me to miss a lot of school and in spite of being suicidal as a consequence of being molested and raped and sometimes just not bothering to do my homework and hoping I would die in my sleep and it wouldn't matter that I hadn't done this bullshit.

Anyway, memory says she was my 10th grade English teacher and that should make me fifteen but maybe I had some other class with her or something. I should have been a senior when I met these guys from my gaming hobby and got asked out for a date.

And we had some journaling assignment and she promised us no one but her would read it, so one of the things I journaled about one week was how outraged I was that these guys paid for pizza and then wanted to grope me.

So I had this safe space in which to begin thinking about the fact that GUYS typically PAY for dates and it's not really unreasonable for them to want something in exchange for their money. 

I don't think MEN are TERRIBLE for wanting to get what they are looking for from a gal when they PAID for that date. 

So I concluded in my teens that if I wanted a REAL relationship, I'm not going to "date" men and follow this pattern where he SPENDS money on me and then EXPECTS me to put out to some degree because that offends the hell out of me.

That occurred not long BEFORE I began sleeping with the future ex. We went to the same high school. We were friends. We were part of the same gaming group and the first movie we saw together was The Empire Strikes Back the DAY it hit theaters locally and we went as part of a group of friends from our nerdy gamer buddies.

It was probably five or six of us. I still remember the names of two of them.

So we were spending time together and even seeing movies together and getting to know each other, but we weren't "dating" by my definition of some guy spending money on me and then expecting something sexual to some degree in return for his money.

AFTER I began having sex with the future ex, we DID go to movies and have dinner together in stereotypical "date"-like fashion on top of being part of the same gaming group, but I had more money than him and I paid for a lot of it. We did that to get time alone together away from our families and friends and there was no underlying implication that he was PAYING me to have sex with him.

I'm absolutely certain this is part of why I had as much voice as I had in our marriage though I was a homemaker AND I am absolutely certain it made the divorce smoother.

I have read articles and talked to women friends and seen comments on Hacker News and MEN frequently feel and state openly that they don't want to pay alimony and child support because he's not sleeping with her anymore.

It's crystal clear in my mind that men routinely feel like their marriage boils down to him PAYING for sex from her and that's all there is to it. And then she wonders why her giving up a career and raising kids he fathered etc. SOMEHOW doesn't make his radar as a significant cost to her, his responsibility etc.

Women give up careersvto raise kids and no one seems to count that as a cost to her. And then men bitch and moan about alimony and child support because she's gone and not playing with the one-eyed monster anymore.

His view of that is shaped by the fact that from the MINUTE they got involved, he PAID for stuff so SHE would spend time with him and put out. If he wasn't BUYING her stuff, she couldn't pencil him into her busy schedule.

That was NEVER the basis for my relationship to my husband and I feel confident that things would have been much worse if it had been.

Relatedly, I have a previous piece on this site about Younger Men and it's mostly pretty negative, though it does mention that I never felt weird about Demi Moore's marriage to a younger man because they were both big movie stars, both seen as members of the Beautiful People and both invested in businesses like restaurants.

I don't know either of them. I don't know what their relationship was really like. But as an outsider, it looked to me like they had a lot in common and probably had a real relationship.

I think the world would be healthier if we all figured out how to judge if a couple has a lot in common and a deep emotional attachment etc. instead of using some rubric that appears to boil down to "They need to be close in age, but it's okay for him to be a lot older."

How Stella Got her Groove Back and Flirting with Forty are two movies about older women and younger men and trying to navigate that.

I think in both cases, the initial meeting of the couple is at the beach. Both women are still fit and the plot point of one movie is the 28 year old surf instructor sends her a bikini and encourages her to ditch the one piece.

One thing that has crossed MY mind as someone who has grown a lot healthier post divorce is that I did gymnastics in my youth and my ex was career military and I get misread as younger than I am because of how I look and maybe at some point my tendency to find substantially older men attractive stops working because they are in the old folks home in wheelchairs and I am NOT.

I especially like Flirting with Forty because of the WAY they meet. Some creep is bothering her and he intercedes.

Both movies also address issues of navigating career goals for a couple where she has an established career. And whether you want to date a younger man or not, that tends to not be a theme of most romantic comedies and seems to mostly come up in earnest in movies about dating a younger man who can't pay her bills because otherwise everyone assumes she quits her job and is happy to be provided for, as if an income you desperately need is the ONLY reason ANY woman would EVER "work" -- and don't get me started on a long rant as a former homemaker about how the very framing of "work" as solely a PAID job pissed all over moms and homemakers and women's work the world over.