Last week, I wrote about what's wrong with dating in America.
I wrote it after being troubled when reading about the latest round of
pettiness erupting into a media firestorm because of the "battle of the
sexes"; at tech convention PyCon, a female employee of email company
SendGrid heard a couple of male employees of game developer PlayHaven
making juvenile jokes about the words "dongle" and "forking," turned
around, took their pictures, excoriated them online, and PlayHaven
fired
them.
After the resulting firestorm, centering on this individual who had
a couple of men with families fired for whispering jokes to one another
in a conference, SendGrid attracted a great deal of hostility from the
developer community (in other words, its customer base), and
consequently fired the picture-taker. (You can read the full article here,
if interested.)
That got me thinking a lot about where all the virulence between the
sexes in the West has come from recently. You don't see it a lot of
other places in the world... just here. Like I talked about in the
article on bitter women, I'm not really so
certain
there are that many truly terrible people out there, as much as it is that the Internet acts as
an emotion amplifier and makes it seem so, with its text-only,
subtext-free, tonality-free communication making everything seem so cut
and dry, black
and white, and frequently making
everyone sound so certain, absolute, and polarizing.
But as I thought about it, I realized there was something else
causing conflict between men and women, too: a product of a mix of the
modern unisex workplace and social environment, and
the Western ideal of independence, but not at all what any of the women
(or men) struggling for women's rights ever expected - that "equality,"
at least as most people have fought for it for Western women, has
really ended up meaning that women are now required not only to fight
with other women for what they want, but to fight with men now too -
and that men are required to fight them back.
In
"
In
the
post on 
Lately
I've been noticing a fair amount of guys discussing
difficulty approaching women while looking smooth and effortless. Some
of the time, they're ending up not approaching girls they like at all,
because they can't find the "right angle" or they're waiting for the
"right moment," and that moment never comes.
Today
I
want to talk about a strange and confusing topic for a lot
of guys - namely, getting