3739 Singles' groups, and more

Saturday, June 8, 2013

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.  -Isaac Newton
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.  -Hal Abelson
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.  -Brian K. Reed

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Meetup has a few local singles' groups that I joined.  I haven't gone to anything because I'm not really looking, plus they seem to concentrate on booze, bars, and bands, which don't interest me.  But I joined just so that if I ever wanted to check the local single males, I wouldn't have to plow through the several hundred NYC offerings to find the local singles' groups.

That "not really looking" is key to today's rant.

One of the local groups has sort of blown up.  Some guy wrote a group-wide email complaining that NONE of the women in the group seem to be really looking.  He complains that he constantly gets the brush-off at events, and on the few occasions when a woman consents to a date with him, it goes no further than a dinner or two or three, and no further.  He complains that the women in the group are not really interested in any relationship, at least no futher than a few free dinners.  He says that all the women seem to have already decided what they want in a man, specific criteria and high standards, a list of requirements that no man could ever meet (let alone the men who resort to Meetup - those are my words, not his).  He says the women go to meetups not to meet up, but just to socialize and reject.

He was then joined by other men in the group who agreed with him, a blizzard of whining emails.  (Not one woman responded with what I would expect to be the rational response - "Hey, fellows, maybe it's you.  Maybe you're turning them off.")

I think there's a very wide divide between men's and women's expectations at any event listed as for singles.  Women go thinking that the best way to find "the one" is to meet as many single men as possible, and this is one way to meet a bunch.  Men go thinking that wow, here's a whole bunch of women starving for sex, I ought to be able to get one of them for myself.

It's like the men think, hey, if you don't want to sleep with me, why are you here?  Why are you wasting my time?


Well, the organizer's response to the furor was a note to the women of the group, saying that if you're not "really looking", then maybe you shouldn't be a member of the group.   Um, is she saying that if you don't hook up with a certain number of the male members per year, you should drop out?  Isn't that procuring?

Are the women expected to prove that they are open to a relationship by sleeping around?
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