The Favourite Accusation
I am so tired of it. The bitterness sits right at the front of my mouth these days. Not the performative kind. The real kind that comes from watching the same cycle repeat while being told the problem is that we finally stopped clapping for mediocrity.
Feminism did not ruin dating. It just stopped large numbers of women from accepting arrangements that primarily benefited someone else. That is the part people do not like saying out loud.
What Settling Actually Looked Like
Settling used to be dressed up as realism. Take the man who is mostly kind. Ignore the fact that he never initiates anything meaningful. Accept that your orgasm is optional. Accept that your time is less valuable than his. Accept that emotional labour will fall to you by default. Accept that your ambitions will be treated as hobbies if they ever conflict with his comfort.
Women did this for years and called it compromise. We lowered our voices. We laughed at jokes that were not funny. We pretended the effort was equal when it was not. We stayed in relationships that looked fine from the outside because leaving would have made us look difficult.
That version of dating was not healthier. It was just quieter. The unhappiness went inwards instead of outwards. Women managed the gap between what they needed and what they were given until many of them forgot they were allowed to need anything at all.
Raised Standards Are Not the Problem
When women stopped doing as much of that work, the reaction was immediate. Suddenly we were told we expected too much. The same men who used to benefit from our lowered expectations began talking about how dating had become a battlefield.
Wanting consistent effort became high maintenance. Wanting to enjoy sex rather than simply tolerate it became selfish. Wanting a partner who could manage his own emotions without constant management from you became unrealistic. The goalposts did not just move. They were declared unreasonable the moment women refused to keep chasing them.
I feel the bitterness most sharply here. We are not asking for perfection. We are asking not to be the only adult in the room. That this is treated as radical tells you everything about how low the previous baseline sat.
The Entitlement Problem
What it rarely acknowledges is the sense of entitlement that existed before. Many men grew used to a dating culture in which average effort could still secure a relationship. They did not have to be particularly emotionally available or sexually generous or consistent. They simply had to be present and not cruel. That was often enough.
Feminism disrupted that arrangement. It did not make all women wealthy or hyper-selective. It made large numbers of women less willing to translate basic decency into a personality. When the automatic reward for minimal effort disappeared, the resentment followed.
I am not sorry about that. I feel no urge to soothe it. The discomfort some men now feel is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It is evidence that an old imbalance is being challenged.
What Women Are Refusing Now
- Women are refusing to pretend that one-sided emotional labour is love.
- Women are refusing to treat male potential as a substitute for male action.
- Women are refusing to stay in relationships where their pleasure is secondary.
- Women are refusing to shrink their lives so that someone else feels larger by comparison.
None of these refusals are signs of damage. They are signs of self-respect that should have been ordinary a long time ago. The fact that they still provoke so much pushback shows how invested some people were in the previous system.
The bitterness comes from watching the same men who benefited from the old arrangement now describe themselves as victims of the new one. They speak as if women collectively decided to become cruel rather than simply less available for exploitation.
The Real Crisis
The real crisis in dating is not that women have standards. The real crisis is that a significant number of men were never required to develop the skills that make them good partners. Emotional regulation. Consistency. Generosity. The ability to see a woman as a full person rather than a source of comfort and validation.
When those skills are missing, feminism becomes a convenient scapegoat. It is easier to blame women for refusing to settle than to ask why settling was ever required in the first place.
I have no interest in softening this point. The loneliness some men describe is real. The frustration is real. The solution is not for women to lower themselves back into positions that made them quietly miserable. The solution is for more men to become people worth choosing.
We Are Not Going Back
There is no return to the previous normal. Too many women have now experienced what it feels like to stop bending. Once you have lived with your own standards for a while, the old compromises start to look humiliating in retrospect.
I feel protective of that shift even when it makes dating harder in the short term. Especially when it makes dating harder. The difficulty is not a design flaw. It is the cost of refusing to participate in something that was never fair.
Feminism did not ruin dating. It revealed how much of dating had depended on women accepting less. The people mourning the old version are rarely mourning connection. They are mourning convenience.
I am done with the convenience argument. I am done with the idea that women must choose between being alone and being under-valued. If that refusal makes me bitter in the eyes of some, so be it. Bitterness is sometimes just the taste that remains when you stop swallowing things that were never good for you.
We are not going back. The women who have learned to stop settling are not going to forget what it felt like. And the longer the complaint goes on that feminism ruined everything, the clearer it becomes that what was ruined for some was simply the ability to rely on women making up the difference.
That is not a tragedy. That is progress with sharper edges. And I will take the sharper edges over the old quiet unhappiness every single time.