Comments on: The “man date”

By: david hume

david hume — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 03:52:29 +0000

This Lee story is getting major play around the world now, appearing in translation in Japan, Taiwan, France, Germany and Spain, among other places where the NY Times news service is synidcated by newspapers there.

So this new term is not going to die out. Give it a wide berth!

By: The Navigator

The Navigator — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 17:31:03 +0000

Best…. comment…. ever:
“My boyfriend asked the people on his world of warcraft server, and they said everything mentioned in the article as not-ok is fine, as long as it’s not all of them together.”

Oh yeah? Well, I asked the people on my Dungeons & Dragons server, and they all said “girls are gross anyway, who’d go out with them?”

If I may paraphrase Larry Groznic, When you are prepared to have a serious discussion of man dates in world of warcraft, you have my email address.

Oh, and as to the merits of the article: People. Please. This woman’s middle name is 8, and she has obviously drawn from her own social circle. Nuff said.

By: david tiley

david tiley — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 15:30:10 +0000

The next article is about people of opposite sexes going out with each other when they are both involved in relationships and a) how they establish with their partners that this is a not-date thing and b) how they behave when they meet people who might conceivably think they are playing around and c) how they deal with going out together but in a not dating way, except that they are so comfortable with each other that if they were not previously partnered they would be an item.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:22:22 +0000

I think that the author might actually be on to something, because as I struggled through the article, I ended up concluding that most of those guys were, in fact, gay, and in some pretty serious denial about it.

By: carla

carla — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 02:44:33 +0000

Perhaps I’m the only woman commenting on this post so maybe I’m out of my element.

I asked several of my straight male friends (I’m 40 and most of my male friends are about that age) about this…they said it was BS.

But even if it isn’t…why would anyone care what a bunch of strangers think? Have I forgotten what it’s like to be young and insecure?

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 02:34:07 +0000

As someone mentioned briefly above, much the same worry (perhaps more) happens in opposite sex situations, too. It doesn’t seem too hard to me to plan an outing w/ another man. But, it can be much more tricky to plan a non-date outing with a woman one doesn’t know well, if what one wants isn’t a date, meaning something that might lead to romance or sex, but, a shared trip to the museum or the movies. It can take a special sort of care to make sure it’s know that something like this isn’t a date, but not becuase you don’t think the person is undateable or the like. This sort of thing can make it hard to form different-sex friendships, I think, in a way that comes up less (at least for me and the people I’m friendly with) than in same-sex friendships.

By: denny

denny — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 02:15:50 +0000

What’s interesting is they almost make it sound like it’s the fault of the “higher exposure of homosexuality” if these poor things can’t enjoy a meal without getting that paranoid. Oh, and the usual stuff about how men are more on the defensive about their masculinity because of… women who are “stepping into male areas”. Right. The gay man and the ‘non-womanly’ woman, needlessly complicating the lives of nice, simple, helpless straight men. Please pass the kleenex…

If there’s one thing that rings true, it’s that adult friendships can be a lot less informal and spontaneous than in teenage or college years. But that’s hardly new information.

By: denny

denny — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 02:10:18 +0000

Well the article does say:

Although “man date” is a coinage invented for this article, appearing nowhere in the literature of male bonding (or of homosexual panic), the 30 to 40 straight men interviewed, from their 20’s to their 50’s, living in cities across the country, instantly recognized the peculiar ritual even if they had not consciously examined its dos and don’ts.

Sounds like they found the kind of guys who’d fit in something they had neatly given a label to, and that is how a new social trend is ‘discovered’. Keyword “undercurrent of homoeroticism”. Any male to male relationship can be made to fit into that. Everything has an undercurrent of eroticism if you want to look for it.

I’m sure there are men who really are that sad and homophobic, but the attempt to turn it into some previously untapped phenomenon is a bit too transparent.

(A while ago it was metrosexuals. As if straight men who cared about their looks and style and taste had never, ever existed before on the planet, as if there wasn’t a tv show to push. Two years ago, straight men loved to be mistaken for gay men, now they are terrified. All or nothing. Trends are like this; when a new one is discovered, the previous ones disappear.)

By: David Sucher

David Sucher — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:33:02 +0000

George S is correct. It’s totally a media issue. I hope. I went out for dinner a few nights ago with THREE other guys and none of us worried that the people in the pizza place might think we were on our way to/from an orgy.

By: Uncle Kvetch

Uncle Kvetch — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 23:17:28 +0000

“Going to the movie with one other guy is sort of weird, but you can balance it out by having a seat space between you”

Given that the “straight male friends who are absolutely terrified of being tagged as gay” has become a recurrent trope in TV & movie comedy on a par with classics like the nagging, shrewish mother-in-law, I have to wonder whether it isn’t turning into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If there’s one thing that Joey and Chandler taught us, after all, is that the kind of emotionally stunted thinking exhibited in the quote above is positively adorable, not to mention hilarious.

By: Bernard Yomtov

Bernard Yomtov — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 21:33:39 +0000

The whole thing is idiotic. Just someone looking for a “trend.” The advantage to the reporter is that in six months she’ll be able to write another article talking about how these fears are dying away. Two for the price of one.

By: Vache Folle

Vache Folle — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 21:00:56 +0000

I never worry about this. I am overweight and dress badly such that noone would ever mistake me for a gay man or even for anyone whom anyone, gay or straight, would “date”.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:53:55 +0000

Speaking as an Australian, I have to say the line about it being a “no-no” to share a bottle of wine rang true.

A bottle each and a bottle for the table is the rule for a big night out.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:45:49 +0000

My reaction was also, WTF? Making shit up, or possibly selection effect—how did she find these guys? An ad in the back of the Village Voice? “Are you a man who feels insecure being social with other men on a one-to-one basis? If so, call 1-555-MIDDLE-8 for a confidential interview.”

Next story: how many couples avoid doing unromantic things because they don’t want other people to assume they’re not sleeping together.

By: Keven Lofty

Keven Lofty — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:21:57 +0000

Surely this would be the same thing with a woman? If I were to go out with a woman who I’m not on a ‘date’ with, I wouldn’t do ‘date’ things with her. If I went to a movie or to a posh restaurant for dinner with just me and her people would assume we were on a date. That’s a regular assumption. If I actively didn’t want it to look like a date I’d do something else.