The “man date”

Don’t believe everything you read in the New York Times. I asked a bunch of straight guys I knew about this, and no one had heard of anything like this.

This is just a style journalist Making Shit Up.

Jeremy,

Going to a bar is explicitly singled out as “not a man-date”, since it’s good regular behavior for heterosexual males. I agree that the article is weird, and that if people really worry about this they are sad and pathetic, and that I’ve not known people to worry about it, at least much, but since going to a bar is not supposed to be a cause of trouble (since it’s okay for heterosexuals, like going to a ball game) it doesn’t tell against it. I am sympathetic to the idea that it’s just all made up nonsense, though.

OTOH Matt Yglesias seems to have identified with the behavior described in the article so maybe it’s one of these kid things.

As a gay man maybe I wouldn’t notice, but I find the story very odd. I never worried about appearing gay by hanging out with male friends when I was afraid of people finding out I was gay, so I would be shocked to find out that actually straight guys are so worried about it when they aren’t gay. But people are weird, so there you go.

Everyone i’ve talked to about this article agrees with Kieran. 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.

i agree with eszter…to the extent that such “man-dates” actually occur and straight men worry about looking gay, it is pretty stupid. although i suppose homophobia among straight guys is nothing new, and it’s always been pretty stupid…

are you also suggesting – as you seem to be – that this wouldn’t ring true for any guys?

No, not at all. No doubt some straight guys feel this way. But I suspect that straight men who call each other to visit art museums (or, even the sorts of straight men the Times usually concerns itself with) are probably least likely to feel this way. I call BS on this article, too.

“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,” explained Ames McArdle, (a 9th grader currently working as–ed) a financial analyst in Washington.

I am a bimbo, though, what do I know. Sorry ’bout the triple post.

The author made up the stupid term “man date”. I think she wants to add to any stigma. If she would have used another term, no one would have paid attention.

I grew up in rural shit-kicker america, and I often find myself worried if people think I’m gay when I’m with a friend. For instance, if I’m meeting a friend for diner, we’ll sit in the bar. Or if we’re going to a movie, it will be something with action and explosions. Or if we’re going to a park, we’ll make sure it is a state park and it is hunting season.

The things I do to keep people from thinking I’m gay, whew.

[satire alert for those with broken funny bones]

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.

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”.

“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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.