Martin Vidal
2 min readJun 22, 2024

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After giving it more thought, I decided to respond to this comment again instead of your follow up to it:

Grouping together things like “lazily taken selfies” alongside of they engage in “emotional abuse” makes for a pretty huge (and essentially meaningless) range of behaviors, so I'm going to parse into particulars.

If most men take bad pictures, then where is the expectation for better pictures coming from? I think if we're talking about unrealistic expectations, then to say that what's expected of men in general is an attribute that almost none of them display automatically makes it unrealistic.

I should not expect to meet very many women with a trait that almost no women have. I can't blame women as a class for this; I have to reflect on my own expectations. If it's observably the case that almost no women act that way, where is my expectation that they should coming from--other than by comparing them to a different gender or some imagined ideal?

To the point of men's conduct, that may very well be the case. As a man, I'm in no position to argue with you on that, and I agree that men tend to be responsible for a lot--the bulk--of bad occurrences in society. However, this moves past the devaluation I was talking about in the article because that's about the distribution of likes and ultimately matches. The average man, and the ones that are the most devalued, aren't getting hardly any likes or matches at all. Therefore, on most apps, they never reach the threshold for having negative interactions with women--they're not really having any interactions at all.

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Martin Vidal
Martin Vidal

Written by Martin Vidal

I put the “me” in Medium. Like books? Check mine out at martinvidal.co

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