Or, I think straight cis men should be more like birds.
There is a certain species of bird-of-paradise called the parotia, or six-plumed bird-of-paradise. These birds perform very elaborate dances on their very own beak-made dance floors, with a little branch going over the whole thing that’s meant for their single audience member, any female willing to give them the time of day. The dances can last hours at a time and have specific choreography that the males endlessly rehearse when no females are around. It is a serious investment and life-long pursuit for these birds.
What’s interesting to me is what juvenile males do. After all, they can’t master these dances in a day. What they end up doing is team up with another juvenile male and they’ll find older males’ dance floors to practice on. One male sits on the branch while the other does his stuff and, one presumes, somehow offers feedback on the dances (possibly by flying off when it sucks). They’ll switch off repeatedly so they know both roles well.
Now we come to my title: I think straight cis men should take their bros on practice dates.
I’m not talking gay subtext, though if they discover they’re gay or bi then more power to them. I’m talking one guy takes on the woman’s role and assesses what the other guy is doing. Test that dating etiquette in person across from each other. Make it fun, strategize, talk it out, but actually show each other what is going on. If a bro starts ranting about his ex, let the assessing bro call him out. If a bro starts making the assessing bro nervous, let the assessing bro call him out.
This does require the assessor to actually have some empathy. The idea is not to have some raging manosphere alpha bro sit there and yell that you need to show off the dark triad traits. The idea is that the assessing bro needs to actually be taken out on a date and think seriously about if, ignoring gender, he’d be down with having his bro as a partner. And he needs to be really, really honest, too.
There are several things the assessing bro should be looking at while his bro is trying to show what he’d do during a date:
- Safety. Imagine your bro is a foot taller and way brawnier. Do you feel safe with him, or do you worry about getting violated before the night is over? Does it feel like your bro would respect you if you said no? Safety assessments should be NUMBER ONE. There are a lot of rules around making a date feel safe, anything from walking between her and the street while on a sidewalk to offering to walk her to her car afterwards (even if it’s in fucking Narnia). Assessing bro needs to know at least the basics. There’s a reason they’re there!
- Getting Personal/respect. Is your bro listening to what you say and responding properly, or is he just treating you like a standard FEEEEEEEmale who likes flowers, chocolate, poetry, and being bought fancy gifts? Does he act like your HQ bussy can be bought? (Even if you could easily be bribed to have sex with another guy, put that aside and default to finding that disrespectful for his sake). It’s very important to actually listen to your date to determine likes, dislikes, and whether or not you’re actually into the person who’s piloting the meat puppet sitting across from you.
- Dealbreakers for both parties, aka dodging bullets. This one’s complicated but it’s the right of every adult involved in a date to ditch it the second there’s a dealbreaker. How do you gracefully bow out? How do you recognize when someone is bowing out, and how do you react? This is very important to practice. It will help build resilience for rejection as well as actually recognize rejection and be able to react appropriately.
- Etiquette. How good are your manners? Bro should be testing you on it in real time. I won’t go into details here but it’s all about making the date a pleasant experience for both of you. Women have their own dating etiquette, which they are generally better at sticking to, though it’s not as strict as men’s. This is heavily related to safety as well, by the way. You should also have good sex etiquette, if it gets that far.
- BTW because this is apparently a thing due to porn… MEN. DO NOT CHOKE WOMEN WITHOUT CONSENT OR SAFETY PRECAUTIONS. jfc. Women are having strokes because of the damage from men randomly strangling them during sex. It’s not hot! What the fuck is wrong with all of you!!
- Date Ideas. A lot of people immediately pick this one as priority but it’s just the glitzy glitter, the icing on the cake. If the cake’s no good the icing doesn’t matter. Get the other stuff down first! A lot of men these days think dinner dates are still a thing. Maybe there are idiot women out there who agree. But with inflation and the way men don’t really appreciate being used as a wallet (and to be fair, NO ONE likes that…if they have self-respect, anyway), or being used in general, it’s time to get creative. Be sure to have bros assess your date ideas! Discuss them! Compare notes! Please, I’m begging you.
- Follow-through. If you’re seriously courting someone, the date is just part of it. Discuss it with your bros. Honestly, I think a lot of men already do this. Everyone freaks out and psychoanalyzes text chains, it seems to be a universal thing.
There’s one major flaw with this idea that I’m sure the many defensive men who don’t know how to date or are super duper alpha (DEBUNKED CONCEPT!!!) and would never, and that is the terrible possibility that someone will see you and GASP think you two are gay. (What’s wrong with that, anyway? Other than idiots who come yell at you for things that have nothing to do with them.)
Bro. You’re worried about that and not about someone seeing you behave like a single-celled organism across from a woman? I’ll tell you which one is more disgusting to see in public: it’s that second one. If you seriously base all your self-esteem on the validation of the opposite sex, then maybe consider putting your pride aside and git gud.
All right, there is a solution. Just repeatedly compare notes and discuss the topic at hand (dating skills, dating, how a woman might react) frankly and in the hearing of others. Make sure you are 100% respectful of the theoretical woman who’d be in assessing bro’s place. I promise you it will quickly go from ‘GAAAAAAY (derogatory)’ to ‘respect for working hard on it’. Might even get random old guys giving you tips (ignore them if they’re bad, old men are crazy sometimes). It is only as homoerotic as you want it to be, brodudeskis.
There are some big pros to this idea, in my mind. Number one, you guys practice actually dating but low stakes, not freaking out because you’re overwhelmed, your fragile self-esteem is safely in the hands of your assessing bro. If he smashes it, get a new friend because he’s an enemy now. But functionally speaking, this should help build up self-esteem and let you practice skills you ordinarily wouldn’t manage easily. (Yes, I’m aware that many men struggle to get dates.) You can also switch places and become the assessing bro. It puts you in the woman’s shoes, but that 100% helps understand things from her perspective and will make it a lot easier to figure out what most women actually want. It’ll help you learn how to dodge bullets, be more discerning, and make everything safer all around for everyone.
The cons? These are hidden. Where this idea goes wrong is when you have a raging fucking asshole as an assessing bro, or your entire friend group is deep in the manosphere stuff. I’ll be blunt here. If you guys are all trying to be alpha males, this will backfire hard because you’ll just reinforce damaging stereotypes about women and end up figuring out how to abuse them.
I have a lot of thoughts on the manosphere guys but I can’t say anything terribly new about them so I’ll just say that they are so profoundly insecure due to placing every single iota of self-worth they have on whether or not they can get attention or sex from women that they are more fragile than soap bubbles. Because of that, I’ll give one single piece of advice to keep in mind for those who want to try practice dates, which I feel reaches the main heart of the matter when it comes to the ‘male loneliness epidemic’.
Do not base your self-worth on whether or not women notice you. I know there’s a great deal tied to being able to date and hold onto a good woman. You get raises sometimes. People see you as more respectable because you’ve earned the respect and devotion of a woman with good qualities. You hold more worth in the eyes of other men. Theoretically, you have someone who’ll validate you in bed, who’ll validate your life by popping out your babies and taking care of them (I suggest you examine this expectation because that gets into a whole other set of problems), who’ll smile at you when you feel down and encourage you. Men seem to believe women will fix everything wrong in their lives for them, which is why so many desperately pursue women.
You cannot let any of that touch your self-worth or self-esteem. You have inherent value as a person in this world that no one can take away. These skills you want, this validation from others you seek, these are just fleeting things. You have to be able to value yourself despite everything that will happen to you in this life, and to do that you must detach your self-esteem from any and all outside sources. Be it attention from women, attention from men, raises, good job opportunities, big gains at the gym, personality traits you have or don’t have, money, religion, family, you must not use these to determine if you are worthy as a person.
You are you. No one else can be you for you. You cannot be someone else. There is only one person in this entire world who will be with you from the moment you’re born to the moment you die: you. So be you. Do your best to be the very best you that you can be at this point in time.
Your opinion of yourself reflects outward onto the world around you. If you hate yourself, you will be hateful to others. If you love yourself, you will be loving to others. If you feel like you hate how you are right now, know that you can change that. Love yourself enough to make the effort.
Anyway, I still think you guys need to be more like birds. Please take your bros on practice dates and report back on how much you’ve learned.
