Japanese Herbivore Men

MilkmanDanimal wrote:
oddity wrote:

I will say though, that that's not always an option. But, for a society that wants to grow(IE:children), 1 homemaker 1 earner is the smallest efficient group for raising healthy emotionally stable and viable families.

The problem is this is the kind of statement that is simply not supported by evidence. Yes, a stay-at-home parent gives some advantages to a child. Two working parents also gives advantages to a child. There have been multiple studies looking at the children of stay-at-home vs. working parents, and there is no viable statistical difference whatsoever between academic performance, behavioral issues, health, or general success in any way. This is the kind of thing that has been looked at repeatedly, and it's simply not true that a stay-at-home parent leads to more healthy and emotionally stable children. A child needs excellent care and stability. It can get that from a parent or a relative or a paid daycare provider of some sort.

I'm relatively certain that the studies you are referencing, make no distinction between those children who's stay at home parent is one of a functional earner/caregiver pair and those children who stay home with a parent that has no corresponding working counterpart. If you lump the children of both these groups and their wildly different outcomes in the same system and compare that to 2 working parents system, I'm sure that the comparison is not as unflattering as it could be.

For now, I'll agree to disagree with ya MMD. We can take it outside if you want to continue that facet of the discussion. But it's really a derail and that's my fault.

There's a lot of territory to explore in this topic but for now I offer one thought:

1) if herbivore men seek more "meaningful" or "non-sexual" relationships with women, what is the response from the women who interact with them? The western commentary under that Jezebel article was rather distasteful and condescending. If we assume strict hierarchical gender roles exist, then Japanese women should theoretically be baffled by the herbivore movement. This lends some credence to an earlier post about the surprise of Japanese girls to the thought of having male friends.

Prederick wrote:

Suddenly, I'm reminded of "The Sexodus" articles Breitbart was running a week or two ago.

That reminder would probably be because on some level, the Herbivore movement appears to be in some ways analogous to the "The Beautiful Ones" from the study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun) that was referenced in one of the Sexodus articles.

Bfgp wrote:

There's a lot of territory to explore in this topic but for now I offer one thought:

1) if herbivore men seek more "meaningful" or "non-sexual" relationships with women, what is the response from the women who interact with them? The western commentary under that Jezebel article was rather distasteful and condescending. If we assume strict hierarchical gender roles exist, then Japanese women should theoretically be baffled by the herbivore movement. This lends some credence to an earlier post about the surprise of Japanese girls to the thought of having male friends.

It's less of an organized movement and more of just a widespread phenomenon with lots of people getting caught in it. I didn't get the impression that herbivore men specifically are avoiding relationships or sex - though some of them do, for various reasons. They're just avoiding typical relationships and gender roles, which means that many women may think that they don't want sex.

oddity wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Suddenly, I'm reminded of "The Sexodus" articles Breitbart was running a week or two ago.

That reminder would probably be because on some level, the Herbivore movement appears to be in some ways analogous to the "The Beautiful Ones" from the study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun) that was referenced in one of the Sexodus articles.

Yeah.

I'm not really getting that impression. Herbivores aren't checking out of society. They're just checking out of traditional dating games. There are herbivores who have sex and have relationships - just not ones that your average Japanese couple would engage in. It strikes me more as a renegotiation of gender roles and relationships. Herbivores recognize that many of their female contemporaries earn as much as they do, and have no desire to be tied down to marriage expectations. They should, because they feel the same way. That said, it can be difficult to break through social paradigm and expectations.

In a way, herbivores are aggressive. They're aggressively pushing the idea that they only want relationships on their terms, not on society's terms. That where they run afoul of The Man. Even a feminist Japanese woman might feel uncomfortable about going Dutch on a date when it comes down to it, but the herbivore isn't waiting. He'll insist on it and you can decide for yourself if you're okay with that. A lot of women still aren't. It's that ongoing renegotiation thing again.

I think the best thing the Japanese government can do in this scenario is to facilitate communication to speed things towards new deals and arrangements. I suspect that the large gulf between men and women in Japan might be responsible for this. A non-segregated group of people tends to naturally renegotiate internal arrangements on its own, without the need for outside intervention.

There is sort of a parallel with PUAs and TRPs here. These guys have decided that the dating game is rigged, and they've decided that they're going to play it exactly like a game in order to "win." There is unfortunately a festering sort of misogyny in both of those movements. They'd probably achieve their goals better without that defect.

The entire men vs. women "Sex Wars" as they're called strikes me as a decidedly wrong way to look at it. Just by thinking about society in those terms, you've already lost.