35 years old in 1997.
(all text after this point is "heteronormative", the entire context is heterosexual, because it is my life story and the things I was especially concerned with.)
As I began to be interested in dating and courtship, I wanted to be a good guy in relation to women. I supported feminism as far as women being able to pursue any career, any vibrant intellectual, athletic or adventurous activity. There are all kinds of archetypical bad guys in relation to women, and one might say I was trying to not be any of them.
That noble goal encountered a new wave of norms - progressives and feminists were deeming unwanted advances as a fundamental evil.
I took the meaning of unwanted advances to it's logical conclusion: if I asked a girl out on date or implied an interest in anything beyond platonic, and she said no, then I have already committed the crime of an unwanted advance.
Beyond being trapped in this logical conundrum, I was backed into a corner emotionally as well.
Since all this was deeply seated and sincere, I had many many beautiful, charming, intelligent women spending time with me over the years. The more I thought highly of them, and felt they were precious, the more I doubled down on never committing a wrong so grave as an unwanted advance. And by unwanted advance I mean even uttering an interest in them beyond being friends.
Once in 1992 I was a fitness instructor at a physical therapy clinic, and the receptionist and I had this magical rapport. She was one of the most attractive women I've ever seen. A few months into being at the clinic and the owner took me aside and said the receptionist was very upset that I had suggested to her a guy she might like to date, he said she was so into me and traumatized by my not being interested.
In 1995 at the age of 33 an older female friend (this one truly platonic, not in my age group) was listening to me tell some personal experience, and she interrupted me and empasized that if a woman takes her clothes off she's wanting intimacy.
All the above may make a reader wince. For me it is just painful loss of opportunity. To me, even to this day and with all the self-criticism implied in this writing, logically I still see the barriers to having realized those relationships.
The common person would get past the barriers by believing in physical cues, context, things being implied without explicitly saying anything.
I can access all the above non-verbal and implicit communication, and often did pick up on it in real time. But here is the final inner barrier: how can we be sure these subtle acts are truly communicating what we assume? Ultimately, in the strictest sense, we don't know. We don't know if long engaging conversations mean an interest in more. We assume, but we don't know.
Enough on "unwanted advances", now we move on to the feminist war on physically fit healthy women.
Where I was born, progressives were pro exercise and fitness. When I moved to Seattle I encountered my next hurdle constructed by feminists - a hostility towards women being expected to be physically fit.
I had been a fitness geek since 1989, a weightlifting instructor, long distance runner and mountain and desert hiker. My only, and I mean only, vision of life with my spouse was as a daily active lifestyle of inner city biking, and effortless hiking in the mountains, especially hiking and camping in the winter.
Now, in Seattle, I was in a culture that shamed my vision of what married life should be. To expect a woman to be fit was tied to being concerned with her visual appeal to me a hetero male - and that can be construed as seeing women as a sexual object - which is another fundamental evil feminist culture cannot tolerate.
In 1999 I began dating this pear shaped girl I was thoroughly not attracted to physically. I was just trying to fit in. After a few months I tried to break it off with her, but it took a year for her to accept it.
Eventually I would marry someone I met in grad school. She was and is a life long third-wave feminist [Wikipedia]. She was the very vanguard of the movement - to keep the peace I dared not express any predilection towards fit women. On top of her ideology, her adult years had been a history of being slim then being overweight, back and forth. She spoke with pride about in her mid-twenties deliberately gaining weight to spite her mother's nagging for her to be more attractive.
I have the saddest deeply intimate story to tell. After the birth of our son, she got in the best shape of her life. I know because I've seen photos of her past, and the body she developed from aerobics and yoga at home was by far the most fit of all her years.
One day she came out of the shower and was so amazingly sexy. Here is the emotion that hit me: I was elated then hid it and was sad. Saddened that if I had shown some great sexually charged enthusiasm that be valuing her new sexy fit self more than her previous self. I allowed her feminist value system to negate any of the special reaction and attraction her new body was prompting.
One year after her physical peak, she began to gain weight quickly, becoming so large someone asked her in sincerity if she was pregnant. To this day she is especially large, and we are divorced.
Now I want to move on from this diary of experience. There is hope and some good news. Technology has thoroughly killed some of the toxic effects of the unwanted advance conundrum. Dating apps and sites like OKCupid and Tender are now the common way people find each other. Being on the site, and especially explicitly stating in one's profile what you are after, is explicit and declarative.
Problem solved (a bit late for my generation).
Next let's think sociological, I have an insight that is plain as day to me but haven't heard from anyone else.
You know how in hospitals and maybe other environments sterilizing can wind up killing good germs and leaving predominantly the bad lethal germs?
A lot feminist hostility has done just that - nullified and silenced good men and left the truly dangerous and hideous men unscathed.
As of this writing in 2020 we have in recent years had ghastly murders of women for simply being women. I'm thinking especially of the man in Florida who walked into a bank, asked all the women to lie on the floor, and he executed them.
The agenda of feminists is a hot house flower - only able to live in the most favorable environment. College campuses, city bureaucracies in the more progressive metropolitan areas, high profile companies et cetera are where the criteria of feminists is taken seriously. Beyond that, on the individual level, it's the sensitive, thoughtful men who give the feminist criteria a role in shaping their behavior.
But not anyone in Pecos Texas (for example), and not any of the groups of mean, brutish, aggressive men that are the actual perpetrators of real hurt to women.
I contend these men are more toxic and violent to women than in the pre counterculture years precisely because we have abandoned the critique of men in the form of demanding some degree of gentlemanly behavior towards women, leaving a void.
Toxic third-wave feminism, toxic women hating men
....and the main harm going to nice men and women.
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