GOOD MEN SHOULDN’T BE SO HARD TO FIND
Aziz Ansari’s jokey foray into the sociology of contemporary dating is secretly the most progressive handbook for modern men seeking love
Aziz Ansari, the American comedian best known for playing the overconfident slacker Tom Haverford on the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation, has made being a feminist somewhat of a cornerstone of his post-sitcom career. “Most people are a feminist and yet don’t want to identify with that word,” he said in an interview with Cosmo earlier this year. Of course, men can identify as feminist if they choose, but it’s a watershed moment for pop culture when one corner of the male-dominated standup comedy becomes safe-ish for women.
Mercifully, Ansari’s new book, Modern Romance, co-written with sociologist Eric Klinenberg, is not pitched as some kind of feminist tract — which would, perhaps, be the ultimate mansplaining move — but an exploration of dating culture in a our newly digital world. Our romantic lives increasingly play out across two worlds, Ansari writes, “the real world and our phone world.” As far as dating guides go, it’s rather peculiar, driven largely by data gleaned from matchmaking sites like OKCupid, as well as smartphone and dating studies from around the world. Some of those studies Ansari and Klinenberg set up themselves, for the purpose of this book: There are anecdotes from daters in big U.S. cities, small Midwest towns, as well as Doha, Tokyo, Paris and Buenos Aires, that give some insight into how the culture of dating (and attitudes toward technology) has evolved globally. (Modern Romance comes with the disclaimer that it is a heterospecific, middleclass investigation.) Well, the book is not written in the lingua franca of social justice, Ansari’s politics have led him to develop what could quite possibly be the most progressive mass-market dating guide yet.
Because it’s authored by a prominent male celebrity, Modern Romance isn’t positioned as much more than some shouty, gendered rhetoric about love and relationships, but that might be where its subversive power lies. Historically, the dating advice industry has directed much of its energy toward marriage or companionship-oriented women. Men, by contrast, are conditioned to loll about in a state of perma-bachelorhood. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, the popular 1993 book written by John Gray, revelled in stereotypes about the psychology of men and women, perhaps solidifying the myth that each gender thinks about relationships in different ways.
It’s easy to observe the way popular thinking about romantic relationships is gendered: on cosmopolitan.com there’s a tab marked “LOVE,” while maxim.com’s ana- logue is labelled “WOMEN.” The New Yorker, writing about Binder, the dumping app developed by two Scottish men in their late-20s, as a hoax intended to complement a marketing initiative for beer, opined that “an app for breakups still seems callous, beyond even the imaginations of notorious tech bros.”
Over the past few years, Pickup Artist (PUA) culture has come to the attention of the mainstream. PUA culture targets women with methodical, manipulative “seduction” practices popularized by a cottage industry of manuals and workshopping groups — media, especially online, have rightfully derided the practices for instilling predatory values in straight men who need practical dating advice. Ansari, on the other hand, is evenhanded in his observations about heterosexual dating dynamics, even as he sets out to course-correct the boorish behaviour of men in both the real and phone worlds. “Our firm take-away from all interviews with women is that most dudes out there are straight-up bozos,” Ansari writes, introducing a section titled The Modern Bozo.
Christian Rudder, founder of OKCupid, a popular, free dating website, believes that online dating exacerbates gendered dynamics of romantic relationships. “Women are often more passive online than in person, and I think men are the initiators of many things in the online and offline dating world,” he says. “(In a heterosexual context) women are the recipients of more attention in person than guys.” Rudder notes that OKCupid has a pretty healthy ratio of male to female users, 55 per cent versus 45 per cent, unlike a lot of other services such as the app-based dating tool Tinder, which he estimates has two male users for every female user. “Say you’re at a party and see a woman surrounded by guys trying to hit on her. You might stay away, thinking, ‘She’s busy!’ but online, there’s no sense of that so you can have way too many guys focused on far too few women.”
It seems that technology, including dating websites and apps and the enhanced methods of communication precipitated by cellphones such as texting and sexting, has expedited our likelihood for romantic encounters but our attitudes and expectations have been slower to change. “Online dating does make it easier to talk to people,” says Rudder, “the web in general disinhibits people for bet- ter or worse — for better, I think, when it comes to dating.”
Modern Romance is positioned as a rational guide to the way people pursue contemporary coupledom, and the predominance of data (seen as the domain of men who, as popular science has it, are more fact and logic-oriented) seems to intimate that Ansari is speaking directly to his bro-demographic.
Earlier this year, Deadspin, the sports culture arm of Gawker Media, launched The Adequate Man, a vertical aimed squarely at re-conditioning its male readership. Self-improvement is a genderneutral ambition, writes editor Rob Harvilla, “but it’s possible to calmly and reasonably note that the practical, real-life adequacy gap is widening, that in the 21st century, for some reason ... young men (and yeah, this is mostly men) are just less competent at life than preceding generations. We don’t know how to do things. We don’t know what to do. We hardly know what we know, let alone what we don’t know.”
Men, it seems, need all the help they can get. And the work of Harvilla, Rudder, Ansari and Klinenberg seems to suggest that the cultural landscape is evolving to ease the aggressive nature of sexual interactions between men and women. Or, as Ansari might say, to correct for the prevalence of the modern bozo.
“Today, people spend years of their lives on a quest to find the perfect person, a soulmate,” writes Ansari. “The tools we use on this search are different, but what has really changed is our desires and — even more strikingly — the underlying goals of the search itself.” Modern Romance wants readers to know that the reason they’re having trouble finding a mate isn’t because of technology, or because women fundamentally want different things than men, but because the relationships mean something different in today’s global culture than the Platonic ideal of housecar-two-kids.
Women might have adapted to the new rules much quicker, given the restructuring of society and the workplace to be more gender-inclusive. But straight men, Ansari suggests, are having a tougher time. In Japan, this manifests in men reverting to sex toys or even abstinence instead of pursuing relationships with women. In Argentina’s relatively sex-positive dating climate, women still have to contend with high levels of street harassment. Modern Romance is just one of many dating texts out there, but its quasi-feminist stance is an important counter to a cultural landscape that caters to the rhetoric of lad mag readers, PUAs or just your average, everyday bozo.
Our firm take-away from all interviews with women is that most dudes out there are straight-up bozos