Things that are generally true should not be treated as specifically true

If I were to offer advice to the tune that, "All women like to breathe in and out", I would like to think that most people reading that advice would be of a mind to say, "Well, duh, Snowdrop! All people like to breathe in and out!" Indeed, breathing is a pretty basic function of what keeps us alive and respiring.

While that same essentialness is not a quality of most of the advice that I can find on dating and so on, there is a lot of advice that seems to fall into a similar trap of suggesting (by omission or implication) that things that are true of one sex are specifically true of that sex, when in fact most people regardless of the gender expression, have a tendency towards the same sorts of behaviour.

An example that came up recently was "mixed signals". A blog called "Compatibility and Love" posted a youtube video from a pair called Matt and Tamsen about "how do you tell if he's into you?" (I won't post the video myself, the gender-essentialism in it is OTT, just follow the link if you're curious) - with a smattering of the blogger's own commentary basically echoing the statements in the video:

...if a bloke starts to like you – whether he realizes this or not – at a subconscious level he’s going to feel like his heart and his head are in the blender. He won’t know what is up with himself even. I’d go so far to say that his inconsistencies even take him by surprise.

But how many times have you read female characters by female authors describe themselves as "head and heart are in a blender" or similar words? I'm pretty sure that is a staple of the teenie mag advice columnists' in-trays, too. That is, women feel the same way, and act inconsistently, and all the rest of it, just as much as men do!

For the record, the bit I snipped at the beginning of the sentence was, "Guys fear commitment, so..." and what that is is someone putting a gendered explanation on behaviour that is in fact common to both sexes.

Interestingly, a recent post by Evan Marc Katz ("Dating coach for smart, strong, successful women", no less! Somehow, that tagline always makes me giggle) pretty much addressed the same question: why do people seem to do "push-away" type dumb things just when they're really getting into the other person? (The overall topic of the post was actually about first dates, and not letting every little flaw become a "deal-breaker")

He starts off by apologising for the monumentally boneheaded antics he's got up to, and for the boneheaded antics of all the other (heterosexual, dating) men out there in the Big Bad World.

But his examples are all drawn from the behaviour of his (female) clients (he does give some of the stuff that he's done, but those are so extreme, they weaken rather than strengthen the point):

Consider, for example, my client, Amy, a marketing executive who always speaks her mind. So when she got comfortable talking to Scott about her four-year-ex-boyfriend who broke her heart, it didn’t even occur to her that she was rambling for about 30 minutes uninterrupted.

Or take Tina, who had an awesome 4-hour first date with Don, which ended up with a fifteen-minute makeout session. Needless to say, Tina was excited. Which is why she asked Don before he left the car, “So, when are you calling me again?”

Tina’s not wrong for wanting to see Don again. But in Don’s mind, a woman who asks him out at the end of Date 1 appears weak and needy. That’s not an attractive quality to most men and it’s often going to affect his opinion of you.

Finally, there’s Melissa, a 37-year-old with a strong, vivacious personality. So she didn’t think much of it, when, after 3 drinks, she told her date that she liked it “rough” in bed. Check, please.

The point is that sometimes we let down our guard and say or do something that is simply embarrassing.

Seriously, is it not terrifically easy to see from this how similar behaviours are as common in men as in women? EMK says later on:

You are undoubtedly doing JUST as many things “wrong” as he is. Would you like him to dissect you for being 5 lbs overweight, a bit nervous or shy, or for talking about your organic garden for too long?

Now, those examples may be just a teensy bit more gender-stereotyped than the last lot (and again, don't women judge men similarly for doing the exact same things - being less than perfectly buff, being too shy/nervous, talking about their hobbies (which may include gardening) for too long?) but the point is there.

As mentioned, EMK was talking more about first-date slip-ups that really shouldn't be dealbreakers but too often are treated that way. The "Matt and Tamsen"/"Compatibility and Love" deal was talking about a little bit further down the line, and the push-and-pull behaviours that "men" exhibit. The thing is, women do the same things too. We are told that women have to "play hard to get", and how is that anything but confusing, mixed signals? Not to mention that a lot of the time, the same "fear of commitment" (though typically spun differently depending on gender) exists on both sides of the equation, and sometimes all it takes is one confusing signal from one person to produce confusing signals in the other as well.

In general, then, I think it pays to take any form of dating advice and flip the gender roles to see if it still holds true. If it does, then the advice shouldn't be gendered in the first place (and it's probably a pretty good idea to throw out any gendered explanations of why people behave in those ways, too). If it doesn't, then in the vast majority of cases, I've found that the advice is not applicable to all people of the described gender-presentation and may not even be applicable to the majority (it only looks that way because people try to conform and perform their assigned gender roles).

My general expectation is this: If it's generally true of one gender, then it's probably true of all the others, too; if it's true only of one gender, then typically it either isn't true at all, or else it's actually only true of a specific (and limited) subset of that gender.