PLAIN TRUTH: Just what happened to the good old chase?

Modern men have become lazy about pursuing women they are attracted to – and we should not accept it. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • I will not get into the breach of privacy issue. The bigger issue, the issue that I think is plaguing this generation of men, is laziness.
  • What this young man did – sending a woman he was interested in a WhatsApp message at 10.49pm – was not only rude but utterly lazy.
  • And a lot of men saw nothing wrong with it because this has become the new normal.

Three weeks ago, a rather artless male employee of a local telecommunications firm found himself in trouble when he got a female client’s number from their customer records and sent her a WhatsApp message late in the night in an effort to get a date with her.

The client released the messages he sent her on social media, and there were mixed reactions to them. First, there were the women who tore this woman down for what they referred to as pride. I think that there is a special place in hell for women who gang up to tear down other women. I am not going to talk about these women here.

What caught my eye was the reaction of most of the men. They saw nothing wrong with what the young man did. “What are you all making a fuss about? This was just a smitten young man trying to get a woman,” they argued.

BIGGER ISSUE

I will not get into the breach of privacy issue. The bigger issue, the issue that I think is plaguing this generation of men, is laziness. What this young man did – sending a woman he was interested in a WhatsApp message at 10.49pm – was not only rude but utterly lazy. And a lot of men saw nothing wrong with it because this has become the new normal.

Random WhatsApp and Facebook messages declaring unending love, catcalling and even groping – ask any woman today and she will tell you she has been on the receiving end of more than one of these actions. Our men have become lazy in their pursuit of us. Maybe their aggression in pursuit of success and other things in life has dulled as well; I don’t know.

I have always wondered which response a man expects when he whistles at a passing woman, or when a man grabs a woman’s          behind in a bar. Do you want her to turn, smile and thank you for noticing her?

Luckily, this is one of the few areas that women actually have the power to change things. You can start by raising the bar. By this, I mean stop rewarding this lazy and generally intrusive, unwelcome behaviour. Ignore that WhatsApp message he hurriedly composed in the middle of the night. Don’t reward those catcalls or winks with smiles.

Let that man who is interested in you make the effort. Texting is not a form of courtship. Let him ask you out on a real date. Let him take some time planning this date. If he can send you flowers along with his request for a date, that is even better.

We are not asking men to get up every time a woman walks into a room or to lay their jackets on puddles of water for women to walk on like the chivalrous men of the past. Times have changed, we acknowledge that. All ee are asking for is respect and much more effort than is being put in now.

After all, if you can’t bother to make the effort to find the time to walk up to me and tell me that you are interested in dating me how do you expect me to believe that you will put effort into making the relationship work?