The End of Courtship?

Image source and link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/fashion/the-end-of-courtship.html

While I don’t want to discount the role of social media, email, dating websites, and texting, those are certainly not the only forces at play in the evolution of the dating (or “post-dating”) scene.

I think these two paragraphs deserve more attention:

Maybe there’s still a sense of a man taking care of a woman, but our ideology is aligning with the reality of our finances,” Ms. Rosin said. As a man, you might “convince yourself that dating is passé, a relic of a paternalistic era, because you can’t afford to take a woman to a restaurant.

and

Many young men these days have no experience in formal dating and feel the need to be faintly ironic about the process — “to ‘date’ in quotation marks” — because they are “worried that they might offend women by dating in an old-fashioned way,” Ms. Rosin said.

Basically, in this post-feminist (by which I mean after the feminist critique of patriarchy) society, many men don’t know what it is to be a man anymore, or how to be a man who stewards his privilege well.