Men, Sex and Relationships - A Guide for Modern Dating & Male Self-Improvement | Dating Advice, Relationship Tips & Personal Growth for Men

I thought this looked interesting, so I was excited to order it.Then when I received it, I was totally disappointed and worse actually irritated by the content.Just to frame everything, my undergraduate and PhD training and focus was psychology (cultural, social, and neuro-psychopharmacolgy). I'm well versed in empirical research and while sometimes non-empirical psychology can be an interesting exercise in theory, fundamentally it's all moot debate as there is no actual verifiable and irrefutable evidence. Also pretty much always such is mostly personal opinion that people expound as truth ipso facto from their qualitative arguments alone.Empirical psychology is problematic enough; non-empirical psychology is far worse and tends to inject more confusion than actual insight, so unless the author is a genuine researcher, qualitative essays/writings are a waste of my time and just annoyancesThis is because much of such writings are plain and simple mental masturbation. The authors have some sort of pet idea that they are stroking through their often ridiculously complex and convoluted academic theories that have no substance.I appreciate gender and sexuality research and theory but not when it's just pretentious crap by arm chair psychologists going off the deep end with their fringe ideas, and this book is the worst offender I've ever seen.The source of the book is a quasi-intellectual group that focuses on sexuality and they are not a true research institution. Also all the writings seem to be done by members of said group with the only qualification being just that, they are members of said group.There are interesting titles within the book but when i began reading them, I was infuriated to find that they are the worst kind of pop psychological writing: unprofessional, unsubstantiated, and utterly confounded with personal opinions conflated as fact.For example example, one author delivered a silly exercise in analyzing and determining that porn is disrespectful to women etc.First, just ranting in that direction is stupid and clealy uninformed as actual research is very convoluted and nuanced and much of the overall dialog is driven by biases and prejudices.Second and more importantly, the author takes a self-congratulatory position that after great self-searching and listening to others, he has come to see that porn is negatively biased against women. However, the entire time I read his writing, it was painfully obvious that he himself was utterly unaware of his and society's bias against same-sex relationships, and thus by extension, same sex porn.His ideas and essay are probably actually more harmful than helpful, even though he likely thought himself doing a good deed for women and society, because he is simply perpetuated heterosexist biases that are probably far more harmful than any sort of imagined slights generated by heterosexual porn.By overlooking and failing to address same-sex relationships etc, a deeper and more pervasive culture of prejudice and negative thinking goes unchallenged and unaddressed, and when we marginalize and disregard portions of our society, all of society suffers.For example, unequal pay rates between men and women, also hurt men because while some men may be paid higher overall, other men might be suffering because the corporate culture that disregards women likely fosters a larger cultural malaise of unfair compensation to all. Case in point, executive compensation is massively unbalanced relative to the average employee. The cultural attitudes that engender inequitable pay for women likely reinforce and compose the cultural attitudes that support the even greater problem of gross compensation inequity between executives and all other employees.Ultimately, I found this book to be shoddy arm chair psychology and am only happy that I didn't pay much for it.