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Stop it. That's easy to answer. They're at shows. Like most places, shows (good live bands) are sausage fests. Most I go to are in the 80% male range. it was less than that in Portland when I've visited, but still heavily dominated by men. Portland, aka, PDX, has a huge live alternative music scene, esp in the D Beat / Crust scene, but lots of other subgenres as well. If you're a woman with awesome taste in punk, etc you're set. Black Water, Mississippi Studios, and oh, of course, brewery / beer events are still heavily male dominated (but less so than years ago). The women I know and have met in PDX have no problems, except you know, the lament of the musician that wont' settle down.
On the one hand, sure, you do have to expand your horizons to meet people, but at the same time you don't want to do things that you have no interest in. I'd rather stick toothpick under my fingernails than to sit through a whole crust/d beat show, and NWGirl doesn't drink, so craft brewing and artisinal liquors aren't going to be her thing. Sometimes you just need to meet in the middle.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
41,937 posts, read 36,957,550 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by fleetiebelle
On the one hand, sure, you do have to expand your horizons to meet people, but at the same time you don't want to do things that you have no interest in. I'd rather stick toothpick under my fingernails than to sit through a whole crust/d beat show, and NWGirl doesn't drink, so craft brewing and artisinal liquors aren't going to be her thing. Sometimes you just need to meet in the middle.
Sure, you're right. I'm not going to a salsa dance thing to meet women because I hate dancing. But I can't really complain about not meeting women IRL if I don't. Which makes OKC great for me. I don't expect a 35-40 yo cool dude in Portland to go to a wine tasting event... or a west coast swing event. Tons of people move to PDX, its been a top destination for well more than a decade, and its like Austin in that people flock there for the music and scene.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NWGirl74
You also haven't seen the city for yourself in what was it, 3 years? Three - five years ago, I found it much easier to meet age appropriate men, but at the time, I wasn't ready to. Even with OLD, I was contacted more at that time and had a decent amount of profile views.
I'm down to try new things. Will you please PM me a list of bands you recommend since D Beat/Crust is not something I am familiar with? I can look up Black Water and Mississippi Studios event calendars but that's not really going to tell me who is worth seeing.
I'll take a look, but I'm most familiar with those because I've been, and I have friends whose bands play them often enough. Sure, I haven't been there, but the scene is standard pretty much everywhere. It's male dominated. And lots of times I don't know the bands, I just go for a show. A few weekends ago I did three days in Brooklyn, it was easily 75-80% male at shows. I went to two Friday, one Saturday, two Sunday... same demographics.
Stop it. That's easy to answer. They're at shows. Like most places, shows (good live bands) are sausage fests. Most I go to are in the 80% male range. it was less than that in Portland when I've visited, but still heavily dominated by men. Portland, aka, PDX, has a huge live alternative music scene, esp in the D Beat / Crust scene, but lots of other subgenres as well. If you're a woman with awesome taste in punk, etc you're set. Black Water, Mississippi Studios, and oh, of course, brewery / beer events are still heavily male dominated (but less so than years ago). The women I know and have met in PDX have no problems, except you know, the lament of the musician that wont' settle down.
This doesn't really answer the question, though. So they go to shows. What do they do with the rest of their time? If they're interested in meeting women, why aren't they making an effort to do that?
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
This doesn't really answer the question, though. So they go to shows. What do they do with the rest of their time? If they're interested in meeting women, why aren't they making an effort to do that?
Probably working and at band practice, or biking and record digging, or ultimate frisbee. Shows out there can be gone to every night. Probably hitting brew pubs/beer bars too. It's like most other places. Why do you think they're not meeting women? The dudes I know out there meet plenty of women. Well, except for the one who got married to one he met (total babe, they just had their first child). For a lot of people I know the act of giving up doing what you like to be doing in order to meet the opposite sex doing something you think women might be doing has long since past, since you can now connect online. Personally, I think trying to put effort into meeting people IRL is a waste of time/resources. It's just too inefficient. If it happens in the course of my life, great, but I'm not tailoring my life in the hopes of hitting it off with someone every few months when (which is really maybe a couple of people a year more realistically) when I can meet more than that in a single week with OLD.
On the one hand, sure, you do have to expand your horizons to meet people, but at the same time you don't want to do things that you have no interest in. I'd rather stick toothpick under my fingernails than to sit through a whole crust/d beat show, and NWGirl doesn't drink, so craft brewing and artisinal liquors aren't going to be her thing. Sometimes you just need to meet in the middle.
Yeah, I agree with this. It's one thing to try something new that you think you might like, totally different to go to something you're 99% sure you wouldn't. Especially because if you do meet someone there, what are you going to talk about? Kind of the idea of meeting someone in this sort of scene is having a shared point of reference where you can connect with people, even if it's like "well, I've never done rockclimbing before, but a lot of my hiking friends have raved about it, so I figured I'd give it a shot." And then you can trade notes about good places in the Gorge or what have you.
And I will say - when I was visiting my best friend in Portland last year, I didn't get the impression that everyone I ran into was part of a really specific subculture. She certainly isn't, and it's not like she was taking me to places that were empty and unpopular. There's the obvious caveat about visiting for a week vs. living there, but I can't say I spent my time in PDX wondering where all the "normal" people were.
Oh yeah, I pretty much always go into Portland for activities. I went to 80's night once, not really my thing as it was very crowded. I'm very fit but average-looking so I need to be able to talk for someone to like me- they're not going to approach me or be interested based on my looks. I'm a member of many different meetup groups, though I go fairly sporadically. Seems to be all over the map- one of the meetups I go to will often show 20 women and 10 men going and it'll turn out to be 8 men and 3 women or something. Not a big deal since I only go to ones I'm interested in, not as much planning to meet people although it would be nice if it happened. Haven't seen many singles events on facebook, but I'll look around there too.
I think meetup would only work for me if it's one with a regular crowd, where you see the same people repeatedly. Although that has its own problems if you meet someone and it doesn't work out.
The 5K option is a possibility too, thanks for mentioning that.
Maybe you can help us solve the mystery of where Portland's men are hiding. They're not going to singles events and all the places Portland women go to look for men, especially in the 30+ range. It's kind of funny, but also sad that a guy has to ask where all those "ladies' nights" are, the female-majority events, when for years, women in Portland have been wracking their brains, circulating everywhere they can think of, but not finding any, or very few men. NW Girl has been chronicling the situation pretty thoroughly, here.
Ha- I guess it's a matter of perspective. A lot of men in Portland say they never meet women at events. As for myself and a good number of my friends, in the summer we're often out on fairly long hikes which obviously isn't a great place to meet women.
I was at a bar with some friends the other night and a guy I'd never met before went on an incredible tirade (20 minutes+++) about how the only interesting people you ever meet in Portland are men. Obviously I don't agree with that, but it seems that both men and women 30+ find the dating situation frustrating.
Well, conveyor belt is a good analogy. You meet in a bar, usually in a reserved section and before the place gets hopping and you are assigned a table. Find your table and the person across from you is your first "date." A bell rings to start the round and you have 5-7 minutes to talk to your date. It's not a lot of time, but "they" say you know within 5 minutes of meeting someone whether or not you are interested in continuing conversation with them.
Bell rings again and usually the guys move on to the next table while the ladies stay put.
Between "dates," you make little notes to yourself about the person you just met on a "score card" you are given when you arrive that has everyone's name on it (if you are a guy, you get a list of girl's names, girls get the guy's names) and you circle "yes" or "no" on it. At the end of the night, you go home, log back into the site where you registered for the event and you mark all those you are interested in seeing again. If they are interested as well, you are given each other's email address to go from there and then rarely does anyone ever actually contact each other because people here like dating in theory rather than in actual practice.
Why continue to use speed dating if most of the people don't contact each other anyways? Is everybody really that jaded towards dating? I mean if I did a round robin of 10+ dates in a night, I'm certain I could find one or two that are worth my time for a follow up. Now, if you're dating and trying to build megatron out of the dates, then no one is going to meet up to your standards.
I just don't see the point in people using speed dating if they're not contacting each other on the site. The only other option is that the people are exchanging information with each other and just bypassing the website all together, and to be honest, I don't blame them. I'd prefer to bypass digital communication for the real thing as well.
Spoiler: people still socialize and find people attractive outside of the WWW.
The trick is you have to be their as well and not just show up and expect it to start raining on your lap.
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