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There’s no shortage of misguided notions to be found in MRA/pick-up artist/MSN-Lifestyle-reading/Craigslist-rant-posting circles (which all seem to overlap, surprisingly). But one common meme that seems to always crop up is the scenario of a man and a woman, out on a date. He buys dinner and movie tickets and perhaps some flowers, and then acts gobsmacked when she doesn’t repay him with sex. He immediately goes on the internet and complains about gold-digging women.

Here’s an excerpt from an article recently mocked on Pandagon:

As I mentioned earlier, women often have an imagined ideal for a date. This may involve many things I’d rather not do (and pay for) with a complete stranger: dinner at Daniel, drinks in the Rainbow Room, the opera — all of this is fine if I really enjoy the person. But with a woman I hardly know this an unacceptable risk to wallet and watch. Not to mention the slim chance of either party wanting to get physical after such a marathon night. In addition, women often say they “want to go out (on the town) so they can get to know me,” which is contradictory. Spending time with me in my apartment will show them more about who I am than cavorting about town. And in my experience, young women often brag to their girlfriends about where they went and what they ate, rather than who they were with. That’s a lousy deal for the sap who funds the night.

Now, misogynist slime oozes out of every corner of these sorts of articles, as the post and comments point out, but one assumption that often goes unremarked-upon is that the man is always paying for the date. It made me wonder whether it’s just my own group of friends that assumes that the couple (het or homo, platonic or romantic) splits the bill evenly, unless there’s a good reason (a birthday, for example, or one party being flat broke). Granted, I mostly hang out with, and date, other Canuckistani-based leftists, so it occurred to me that I just might be living in a social bubble. Seriously, who are these men who drop hundreds of dollars on dinner? And who are these women who are getting free meals all the time? Is it a geography thing, a class thing, a this-is-what-non-feminist-couples-are-actually-like thing?

Fortunately, I live with someone who keeps etiquette books in our library (awesome), so I was able to consult the 1950 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, Publishers). This was what Post had to say about who pays on a date:

In this modern day, when women are competing with men in politics, in business, and in every profession, it is really senseless to cling to that one obsolete convention—no matter what the circumstances—that the man must buy the tickets, pay the check, pay the taxi, or else be branded a gigolo or a parasite. The modern point of view has changed in every particular save this one! Certainly it does not seem logical that an otherwise modern man-and-girl situation should still be depicted as that of a Victorian lady dependent for her safety in public upon the protection of a chivalrous gentleman, instead of the modern one of girl friend and boy friend—or one business associate and another.

Ethically this subject comes down to a question of underlying motive. The man who is deliberately “out for what he can get” from a woman is a type of parasite that is not even mentionable. And it is natural that every man of decent impulse shun the faintest likeness to one of these pariahs. Therefore, it is very hard to say how the various angles of a man’s self-respect are to be reckoned with, and at the same time solve the typical situation of Mary who is wondering what has changed Jim, who used to be the life of the party, but who never wants to go anywhere any more! In other words, what can the girl, who likes Jim better than any other man, do about it except to make believe that above everything she likes to cook and stay home and to listen to the radio?

The only real advice to be offered is, first of all, to take whatever the situation may be, frankly and unself-consciously.

Wait, so in the 50s, the time period that anti-feminists consider ideal in regard to courtship and gender relations, the etiquette experts were recommending dividing up the bill on an egalitarian, or at least case-by-case, basis? You’d think that nearly 60 years later, this arrangement would have been adopted into common practice. And I think that it probably has been, if only because there can’t be that many men wealthy enough to regularly pay at fancy restaurants.

So what’s the deal, Punkasses? Are the MRAs lying again, or am I just dating cheapskates?