This is where a person misconstrues an argument to make it easier to argue against. So perhaps you could be discussing how hard dating is for a male, women have high standards compared to men, men are supposed to pursue women and not the other way around etc. and the answer is,
“Oh, so you should just be able to walk into a bar and women start worshipping you and begging for sex? ”
Now that is sarcastic and silly, but it’s also a straw man argument because it isn’t what you said. As always, you need to be alert to spot these fallacies and call them.
“This isn’t what I said. What I said was [repeat]”. The first points were reasonable, the second points which you didn’t say, were unreasonable, they were putting words in your mouth.
The straw man can exist as a mental process also. One thing I notice is that when I think about my past, it was quite abusive and I’m bitter sometimes, but I imagine things that happened to me, or variations of those things, and exaggerate or change up the situation, the characters stay the same but I put a different, unreasonable dialogue in their mouths and I get myself angry like this. But it’s about something that didn’t literally happen.
But your inner-reasoning (thought-process) can also exaggerate or misconstrue a situation. For example, when you start writing down the contents of your mind then you might find that you have the thought (or perhaps even end up posting it online somewhere), “Yeah, so women have these high standards, they want you to be seven foot, muscular, rich, white, three master degrees and worship them day and night”. Now the statement that you actually want to make is that “women’s dating standards are too high”. Now is that true or not? Maybe, but you could write it down and reason it through and perhaps it’s true, or not. If it is, then what are the other fallacies and illogical turns in your thinking that bring you to the incorrect conclusion that you cannot be happy because of this fact (if it is true).
When you misconstrue the argument like this, you accept it and it either shuts down the conversation (so an argument cannot proceed to the truth) or it stops your reasoning process. You think, “Hell yeah”, and slouch back in your chair with a feeling of despondency, when you could have called the fallacy and kept writing and reasoning to the reasonable truth.