DoktorGlas
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User ID: 1338
Earlier this spring I met a girl on one of the many dating apps I reluctantly use. It turned out to be one of those life-changing romances you mostly only read about in novels. Most of the time I have trouble feeling comfortable around people, and yet the vibes here were totally instant. We hit it off right away and just sat by the town river cuddling and talking for several hours on our first date, and the second one went even better. I've only felt so instantly connected to and comfortable with someone once before in my dating life and that was a long time ago. After that we slept together, which I would honestly rate as one of the highlights of my life. My judgement is naturally clouded my hormones, but she really was perfect: more than I would dare hope exist.
You've already guessed what comes next. Soon after our fourth date she rejected me over the phone one evening when I was coming home from a trip (ostensibly because of my political beliefs, but you never know).
This has already been a less than stellar year for me due to job-related reasons, but losing her was devastating. I fell into a lighter depression, and I have been low, low, low since the day she left. Only the last month or so have things gotten somewhat better. I still think about her often and I still feel like something that could have been really special vanished for no good reason; but I can distract myself with other activities and sometimes feel like things are maybe okay. A lot of my moments are nevertheless even now spent listening to Townes van Zandt and thinking about death.
The ordeal has also got me thinking and reflecting a lot about my lovelife, especially since the intimacy with her was so exceptionally wonderful. I'm now in the later part of my twenties, and I have had sex a total of four times in my entire life (and that is including this encounter). This is about a couple of hundred times less than I had hoped to have by this point. If someone had told the teenage me that I was in for more or less a decade long dry spell I think I would've been horrified. But it has become this way gradually, day by day without a girlfriend and with no other willing partner, and only now when auditing the records of my life has it really hit me how badly things have gone. The aforementioned girl was younger than me, yet from the conversations we had it's clear she already had way significantly more experience than me in this field. Same thing when I compare myself with my male friends. I am obviously and painfully doing unusually poorly.
By many other metrics things are going decently well for me. At the same time I value women and sex highly, I can't help myself from doing it, and I remember looking forward to having sex when I was teenager. I have since tried my luck on dating apps and in my social circles, and despite all my attempts it now more and more looks like my younger years will soon have passed with very limited success with the opposite sex. Looking forward I am also not feeling optimistic. In particular the prospect of becoming 30+ and attracting women the same age who've already had their fun and now want someone "serious" to settle down with doesn't appeal to me. I don't want to be practical choice rather than a romantic one. I'm sure in this modern world it's terribly entitled and sexist of me to think like this, but I value youth and beauty in women, and it's something that I want to experience more in my life.
In the year that's coming I'll likely try to make some changes to my life and put myself out there, try and salvage the situation somewhat as best I can. I think history is a good predictor of the future when it comes to things like this though, and another miracle-woman like the one I opened this post with seems unlikely.
I don't know what I hope to achieve by posting this here, or what advice or encouragement I hope to hear. Still, a lot of your are cleverer than me: maybe someone here will figure out something smart to say.
DoktorGlas
5mo ago
It's possible to get away with murdering a high-ranking official even with a sloppier and more opportunistic approach; just have a clean record to avoid being identified by your DNA, wait until a reasonable opportunity presents itself and then take the shot. Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated more or less this way in the Eighties and the killer still hasn't been conclusively found, though one Christer Pettersson was put on trial (but acquitted in the Court of Appeals) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Olof_Palme
The real give-away of a nutjob amateur is indeed choosing a time, place and method of execution which only guarantees one casualty: that of the gunman.
DoktorGlas
1yr ago
Indeed it was, thank you. This 10 000 character limit is playing tricks on me.
Earlier this year, the Swedish publisher Natur och Kultur released a new book discussing the rise of male sexlessness by the name of “Man går sin egen väg: riktningar i sexlöshetens dimma.” The title is an untranslatable pun on the Swedish word “man” which means both man as in “a man” and “one” as in “one does not simply walk into Mordor.” Rough translation: "Going your own way: directions in fog of sexlessness." The topic is one in which I am both deeply interested and deeply invested (the same way one might be invested in curing a debilitating disease) in, so I thought I’d relay the content to the Motte. Here's a link to the book if you want to check it out: https://www.nok.se/titlar/laromedel-b2/man-gar-sin-egen-vag-92ad4e66/a2ada8af-b732-488d-8a0e-937d6558b675
First off, the book does a good job of giving a concise overview of the situation for young men and forces at play. If you’re at all familiar with the ideas contained within, e.g, The Selfish Gene, these thoughts will hardly be mind-blowing, but it’s refreshing to see someone approach them with frankness in popular science/sociology. (Though if you’re unfamiliar here’s a good link to an interesting study https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/12/health/young-americans-less-sex-intl-scli-wellness/index.html).
The author also commendably takes a refreshingly global view of the problem, and has a lot of interesting facts from Japan and India which shed light on the broader dynamics of the sexual marketplace. For example, many of you might know that Tinder in the West has a verification feature for your face: take a selfie and prove you’re really you, and you get a little checkmark! Apparently, a Japanese online dating has adopted a similar feature - but for salaries. That’s right, just send a picture of your payslip and you get a checkmark letting all the women know you’re not horsing around with your six figure income. I don’t know if I should applaud the Japanese for their honesty, or deride them as crass. Maybe both.
Beyond that the book doesn’t have much new data to offer. The exact extent of the problem is difficult to assess given it relies largely on self-reporting, and the causes are equally difficult to pin down (though in India and China the uneven gender ratio is an obvious culprit, and the broader trend is also clear). Internet porn, Metoo, men being outcompeted in academia, rising obesity and women gaining status and increasing independence are all suspects, but the exact extent of their involvement in the conspiracy remains unclear.
The author doesn’t dwell on this. The book is more interested in categorizing and understanding the male response to sexlessness than in explaining the root causes: and it actually does a pretty good job of creating a frame to discuss and understand the problem on an individual level. The idea is that men without sexual success have four different strategies at their disposal (or copes if you want to use incel lingo) when faced with want of sexual success, namely
Folding: what it sounds like. the core of this strategy is simply giving up on ever really wooing a woman to whom you’re attracted, and doing something else instead. There are many variants but at its center this strategy is about recognizing that “it’s over” and trying to scratch the sexual itch with other and perhaps more attainable pursuits.
Fraud: unsatisfied with simply surrendering, some men instead turn to various forms of deception in order to overcome their predicament. This similarly diverse group includes pick-up artists and various other fraudsters who rely primarily on manipulation. The common denominator for this strategy is insincerity: the whole point is to trick, nag or fool women into sleeping with you rather than convincing them by improving the package on offer. Nowadays I see few “red pill”-folk proclaiming that all you need to do is learn to neg women correctly in order to get laid. Probably this way of doing things didn’t work very well to begin with, and the realization has set in.
Resentment: you already know this one. This is the strategy of Elliot Rodger, the violent rebellion of Cain against an uncaring God. Though seldom taken to its logical conclusion, this response has gotten a disproportionate amount of media attention since it often involves violence and hatred towards women. The attention paid to the worst of the incels have clouded the fact that many feel negative emotions affter rejection.
Improvement: Lastly, we have the most intuitive strategy. If no one wants to buy what you're selling, improve your product! The author neatly exemplifies this strategy with the cult of JBP and “12 Rules for Life”, and I think the connection between sexlessness and the rise of anxious self-improvement is fairly natural. Keep in mind there are many different ways to improve the odds. Improvement can also involve throwing a wider net, and doing other activities to improve not yourself but the general chances of attracting a mate.
This is by far the most optimistic and pro-social strategy, and it’s the overwhelmingly most common reply when men complain of sexlessness. Just get stronger, wealthier, cooler and smoother, and you will start to see success. If you’re a semi-nerdy intellectual guy – and if I understand the demographics here correctly you probably are – you’ve heard this one many times, I’ll bet.
Nevertheless, it’s evident the author himself is skeptical. He spends a lengthy section of the book detailing how JBP himself collapsed into a highly dysfunctional and disorganized existence. If you don’t have Tinder and never go outside you’ve got some low-hanging fruit to pick, but what if you have Tinder and you go outside, but still fail? In the end the book seems to purport that, whatever it is that causes women to reject a certain man en masse, it is quite difficult to change.
Summary
All the categories above represent extremes, and inescapably simplify complex human behavior. The book is well-aware of this, and makes a big point of emphasizing that most men employ a decidedly mixed strategy when faced with female rejection. After a particularly long dry spell the average man is more likely to spend some more time with other pursuits (folding), edit his photos to make them more attractive (fraud), vent his frustration to friends over a beer (revenge) and slowly build wealth and status (improvement) rather than going all-in on any one extreme.
Another point the book makes, which I mentioned before, is that no strategy really seems to pay clear and great dividends (though one is clearly worse than all the others). The book never says it out loud, but the data and the narrative it presents appears to hint that the only correct move in this sordid game is to not become sexless to start with. I think this might be correct. Constantly getting rejected by all women you consider attractive is something most men consider very, very bad, and for good reason. In evolutionary terms that form of harsh sexlessness is a strong signal that something is going terribly awry, and we should expect most young men to react very strongly if they were told, right now, that they’d barely have sex in their life.
Last but not least, I have a few closing remarks regarding the different strategies, and on the broader problem with male sexlessness.
To start with, I think folding is by far the weakest approach to the problem. In another type of society ignoring your sexual desire and doing something else might be workable as a last resort, but in a modern welfare state it is for many reasons a humiliating and degrading proposal. It’s well-known that women (at least in Europe) receive far more money from the state through welfare, maternity care and health care than they pay in tax, and that means all tax-paying men inevitably support women with their hard work. This has far-reaching implications. To put it bluntly: if you spend your entire working life as a man giving desirable young women your money while other men fuck their brains out, what does that make you?
The simple fact of the matter is that most men have no way to cut women out of their life entirely. What opting out really means is accepting all the drawbacks of having a girlfriend without any of the benefits. That’s barely even a strategy: it is more of an unconditional surrender than an attempt to actually handle the situation. Maybe I need to look at more OkCupid statistics to really get how “over” it is for most men, but the profound despair hidden in this sort of response does not appeal to me. I’d rather rage against the dying of the light than quietly accept defeat.
Improvement is the other strategy which deserves a response; and my response is that I’m far from convinced. The few instances in which I’ve had success with women have had an almost random quality to them, and have been seemingly unrelated to any obvious self-improvement project. Lately I’ve greatly improved both my wealth and general status, and yet success has been sorely lacking.
Frankly, if you’re having trouble with women as a young man – and I speak as a young man who has had much trouble with women – the problem is likely to get worse with age. It seems likely that for every step you take forward in self-improvement you will take another two steps back through aging. Another weakness in this strategy is that if you’ve gone without sex for several years then, well, that’s several years without sex. You are not getting those back! Dwelling on the past is never good, but I am unsure if investing large resources in order to marry 30 year old woman who would have rejected you if she was 20 is a sound or sustainable way to move forward.
Last but not least, a question to open further discussion: what is the optimal strategy, both in general and in more detail (i.e. should you improve, and what aspect of yourself or your dating approach is most fruitful to improve?).
The essay reminds me quite strongly of an old quote from the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderbergs best and most well-known work Doktor Glas:
"Ett nyfött barn är vedervärdigt. En dödsbädd gör sällan ett så ohyggligt intryck som en barnsbörd, denna förfärliga symfoni av skrik och smuts och blod."
"A newborn child is hideous. A deathbed seldom makes so terrible an impression as a childbirth, this horrific symphony of screams and filth and blood."
Pregnancy and childbirth truly are among the most hideous physical processes in existence. Everytime I watch a hospital series and a birth scene comes on, I feel the same revulsion as if they'd switched to a snuff film. It's telling that the Old Testament felt the need to explain pregnancy and childbirth as a punishment from God for an espeically egregious sin, and in a broader metaphysical sense the old story of the Apple of Knowledge and the plight of the female pelvis carries deep metaphorical truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma
This is an existential problem which haunts me, and more so than usual lately. I see no solution – that is to say, a solution which cuts to the heart of the matter – to this, short of maybe artifical wombs followed by abolishing women as a sex. That idea has a lot of merits, and it would make the natalist position a lot more appealing if we could at least make it less of a travesty to create new people; but it is also a pipe dream which will obviously never become reality. I am at least grateful for the fact that I was born a man, and that I was thus spared the fate of being a sacrificial lamb of human reproduction.
Despite all this, it's unfortunately difficult to feel particularily sorry for women. The Female of the Species is more deadly than the Male, as the good Kipling wrote, and through their harsh sexual selection women have created what they are now complaining about (this is, again in a metaphorical sense, the aforementioned sin for which they are now all collectively being punished). Men obviously fare only a little better in the equation. The truth is, my friends, we are dumb and evil animals and for that reason we all deserve to be miserable – and so we are.
I end with another classic Doktor Glas passage:
"Jag hade alltid känt ett stort förakt för de dåliga gossar, som brukade rita fula ord på väggarna och planken. Men i den stunden var det mig som om Gud själv hade ritat något fult på den blå vårhimmeln, och jag tror egentligen att det var då jag först började undra, om det verkligen fanns någon gud."
"I had always felt great contempt for the scoundrel boys who used to draw ugly words on walls and planks. But in that moment it seemed to me as if God himself had drawn something ugly on the blue spring sky, and I think it was a that moment I began to wonder, if there really was a God."
I do not wonder. There is no God. We are alone.
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