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Notes -
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?).
I'm sure Western societies are already close to the point where women pay more than 50% of all taxes.
EDIT: looking back I think it's easy to interpret this comment as feminist or pro-feminist. It was never intended as such.
No, I’m pretty sure that’s closer to 35% (all else being equal); taxes are progressive and they keep claiming they only make 80-85% as much as men do, so we should expect them to contribute correspondingly less to the public coffers.
The wage gap originating from structural sexism is just a claim, nothing more. As far as I can tell, the statistics do not prove it, and judging by current trends in female participation in the workforce and education, I think the time is near when women won't be net tax consumers anymore. I'm not claiming that they will generally like this, of course, but that's another subject. The general situation we'll be in is a somewhat African-style quasi-matriarchy, where even the last vestiges of Christian patriarchy will be gone.
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I know this forum is more focused on a specific cohort (intelligent, financially successful, often romantically not so much) but I'm approaching this issue from a different angle - a family member who is a classic disabled NEET in his early 30s. Near the bottom of the desirability totem pole, the question of 'fold' vs 'improve' has to contend with the latter having a very significant chance of being very costly in rime & effort and bearing absolutely zero fruit. This is where a lot of 'resent' cases come from, (though not all) but luckily that doesnt seem to be a major factor for now.
The question in these cases is, at what point is it rational to cut one's losses?
The thing about 'improve' is that it's generally the right decision even if your chance of finding a mate is 0. It's just that it's also by far the hardest option, and finding a romantic partner is good motivation to pick the hard road.
I would say instead that 'improve' efforts should be realistic, which means focusing on foundational things like getting a job and maintaining a stable emotional state before trying to start a family.
Yeah. Unless he gets maimed from a weightlifting accident or something he's going to be better off from self improvement.
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How far has your family member dropped their standards when it comes to an acceptable mate?
Where does he want the ambulances? I'm not entirely clear if a relationship with the type of person he can attract as he is would be good for anyone concerned. Maybe it would be.
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"A woman to whom you're attracted" is an odd term to use in in a society-wide analysis. Attraction is fundamentally situational - like everything human, it adjusts to its environment. If you were stuck on a desert island with your grandmother, she'd become appealing after a year or two. If you spent a few years surrounded by only supermodels, you'd find something unappealing about many of them.
Consider - a quarter of America is obese. Of all the very fat, ugly men who date very fat, ugly women - nothing could biologically make you like fat women just because you're fat, if you could go after models you'd find women as viscerally disgusting as I do. But, for the most part, fat people manage to get it up and desire sex with each other. People adapt.
This isn't really a cause of sexlessness or dating woes, though. And I don't think sexlessness is that big of a problem anyway. To whatever extent it does exist, the cause is probably a combination of physical proximity not happening on the internet, pornography, and whatever other right-wing social ideas you want to add to that.
How is pickup artistry fraud or manipulation? Everyone, admit it or not, both consciously and instinctively, practice and train their speech and behavior to get the partners they desire. PUA stuff is kinda just an explicit and well-done version of that. Which doesn't mean you have to like the consequences, but it's not any more 'manipulation' than makeup or 'asking a friend what you should text'. Semi-deceptive or semi-adversarial techniques aimed at getting sex or a better wife aren't new features of the 21st century, or even modernity.
Can't speak for all PUAs, but Julien Blanc specifically advised lonely men to falsely claim that their father had recently died in hopes of securing a pity fuck. Numerous women shared screenshots of him trying this exact strategy on them, months apart.
The entire concept of pursuing a "pity fuck" contradicts the fundamentals of PU Artistry.
Maybe so, but that doesn't mean that certain professional pickup artists aren't above suggesting it as a strategy.
I was pretty disgusted when I read about it (and not just it's because cheap, deceitful and manipulative). Surely when men are laying out that much money for a seminar, they expect better advice than "lie to women so they'll feel sorry for you".
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Reality is not a morality play, it's perfectly possible for someone to vocally endorse the optimal strategy and yet have it fail them (or him fail it).
The benefits of low hanging fruit like working out, good grooming and fashion are so blatantly obvious that one man's failures do not derail them. I'm sure the author doesn't hold Jordan as the sole argument, but I still can't see it being true.
Scott drew attention to a semi-serious analogue to micromorts, micromarriages, as in an action that has a 1/millionth chance of getting you married. I posit that it's obvious that microfucks are a useful concept too, and that while you any individual act of self improvement cannot be guaranteed to lead to getting laid, they tend to add up over time if you're being diligent.
Handsome people are already born with a lot of (micro)fucks to give, but for the rest of us, we have to work to earn them. Very little guarantees getting laid, short of paying for it in cold hard cash, but it's still worth trying.
In my reply to Cjet, I elaborated on why, despite being significantly above average (at least compared to my peers), I have immense sympathy for incels and incel-adjacent people.
Others have already pointed out that women tend to prefer older men, at least in the age range when men are still desperately horny.
Firstly, you have to at least try at the "improvement" category. Go to the gym, dress better, get a nice haircut.
If you're extremely unlucky, then yes, this may not suffice, but I feel no qualms about endorsing it in general.
You are far less likely to improve things like height/intelligence/charisma. Some of that isn't outright impossible, since you can always do limb lengthening or keep on hitting the field till you brute force a pickup strategy that works. It's simply not productive.
That being said, it really is a numbers game. If you never try you'll never know, and modern men have a degree of shame and fear that is blatantly counterproductive when you don't have to live in a tribe with the same dozen women your entire life, who gossip about your pitiful failure to court them all. Hit on women goddammit!
Finally, avoid the apps, unless you're in the lucky 10% who get all the goods, in which case my advice isn't for you. For the majority of men, it's a painful, soul sucking process that only dents your self-esteem.
I am unusually good at both in-person flirtation and sliding into DMs, but the advice is still true for the average man. Women are far less picky face to face, and you get far more than a fleeting moment of her attention.
That about sums it up when it comes to general purpose advice, everything else must be tailored to your individual needs.
Addendum:
I'm not being facetious, but my (sweet and loving) girlfriend was looking over my shoulder while I write this post (of all the hundreds I've written lately!).
She would like to make the following statements, written by her own hand on my phone:
Do not listen to anything he said. Doesn't apply to most women. If I slide into her DM, don't expect to get anywhere. My boyfriend vastly overestimates his prowess in the matter of flirtation. He is a very nice man, and that is the 1sf and most important thing g. Women have a radar in detecting fake vs real. I was the one who asked him out, yes that does happen, but it was not because of the flirtatious attitude. Tbh, It was painful. Be yourself. Not everyone is suited to everyone. I can assure you, I like him way before he started flirting. Cause I thought we had a genuine connection and I cud talk to him. That is what we want I the end, someone to talk to, make a life with. Had I not liked him before, his flirting wud have been construed as creepy. So, find out what u like in a woman, and stick to that. Don't slide into peoples dm'z. I assure u, that is a full proof way of getting blocked.
Addendum to the addendum:
Thank you sweetie, of course you're right :*
(Quick, she's looking away!)
Ahem, I would like to add another point to my list of general advice.
Do not take dating advice from women.
I was actually the one who started flirting with her weeks before she even noticed, even if she was the one to ask me out on a date and the one who pulled me in for a kiss. Her mom called me handsome the day the two of them first saw me 😉
That's about it, I don't want to get too saccharine haha.
I would advise making a top one percent income and being charismatic enough for a career in politics. Failing this, either choose lifelong celibacy or decide where you want the ambulances. If the former it helps to take a job that meshes poorly with marriage and family. A truck driver or a neurosurgeon both don't have time to put down roots.
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I can't emphasize this point enough. You wouldn’t learn how to cook from a restaurant critic would you? Women are consumers of romance, they don’t produce it. I’d further extend it taking almost any advice at all from women on any subject. I decline to elaborate further due to this board’s civility norms. Instead a story.
I friend of mine had a dog that really wanted to chase cars. He was fenced in well but managed to jump over, so they got a higher fence. The dog then dug under that one so they started tying him to a lead as well as sinking the fence. The dog strained at the lead when vehicles passed, dug ever deeper holes, and maintained it’s single minded focus. One day it worked. The material stress on the lead compounded and it broke, the escalating digging efforts were adequate; he did it, he was free. A particularly obnoxious or chase-worth vehicle was in his sites, going slow. The dog finally caught one and it crushed his head like a grape.
The libido of a young man is a powerful thing, it’s built civilizations and it’s destroyed them. It’s driven men to the highest levels of achievement as well as suicide. Marlon Brando once described it as being chained to a madman. Short of voluntarily becoming a eunuch, men are in a tough situation in our modern world because of it. I have great sympathy.
However, if you think you have problems with women related to not being able to catch one, wait until, like the dog in the story, you do.
The next time you experience an ebb in your libido, try the following thought experiment. Consider a woman you know well and are attracted to. If through some sorcery they were magically transformed into a man but everything else about them remained, their behaviors, attitudes, they way they treat people, their “personality”, work ethic, etc all remained identical to their pre-transformation self. But instead of their attractive female packaging they now male, would you want to be their friend? Is this a man you would engage in cooperative pursuits with? Even want to be around them at all?
This really helped me when I was young and in the throws of my libido. For me the answer was overwhelmingly NO for the vast majority of the women I was attracted to. At the risk of violating this board’s norms against “booing the outgroup” the vast majority of the attractive women I’ve known in my life have been kinda shitty people. Petty, vain, immoral, motivated by a combination of fear of consequences and avarice. Deathly allergic to taking responsibility for any of their negative behavior. A weak internal locus of control. I’m am absolutely not saying all women are like this, but the American white middle class women I’ve spent most of my life around absolutely are, including all of my immediate family (barring one self-actualized aunt). This also describes a good chunk of the men as well. In times of weakness it also described me.
If you have a strong lifelong desire to start a family you have few options here I’m afraid. If you don’t ever desire children its easier. The main point of this rant is to consider more carefully the objects of your desire as much as you can while blinded by the fog of that same desire.
Finally, self-improvement is worth it for the its own sake. Worry about yourself more. Be more selfish. Be healthy. Pursue your goals, career or otherwise. Be ok with occasionally being an asshole. Perversely (or maybe not?) a fit and driven man who doesn’t give a shit about women is attractive to some of them. Often most of them.
If and when you finally do achieve your goal of forming a relationship, like the dog in the story, then do your real problems start.
I find the average Indian man or woman rather vapid and boring, and even attractiveness doesn't seem to have more than a minimal bearing on that.
Maybe it's different in the West, but the closest I get to seeing the kind of insanity most average Americans suffer from is when I accidentally wander into a default sub on reddit.
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This is wrong I think. The apps truly are a painful, soul crushing experience. But if you are not very picky they will give you the chance to very quickly practice pitching to women. And there are few things that motivate sticking to the gym more than hour after hour of hard rejection.
Genuinely awful advice. Women have no such radar and that they think they do it very bad for them.
Sure, if you want to use them as training, they work fine, but unless you're already so gifted you don't need any advice, you won't be getting much in the way of dates out of them!
As much as I love her, she, like most women, has little insight into why she likes the things she likes in the realm of courtship.
It does get mildly aggravating when some of them well-intentionedly give advice that might be accepted by naive men, who think that surely words straight from the horse's mouth are of any help when you're trying to ride it.
If you're willing to spend the untold hours I believe practically anyone can at the very least get a match that will respond occasionally and eventually set up at least one coffee date. We're talking many hours here - thousands and thousands of miserable swipes. It worked for me, and the pretty tangible increase in hit-rate as the gym slowly paid its iron dividend gave me a latter I could feel.
It's very striking how bad the advice tends to be and it has caused me to introspect on the advice I give to women about men. I now try to keep my commentary to simpler things and be extra critical of any opinion that could be subconsciously trying to frame male behavior as pro-social. That said, unlike with women society at large is already pretty suspicious of male behavior.
Hmm. My close female friend told me to stop being so self loathing. This has been helpful. I might have a date this weekend with a thin middle class American woman. Other than that...I don't remember having gotten any garbage tier advice from women, although it is possible I can't tell good stuff from dogshit.
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As far as I've seen, men are far less likely to unsolicitedly give such advice to women, though I have no strong opinion on how good that advice would be if they did give it.
I think people, men included, give advice to women about men. Just probably not of the "how do I even get them interested in me" variety. My Fiance's sister is starting college in the fall and I gave advice to her today about how to be careful at parties.
Well I'd say that I don't think men do a bad job in that regard, from what I've seen.
I was more focused on the advice to women about how women should get the men they like category myself.
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Going to push back on this. While you will be hard-pressed trying to find a straight man who finds a 35-year-old woman more attractive than her 22-year-old sister, age is nowhere near as much of a demerit for straight women. If, as was recently argued here, men tend to go for looks while women go for status, it makes sense that women would tend to find older men more attractive than younger men, as they've had additional years to accrue wealth, experience and knowledge. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, as a 50-year-old man is just as capable of impregnating a woman as a 25-year-old man (albeit the former's child is at greater risk of birth defects).
If looking for a one-night stand, women might well go for the dumb broke 22-year-old barman over the smart, ugly 37-year-old hedge fund manager. If looking for a husband? I think it's a very different story. (Redpill/blackpill essentially acknowledge this with the "alpha fucks/beta bucks" framing.)
Here's an article on the phenomenon:
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Those who make folding impossible make resentment inevitable.
Yeah, the idea of honorable, celibate life paths was something we lost when we became less religious. I think that (rough ballpark) five or so percent of people aren't good candidates for marriage, relationships, and children. It's like the Army...fifteen percent of people don't have the cognitive horsepower to be Army cooks or janitors. You've got the intellectually disabled, treatment resistant schizophrenia, different kinds of physical disability. Those are often no one's fault, but even so, they aren't great candidates for relationships and may not be able to form mutually beneficial relationships. Then you've got the traumatized, the unattractive, the asexual...every generation is going to have some of these people, and having them become long-haul truck drivers or travel nurses or neurosurgeons who are "too busy to date" doesn't sound like a bad place to park them.
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Can you elaborate about how some make folding impossible? Are you speaking only about the difficulty of avoiding taxation, or do you posit other ways that opting out, MGTOW-style, is insufficient/impossible?
(As to taxation: I can see some might the on average unequal contributions/disbursements for men and women a source of resentment, but I hardly think this is universal amongst unsuccessful men—consider that at least some are socialist—while plenty of successful men object to taxation on grounds unrelated to the disparate impact between men and women.)
You cannot be honest about it without being judged as a loser.
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Surely the dividends of self-improvement are just that, self-improvement? If someone is only improving themselves in shallow ways to get girls then perhaps this would be better categorised as fraud. This point is more than a quibble about definitions, as women find the moral qualities (or lack thereof) which motivate men to be attractive or repulsive in themselves.
Wealth and social status certainly play a part in attraction but perhaps there are certain personality traits people fail to display which makes this all for naught, wealth and social status alone don't make it pleasant to spend hours with someone after all. Tattoo artists don't have much wealth or (outside of being the best of the best) social status, but they get laid a lot as spending hours distracting someone from physical pain while they talk about their life is great empathy training.
"You're only working out, improving your diet & lifestyle, practising your social skills and progressing in your career so that people (including women) will like you more and find you more attractive!"
yeschad.png?
If you're only doing that because you want people to find you more attractive and not because the progress justifies itself I think there would be a problem. Would this stuff be worthwhile even if it didn't get you attention from women? It should be, and you're not going to surpass any heavy lifters if you're relying on a steady increase in female attention for motivation i.e. onlymenaremiring.png.
And how would the progress justify itself? You'll look more attractive i.e. people will find you more attractive. Sure, you may feel more confident, be generally healthier and have improved mental health, but these are ancillary benefits at best. Everyone knows that the purpose of men going to the gym is to look more attractive, and failing to recognise this leads to "I don't wear makeup for guys, I wear makeup to feel good about myself" levels of cope and rationalisation.
A healthy body drives a healthy mind. There is no separation; its all one organism. Being healthy makes you happier. There is much focus on the gym here, but also vastly important is diet.
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Attention from women is also an ancillary benefit (and not necessarily more important than the others you mentioned imo), and something I think could be gotten with much less effort through other means. The gymcel is a real thing and if you're grounding your motivation for lifting on women you're risking disappointment. Unless you take steroids it's going to take at least a year (more like 2-3) and hundreds of hours to get jacked.
I'll expand this to self-improvement in general and say that if something is worth doing it's worth doing even when the ancillary benefits aren't clear, that's how I'm distinguishing shallow from meaningful pursuits. I could try my hand at listing all the external reasons you should focus on fitness but strength is valuable in a way I can't exhaustively articulate, anecdotally I'm getting way more attention from women now than when I was at my strongest but there's still some feeling of loss from no longer pushing the limits of my body.
I'm no feminist but I think it's both. Women do care about beauty for its own sake, this is evolutionarily ingrained in them for its mating advantage but as an internal state the drive for beauty precedes making the connection to attention from men or learning facts about evolution. It also extends beyond the former in the fact that women care about making things look nice which have no connection to male attraction (and might even annoy the men in their life by insisting on beauty at the cost of utility).
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I really think this is a bad/unproductive framing. How exactly is it fraud if the quality of the good is raised, and not just the marketing of it?
If a man, tired of not getting laid, works out a ton, becomes buff and successfully lands a woman, I struggle to believe that most women would consider this a failing as opposed to a guy who works out for either "himself" or because he enjoys it. Either way, they get a buff boyfriend/husband.
Sure, the former might increase the chances that the guy gives up on the effort when he's getting tail and lets himself go, but empirically that does not appear to matter. I can't say the period where I diligently worked out did much for my actual success with women, even if I do think it increased the odds; and men are still motivated by a desire to keep doing what's bringing in the poon.
Further, if the woman doesn't leave the guy after he stops working out, that signals that she derives some degree of positive satisfaction, from revealed preferences. Sure, people regularly stay in relationships they have ended up hating for many reasons, but at that point it's on them for staying.
There's no distinction being made between quality of a person (which has inherent value) and marketing is my point. If we judge things solely by the metric of getting women building bigger muscles is just a more effortful alternative to peacocking or practicing pickup lines, marketing and quality are just different strategies geared towards the same end.
Maybe I'm just being a poor decoupler, but in the same way that a Christian would be offended at someone saying that going to Church paid no dividends in their dating life I want to shout 'you're missing the point!'.
Is that person going to church only for dating? If not, well, I'm sure millions of both men and women go there while sincerely religious and expecting to find a like minded partner.
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When did you start pursuing women?
I started basically as soon as puberty hit, when I was about 12. It was another 5 years before I had sex.
Having sex at 17 isn't so bad, certainly felt like forever at the time. It was another 5 years and two girlfriends later before I could reliably have sex with new women after just a few dates. It was about a year of me being a bit of a manwhore before I met my now wife and settled down.
It took me about ten years and usually 40+ hours a week of dedicated practice to get good at it. I broke 6 figures in pay at a job faster than I broke into chadhood (and a very mediocre chadhood too, I've had only 20-30 sexual partners, but I was always a little more interested in long term relationships than just sex).
Being able to have sex with willing women is the most difficult thing most men will accomplish in their lives. And I think most of them have only managed it by sheer dogged determination.
And this is fine. Because on the other side of this endeavor is women, and they have at steak the most difficult thing most women will ever do: raise a kid.
Yes birth control exists, but it hasn't sunk into our evolutionarily thickened skulls. And why should it? Raising a kid is still at stake in the modern world. A woman wasting three years dating a loser might mean some prime fertility years are lost.
Improvement is the only option. The progress won't be fast, and it probably won't even be slow. It will be glacial. Circumstances and luck will always play a role, and the best you will ever do is to tilt luck in your favor. At best you might raise a 1% chance to a 5% chance. So instead of striking out 99 times you only strike out 19.
I'm running out of good advice to give to young men, and coming back to the one thing that I think made me successful: I was relentlessly horny and wanted nothing more than willing sex with attractive women. It was only once I got there that my fog finally cleared from my mind. I realized i wanted more (and needed more) after i obtained the goal.
I was 21 when I lost my virginity. After that I've had a "normal" sex life, which certainly doesn't mean a Chad sex life; one-night stands, weird little quasi-relationships, and finally now 5 years of marriage (pushing towards six) with its assorted ups and downs, along with 2 children.
What I remembered most of all from the terrible-feeling years before losing my virginity was not just horniness, though of course there was that, but the overwhelming wish to just be normal. I think that really is a major component of inceldom and all the assorted cultural quirks; the overbearing belief that you're not normal, you're not doing the normal thing that the society is focused on telling you that every normal person is doing all the time, and you either keep reaching towards that normality any way you can think of or give up and start stewing in your abnormality and hatred towards normies as the ultimate form of cope.
Of course, the infuriating paradox of it all is that if you just want to use sex as a tool for normality, it immediately becomes subconsciously obvious to women that you are not normal and not someone to have sex with, which makes it all the harder. Of course I also remember reading things to this effect during my sexless years and them just making me angrier due to the zen koan nature of it all.
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Out of curiosity, is the picture in your profile you IRL?
I would call myself someone with modest but certainly above average success with the ladies, I don't know the exact percentile value, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number of partners I've had at this point in time put me in the 90th percentile for Indian men, even if in absolute terms they're an OOM lower. India is a rather sexless country after all, and a great number of perfectly average men (and women) don't get laid till they're packed off to an arranged marriage.
I certainly suffered from severe horniness as a teen, largely fruitlessly, but in my defense very few Indian teens hit third base, let alone get laid.
It took until I was in med school for things to change, something I'd certainly classify under "improvement", since it indisputably increased my status.
And since I've spent the majority of the last 7-8 years in a longterm relationship of some description, I count myself comfortably well off. While I wouldn't sniff at more ONSs, they're so difficult to get unless you're a 99th percentile dude here it's a bad standard to hold one's self too.
As such, while I wouldn't go as far as to call myself a Chad, I'm certainly further on that end of the spectrum than the other. I still have immense sympathy for incels/average dudes, because I had to deal with raging, all consuming libido for years, and still had dry spells afterwards. I look at the latter, and think "there but for for the grace of God go I". The Chads (and women) simply don't understand what torture that is, how corrosive it can be to your self esteem, even if most of your peers are in similar straits.
Agreed, you have only yourself to blame it you don't at least make an effort. I'm sure there are some poor buggers so cursed by genetics that they still can't get anyone to sleep with them, but the advice is sound for the average man who isn't getting laid much if at all.
Much the same, albeit those trysts usually ended up in relationships. I find myself immensely more successful through IRL approaches than the apps, though I have successfully slid into DMs and charmed panties off. This is likely true for most men, since Tinder and the like are all-you-can-eat buffets for women with 10% of the men getting 90% of the attention, and being hypergamous enough to satiate the needs of the majority of women.
I used to be highly envious of my brother, who got all the handsome genes, and I gape at how asexual he is despite the oodles of female attention he receives. It makes me mildly yet irrationally angry, I want to shake him by the neck and act like a 90s suburban mom telling him that he's doing the equivalent of throwing away his food while orphans starve in Africa. But at the end of the day, he's not hungry, so good for him. I wouldn't wish the curse of male libido on my worst enemy, even if I don't want to remove it (or, I would, if there was an simply, temporary pill without real side effects that did so, instead of the only real options being castration of the physical or chemical nature).
I myself, which distinctly average in the facial department (4-5 if I'm not putting effort in, maybe a low 7 if I am, going by a normal distribution of attractiveness instead of the typical right skew), but every day I thank myself for being tall, intelligent and charming with a deep voice. I appreciate and count the chickens that did hatch, because I see a lot of poor bastards pecking in the manure pile to this day.
As far as pills...the efficacy is not great and it's probably bad medical advice to use them for this purpose, but you're a physician. Surely you are aware of the side effects of SSRIs for some people?
What are you referring to? I'm pretty sure I was the one saying that talking SSRIs to reduce libido is a bad idea.
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Yes, that is me, in India actually. Random museum in Dehli, some back room had that portrait.
That pill is a low dose SSRI. I've had some mild depression my whole post pubescent life. Never really treated it until I met my wife and was planning to settle down. I thought I always had a low level of background unhappiness because I wasn't getting the amount of sex I wanted, or sex with the type of woman I wanted. Once I had that covered and still felt depressed I realized it was something more. It took me from like 9/10 libido to a 6/10 libido. Which is still higher than my wife who is probably like a 3 or 4. I don't know if it would have been a good idea to take it in highschool.
I feel the exact same way. By all metrics I am currently successful. But it certainly felt like it took a long ass time to get there and I was pretty miserable that whole time. I think it is quite likely that I was even viewed as one of those "chads" that just effortlessly got women. People mostly stopped saying things like that because I got unexplainably angry at what they thought was a compliment. No! It wasn't effortless, that was a decade of my life I spent getting good at that! And I was miserable the whole time I was learning! (okay that last one is obviously a lie, there were some fun moments of temporary success)
So you were a depressed teenager, had a grueling ten years, and were still depressed after achieving the socially approved goal. Then you got older, took a pill, settled down, and it got better. Isn’t the obvious conclusion that the aggressive pursuit of sex with women (as opposed to jerking off) was a waste of your time/actively harming you?
Yes obviously. But jerking off wasn't an alternative.
And the end result has been nice.
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Achieving the socially approved goal may have been necessary but not sufficient for the above poster to overcome his depression.
If you replace ‘achieving frequent sex with various women’ with ‘climbing mount everest’ in the story, I don’t think that points to climbing mount everest being necessary but not sufficient to overcome his depression.
A prediction (‘My depression is the result of my "sexual failure", therefore fixing the latter will fix the the former’) was made, acted upon at great cost, and was falsified.
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Oh boy. I had and have mild to moderate depression since my late teens myself, and SSRIs not only didn't work for me, they gave me ED while not changing my libido. Hell, that probably made my depression worse!
They're not a drug I would in any way recommend for that purpose, as the side effects are too onerous and the effect is too unreliable.
I'd say I went from 9/10 to 7/10 simply naturally with age, when getting laid went from a wild fantasy to something important yet mundane. Normalizing something and knowing it's mostly on tap does a great deal to help with the hopeless cravings.
delted
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Eh I guess mileage varries.
It was a sudden drop. The more gradual drop from 10 to 9 happened a year before. And now I'd say I'm at like a 5 or 6. So I've seen gradual change.
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Wouldn’t 25 be in like the 90th percentile of partner count for heterosexuals, if not higher? Most men (and women) never come close, they have a few long term relationships, maybe a hookup or two, then get married. Often these are with friends or friends of friends, with classmates and coworkers and fellow students or with friends or siblings of all the above. Most men aren’t cold approaching women and never have.
I think if you set yourself a target like, persuade 25 very beautiful women to sleep with you as an average guy, that’s probably a hard goal, and might be the “hardest thing” a man accomplished in his lifetime (I mean I hope not, but it depends on what he’s working with, I guess). But that doesn’t really describe the lives of many men.
Its impossible to say. All the data is self reported and both sexes have massive incentives to lie, though in different directions. Short of tracking chips implanted at puberty this one will remain a mystery. I did read some interesting research once about the topic of lying on self report surveys about sex and relationships, hinting that perhaps the dishonesty was somewhat uniform and predictable. I've since tried to find this paper multiple times to no avail and much frustration. I do remember that they determined men tend to double their partner count and women reduce theirs by 2/3rds, but lacking the methodology at present these figures can't be trusted.
No idea what papers you read, but I've seen some research along these lines. I think the most amusing was when Fisher and Alexander found that college women hooked up to a (fake) lie detector reported an average of 4.4 sexual partners, vs 3.4 for women who expected their answers to be anonymized and 2.4 for women who expected their answers to be read.
There are other factors influencing self-reporting (women report more and men report fewer lifetime partners on the GSS when they have a male interviewer? Male overreporting is massive when asked about lifetime partners, large when asked about recent partners, and maybe only 20% when asked about very-recent partners?) but I'm not sure what methodology could let anyone properly calibrate any of this. Bayes says "women are underreporting and men are overreporting" is the most likely explanation of the discrepancy between the two, but either "women are honest and men are grossly overreporting" or "men are honest and women are grossly underreporting" would be consistent too.
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For a lot of American/West European PMC types, sex is the single meaningful area of "free play" in their lives. I think that's where the definition of "hardest" comes in. It's true for me for a certain portion of my life.
Getting into a T14 law school, graduating from it, and getting a job at a well ranked law firm were all "harder" than getting laid in the sense that fewer people can do them. Getting laid was harder in the sense that there were no guides, or only marginally useful ones.
I know a fair number of my classmates who fit this definition, who have achieved amazing things professionally but can't fuck their way out of a paper bag. The K-JD student, extraordinary in talent but on rails in life from helicopter parents to academically strenuous schools to SAT prep courses to selective colleges to LSAT prep to T14 law school to Vault-10 firm associate to partner-track or In-house-counsel at a Fortune 500. Every step of that path is INCREDIBLY hard in the sense that it requires a huge amount of intellectual ability and hardworking discipline, but incredibly easy in the sense that there are prescribed steps you take, guidance from mentors or parents or online forums, and if you complete those steps you get what you wanted.
Getting laid is the opposite. There are no steps. The mentors and online guides are mostly useless or hucksters. It is free play, unguided by society, the rules are made up as you go. You have to figure it out on your own, figure everything out on your own.
A lot of men I've known were very well adapted to following rules and steps, and very poorly adapted to improv. I know a shocking number of men making nice six figure salaries in NYC big law who are sexually and romantically frustrated. Because the things they are good at aren't romance.
Are they hot, though?
Eye of the beholder and I'm pretty heterosexual, but I'd say so? At least fuckable? I mean thinking of my law school roommate, right, he's taller than me and slimmer than me, dresses well, he makes more money than me, can perform intellectual tasks that I cannot, he has clear skin and good posture. ((I guess Korean is a downgrade for some people, but racism can't be that prevalent right? And I feel like I know white/black/hispanic examples but not to the same degree of certainty)) I never saw him succeed with a girl through all of law school, and after law school he's had only sporadic and difficult success with women. It's insane to me.
He succeeded in doing things that most people would find literally impossible, like passing the patent bar. Dating is the harder thing for him.
I think our Korean hero has deeply unrealistic expectations. Is he insanely charismatic: could he become a politician, or not? Is he making or on track to make a million a year before age 35? If not: he needs to be looking for the type of person that can just barely hold down a job and live independently, not thin, pretty UMC women. Passing the patent bar or the USMLE or running a marathon or even climbing Everest are often a lot easier than finding a partner that is sane, not morbidly obese, works a job, and isn't addicted to drugs.
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Can he inspire people? Can you see him succeeding at high end sales or in politics? Also: how tall is he?
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I guess East Asians have a reputation as being less attractive. Koreans are still seen as handsome, though, see Kpop obsessions and so on. I’ve found (some) Korean men attractive but I think if I met a straight-laced Korean biglaw lawyer set on partner track who seemed more trad (socially/culturally) I’d automatically write him off as probably only interested in Korean women. East Asian men who do well with white women often cultivate either a kind of artsy intellectual vibe or a tattooed vibe (male equivalent of ABG, say) I think because it’s kind of like saying “I’m not the stereotype”.
I think it’s interesting to think about the kind of people you’re attracted to. Something that seems true for both sexes is that while hotness is based on physical features, it also has a lot to do with vibe. I’ve seen women go from being largely invisible to men to doing better with them (not just sex but relationships, dating etc) without changing their physique just by changing the way they do their makeup, changing their fashion, acting differently and seeming less closed off to men.
If I look at Cjet’s profile picture he seems like a handsome guy and I know many people who would go for that kind of thing, but I’ve never been attracted to the default American male vibe, even if their facial features are great. I like tall, skinny, sometimes slightly androgynous white (sometimes jewish) guys with pale skin and long dark hair, at the top end maybe men who could be YSL runway models, I don’t know. This isn’t an uncommon preference among women I grew up with and know, although it’s not the norm. Men who could be described and who might even describe themselves as ‘beautiful’, or at least going for that vibe. In my experience, these men always do quite well with women, even if they’re only average looking, because they have a lot of women friends and are into things that women like like fashion, the arts, literature. So it’s possible I have an inflated (or deflated in this case, I guess) view of how hard it is for the average man to get laid, because in general the men in my life who seem to cultivate a vibe of some kind do well, while the plain, default American kind of guys, even if they have good features and height, might struggle.
I’m not going to universally recommend ‘move to Brooklyn, grow out your hair, cultivate an air of mystery’ to young men struggling with women, but it probably would work for a substantial number of them.
Taking up a vibe isn't as simple as you make it out to be though! You have to find a vibe that is solidly in line with what you're working with. As a (presuming from your writing) gorgeous and intelligent woman, you have more ability to take up whatever aesthetic you choose, and being attractive you will carry it off.
For men, it is just not that simple to pick up a new style. It's not as simple as reading a magazine guide, buying the stuff, learning the lingo, and going to it. There are a great many styles that, even if I put effort into it, just don't match with who I am. A big part of my growing up and becoming attractive to women was realizing that the vibe/aesthetic I should be going for was trad all-American boy. Blond, blue eyed, broad shouldered, sweet, well-read, good family; God help me I spent my teenage years trying to be punk and failing completely. When I started playing to my strengths, I grew into it fast.
But finding one's unique vibe isn't easy for many men, and it isn't the sort of thing that one does simply by following orders. Which is where my old roommate failed. He did his homework in high school, studied hard in undergrad, worked incredibly hard in law school. But in his personal life, no one can tell him what to do with any successful odds.
I agree with most of your post. But this...
Isn't really true. He's a tall, skinny, relatively handsome Korean guy in his late twenties (with money)? Kpop-maxx. Clean-shaven, get the cross earings, the Kpop star haircut, the rockstar clothes (but slightly lower-key). There are girls writing fanfic about a slightly modified version of this guy. In NYC? Some pretty white girl will go for it, probably many more than that. He's a rare niche in the middle of a huge cultural fetish. What do you say to a hot white guy who can't get laid in Southeast Asia? "Go outside"?
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I'm not sure where I am in percentile amounts. I know men who had hundreds of partners (and I believe them because I've met dozens of their partners in the short time I knew them). But I probably know way more men who have had fewer partners than I have. Being in the 90th percentile wouldn't surprise me.
I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a cold approach. Like I have never met them before? Or they have no social connection to me? I've succeeded with women I've never met before, but it was often in situations where her friends knew my friends and some even knew me as well.
I had some success with okcupid back when Tinder was a new up and coming dating app. I suppose that is sort of a cold approach.
I think to be in the position to do that, or to just have one successful relationship with a woman can require a lot of work on the part of a man. It's emotional growth, career growth, physical growth, social growth, and just general personal success. Starting from having only a working dick at puberty and getting to the point of being a mature adult is what it takes.
I've talked about this subject before and compared it to getting a job. To some extent getting a job is easy. Submit a resume, have some job skills, and be able to show up and work. But that requires a whole bunch of assumptions, and you realize just how many assumptions when you give that advice to a three year old. There is a decade of learning and growing they need to do before that advice can apply. The same is true of sex and relationships. You can't just tell a freshly minted sexually active teen boy to go be confident and talk to a bunch of women in order to have sex. That boy needs about a decade of growth before they are good marriage material, or sexual chad material.
What seems to be happening in our society is that we have been pushing the age of early teen sexual dynamics later and later. This is maybe a good thing for young girls. But for young boys it means that the moment of their sexual maturity is also being delayed. They aren't doing the growing and learning soon enough.
To clarify why I think it is the most difficult thing:
I consider the completion of a man's sexual journey to be the difficult thing. That means a successful monogamous marriage, or sexual chadhood. They have done what they need to do to either swear off the pursuit of many women, or they can successfully engage in the sexual pursuit of many women.
When a young person applies to college all they are doing is submitting an application. The process of submitting an application is not very difficult. It takes less than a day. However, they can rightfully say it is the hardest thing they've ever done, especially if that application gives them a good chance of getting into a great college. The pre-requisites are the difficult part. Taking all the standardized tests, completing over a decade of school, the extra curriculars, the essays, etc.
The same is true of men reaching sexual maturity. The final steps are usually easy and straightforward. It's the previous decade of pre-requisites that was the hard part. Learning how to be funny, hold a conversation, learning how to read all the social cues, learning how to be a productive member of society, etc.
But many of the most promiscuous (straight) men haven’t done any of the above complex personal work, they’re just somewhat hot dudes who spend their twenties as bartenders or in an unsuccessful band or hanging around the cheaper parts of Brooklyn where they live with roommates doing various low skill jobs. I think this is a misunderstanding of ‘what it takes’ (not that I oppose self improvement for its own sake).
With the exclusion of star athletes or musicians/actors successful enough to have large numbers of groupies, the straight men who have the most sex (with women who aren’t prostitutes) are those who spend the most time around large numbers of drunk young women late at night. I don’t mean in a predatory way, necessarily, just in general. The jobs these people do are almost all low paid. The bartender who lives with four roommates in deepest bushwick and moonlights as an UberEats driver is getting laid more than the banker who lives in Murray Hill, all else (looks, charisma) being the same, just because of opportunity, even though the latter has more ‘of his shit together’ in the financial/career/etc sense.
My suspicion has always been that many men see it as an indignity to have to try to get laid, and that’s where the hangup is. Having to pursue feels like an insult. I don’t have any strict evidence of this, it’s just a gut feeling.
I’m also sure that many women see it as an indignity to have to try to find a husband/boyfriend. After all, it’s something that should just, you know, happen to them. And the thing is, they aren’t wrong, because a well-functioning society puts various structures in place in order to facilitate mating long-term and short-term, so that nobody has to structure their entire lifestyles around finding at keeping a mate with high and concerted effort. At the very least, it doesn’t sabotage male attempts at pursuit in various ways.
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Yes there are some men who acquire sex easily. I have known some. But you can't always be sure some of them weren't previously ugly ducklings.
Indignity feels like totally the wrong word. It certainly feels like a chore or a useless set of tasks after a while. It's also not much of a challenge after a while.
The requirement of a pursuit is a filter, but it's sometimes a filter that has entirely stopped working for certain men. And why wouldn't those men start to view the filter as a waste of everyone's time?
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Counterpoint- pursuing is really, really fun, and our society has to put a moderately high amount of effort into preventing men and older boys from doing so in inappropriate times, places, and manners.
I agree lots of men like it, but I’m talking more about those who don’t or who dislike having to do it.
And also those who have had a string of strikes (starting the vicious cycle of self loathing).
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Maybe we've had quite a cultural shift in the past ten years, but the most recent data I could dig up shows the median number of partners for a man is about 6, and men are probably inclined to inflate that number.
About 20% of men have had 15+ partners, and about 70% 40+, so 25 being 90th percentile feels about right.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5795598/ and https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm#numberlifetime
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Is there anything more you can say to elaborate on this?
Prior to my sexual maturity I would say my main goal in life was sex. Afterwards I would say sex was part of my life but no longer the main goal. I could have other goals. Like having a family, a good career, and a happy life.
I think many men live through the same thing. Either they settle down with one woman and give up on the single minded pursuit of sex (marriage), or they can achieve sex so easily that it ceases to be a meaningful goal (chadhood).
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Sex isn’t everything.
Not having it is.
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Consider dating women from more traditional societies with marriage and children as your goal, and adopt some more traditionally male traits, especially the kind that would make a woman feel as if you can provide for and protect her and your future children.
Where do you even find such people? Do they even exist?
The answer I've been given most is religion, which I guess makes sense in broad terms but is totally impractical if you're a modern westerner. Much as I like cult hopping myself, you can't just join random foreign belief systems until you find one with chicks. Especially if you actually have beliefs of your own and limited time.
I think it's kind of ridiculous that I personally know not just one but three very wealthy western men, of good character, with looks that vary from decent to could-be-a-model, that could fund a tradwife and kids no questions asked and yet can't even procure a girlfriend.
Maybe it really is that much easier for passport bros and they'd find instant success in a more enlightened country.
Myself I'm this close to falling for one of these matchmaker scams on the off chance that somebody can source the mythical tradwife and not the sea of single moms dating sites have condemned me with.
Do you know anyone in a long term marriage to a mail-order bride? She might have a niece who needs a green card.
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Refugee camps.
A rare sight in the US (I hope).
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I believe this paragraph is unfinished
Indeed it was, thank you. This 10 000 character limit is playing tricks on me.
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You don't have negati? How do even pursue a woman without negati?
The Matrix took my Negati, very sad times
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Is this one of those nonsensical zoomer words for simple concepts like "rizz" or are you joking?
Genuinely can't tell.
It's a joke.
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I think it's probably the beginning of negative, but not positive.
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