Yeah, except as with EVERY OTHER SOCIAL TREND, its more women than men. Same with LGBT identification.
This is all tied up in the same basic cause.
If you want to reverse it, target the more susceptible gender.
The data from this report display an interesting divide regarding gender. Teen girls are more likely than teen boys to report that social media negatively affects their sleep, productivity, self-confidence, and mental health overall (Duffy, 2025).
Its the women.
faceh
2hr ago
That just pushes the problem off on those countries. What about the men that live THERE?
And, as I said not too long ago:
I'm reactionary enough to suggest that an average male shouldn't have to leave the country of his birth to have a prospect of finding a wife. That's a major social failure.
"We shouldn't work at solving this massive domestic social issue as long as men can travel abroad to avoid facing it" is, at its core, a STUNNING admission of impotence and/or dereliction.
Here's a question: Would you support an immigration policy that specifically EXCLUDED young males in favor of inviting in as many nubile fertile single women from abroad as possible?
Which group, do you suppose, might oppose this policy?
Solution: form your own community.
Been at it for three years. Here's a report I made a year ago:
I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.
I'm active in my gym, which is full of great people but turns out most of them are busy with their own lives. I went through a period of putting together parties, get-togethers, and casual hangouts on at least a monthly basis.
Ironically, my most consistent attendees were the ones who managed to pair off (not with people they met through my events) and thus became... less consistent.
Once again, I find myself one of the few unpaired people in my group. Which makes me now the only one with any time to put in to building events. And I'm trying to reforge my close friend group for like the 5th time in my life.
If I go back and search my past posts as a compendium on my dating attempts over the years, it will mostly have the same complaints, over and over again. I PUT IN ALL THE EFFORT, WOMEN ARE COMPLETELY DISINTERESTED BECAUSE THE APPS GIVE THEM INFINITE OPTIONALITY.
My lament a year ago:
There's also a particular dynamic with females. I specifically try to have mixed-gender gatherings (part of my goal is to get people of opposite sex to form connections and maybe create dates and relationships), but with females in particular, they tend to only want to come if they can 'know' that other females will be there. And if they aren't coordinating directly with other females but instead through me, the organizer, there's an information asymetry. If I tell them "oh yeah plenty of women are coming" how much do they trust my word? So last minute flakes are probably the rule there.
There is exactly zero, zilch NO social pressure on women to actually honor commitments, show up to events if they're not feeling it, or do anything other than passively participate and then leave when something more interesting arises.
This is approximately the same approach they display towards romantic relationships in general.
I don't just have studies, I have my own emperical research over years now. Its the women. The problem is with them.
A close friend in Chicago did something similar with Latin dancing.
Had a friend who did this regularly get me into some classes and social and gave it a good ol' try. ABYSMAL gender ratio. I think all guys have the same idea. Most women that show up bring their own man. I wouldn't mind learning the skill but for finding a partner it'd be a waste of time that could be used on more fruitful endeavors (none of my endeavors have been fruitful in finding a partner, of course).
Any space that has a decent gender ratio won't have one for long if men get the idea that they can show up and have a chance at meeting a single lady. I've seen this in every single context imaginable.
Understand that my cynicism is entirely earned, in addition to studied.
faceh
19hr ago
So I'm curious (genuinely) as to what precisely you think the correct approach is that has decent odds of success.
What community out there is welcoming to new members, gives them a true purpose and puts their contributory efforts to good uses, and doesn't mind, and in fact supports members eventually pairing off together?
And, critically, has a decent gender ratio?
No cults, please.
I attest that, at large, in mainstream society, these functionally do not exist any longer.
faceh
22hr ago
That's not how relationships happen anymore.
Its been replaced with online interactions and apps.
And people just NOT forming relationships. The doors you're describing are just shut, by default.
You describe my PREFERRED method of finding a partner. You're also describing the exact method that failed me repeatedly over the years when it turns out the women in a given community aren't actually looking for partners from said community.
This is my point. I've gone through this process, I've failed, and I've tried to adapt.
Its OTHER PEOPLE who have the mindset that led here. I'm just dealing with the fallout.
faceh
22hr ago
Ones who expect foreign travel.
I mean, you see them on dating apps a lot, but I think they're just harder to pin down dint of being so traveled.
Not really a big point either way. Lots of women advertise their preference for traveling.
Its slightly rarer that one has been actually well traveled in their youth.
faceh
23hr ago
I think there's women like this out there.
I think they are extremely hard to locate if you don't already know them or their families.
faceh
23hr ago
We have evidence. Nothing I've seen would be quite sufficient to convict anyone of note.
The one that raises my suspicion is the so-called Lolita Express. If you were going to either pressure a VIP into a compromising act or reassure them there was no chance of getting caught in said act, 30,000 feet up on a large Boeing aircraft is pretty ideal.
faceh
23hr ago
On the one hand that is likely correct.
On the other, Cliven Bundy is still a free man.
faceh
23hr ago
A lot of the language you used implied very strict control against a woman's wishes.
I mean, I noted that women left to their own devices have gotten fat, covered in tattoos, and do weird things with their hair. And they're abjectly unhappy too.
Who else should rein them in, if NOT their husbands?
It's clear that you think of yourself as a benevolent dictator, but your still describing a dictatorship.
Yes. Actual dictators have wives too.
But I only extend my dicatorship to the boundaries of my actual, personal property. And, it turns out, I don't view a wife as personal property.
"fair and equitable for any woman willing to help raise my kids." Language imply that this control persists after she's had kids, and that the kids are yours (singular) not yours (plural).
Do you think the phrase "help raise my kids" implies that I'll be involved with and assisting this process too, as in there's mutual exchange here?
I dunno, once again I just try to use the terms that actually express my beliefs as precisely as possible. You're pattern matching them to a type of guy that is basically nonexistent in the modern era.
faceh
1d ago
Seen it suggested that a multibillionaire could do a version of the 'charter city' thing except they create literal 'company towns' where they revitalize some downtrodden area with a new industry (even if heavily subsidized at first) and make sure all the townspeople are employed, safe, and well-fed.
Which can translate into "will fight to protect you if the feds come knocking." You just have to be willing to let much of your wealth intentionally trickle down.
Elon has sort of done this with Starbase, Texas.
This does little to tackle the primary issue head on, though.
faceh
1d ago
Vance states he is an Epstein conspiracy theorist (but not in the popular way), in the interview he focuses more on the financial aspects of whatever Epstein got up to and focuses away from the pedophile stuff, hard to tell if he really believes nothing is there on that end.
This has always been about my view on it. Been aware of Epstein since around 2007 (grew up in Palm Beach County, where he got prosecuted).
My nuanced view is that the pedo-ish stuff is bad, very bad. But it was never the end goal or the raison d'etre of the conspiracy. It created leverage, and the leverage was used for... WHAT? Financial shenanigans was certainly part of it.
Hence why I'm a bit annoyed (not surprised) that everyone wants to string the folks on the epstein list of specifically for sex crimes, rather than possibly more broadly impactful activities that would be very interesting to uncover.
Cognitive rigidity is a choice. You should get over it. You can be happy or you can be right, which would you prefer?
Thus far I'm managing to be both.
Most people are managing neither, it would appear. I'm cognitively rigid insofar as my process has brought me towards what I actually want in life, and I see others processes do not.
Note, I may have a different overall set of priorities than the average person.
Their partners? People talk, I’m not sure about your personal platonic ecosystem but are you really so spoilt for choice that you can afford to burn bridges and close doors of opportunity?
Which bridges and doors are you referring to?
People aren't getting in relationships at all these days. The doors have been closed already.
Its worst among the young. Nobody is reckoning with this in a meaningful way.
The whole problem is that whatever mindsets you're trying to talk me into has led to this disastrous landscape.
Why would I change MY mindset when I can directly observe that doing so doesn't actually improve the situation?
faceh
1d ago
My autism is sufficiently advanced that yes, I am simply predicting with confidence that the natural/inborn evolutionary psychology factors will kick in and I will feel that specific way in the future with near certainty.
But you realize how many steps have to happen at this point to even get there, what else can I do but talk in theoretical terms?
I've said it before (though I can't find the link at present), if she's willing to bear and raise my children, she will receive my reverence eternally even if her looks slide.
Indeed, that's part of the point. If she is willing to accept the travails of pregnancy, I will dig in deep to my provider role, and will accept the tradeoffs to her personal appearance because the outcome we're achieving is SO mutually beneficial I can't imagine deciding against it. My consent to her gaining weight is both implicit in the act of getting pregnant and I will happily make it explicit and praise her to the heavens for the sacrifice.
I'm mostly seeking the parts of a good and compatible personality that happen to correspond with keeping oneself healthy and aesthetically pleasing... while not overindexing on that measure.
Because guess what, those are traits I'd like to pass on to and inculcate in my kids! Its all tied up in the same ultimate objective.
"I will track what you eat, how much you exercise, and select your wardrobe" which is how it kind of came across the first comment.
Yes, and I'm suggesting you should interrogate a bit why you jumped to THAT interpretation from the rip rather than asking clarifying questions. "I will get a final say in how she dresses and maintains herself," to me, means closer to "she's making decisions independently (or with my counsel), but I hold veto power when I think it necessary." Tracking how much she eats and exercises sounds like a freaking DRAG, man. Although maybe more possible with AI agents. She wants to get ice cream for dessert I will provide without blinking. She wants to eat ice cream for every meal... imma put my foot down.
I try to be as specific as I can and avoid ambiguity in my language, and don't always succeed, but man, if I wanted to say "I WILL CONTROL ALL HER FOOD INTAKE AND WILL PHYSICALLY RESTRAIN HER FROM GETTING A HAIRCUT" I would have said that.
And whilst I can SEE how you could get to that interpretation, I would suggest that isn't the most charitable or straightforward takeaway unless your priors suggest any signal of wanting some control in a relationship indicates being a micromanaging overbearing control freak.
Hopefully I've given sufficient clarity now.
faceh
1d ago
I never say it out loud in person with a woman I might be interested in.
I don't intend to change my mindset, when its everyone else's mindset that sucks.
If it were working for them, they wouldn't be in the same boat and also mentally worse off than I am.
If every time a relationship fails, you make an adaptation that would have ensured it worked, that does not necessarily mean you are becoming overall more desirable to the women that you want. Meanwhile, you are slowly giving up on something you value deeply.
Yes. I am in a constant state of self-evaluation to see if I feel as though I have strayed too far from my 'authentic' self.
And the adaptations I make are not so much to 'ensure' that a failed relationship would have worked. I'm genuinely just trying to maximize the chances that I can encounter and then attract the sort of woman who is more likely to work it out with me. I have to filter aggressively, I have to maximize the space I'm searching but also minimize wasted time by not searching spaces that will turn up false positives. Its a DOOZY of an optimization problem.
And I also have to avoid all the various traps that dating has set for men in this day and age to boot. This sucks. Better men than I have failed. Nonetheless, I have the irrational confidence that I can somehow defy the odds or die trying.
Not to put too fine a point on it: Of all the women I have dated with intent... only one of them has gone on to eventually get a stable, lasting relationship (so far). The rest have crashed and burned in various ways. That one gained a bunch of weight and is perennially single. This one got knocked up and is a single mom. The one over there had a mental health crisis and hasn't surfaced since. And of course my high school sweetheart died.
Conclusion: those would not have been successful relationships regardless of my own contributions. I don't feel smug about this fact, I realized that I was damaged in my own way that led me to not see the issues at the time. As is my way, I did the hard work to try and fix myself as best I can. THE WORLD AS IT STANDS DOES NOT REWARD FIXING YOURSELF.
I'm not perfect, but I can very, VERY safely say by this point that I have my life in better shape and I am in a happier place than any of the women I once considered prospective wives.
Their loss, not mine.
The task is to find a woman with the necessary features that a relationship CAN be successful. The terrible fact is that the current social pressures actively despoils women in a way that makes that less likely. There's far, far fewer such women than we need.
Hence, as part of my campaign, I've declared war on the current status quo.
But its very hard to both fight the social forces that create this hellscape WHILST navigating the hellscape itself searching for a partner, so again I have to optimize where I can.
faceh
1d ago
I told this story in another thread. Its even more tragic than you'd think. She broke it off with me and DIED not too long thereafter
To say that was a formative event for my psyche is underselling it.
I am significantly more of a naive or fatalist romantic
My Brother in Christ (said completely without irony), that is who I am on the deepest level.
I fully expected I was going to marry my high school sweetheart. But we went to different colleges so you can guess how that turned out.
My entire relationship history is me trying my damndest to wrest a romantic happy ending from an increasingly cynical world. Each time I fail, I make some adaptation that hopefully improves my odds, and each time the reality of the situation proves I wasn't cold and calculating enough. So I become more strategically machievellian with the instrumental intent of finding someone to partner with and then GTFO of the toxic pool.
I've done everything I can in the past three years to maximize by 'social surface area' so I can have that chance encounter with the love of my life.
And unfortunately all this has done, now, is expose me to every single variant of dysfunction you can imagine. I've observed other people's relationships fail for the silliest, most avoidable of reasons, I've seen the very depths of toxic female behavior. I'm still fanning a small, candle-esque flame inside of me that believes a romantic happy ending is possible. But the stats are what the stats are, I won't look away.
If I were able to acquire the necessary power, I would radically restructure the social order enough to allow the sensitive young man to once again be competitive enough in the sexual marketplace that they CAN have their organic, fated encounter with their soulmate and expect the "live happily" to actually last "ever after."
On the one hand its a natural thing. If the parents are doing really well, making sure their kids are comfortable (and, more directly, making sure their beloved Katie never has to do porn or shack up with a drug dealer) is what they would do as an extension of their established role.
The second/third order effect of "Katie now expects to live in a 5000 square foot house and drive a late-model SUV and will reject anyone who can't offer that" is a little harder to see.
The very SECOND I hear that a woman has left the country on vacation more than once (with the exception of Mexico travel, I guess), I pretty much know my chances have dropped to negligible.
faceh
1d ago
This is kind of the problem. I'm familiar with the concept of 'tradeoffs' and accept that. If I somehow land a smoking hot redhead with DD's, I can accept she might be a bit profligate in spending, which I will corral as best I can.
But the women are generally lacking so many of the desirable traits I'd look for that there's not much to trade off against!
I realized a while back that a lot of women were raised in McMansions with parents who basically paid for everything, from cars to clothes to fancy knick knacks, and of course university education, from the time she could walk.
And inherently, they will expect the same from their spouse. But that's impossible for a normal guy in early-adult stages to procure.
By becoming as wealthy as we have, we've now made it so that the general norm of "you, a dirt poor peon, marry another dirt poor peon, and gradually build your life up to a higher standard" a thing of the past.
Women who came up in prosperity would inherently have to accept a (temporary!) standard of living hit to marry a guy in his early-mid twenties, unless his family is massively wealthy. Women are generally wired to never, EVER accept a loss in status and standing and so this thought is probably vomit-inducing.
And there's now ample evidence that women, when given economic/financial advantages, tend to opt against having families/kids.
Again the solution is to economically boost men, or at least, stop the policies that are economically de-boosting them.
I don't mind competing with other men in the abstract. Especially when the competition is "friendly" (i.e. they won't kill you to take your woman if she chooses you). I dislike that under the current norms, the competition is entirely opaque. She's got 20 other dudes in her messages and you have no clue who any of them are, what they look like, what tactics they're using. I can't be effective at competition if I don't know what I'm up against.
But the blackpill is realizing the pool of women you're competing for is heavily tainted, and the supply of women you'd genuinely want to marry is shrinking. Relative to the population of guys that want to lock her down, your base odds are pretty horrendous. I did a not-well-received post in the CW war thread on this topic. If you want though, any of the mainstream LLM's will run an up-to-date calculation for you!
So the thought that I might have to be physically fighting other dudes to the death for the few remaining marriageable women crosses my mind occasionally. Thankfully I trained martial arts while many other guys just went for general aesthetics.
The Vantablack pill is noticing that you're not just competing with your peers... but professional athletes, millionaires/billionaires, and various boomers who are sitting in various positions of wealth, power, and authority and are happy to also snag the occasional 20-30 year old for a fling.
Elon Musk is going around inseminating women seemingly at will. We have no legal or social guardrail on this, so assume other billionaires and high status males do something similar, which again cuts into the supply of attractive, marriageable women. Historically this is closer to the norm for humans. So you, regular middle class dude whose family doesn't have old money, whose job is not high status, who doesn't own a company or have power over thousands of humans, who is locked out of positions of power by older generations who view you as a rival... sorry bud, you just don't get to reproduce unless the random lottery draw for one of the last few decent women comes up in your favor. So sad.
Sorry, didn't mean to get THAT dark, but I think this is representative of where a LOT of guys heads' are at, (remember that spree shooter in Canada with the manifesto, last month?) and there's no discussion of real solutions on the social level.
Do you not think an effect size that is 25% larger is significant, meaningful, important?
Okay.
Young women are over twice as likely to say social media has influenced their opinions than young men.
Hence why young women are about 2-3x more likely to identify as liberal/democrat than young men, ENTIRELY explained by the women shifting whilst the men stay steady.
Which, well, we notice that white liberals have the highest rates of poor mental health among political ideologies.
And women are at least 2x as likely to be on antidepressant medication than males. This divide is starker among the younger generation (i.e. the trend has changed for the worse in women only.)
Quoth:
So this all tracks.
And they're now less likely than men to want to get married. Female desire to get married dropped by 22 percentage points over 50 years. Male's dropped... 2. Its the women.
Female religiosity and church attendance dropped off a cliff. from 30% unaffiliated to 50% unaffiliated in less than 10 years. A 20 point shift. Men's shifted... about 6 points. For the first time EVER there's a religiosity gap in favor of young men. Its the women.
Oh, and here's data that 3x as many women under 30 hold a negative view of young men, compared to the reverse. 21% vs. 7%. Oh its 'only" 14 points, right?
When does it become pure epistemic malfeasance to pretend these distinctions don't exist or don't have significant impact on outcomes?
Its the women.
I'm not ignoring the harm to men.
I'm just noticing that every single article examining gender-based social issues pathologizes male behavior and either implicitly or explicitly excuses female behavior. Its almost impossible to find article even WRITTEN by a male that explains their issues sympathetically.
Anyhow. Solutions? Here's my previous thoughts:
I'd like to see some feasible measure developed that can 'quantify' the benefits and harms of social media use and THEN we can craft policies that regulate the issue, just like we do with cigarettes, toxic waste, and like we USED to do with gambling. My general prescription is that we should add friction to the vices.
If we can provably detect that social media detracts from attention span, mental health, educational attainment, and financial stability, then surely we can discuss regulating them at the source, right?
(remember those studies I posted up there with women being more influenced by social media AND having worse mental health?) In practice, flat bans might be the ONLY thing that provides sufficient friction.
Other possible solutions: require women wear a watch device that counts down the days of their highest fertility so she's under no illusions about her timeline for marriage and kids.
My favorite proposal to bring up: Return the funding/loan standards for higher education to their pre-1993 levels. But this would detract from womens' ability to go to college so I'm SURE there'll be a fit pitched about it.
If it isn't clear by now I've considered this whole thing from just about every possible angle with as much data as I can find.
I'm still hammering away on my point here because I have yet to have a single solid refutation: Women's behavior has altered drastically over the past 30 years. Mens hasn't shifted that much.
Meanwhile EVERYONE reports being less happy.
Its the women.
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