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What if the incel problem is downstream from the problem of marriage and therefore relationships being unattractive arrangements for both men and women, but especially men? This just came to me, but I used to be a loner guy. Pretty much the entirety of my 20's was spent alone. Tragic from a certain perspective, but I'm not crying over it. Now that I've had girlfriends I'm struggling with the idea of actually staying with one long term. Not because I'm emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise incompatible with the women available to me, but I just don't see the point. I take on all this risk and responsibility... for what? They take on a dependent role and have children (probably unattractive for them) for what? The answer can't just be sex. I feel like everything that once made marriage an attractive or necessary arrangement for both parties has been totally eroded and now we're just running on the fumes of the fuel that once made marriage desirable.
The implicit point of this analysis isn't that men have become especially unattractive and this is what's fueling the loneliness epidemic, but that the clear obsolescence of marriage has taken away any motivation for men to become attractive to women and to actually try.
Women probably feel the same thing and aren't trying to be "marriageable" in the way they once might have, but their role as the selector makes the problems that result from this societal issue seem less serious, though obviously they are feeling the effects as well. I think most women want to be married with kid(s) eventually, but invisibly, imperceptibly, their opportunity for accomplishing this passes them by, and they either have to settle for a man they otherwise wouldn't have if they knew what the deal actually was in their youth, or they go it alone.
I've recently (in the last year, I think) started to get a sinking feeling that there's been pretty significant shift in the payoff matrix for marriage or even long-term relationships. A combination of men needing to work harder than ever to actually attract a decent mate, and conversely women having to do less and less to be considered 'marriage material'.
In a sense, EVERY woman in the dating scene is just a milder version of Natasha Aponte where they can make all the interested men jump through hoops to compete for her attention while she sits back and judges their performance. And isn't even obligated to pick one at the end. Far as I can tell that lady is still single.
So it becomes pretty reasonable for a guy to look at all the effort and money he'd have to spend to locate a mate and outcompete the other males in the population for her attention, compare that to what he's getting if wins (that is, a companion he can hopefully have regular sex with but who won't cook, clean, may not even give him kids, and will be generally insufferable to deal with half the time) and decide he should just focus on grinding out more wealth for himself and try again later when his relative status improves.
The girlfriends that I've had (including the one I actually proposed to, and then got dumped by prior to the wedding), in retrospect, brought virtually NOTHING to the table that I couldn't have gotten with a male roommate. They weren't good cooks, generally didn't contribute much to household upkeep (despite contributing plenty to the mess), spent copious amounts of time on insta/tiktok/netflix, and had the emotional regulation ability of a teenager at best. The girls I've dated in recent years are not much better, where the one thing they could actually sell themselves with (willingness to bear and raise kids!) seems to be the last thing on their mind.
So getting a GF means you can have sex, yes. But we've all heard the stories of bedrooms going dead after you've tied the knot.
Yeah, if you find a decent one it will contribute a lot to financial stability, that's a strong benefit. But if she ever divorces you it will be the most financially crippling event that could happen short of a chronic gambling addiction.
So on balance a male roommate could still win out.
I'm half considering making that a qualifying question I ask of women I date. "What do you have to offer that I couldn't get from some random guy I met through Craiglist."
Ties into my point that corporate jobs are a substitute for a husband for a woman in her 20's. And there are very few warnings being given to women that "hey, if you put off family formation until your late twenties or even thirties, you are making it SUBSANTIALLY harder on yourself to ever achieve it."
So the current zeitgeist is leading to an outcome where women 'unknowingly' burn their most important years in ways that aren't conducive to their long term happiness.
AND YET, people are still getting married and holding on to (seemingly) happy marriages, kids and all.
Another point for random guy: In the event of a home invader, having a male roommate instead of a girlfriend/wife means the fight will be 2-on-1 instead of 1v1.
That could be a good “Man vs. Bear”-type question for Twitter and TikTok seethe. “For the men out there with wives or live-in girlfriends, who would you rather live with? Your wife/girlfriend but no more sex or blowjobs, or a random guy you can pick from Craigslist?”
Random guy could himself be a threat. Better a female roommate that can be bullied into at least doing her chores, than dumbfuck larry who spit shines his plate before nuking another hot pocket.
For the most part though, the problem is that women on dating apps have an extremely limited window of Compatibility before they are removed. Good women shack up fast and are taken off the market, or get spammed by shitty dudes and shut down the app, or go on a series of unfulfilling situatkonships and shut down the app. Those who remain are women who like drama, or are undateable for any other reason.
It is quite commonly seen on this board and others that the most viable population for mildly asocial professional westerners is asian women, since they tend to despise asian men and are not fat enough or crazy enough to be disqualifying candidates for dateability. There is the pretty severe risk that an asian woman on dating apps TURNS INTO her white sisters and falls into shrewdom, but thats her fate to bear. Optimal strategy for women should be to date up and secure the bag asap, not fight in the thunderdome to be Chad Thundercocks leavings.
Yeah.
There's not nearly enough pressure on women on the apps to just HURRY UP AND PICK SOMEONE or go look elsewhere. The ones who stick around, even if they're not crazy, are basically grazing like herd animals, wandering from one patch of grass to another and eschewing any real decision.
Your complaints can also apply to guys, mind. If a guy has been on the apps for a long time, gone on dates, and is still swiping, there's gotta be something about him that is keeping him from successfully entering a relationship.
But yeah, seems like getting 'lucky' on the apps is just that. Luck. You have to manage to catch a lady who is inexperienced and naively entering the arena, hasn't been picked up by a Chad, hasn't been scared off by the waves of creeps, and hasn't gotten mild PTSD from a series of bad outcomes.
And most guys are lowkey aware of this, so they're all on the lookout for the fresh faces to jump on ASAP before they're spoiled. Which ultimately worsens the "overwhelming wave of creeps" issue.
Hell of a collective action problem to solve. Not that the appmakers want anyone to solve it.
When my galpals whine about not finding men to stick with them, I ask them to consider women. Apparently this is autistic to verbalize, because for all their claims that sexuality is a spectrum most insist on liking cock, preferably attached to a 6/6/6 who can 'banter'.
This of course happens because my friends are older women who are comfortable explicating their preferences to Wrongthink William, and when younger these women gaslit themselves on what they actually wanted. Having wasted years of their lives hating themselves for fucking Chad and then displacing their self hate onto Chad, who then rightfully concludes these women aren't serious, the rapidly diminishing physical value these women command has turned the deluge into a shower. At least in the deluge there was the chance of finding a gem in the flow, but in this state they find their pickings increasingly unsatisfying.
The funniest thing is that for the women that do say 'sure lets see what the carpetmuncher crowd is like', its STILL full of dudes! Shitloads of creeps just say they are women or nonbinary and put their full 100% shitty male profile picture and details there. One girl claims she had her account banned for transphobic abuse when she matched with one of these fakers to berate him for abusing the system. I mock them all for the chickens coming home to roost for them, but I still feel for them and wish they can find happiness. Alas the cat-per-woman average is reaching 2 for these girls, and I think thats tipping point but I dont' know why I think that.
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Sure, but Asian women also tend to receive As and Bs unusually frequently, which mean that parts of their bodies those letters suggest are a given size are larger and smaller than the average man wants, at the same time.
Plenty of perverts raised on anime love Delicious Flat Chest. Between fat and booby/butty versus slim and flat, slim and flat usually wins. That is also of course influenced by scarcity, but thats a different dynamic to examine.
The confounding factor is that most of those DFC-loving perverts are probably also ped—ah, sorry, lolicons.
Go on anime-styled erotic art websites and you’ll find heaps of drawings of girls with massively oversized chests (and somewhat less universally, legs and posteriors). Of course, the dichotomy you proposed was “flat and thin versus round and fat”; if that’s the case, then flat would probably win simply because fat is so repulsive. But for reasonable values of the thickness coefficient, I wager that curviness wins out.
This assessment is largely based on my own lived experience (although does looking at 2D porn really count as living?), but I remember one guy (who roleplays as an Orientalist slave trader—weird shtick) who did a more thorough analysis of popular tags on these sites and came to a similar conclusion.
Waist-Hip Ratio is a better overall guide than cup size or bodyweight. A flat chested girl will have no problems if she's skinny, a slightly softer girl will have no problems if she's well endowed. It's the flat fat girls that need to worry. Everything else is matters of taste.
Maybe, but the absolute sizes going into that calculation also matter, which I think is why certain people (particularly Asians themselves) use the bust-waist-hips model when discussing female anatomy (worth noting that because it's usually given in centimeters, it's going to inflate the importance of small differences).
I think the waist-hip ratio very much does matter to "lolicons", though; where most men prefer 1:1.5 waist-hip (or perhaps golden ratio), I suspect that group would find smaller numbers and a 1:1 ratio more desirable because, uh, that's what "lolis" look like (and I think most men are turned off by that for that reason). And "flat but skinny" doesn't entirely rule out 1:1.5 on its own, either.
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Much fewer people are doing this if a certain graph can be believed.
I believe the graph, but there's still those managing to do achieve something like the traditional life trajectory.
My younger brother got married last year, and is expecting a kid in about a month. He doesn't own a home yet but he has got everything else going for him.
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Marriage is very important to Mormons and Gays. That is an anti-signal to normies. Sorry but Internet Atheism and the fight for gay marriage has poisoned the concept for at least a generation.
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You should have kids. It’s incredibly, unbelievably rewarding. Unless you’re literally on track to be the next Lincoln, having kids will be by far the most meaningful and impactful thing you do. And kids need a stable family life, so you should get married first.
I'm begging the people who push this line (which is true on its face) to actually run some calculations and estimate for the class how many actually marriageable women are available in the pool.
How many are single, heterosexual, haven't had kids already, are not grossly overweight, are not riddled with mental disorders, don't have a huge bodycount or any Onlyfans, and are actually interested in having and raising kids in a committed, monogamous relationship.
Otherwise you're basically telling guys to go bobbing for apples in a tub full of acid.
If you’re middle class, live in the downtown core (rather than fat suburbs) of a major coastal city and are under 30 and dating under 30 year old women then…yeah, there are a pretty large number of these women, tens or hundreds of thousands of them depending on where you are. Certainly enough not to ‘give up’.
If you're living in a city the number of male suitors is going to be large as well.
So it seems likely that the males are going to be in a state of hypercompetition until they get lucky enough to pull an eligible woman. And many, many won't get so lucky.
And the harder the males compete, the less worthwhile the actual reward is, which will lead some to "drop out."
The stats on males without relationships seem to bear this out.
Why is the number of eligible men higher than the number of eligible women? 5’6 Salvadoran construction workers and 6’ software engineers and guys in the hood with records aren’t competing for the same women.
Multiple reasons. At least partially because of stuff like this:
https://nypost.com/2024/06/14/sports/bill-belichick-72-is-dating-24-year-old-former-cheerleader/
A 70 year old man can date a 24 year old.
https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a45069426/who-is-leonardo-dicaprio-girlfriend-vittoria-ceretti/
A 50 year old can date a 25 year old.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/05/us/billy-joel-marries-girlfriend-alexis-roderick/index.html
A 66 year old can marry a 33 year old and pop out two kids with her.
Literally any heterosexual male aged 20-80 can try to compete for the same pool of desireable 18-30 year old females.
And social norms aren't pressuring against this. No, this isn't limited to celebrities, those are just the ones that get attention.
Every single 20-something woman taken off the market by an older man is one less available for the young men. Which by definition will decrease their chances of finding one.
Stats bear out that women are significantly more likely to be dating or married to a "much" older man than a man is a much older woman.
And young men can see these headlines and realize what it means for them.
Then of course there's my point that women are using corporations as a substitute for husbands
So men have to compete with megacorps, too.
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Have you done it? Anecdotally in my locality (SF) basically every late-20s/early-30s woman I know fits the bill. I have a bunch of female friends like this actively searching.
I've run numbers in the aggregate. I'm not standing by them as anything other than a starting point:
About 40% are obese. We've already thinned things out (heh) significantly right there. Maybe Ozempic will save the day.
19% are single moms in the U.S. and Canada. Although I imagine that changes drastically based on race, because I wouldn't have believed that number on first glance.
Around 5-7% are LGBT... although that's much higher for Gen Z women.
Somewhere around 25-27% have had mental illness diagnoses (not counting the severity). Might be 30%+ for the 18-35 year olds that we're talking about)
Around 28% have had 5 or more sex partners. 5 is an arbitrary cutoff, and I CATEGORICALLY DO NOT BELIEVE THE NUMBERS on this type of survey, but again, not an encouraging sign. Difficult to find hard data on how many have been strippers, or prostitutes, or sugar babies, or had Onlyfans pages.
If you want more reliable data take a look at STD rates by gender. Or don't. Its not a fun read. (This one IS hugely disparate based on race, to be fair).
And finally, drumroll please, somewhere around 40% of young women are left/democrat leaning. That's before you examine unmarried women specifically. Something close to 70% of single women are probably on the left, politically. Go ahead young man, take a swim in that pond, I'm sure it'll be fine. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” but barely any that are safe to eat.
So we're likely looking at a scarily small % of single women who are relatively chaste, mentally stable, straight, and politically 'moderate', AND also not grossly overweight. And this is what any guy trying to intentionally date and find a relationship is encountering.
And that's before we get into a guy trying to find a match in looks or intelligence.
And as I said in a different comment, women just aren't bringing much to the table to counter the risks, when divorce is still prevalent and doesn't favor the males.
I haven't done the analysis to figure out how these various stats interact (i.e. obviously there will be crossover, so you can't just treat all of these like independent factors), but my gut feeling is it won't help.
And keep in mind, almost by definition the most marriageable ones will get picked up early and removed from the pool and stay out of the pool (people capable of maintaining stable relationships tend to stay in stable relationships. Surprise!). So selection effects would suggest that you're far more likely to encounter the dregs when you're actively searching.
And what makes it particularly bleak is running the numbers on the number of single males in the U.S., and consider how they're ALL chasing the same pool of women, almost regardless of the guy's age. A 50 year old can still have a fling with a 25 year old.
I would guess that what is actually GEOGRAPHICALLY AVAILABLE to a given man will vary too. SF may be a particularly unique circumstance compared to anywhere else. But the type of male you're competing against will also probably be top 1% too.
So yeah, MY read on the situation inevitably leads to the blackpill.
I want people to get married and have kids, but I feel like I can't, in good faith, tell guys to just bite the bullet and marry someone as quickly as possible when there's a veritable minefield out there.
Some of these are legit (like fertility) but if you’re giving up on having kids because your potential wife slept with 6 guys before you or is liberal, it’s an incredible self-own and you’re shutting yourself out of the most joyous thing you will ever experience in life over really tiny details. Obviously nobody is forcing you to compromise but I really hope you and others reading this don’t sacrifice your happiness on the alter of weird twitter dating discourse.
Please don't minimize like this. I didn't report the comment because I believe in addressing things like this head on instead of running to the Mods.
This isn't "weird Twitter dating discourse" this is, as the kids say, "lived experience."
I spent part of my 20s trying to find Mrs. Tollbooth in order to settle down. I kept an "open mind" the way mainstream culture told me to and didn't care about past promiscuity, political incompatibility, their status as a child of divorce and/or poor relationship with father.
Each one of these relationships failed catastrophically for what I recognize now as very significant character and personality failures. I'll admit that I probably didn't do enough to highlight and try to correct bad behavior (again, I was trying to be accepting) and, in at least one case, sort of gave up but kept having sex because sex is fun (I view this now as personal weakness. I wonder what your average sex positive person would say).
So correlation is not causation, right? That these women had "questionable" backgrounds doesn't mean that those background caused these bad situations, right? Bullshit. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. These women had failed to demonstrate a high-trust and durable relationship with any man in their life up to that point (one was even openly, frequently, and hostile-y critical of her very mild mannered and milquetoast brother). Why in the hell would I take all of the available data and throw it out because "don't believe what you read on Twitter"
I should've been fishing in other streams. I realize that now and that's what I do now. I've also cleaned my own act up over the course of several years. My fear is that what @2rafa said in another comment somewhere in this thread is true - I missed the boat on good pair-bonding in my 20s and now will have to "settle" for a woman who did the same in her 20s, but likely has the same view as I do now. Is that really settling and will I quietly resent her for life? Probably not, that's stupid. The fear remains.
But @faceh isn't being some sort of Twitter edgelord when he crunches them numbers and comes up with "welp, blackpill might be on the menu." He's reflecting the reality of thousands of younger unmarried men. And that reality is now manifesting in meaningful ways
Yep. I fell for a few girls who had classic red flags (grew up without father. Claimed to be molested when younger. And/or were on various psych meds, for instance) and I BENT OVER BACKWARDS to be accommodating.
My efforts were not recognized or appreciated or reciprocated, and ultimately the relationships failed in EXACTLY the way you would expect given the stereotypes. The lady blows it up with some irrational, out-of-pocket behavior which completely ignores the actual history of the relationship. Total waste of time and effort to achieve a predictable result.
Eventually you get sick of ignoring your gut and taking chances on the hope that you found a diamond in the rough.
As far as I know, the ex who dumped me prior to our wedding hasn't found another long term partner in the 3 years since.
Suggests it wasn't a me problem.
This whole thing started with talk of "gynosupremacy", which I'd maintain is a twitter thing. If we're talking about a child of divorce on psych meds , it doesn't matter if she's larping as a tradwife - run!
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The problem is that "is liberal" tends to be an effective proxy for "is a gynosupremacist".
That's intensely corrosive to relationships for what should be obvious reasons, since someone whose axiom is "always take for I am better, never give for you are lesser" simply can't function in an environment of give and take (i.e. a healthy relationship).
And the reasoning is the same as the [steelman for the] virginity argument- "if she had any brains or working emotional regulation, she wouldn't have been given to man-hating in the first place", and being someone who could be vulnerable to social pressure/irrational hatred like that is a liability (corresponding copypasta: "if she's still a feminist, you aren't the one"). Will she fall back on blaming you just for being a man if and when things go bad? Will she take it out on your sons, resulting anywhere from simple quiet quitting to "I'm divorcing you because you won't gender-affirm the new daughter I would have rather had"?
I say this as someone who thinks "a lack of virginity means she's sex-obsessed with all men everywhere" is the spear counterpart of the above, and just as serious a problem, for the same reasons- as this is a clear symptom that the man has problems with his brain or emotional regulation, gives away a bit of underlying androsupremacy, and might take it out on you or his daughters if the relationship hits a rough spot (corresponding copypasta: "raising daughters is the ultimate cuck").
Every new video game or porno-tech (though I repeat myself) produced simply makes the definition of "much to the table" that much stricter. And I think this is relatively equal across genders- the amount of inherent boorishness/laziness in the average man, or inherent entitlement/screaming harpy in the average woman, that can sustain a relationship... is far lower than it was 100 years ago. Personality types that don't measure up are now much less likely to make it out of the gene pool (and that's even before getting to "is he stable?/is she attractive?") and will also be inherently more loudly resentful of this fact.
Almost no women IRL are like this. I’ve been on hundreds of dates in big liberal cities and I don’t think I ever met someone who meets this description. It’s a type of woman that exists basically only online and perhaps in some weird pockets you’ll never encounter in person anyway.
As for the virginity thing, I dunno, sleep with a virgin to get it out of your system. It’s just not important.
There's plenty of women like that, it's just that the "gynosupremacy" usually turns out to be pretty theoretical, and they're a lot more flexible / reasonable in their personal life.
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They're all just risk factors that should be considered.
You want to make the case that guys should marry and have kids, show them the odds they're facing.
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