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Great.
But not my point. I can filter my dates by going on them, even if the ratio of crazy/not crazy is unfavorable.
I'm asking for a quantification of how many women out there are actually likely to pass the filter.
And, to really drive the point home, are there enough of them for most guys who want marriage and kids to have them, or do we have to acknowledge that the pie is too small for them all to get a slice, and thus we're actually in a state of heavy competition for a limited resource?
The honest answer is "I have no clue" we're talking about people's intimate relationships, and I just don't have that much insight into them. But going by what I was able to see, the odds are pretty good, like, in the neighborhood of 100%. I've seen a militant feminist bending over backwards for a 5/10, mildly successful autist who just fell out of love with her, and ended up breaking up, I've seen another psy-op herself into tolerating infidelity / polyamory / wtf it they were calling it, I've seen successful "I can fix her" stories. Now, I'm not saying ~100% of women are marriage material, but I just haven't seen a case where the "gynosupremacy" was the reason for a relationship to fall apart.
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Like I have been saying, almost all of them. The number of normie women who want marriage and kids with normie men is almost certainly greater than the number of number of normie men looking for the same thing. That there’s a huge number of men-hating women out there categorically uninterested or unfit for marriage is a super weird cope made up in red pill/incel/sigma male Twitter. I know this because unlike these people I touch grass regularly and almost every single woman I interact with is normal and wants a normal relationship. Off the top of my head I can think of >10 single women in the Bay Area who are great and looking hard for their guy.
That a lot of these women are below men’s standards for other reasons (too fat, had sex with too many guys, etc) is a different issue and comes down to facing up to the fact that if you’re a 4/10 guy and want to get married you’ll probably have to marry a 4/10 woman.
You can do better than this strawman.
What if the normie women's definition of "normie" men isn't real? Like, what if there is a documented, quantitative disparity here between basic gender perspectives of the other.
I think the modal normie guy is just fine with a wife who had a few boyfriends before him, who puts on some pounds after they start dating (and definitely after marriage and kids) and who sips wine wearing her "The Future is Female" tee-shirt while they watch the Notebook again.
I think that same "normie" woman in that scenario is (not so) secretly resentful that her now husband plays Toby Keith sometimes when he BBQs, doesn't keep up with This American Life, put on a few too many pounds after they got married and lost his nice butt he developed playing Div-3 lacrosse, and wonders about "that chick Ashley" that his frat bros bring up after a few beers when they visit.
Expectations and the delta between them and reality matter. Your "4/10" comment is totally valid, but it also works both ways.
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Yeah, great post. If you want a hot, relatively chaste, young, smart right-leaning woman, that’s not impossible, but you better be the equivalent of that as a man, namely a successful, attractive, charming, relatively young guy who probably has similar values, which in the case of chastity is likely some kind of religious conservatism. Young Mormon men seem to have no issue marrying chaste(ish) pretty blondes who will vote for Romney and deliver 3-4 children, because that’s their milieu. Too often some chubby suburban secular engineer whose primary hobbies are video games and online political discussion thinks he deserves the same.
Hot young people are in no short supply, and some substantial subsection of that group (assuming nothing truly weird or ambitious) likely meets anyone’s individual extra standards. But you have to make sure you’re part of that group, and you’re where the young people are (NYC, SF, LA, etc) and that you have things to offer that they want, too.
A 35 year old average looking guy of average means probably isn’t going to marry a 23 year old conservative trad virgin. If that’s the blackpill @faceh was talking about then, sure, it’s real. But at that point the unlikelihood of winning the lottery is a blackpill, and so is a peasant girl realizing she’s unlikely to marry the prince. If you’re in your thirties as a man you have to accept you missed the first wave of pairings (and arguably the second) and likely (unless extremely hot or successful) have to make do with women for whom the same is true. That’s no great injustice.
The fact that you think these are equivalent requirements shows how ridiculously lopsided the sexual marketplace is against men. All a woman needs to do is be young and chaste, which is something every girl was at some point and which practically guarantees hotness (to men) by itself, and vote for a party that half the country supports. Meanwhile, a man who has spent decades studying and working to become an engineer is told "whoops, sorry, that's not enough, you also need to have interesting (to women) hobbies, be physically fit, and have a handsome face; I'm sure you will find time and energy to do all while you are working at a ridiculously demanding intellectual job, and also you better get all of that done way before you turn 35 because otherwise the idea of you marrying a 23 year old is just creepy!"
In other words, every aspect of a man's life, from his career to his hobbies to his body, must be optimized for attracting women, and it is no one's fault but his own if he fails.
"Women don't care about your struggles, they wait at the finish line and fuck the winners." -- Richard Cooper, The Unplugged Alpha
There was a time when this would have been ordinary. When fathers would have been jockeying for the chance to marry their daughters off to a man of established means instead of standing by impotently as they spend their fertile years getting pumped and dumped by the prince in the futile hope that he will commit. God willing, that time will come again, when the insanity of feminism and the sexual revolution has been consigned to the trash can of history.
But that just isn’t true. Tons of normal men have girlfriends of the same class, social status and hotness. The average 23 year old woman in a relationship is dating a man her age or perhaps one or two years older. He’s unlikely to be particularly rich or successful; he is probably about as hot as she is. What is unbalanced about that?
Most young women aren’t interested in dating a 35 year old guy at 23. They’re interested in dating a 23-25 year old guy at 23, who likely doesn’t have a great deal of money, and who is probably pretty similar to them on all the usual axes. If you missed the boat because you were a loser at 23 that’s sad, but no moreso than a woman who missed the boat and might now deal with infertility or the greater difficulty of finding a good husband in her thirties. That’s life.
I remain entirely unconvinced that it is hugely difficult for an average young man to find a girlfriend that is looks matched (which in America usually means fat) and of approximately the same social status (we can include relative chastity here) and class. I think the obesity crisis has made most people ugly, such that fat people aren’t attracted to each other, and that many people think they deserve more than they can get.
At 29, most women I know married or are soon to marry the boyfriend they had in their early/mid 20s. The minor improvement in income/wealth from marrying an ugly older dude with means just isn’t worth it for most young women.
What sort of evidence would you find 'convincing?'
I don't think @2rafa will find any evidence convincing. I say this because tI never got a response once from her when I push back on her repeatedly and tirelessly asserting that attracting a woman as a man is, easy (or just not hard).
I'll reiterate my response again anyways.
Just because it's done doesn't mean it's not hard. There are countless hard things that get done by almost all people universally. Raising kids, sending kids out of the home, burying your parents, all of it. All experiences almost everyone has, and all tremendously hard.
Much in the same way, males have a biological imperative, and they do what needs to be done to attract women. Asserting that its easy in the same way its easy for a woman to attract a man is glib and farcical. If every other man who has to experience and live it says its hard, I think that's more than enough evidence than theorizing.
And I push back on this only because one ought to have a model of other human experiences to speak about them. If I can understand that women have it hard too, but in a different way, in that they have a hard time attracting a mate that they find attractive, it shouldn't be too hard to understand that becoming the mate that they want also takes work.
Almost in all mammals males do the selling, the female does the buying. If you don't understand this, you have no business taking part in such conversations.
And I can see this coming from a mile away.
"Proximity is all that matters, most men are partnered with people from school and work". Alright, do you think it all happened serendipitously? Or the man didn't do any planning or asking out or navigating the social minefield and making any moves? Are any of these particularly hard? No. Is it harder than just sitting there an existing? Yes.
Yeah.
I'm going to revert directly to that question when I encounter them in the future.
People who INSIST that your arguments aren't convincing to them because they are so certain of their position should be able to articulate what kind of evidence might nudge them to change their mind a little. If they have an absurdly high standard that's fine, but they can't very well complain if others hold them to the same standard.
If they won't, that to me is proof of bad faith. They are taking the other side of the argument then, ultimately failing to support their side, and dismissing every form of evidence, data, anecdote, or even thought experiment without explaining why they disbelieve it.
Not particularly enjoyable to encounter repeatedly.
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So you yourself admit it’s not “particularly” hard and something that the vast majority of men figure out, just like various other things?
By the way, I have never denied and would never deny that being a man involves a more assertive role, requires more gumption, more risk taking, than being a woman in the pursuit of a heterosexual relationship. That is obvious and the product of biology. It is also different, however, to the specific claim that being an average guy sucks when it comes to getting a date or girlfriend or wife (etc).
Okay here's my analogy.
Finding a girlfriend is equivalently difficult as finding a (well paying) job.
The act of sealing the deal is easy. Just go do the interview, sign some papers and you are done. But the leadup to the job is hard. Becoming someone they want to hire, and getting your CV to the top of the stack is really hard. It's the leadup to the easy part.
Same with finding a mate. Becoming the man a woman wants, and getting yourself to the front of the line is hard. Crossing the line is easy.
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What evidence might convince you that men are struggling to find available and eligible women, and especially that they're struggling more than usual?
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Great post (as always--you're a great contributor, which I think you know, but which bears repeating).
To further elaborate on this point--young Mormon men also seem to have no issue marrying a reasonable match. Some years ago a Mormon colleague invited me to his son's wedding reception. The bride was obese; the groom, a NEET. The groom's father said "she's a nice girl. I wouldn't say she's a great catch but let's be honest, neither is he." But he had done a Mormon mission trip and she had the right social attitudes. Now they've been married maybe 15 years, no kids (fertility issues). Neither ever completed college, they both do gig work to scrape by with the help of their parents (they're in their 40s now!). They have dreams and goals they're unlikely to ever achieve, but they have a common social milieu, and they're clearly better off supporting one another than they would be as atomized incels.
It's not a life I'd want, but I have to remind myself--it's the kind of life most people get. Most people don't even get a bachelor's degree. Most people aren't particularly attractive. If we reserve the "good life" for "high value" people, things are going to get real bleak, real quick. But without the social support structures encouraging men and women to accept a good match, rather than always "marrying up," that's where we're headed.
This is exactly it. It doesn't matter if you're talking about marriage and family, career, or just general life circumstances, when you (I.e. mainstream culture) keeps pushing "shoot for the moon" the result is a detonation on the launch pad. This is meme-stocks, Botox, Eat, Pray, Love (both the book and the insufferable wall art), self-taught "AI experts", SoundCloud rappers, 38 year old club DJs, and dudes with their Instagram handle on their car.
Being average is OK needs to be the message for literally half (or more) of society. Know who you are, know that happiness comes from self-knowledge and adherence to whatever your chosen moral / virtue code is, not unbridled personal achievement (however noble that achievement may be). The America of Bruce Springsteen and "Jack and Diane" may have never actually existed, but it's still worth playing the songs.
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