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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3039 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 11, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Motte loves to talk about the things women (even relatively smart introspective women) don’t get about men psychology and dating.

Well, what are some things even the most insightful men don’t get about female psychology and dating?

If there was information women are willing to share, then most likely it would already be public and be written by some female journalist. Topic-obsessed men would have read it ten times over.

There is an oft-repeated fact that conservatives pass the ideological turing test more than liberals do (because of the media landscape, and what is polite to say in public)... I would like to assume that men pass the sexual turing test more than women do (because of the media landscape, and what is polite to say in public)

There is, admittedly, a big reason why these are disanalagous. Women are probably hard wired to know how men think. Or rather, female hard wired behavior is behavior as if she knows how men think. Consider: better emotional intelligence/theory of mind/pressure to navigate physically stronger hostiles, etc.

Not sure how much this counts as insightful in the way you meant it, but FWIW my take on all of this is that human courtship really isn't as complicated as people make out. Because most people are keenly interested in anything that improves their romantic prospects there's an incentive to come up with complicated analysis that can be sold as useful advice (much like stock-picking) but very little of it adds much explanatory power (again, like stock picking).

Like, an alien species discovering humanity for the first time would not find it difficult to come up with a model of human courtship that explains ~90% of observable dating behaviour.

I'm not really sure what you're going for here. Men seem to think all kinds of things about women, some of which is true of many women, and much of which is likely true of some women.

Women want to be loved for the sake of being loved, not necessarily about getting anything in particular out of it.

This looks kind of like trolling for redpill/blackpill hot takes.

I think a lot of redpill stuff is very broadly true, but the problem is that it's too easy for embittered people to turn generalizations into universal truths. "Women are all hypergamous monkey-branching sluts who only want 6/6/6s and secretly want to be owned." If you really believe the worst things that folks like Vox Day and Better Bachelor and Dread Jim say about women, it's hard to believe you are actually capable of loving them except in the way you might love a dog (and honestly, I think those guys respect their dogs more than they respect women).

There are no big secret truths that the "most insightful men" don't get about female psychology and dating. If you're very insightful, you already know them (though some may be impolitic to admit). Women actually aren't inscrutable alien beings. Men and women both protect their psyches with lots of pretending and game-playing, but those who are smart and insightful and honest with themselves are able to recognize it for what it is.

There are things that many people don't want to acknowledge (for example, that men and women both tend to be more comfortable in traditional gender roles, and your feminist girlfriend probably wants you to act like a man even if she pretends she doesn't believe in non-toxic masculinity). But if you are already in or familiar with the redpill/manosphere, I don't think there are undiscovered truths to blow anyone's mind.

hypergamous monkey-branching sluts who only want 6/6/6s

With Bidenflation, it's more like 7/7/7 now.

I'm joking of course, couldn't resist. But, as with all jokes, there's silent syllables of truth here.

I had an idea for an effort most called "CGTOWs - Chad's Going Their Own Way." If you aren't familiar with the MGTOW term this is based off, I encourage a quickly Google. It isn't hard to grok the concept.

Mostly through some outsized and, frankly, random, career success, I move in circles utterly inundated with 6/6/6s - and then (not quite literal) 7/7/7s etc. I am consistently surprised by the amount of single by choice Men wandering around. I don't mean "why get married when I can live the sweet bachelor life forever." I mean "I budget zero time and devote zero effort to dating." Some are full on celebate.

The anecdotal reasons are all over the place. Everything from bizarrely starry-eyed "Mrs. Right will find me one day!" dreamy-ness all the way to onyx-blackpilled "she devils, the lot of them!" jeremiads. I don't quite have a Grand Unified Theory for this (which is why the effortpost is still unwritten) but one of the vague themes I was able to get my arms around was the fact that it seems the modal upwardly mobile woman seems to have a preoccupation for very compelling vibes over hard, but boring, quantifiable qualities.

To be a little brief and trite, these professional dater women are interested in a Man who has a story-arc compelling personal mission in life. Future politician, helps out the orphans, just got back from "being on the ground" in Gaza or something. The literal Chad who's 6'3" and is a founding partner in a local accounting firm (and pulling down north of $400,000) doesn't rate. He takes care of himself and knows how to flirt and socialize, he isn't going to cheat, he wants to have kids and pay a lot of attention to them. But he's ... wait for it ... boring.

And this was what was at the core of the PUA stuff. In a nutshell, it's advice was "go out and talk to people but don't do boring small talk. Also, sometimes insult girls for some reason."

There are comments on the influence of social media here, how women becoming economically independent might shift their relative prioritization of un-boringness, or maybe even a negative view of Football 'n Beer on the weekend bro culture.

The cause is up for debate, but the effect is real - the real life ChadYes.jpeg isn't chadding it up. The 21st century playboy is a walking Gen-Z face tattoo listening to his phone on speaker in public.

I'm an example single-by-choice bachelor (exactly as boring and without compelling vibes as you'd expect for a Motteposter).

The reason it makes sense to spend time and budget on lifting, hobbies, whatever is that there is guaranteed return on those things. If you are doing them wrong or struggling, and you ask people what you're doing wrong, people are helpful and they don't call you entitled for expecting to e.g. get gains because you work out. If you spend money on a hobby, it is normal to expect to have fun.

My (and maybe others?) learned helplessness with dating is that there is no return on investment. The average advice you find is probably anti advice. The idea that dating is like a hobby or like lifting, that you put in as much as you get out, is frankly contradicted by the zeitgeist.

"Bee urself" and "she'll find you" are cope: you're right. But we have to say it. If we admit otherwise, like you do, then we are admitting: people are entitled to dating success if they put in time and effort. You can't have it both ways.

And saying people are entitled to dating success would prescribe all sorts of patriarchy.

Agree throughout.

How would you respond to questions like "Are you worried about ending up alone?" or, on the other extreme, "Bro, don't you, like, wanna f*ck?"

If you're curious, those questions come across to me like, "Are you worried about dying?" or, "Don't you want to live longer?"

(To speak plainly and literally, the short answer is "yes" and the long answer is "yes, and?")

This is broadly what I was expecting and something I agree with. I appreciate the direct response. There is no copium here.

Quite familiar with MGTOW. Honestly I think most of them are just seething and coping.

PUAs are interesting. I read a few PUA books (not because I was trying to get into the scene, but because I was curious about what they actually say). They've discovered a lot of "redpill" truths which they make effective use of, but they also use what are basically some very basic psychological tricks that are just as effective in selling cars or negotiating a raise as they are in scoring dates, but they think they've stumbled onto some secret key to unlock the female psyche. The other thing that struck me was that at least for most PUAs, their stories seem to rarely end in happy long-term relationships, but an initial euphoria as they get laid a lot, and then increasing, pathetic desperation as they keep seeking the thrill of the chase but realize that the women are all the same and the techniques to get them into bed are not the same as the techniques to build real relationships.

Conversely, was very amusing how often you would find women saying "Oh, those lines are so obvious, this stuff would never work on me..." Guess who she ends up going home with?

their stories seem to rarely end in happy long-term relationships, but an initial euphoria as they get laid a lot, and then increasing, pathetic desperation as they keep seeking the thrill of the chase but realize that the women are all the same and the techniques to get them into bed are not the same as the techniques to build real relationships.

This is the "end where you started" truth of the old school PUA lifestyle. Neil Strauss, the journalist who wrote The Game detailed this (more or less) on his own blog.

The guys who really do it and make pick up their focus in life have a high incidence of bad outcomes; mental breakdowns, alcoholism and drug addiction, and, most often, a sincere feeling of existential dread. It's just another branch of the pure hedonism failure mode.

The epilogues tell the tale. One, a guy named Roosh, went hardcore Orthodox Christian. Another, I forget the names now, has had a second act career as a non-anonymous blogger / YouTube warning of the dangers of pickup and recommending pretty basic bro-self-improvement advice (lift, get a good job, try to start a stable family). I think a lot of the more minor figures got on board that MAGA train in a big way.

I can't say that I ever got into or around that world, but it strikes me, as an observer, as very similar to the world of money obsession. I have seen up close how people - who have made getting money into their reason for existence - actually react when they get rich.

There is one common and established career path to brute force your way to getting wealthy - Investment Banking. It is quite guaranteed, but with no skill other than being able to work 100 hours weeks for a few years and absolutely zero concern for anything besides the career, you can grind your way to at least a few million dollars of net worth by the time you're 35 or 40. Most fall off before then because they (correctly) see it isn't worth it. The really smart ones are out quick to doing something else that is always (a) more fulfilling and (b) often somehow equal or greater in compensation. But the ones who stick around, easily half have a full blown existential crisis when they "walk away" with their "fat stacks."

It's not as simple as "oh, they realized money doesn't buy happiness." It's that this goal they had designed for themselves was not only ephemeral once achieved, but the cost of achieving it was the sacrifice of anything and everything else that may have actually led to happiness; deep friendships, finding a spouse, hell even a fun hobby. I'd actually compare it on purpose to being an adult illiterate - it must be terrifying to be without what seems like a basic and necessary skillset at what feels like a relative advanced age. A lot of these guys (and it's always men) have forgotten so completely how to form non-transactional relationships that they either become half-recluse / half-autistic cocaine party animal or literally go through a period of re-socialization not unlike someone "coming home" from prison.

I can see how hardcore PUA dudes would be similar. Every interaction with a woman becomes an win/loss situation. I can't imagine the ones going out three or four times a week to practice the PUA stuff have otherwise normal hobbies with a stable friend group. Spouse? Forget it. Hobbies? PUA. Career? PUA. And then, when they figure out that another random roll in the hay with an Appleby's Waitress no longer interests them, it's not the waking up alone that does them in, be realizing that the paid the cost for howevermany years ... just to wake up alone.

Opportunity cost and compound interest - they're a real bitch.

If you worked in finance, you'd know that.

Women want their past, present and future to all be secure. If you can do that, then everything else is gravy. End Scene.

That's certainly a good view for most women to take, but many don't. Many do want irresponsible adventure and indulgent self-actualization and whatever the hell it is that social media has made them want, consequences be damned (or studiously ignored/denied, more likely).

The women who have the foresight to strive for long-term security...are doing fine, as far as I can see. And so do the men they end up with. Stable, reasonable individuals of both sexes abound, as they always have. But they're not universal, and possibly proportionally fewer than they used to.

Were that simply the case, they would just get paired up with average hard-working provider betas early, stay committed to them and elicit commitment from them. But the information we have doesn't really bear this out.

Well, what are some things even the most insightful men don’t get about female psychology and dating?

you need to target lower than "even the most insightful", this is a null set.

Yeah. If there were some big secret women were intentionally keeping from men, surely they wouldn't share it here.

This is probably not the answer you want, but I've simply stopped putting people into binary gender buckets when it comes to dating and relationships. I think the more that you affirm your partner's values and ambitions and hopes and dreams, and in turn openly share yours, the more intimate and meaningful your relationship will be.

Dating and relationships over the years have confirmed for me that—not only do binary gender buckets work well—they are pervasive and persistent across time, space, and cultures, and contain tremendous predictive and prescriptive power.

How's does that work exactly? Are you gay or bisexual?

I'm struggling to envision what genderless dating looks like, at least between a man and a woman. I'm not talking about hopes and dreams or whatever, I mean that mundane stuff. Like do you ask him/her out? Do you go in for the kiss?

I am a cis male, asexual. My partner is a cis female, also asexual.

If you'll forgive the assumption, the asexual nature of y'all's relationship probably means that your approach and opinion is correct for the two of you.

I think sexual couples have to cut through some more bullshit to get to that point.

I think sexual couples have to cut through some more bullshit to get to that point.

Yes, if the relationship is based mainly on exclusive access to sex (for men) or exclusive access to stability in exchange for sex (for women) and involves the requisite prostitution-exclusivity arrangement for it (most people call this a "marriage"), then it's going to be qualitatively different than one where both participants are aware they're interested in something else. Ironically enough, this happens because sexual relationships are the room temperature, but unless you're aware of what that room temperature even is you're (only figuratively) fucked.

I will admit that I don't fully understand those [sexual] relationships, but I have also noticed that for marginal people, or for normal people in marginal conditions, this default orientation actually works pretty well. It does generate some underlying resentment on people who are conflicted about wanting this, or who might be ace-curious but fundamentally can't handle it, and probably explains why certain kinds of men would rather hang out at the bars than with their wives. If the relationship runs on sex-for-security, that's all it's ever going to be; I am constantly amazed at the number of people who don't actually like their wives/husbands but put up with them for this reason. When these sorts of people say they love each other I am, to a point, baffled that when they say this they aren't lying. "Lie back and think of England" only makes sense under these relationship conditions, and the traditionalist-progressive (feminist) agreement that having to have sex with men is bad is trivially derived from this too.

If you're in it for other reasons, it's... well, it's not really a sex-based relationship then, is it? This is the "marrying for love" side of this, which I guess technically asexuality qualifies as; more concerned about someone you don't need [which then becomes someone you don't want] to protect your psyche from- the "building a life together" sort of thing to which sex is... mostly a nice-to-have accessory rather than the foundation on which the relationship is based. Not that it isn't very important, of course; this is pretty far from the bare-metal "need sex/security to live" but it obviously isn't divorced from it (which is why "asexual" is really not that great a word, since people assume it applies to 'well obviously they don't feel sexual attraction or want to have sex', which is not quite what that means anyway, or it's a woman falsely claiming to be this as an excuse to pre-emptively stress-test [men say 'shit-test', but perhaps it should be considered neutral since it's obviously in the statistically-mean woman's best interests to do this] how stable the man she's dismissing is; they also use 'enby' like this too).

The problem with the model asexual union is that that's basically just how gay unions work (to the point that, just like every other 'got the wrong brain/software by mistake', I think grouping them together is more valid than anyone really wants to admit... which is probably why they're grouped together in the first place anyway), with failure modes more common to those relationships (so you can get one partner exercising destructive levels of openness in this kind of partnership and the other partner not meaningfully able to push back on it, which is how I hear Dan Savage's union is going at the moment). So you're not exempt from problems, you just get different ones (though it's not like marriages can't take on these characteristics anyway).

The other problem with asexual relationships, which nobody talks about, is that just like all non-traditional relationships they're best kept protected or private because their Pride in those worldviews (and I'll argue the sexual revolution was caused by asexual Pride, but in fairness technology had just made it possible at that time) has a corrosive effect on the normies, since they'll just take the tools the [gender-]space aliens left lying around and use them as weapons and in other similar ways in which they were not intended to be used, like the demolition of physical male intimacy because "haha that means ur gay". There was a point made that, for traditional relationships, the junior partner coming to resent being the junior partner in a relationship destroys it, and I think a lot of the ace stuff when it enters the ears of those people prompts that resentment, and because the relationship was built on nothing else it is destroyed. Senior partners can be made to resent their own position, too, which is [though by no means the only reason] why when they know they can just say "honey, I'm a woman now, deal with it" and make a massive mess some of them are indeed choosing that option.

All that to say that yeah, I do agree that a lot of the dating advice that comes from asexuals is not applicable to sexuals, it's very hard to tell which is which, that knowing not to take asexual advice when you're not asexual is very much an asset (which is partially why women freaked out about PUAs, because even if that wasn't a weapon some asexual left laying on the ground it very much had the character of one that was, and was unique in that it's the only one of the sort in the last 40 years that men could actually use against women).

That is correct, and I agree.

[Edit: moved to a sibling thread]

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