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This might just be small sample bias on my part, but most of the stable reliable guys I know are getting laid, usually in long-term relationships. And it is usually with attractive women.
I think the underlying problem might be not so much that women find stable reliable guys unattractive, it's that largely because of economic changes, it's become harder to become a stable reliable guy than it used to be. It is hard to be stable and reliable if you are struggling just to get a decent job and pay the rent. These days you can't just go to the factory and shake the foreman's hand, now you kind of have to either become a white collar guy or really succeed in the trades. In my experience of observing incel forums, it seems to me that being an incel is highly correlated with also having economic problems. The two share some common underlying causes, like mental illness and shyness. Hence the stereotype of the incel who lives in his parents' basement. Of course, physically attractive people also find it easier to get good jobs, which does not help the truly physically unattractive subset of the incel population.
Our society obviously values stable reliable guys less than it did several decades ago, but stable reliable guys still do get pretty consistently valorized in pop culture. Most commercials target stereotypical suburban family units, just more racially and sexually diverse than the ones of decades ago. Of course they do this mainly because those people have money to spend, but still. And the movie industry still churns out plenty of movies that have conventional nice guy heroes who do what they do not because they are adrenaline junkies, but because they decide to put aside their self-interest for what they consider to be a higher cause.
I'm skeptical there's much of a correlation between economic stability and sexual success (at least at the levels of wealth that account for more than 99% of us i.e. not a millionaire). There's a reason the stereotype of the broke, loser man who cheats on his wife/has children with multiple women he owes child support to exists and it suggests that for all their problems, getting laid isn't the main problem for this kind of figure.
The reality is that most guys, reliable or not, are getting laid (at least during some periods of their lives). Genuine incels are a small group and people talk about them as if they have much more impact than they do (case in point, the suggested UK policies that this whole thread is discussing).
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I don't think you even have to "really succeed" in the trades. You can get a very solid job, and most places are even willing to train you on their dime, without being anyone amazing. Now, if you wanted to say that the trades are culturally looked down on by a lot of people regardless of the stability/income they provide, that's a different matter.
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This is almost definitely not due to a small sample bias, but rather selection bias. How many stable reliable guys who have such small social presence that they're literally invisible to you do you know? Given that "being noticeable" is correlated with (some, including myself, would argue causally) "being attractive," whatever observations of people you notice are observations about a population that's more attractive than average.
I figure that most stable, reliable guys at least participate in the workforce. The fraction of them who are independently wealthy or have joined a monastic order is very small. So if there is a large number of stable, reliable guys who are incels I figure that I would be encountering more of them in the workforce, at least in Zoom calls, and in the work-tangential world like at the kind of upscale-ish or trendy bars where people tend to go after work. I could be wrong, though.
If an otherwise stable, reliable guy is introverted, has little social skills and has no girlfriend/wife, he's unlikely to be embedded into your social circle to the extent that you have a mental awareness of him even existing. You'll "know" him but you won't know him.
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Zoom calls and in the workforce, perhaps, but this seems like a leap. The group of guys with such small social presence being talked about would be the ones to disproportionately not go to these work-tangential events and/or spend minimal time in those. And even in those settings, the ones you actually are able to talk to enough to say that you actually "know" these people would likely be disproportionately not from that group. Same would go for other social spaces and clubs and such.
Yeah, the idea that one can judge the fraction of the workforce that’s single and lonely based on who goes to trendy bars after work is ludicrous. Like determining what fraction of the population is religious based on a D&D campaign. (But jokes on all of us, my friends who play D&D — I don’t — are Baptists.)
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I don't understand your post's relevance to the topics I raised.
I am just questioning the idea that there are a lot of stable, reliable guys out there today who are incels. To be fair, what is an incel? The term is poorly defined. Are you an incel if you have not had sex ever? If you have not had sex in the last year? Pretty obviously some Chad who got laid yesterday but went out tonight and didn't get laid, and is frustrated about it, is not an incel by any reasonable sense of the term even if he is technically speaking involuntarily celibate today. I think that probably most stable, reliable guys at least get laid occasionally in random hookups, or they are in long-term relationships, even if they are not getting laid all the time with new women when they go out. Like I said on the other post, I could be wrong, though.
Appreciate the clarification.
"Incel" is, at this point, only a term of self-identification. These are very online guys who have little or no romantic luck and are so embittered by it that they adopt the online moniker (incel) and launch jeremiads against women as an entire class of people. I truly think they are very, very few in number but have been signal boosted by internet echo chambers. There are more men who may say something online that "sounds" "incel like." They are often pilloried for it. It's much the same function that led to shunning of some of the HBD'ers and even mainstream academics - Murray chief among them.
Beyond that tiny subgroup, however, somewhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 3 men in America will go sexless this year. Of those, I think there's a certain percentage that are effectively celibate, meaning they've chosen to deprioritize sex and dating altogether. I don't have a grand unified theory for why. My original post was about how this state of affairs will negatively impact women.
So, how many Men am I talking about? Eh, all in, call it 4 -8 %. It may not seem like a lot, but when you have country level gender imbalances past 5% weird things start happening. If America effectively has 4 - 8 % less men in the dating pool than assumed, that's a problem. If a not insignificant % of that group also happen to be in possession of lots of pro-social and industrious character traits, I think it could create a demographic snowball effect that puts the country at large into a risky spot.
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