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Notes -
Seven months ago I posted the following thesis (if we can call it that) here:
Regarding the part I now bolded for the current discussion I’ll say that I did have some rather vague awareness of the “Are we dating the same guy” Facebook group back when I posted the comment, meaning that I was aware that they exist and are mostly feminist in their social orientation, but that was it. Well, a couple of days ago I unexpectedly came across a reddit thread that was rather interesting from a culture war perspective where the original poster accused the local AWDTSG group of committing defamation, slander and violation of privacy. I would link the URL but I can’t, as the entire thread was nuked after entire comment chains were purged and the OP deleted his profile (probably as a result of getting doxxed by feminists). The Facebook group in question was also scrubbed from Google somehow i.e. some setting was changed so that it doesn’t show up in Google results anymore, or something like that, plus its admins made their profiles private.
Anyway, as the thread piqued my interest I later found out that there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to this phenomenon and now I’d like to make some observations.
The name itself is already curious. It makes it all seem innocent and well-meaning, light-hearted. Just a bunch of average women helping each other out and also having a bit of fun and enjoying a sense of community in the process. Of course, the reality is that these groups should rather be named “Did I just fall for a bigamist/fraudster/liar/rapist/harasser/creep” because these are the real sentiments the female members are expressing.
Also I just love how the name absolutely reinforces the Red Pill thesis on unscrupulous alpha males practicing plate-spinning / building soft harems in a social milieu of unrestrained hypergamy (hypergyny, to be more precise). I’m rather certain we’ll never see a “Are we dating the same girl” online men’s group anywhere.
The name also entails that the members share the expectation of strict monogamous living as the default social arrangement. This is also somewhat comical, as I’m sure that if asked, nearly all of them would swear up and down that they support sexual autonomy, ‘alternative lifestyles’, sexual freedom, polyamory etc.
I’ve seen people argue that such groups regularly violate GDPR regulations. In other words, sharing non-public personal information such as employment data, photos, screenshots of personal messages, photos/screenshots of documents etc. in Facebook groups is technically against the law. I doubt that I’m qualified to comment on the legal aspect of all of this, but I do find such arguments plausible. What I do not doubt though is that were there men’s online groups doing the same to women’s personal information, I’m 100% sure they would swiftly invite a huge media scandal, widespread condemnation, legal action and the attention of the authorities.
The consensus between female members and women that are sympathetic to them is “just be a decent man, and you won’t get accused by the group” i.e. “women never lie”. Which is just pure gold. I’m sure they don’t even hear themselves or just don’t care, which is more likely. “Just be a decent comrade and the Cheka won’t arrest you”, “good citizens have nothing to fear from the police” etc. It’s a story as old as time.
One usual story that gets posted in such groups is “I was duped by a man who was actually married with kids”. Alternatively, “I was duped by a man who was a violent creep”. My initial response is: do you actually need the assistance of a Facebook group of anonymous posters to realize that? Did you not see the warning signs? Also, just the logistics involved in all of this make me wonder. If you’re an asshole guy who just wants to heartlessly use up some gullible woman as a fuckbuddy/FWB, how do you even keep your marriage, wife and kids a secret? How does this even work i.e. how many men are there who can plausibly make it work? If you’re a family man, most of the time you have outside the workplace will usually be taken up by your family.
Just to state the obvious: if these women are so afraid, so certain that a hostile male-centric society enables their victimization routinely etc., why don’t they try finding male partners through people they trust? By their own accord, they are all normal, decent women with lives, not isolated loser incel creeps living in basements – surely they have friends, colleagues, relatives they can trust?!
This reminds me of variations of the saying "men don't red-pill men; women do" and "the red-pill is the easiest cause to be a part of: women do the recruiting for you." The same women making these Facebook groups are likely the same women who would seethe and insist polygyny, female carousel-riding, and female mate choice-copying are but misogynistic incel/red-pill myths.
But I don't know about unscrupulous. Building and maintaining a well-diversified plate portfolio sounds pretty scrupulous to me, good risk management and reduction of idiosyncratic risk.
Just the usual double standards when it comes to doxxing in general. Women doxxing men is women bravely holding men accountable; men doxxing women is men creepily harassing and threatening women. A few years back a man created a webtool to search porn videos for a woman's likeness (use case would be any man looking to thot-patrol his girlfriend or wife's past); it was quickly shut down.
And when it is rediscovered for the N'th time that in fact women do lie, it Just So Happens the falsely accused men had it coming anyway. Trevor Bauer was a toxic asshole, the Duke Lacrosse team was a bunch of rich misogynistic douches, that UVA frat was well, filled with bunch of frat guys and thus deserved to get taken down a peg.
Keeping the marriage and wife secret is optional. Chicks dig married men.
And it sounds like, by their own words, women are easily duped by men. Surely this means we should just update our priors even further as to how shitty and mendacious men are, and definitely not question our priors as to women's ability to be strong, independent thinkers and decision-makers.
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Well, the Wikipedia article you linked yourself gives an example of that:
But of course we all know the men's group is simply a counterreaction borne out of spite and not a serious contender since your reasoning is still mostly true. However, the hypocrisy is still incredible. The women feeling justified in their own stalking behavior while criticizing the men is a classic instance of the Women are wonderful effect.
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I very much agree with you on all of this, and this sort of feminist hypocrisy makes my blood boil. But I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second on one point, based on arguments my wife has had with me over these sort of issues.
As an example, my wife and I have argued about whether male-only spaces are okay. Feminists are clearly very in favor of female-only "safe" spaces, but have historically rallied against every possible male only space you can imagine, from trying to make colleges and frats co-ed, to historical wars against British coffeehouses. I personally believe that having male-only spaces is not only fair, if we are going to laud female spaces, but also very positive for men as a form of therapy, commraderie, social safety net, and many other good things.
However my wife (who loves to argue with me about this stuff, or is at least strongly compelled to because she's so damn stubborn) has talked about how the coffeehouses were harmful to women in a way that comparable female only spaces could never be, because the coffeehouses became a place where men would make and discuss policy decisions in a way that excluded women. She would say that the men held more powerful positions, and the coffeehouses and other such male spaces would never just stay as neutral academic or social spaces, the power from their positions would spill over into the once benign spaces. I myself am not so convinced of either the powerlessness of women, or even if that's true, the lack of value in male spaces even if what she says is true. But I wanted to present that viewpoint here.
So women never discuss politics in female-only spaces? Is it just make-up and which boys they have a crush on then?
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So, prejudice + power?
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It's a common argument, and it's utter BS, because the reverse is how Prohibition came about.
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I’m going to echo what I posted on the fertility thread- lots of women are just fine, or at least not missing anything in an acute way, by not having a romantic relationship. In the past social pressures and general expectations and in a lot of cases actual institutions would push them into relationships anyways, but those are gone. Yes, in the long run women are happier married to Mr good enough. But that’s not apparent to single women.
And AFAICT the actual standards women have are mostly pretty reasonable even if they’re phrased badly- six feet and six figures really just means ‘makes enough to support us and taller than me’. I think, yes, women are saying that because they miss having someone else vet for them, but crucially, that vetting in the past was not an after the fact thing- as recently as the fifties it was seen as important to make sure young women were in contact with high-quality men. This is because women are perfectly fine for a while living with their parents, part time job/in school, social life with no men in it. Until they’re not.
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I'm no anthropologist but my gut sense is that manhood initiation rituals are much more significant to a man's place within the male social order and the vetting of prospector suits for a maiden was primarily women's work. In more patriarchal societies the former might be downstream of the latter, but they might also be completely disjoint.
I expect this is because in public male social contexts men bear the brunt of the social cost, probably more so in the west. Look no further at the semantic creep of cuckoldry and the degree of blame that gets heaped on men when their girl is faithless.
How exactly? I'm not sure there was ever an example of a man who was ever vetted as a marriage prospect but somehow not vetted as a member of the male social order. Also, a woman generally couldn't get married without her father's de facto approval.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Such a Facebook group wouldn't get anywhere because men wouldn't assist one another in such ways at all? Or something else?
I specifically meant initiation/manhood rituals might be disjoint from the betrothal process. I do agree that men will also screen suitors, but it is the women around the bride to be that initially select suitors, aiming to weed out the lechs, cheats, gamblers, liars, creeps etc. AWDTSG groups are analogous to this latter process in that the daters are seeking judgement from other women.
I believe men are much less likely to want to subject themselves to the possible public humiliation of dating a known tramp.
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It’s kinda both. Part of the vetting of men by other men is to make sure that the man in question has the basic traits of a man. The biggest complaints I see from women are things that men used to teach each other about life.
Some of the bigger complaints I see from women:
1). He has no sense of direction in his life. If he has a job, it’s a minimum one, and he has no concrete plan to change that. Not looking for something better, not going to a career focused training program, just working for almost nothing and not caring much about it.
2). Very often having very childish interests. Heavy gaming (like more than 20 hours a week), anime/sci-fi fandom to the point of obsession. No real hobbies or interests outside of those things. In food, tastes are also rather childish— chicken tenders, pizza, instant ramen, macaroni and cheese, no vegetables or fruits.
3). Have no idea how to properly keep up an apartment. The apartments are messy and sometimes furnished only with a bed, a TV gaming system, and cheap furniture.
4). They don’t seem to understand basic adult interaction or if they do, they understand it in a very shallow way. They don’t accept a no in many cases, and assume that if they just keep following the woman around that they’ll eventually say yes. They don’t understand social cues and therefore tend to overstay their welcome in social situations. Because of their narrow interests (see 2) they often cannot have a conversation about things outside of this. They don’t really understand planning social events either.
5). A lot of these men seem to expect a wife to come along and essentially mother them. Take over the cooking and cleaning that he doesn’t want to do. Introduce him to her social circles and teach him how to behave properly. Give them an external push to fix their career path.
Most women don’t want this. They rightly expect to find a man they can partner with who is and behaves like an adult. They want someone with real interests and hobbies they can share that aren’t “consume media products”. They want a man who is in the path to career success and can thus at least help to provide for future children. They don’t want to adopt their husband as a child and manage him like a child.
Men used to teach this kind of stuff in male only spaces. They used to teach each other to strive for success, to take risks. They used to teach each other to adopt more adult interests and hobbies and to understand basic adult interaction. A big issue here is the decline of male-only activities and spaces. It’s almost impossible for men to create the social dynamics that allow them to teach boys to “man up” if women and girls are allowed in. (The reverse is true as well, as women also need those female only spaces for proper female socialization). The reason is that a lot of the things that need to be taught to make a man out of a boy are things that offend women or sound mean. (Again being fair, the stuff women do to make girls into women are likely to offend male sensibilities as well). Men need to be cajoling each other to high achievement, to teach them how to get a woman interested, and to teach them to behave properly around women. When women invade those spaces, it becomes almost impossible to teach boys to be men. The over-competitive nature of boys sports also cuts down on that a venue for socialization for a lot of boys.
I think this is assuming a lot more development on the part of the 'average male' in history than existed. 3 and 5 both absurd when for a lot of human history the idea of a single male living space/doing meaningful household beautification chores was very rare, same going for stuff like childrearing. I've got a baby and my wife's Southeast Asian older family members are absolutely amazed that I participate in stuff like doing nappies/feeding the baby/proactively doing infant tasks, and even current generations have a greater expectation of it being women/nannywork.
4 I'd agree with, but I think digital communication changes the vibe with being 'overly persevering' since every attempt at communication gets rendered onto the permanent record, and if you've originally met through a dating app you're probably not getting the incidental contact to allow for old-fashioned prolonged pursuit. Online dating makes things way more cut-and-dry. I'd also assume 'Understand planning social events' probably code for woes in getting actual dates out of Online Dating that aren't 'meet me at 3AM', but that's its own tangled metagame of both sides being so unimaginably flaky that trying to perform great romantic gestures gets squeezed out of you pretty quick. Also the literal matchmaking of these things means that the most attractive guys (and therefore the ones that get the most mindshare) are happy to throw out the most casual non-date invitations since they've got economics on their side.
I think the main dynamic shifts are that women's liberation/financial equalization has made it less of a matter of just rolling with the above manchild since it was the only path to leaving the family home and having some independence in life, and that the mainstreaming of Online Dating has absolutely torched a bunch of key social feedback loops.
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When shorn of the pejoratives, this sounds like women want:
And...yes...I don't doubt it. But these aren't qualities that men can pick up by being in male only spaces. These are marks of successful, intelligent, popular men. Either these women want a man ten years older than they are, or they want a top-tier man, in which case they'd better be top tier themselves.
(And this goes the other way too. There are loads of girls who can't talk to people, have incredibly vague life plans, and spend their lives looking at girly stuff on instagram that men find baffling and off-putting.)
In practice, most of these are 'virtuous circle' things. People with more career opportunities have more career direction, people with more social experience have better social antennae, people pick up hobbies from friends, people who are sought out by the opposite sex understand the opposite sex better. And everyone else, sooner or later, finds themselves outside the circle of lamplight eating chicken tenders or browsing tik-tok makeup videos in a messy apartment because they're not going to manifest 1-5 into being by sheer force of will and they know it. They no longer have access to the virtuous circles, and from where they are (tired from working 9 hours at a bad job, shy, or poor) the activation energy is higher than anyone can reasonably ask of them.
This state of affairs results not particularly from a lack of male-only spaces but from modern society being mostly opt-in. There are no longer mandatory social occasions like church, balls, or village meetings, there is no longer a madatory social group (extended family living nearby) and there is no longer mandatory (arranged) courtship. We could resurrect these things, and I think we should resurrect these things.
In particular, I think that we should implement mandatory balls or some other speed-dating method, held regularly. Young men and women would be required to attend these, and it would be made clear that their lives would be made very difficult as they approached 30 unless they married. I think a lot of the men you complain about would buck up their ideas pretty quickly if they were actually in regular contact with women who cared, and vice versa for the women.
TLDR: what you describe is not a failure of mentorship, or of moral fibre, but of good defaults and of easy opportunities.
EDIT: which isn’t to say that mentorship isn’t a good thing we should have more of. Only that I don’t think it’s the reason for our problems or the main thing we need to solve them.
I mean this is putting it a lot stronger than OP did. Its more a question of direction of travel than anything else - no-one's expecting Wildean wit or an appreciation of avant-garde jazz, but you know just pick up a book or go to a museum sometimes. Most people aren't that well read or informed so it really wouldn't take much to be comparably so.
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