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Where do you see the Gender War going?
My Definition of the Gender War.
There are many fronts in the Culture War that can be more or less described as a 'Gender War'.
Front 1: Which pronouns to use? Does "gender even exist?
Front 2: Is Western society a "patriarchy"?
Front 3: Is Masculinity Toxic?
Front 4: "Incels".
This post is about Front 4. Growing male sexlessness. I am not going to make much of an empirical argument but more of a rhetorical one.
So what if men are having less sex?
A large enough contingency of young men not having sexual partners is almost always a precursor for political and social instability. All that excess energy needs to be directed somewhere (work to provide for the wife and kids), if it isn't it usually boils over towards the rest of society as men seek out more violent and high-risk avenues to gain social status let that be joining gangs or starting political revolutions.
Moreover, young men are the most productive demographic in society in just about every domain. If a large enough percentage of them don't see any reason/reward for working hard, they just won't.
It's getting worse.
A growing number of men not having sex is a canary in the coal mine. That whatever was holding the socioeconomic fabric together is deteriorating. Let that be worsening economic conditions (we got plenty of that), worsening economic inequality (plenty of that as well), or just worsening social institutions (Online dating is the plurality method of how heterosexual couples met., It's growing rapidly.).
The cultural wind is blowing
Not only that but the two sexes resenting each other is mainstream. As I was growing up in the early 2000s there were 'boys vs girls' conversations. But those conversations were light-hearted and there were no hard feelings.
Nowadays browsing through social media comment sections and talking to other young guys. The tensions are much higher. I see normies spouting black pill talking points all over Instagram and TikTok. And that seems to be the majority ideology. This is in stark contrast to the early 2000s and even the 2010s were the majority consensus amongst men could have been described as 'RedPill' or 'BluePill'.
If you want an example of the above, Read the comments of this video (Videos like this are an entire genre among zoomers). You can feel the tension in the comments. To me, it's obvious this girl is joking, even if the joke isn't all that funny or whatever. The comments don't suggest most people viewed it as such, the men are on edge. I'd wager they wouldn't have reacted like this a decade ago. Another interesting phenomenon is that unattractive girls produce content like this imitating the attractive ones who can actually get away with it and just end up sinking the sanity waterline further as young naive men peers who know her think "wait I can't even this this bitch?" and the women gas up their egos without being able to back it up.
I mean Andrew Tate is actually popular FFS! I have had so many of my normie friends and acquaintances ask me about what I think of Andrew Tate, and most of them say the same thing. "He's got a point, I agree with a large part of what he says". The man is a clown, he's a comedian in my eyes. The fact his rhetoric resonates with men despite all else is a testament to the times we are living in.
On the female side of the aisle, it seems like they are doubling down too. They will just make more TikTok videos like the one I linked above.
Where do I see all this going?
Increasing political and social tension. More fringe political parties are elected, and how that happens will be left as an exercise for the leader.
One can make the argument that countries like Japan and South Korea are already further along the line of atomization and sexlessness (their TFR is atrocious!).
I don't think East Asian countries with the rice farming optimized culture (and genetic predisposition against inhibition, extremely interesting but I can't find the link) are good proxies to model the rest of the world after.
India might be a candidate they have a Front 4 gender war as well, arranged marriage puts a damper but Hindu Nationalism is clearly on the rise.
It seems that we are in the perfect storm for worsening Gender relations. Economic struggles, increasing OLD (that comes with a massive amount of its own problems) app usage, increasing atomization, recommendation algorithms primarily suggesting media that lowers the sanity line (rage bait of the likes made by Ms Andrea Subotic), gender confusion, Males being vilified for???, Women specific AA, all of them compounding on each other...
Here's what it fundamentally comes down to in my understanding: You cannot have a democracy of the feminine and the masculine (or rather, as it often degrades into, the feminine versus the masculine), because they are only two voters between them. (This as far as I can tell scales up to society as a whole as much as it applies to individual relationships.) What happens when both sides disagree? In a democratic modality: nothing. There is no majority and thus nobody can win. It's simply he said she said, 1v1, a tie. Thus all you get is deadlock, disagreement, anger, and confusion. (Occasionally in the best cases you may get trade and compromise, but the capacity of even this is heavily limited when you have a strong disagreement of fundamental values/preferences as you do here.)
One side has to be in charge, has to have the unilateral right of the tiebreaker, because otherwise there's no way of ending most standoffs. Is it not likely that nature, as the most fundamental arbiter of propriety (particularly in sexual/romantic matters which are as instinctively-driven as it gets, at least unless we want to hack our brains to remove its influence and until we're able to), has designated the generally stronger, generally larger, generally taller, generally possessing of more geniuses, generally more entrepreneurial and innovative, generally more possessing of great administrative ability, etc. gender as this tiebreaker?
We slowly began tearing down the above Chesterton's fence over the past centuries, and then suddenly demolished what was left in the last 60 years or so (partially on the basis of a fairly trivially obviously wrong but trendy view that there really aren't any fundamental differences between the genders at all and thus no natural tiebreaker), but did we really justify it any point along the way other than by dogmatic appeals to egalitarianism?
Did we not forget that the most fundamental egalitarianism is an equivalent right to anyone else to simply do what you wanna do and go your own way, cooperating or not as you please? Except cooperation between the masculine and the feminine is absolutely essential for the health, happiness, and continuation of our species. If one side cannot compel the other to cooperate when necessary, then why wouldn't their cooperation and thus the overall health, happiness, and continuation of the species decline?
(It's worth noting that on balance the overall greater welfare created by this often offsets even the "losses" of the party compelled into cooperation. Some day in the past there was probably some cavewoman wishing some caveman would go out and do something practical like hunt or collect firewood instead of worrying about this "wheel" idea of his, but in the end even she was probably better off once he figured it out. Many such cases.)
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On a personal note: My man, I don't want to be a jerk, but you had it right in your post a month ago when you said
And you gotta realize that to say it's difficult to find a woman who meets your specifications:
is as absurd in a free sexual market as a capitalist worker saying the only jobs he can find are beneath him. My brother, what you can get is your market value. A guy is a 6 if he can attract a woman who is a 6, a woman is a 7 if she can seduce a guy who is a 7; QED. It's like ELO, you're as good as the opposition you beat, in real life not on paper, this isn't college football where the analysts decide the rankings. So when you say
All I can think reading this is, do you maybe have a little Greco-Roman homoeroticism hiding under all that "just 'mirin the dudes?" So when you say:
You seem like a great guy, a man after my own heart {other than your opinions on glute development}, so it shocks me that you say this. It is not that hard to go get laid.* You can show me stats that the median man is fat, that doesn't make it hard to run five miles or hard to lift weights, it means those men aren't trying. You can show me stats that the median man reads no books, that doesn't make it hard to read a book. Those stats are reflective in large part of a huge number of men who just flat out aren't trying, are ambition-free automatons of fat and grease and CoD achievements, are marginally employed in dead end jobs they hate to pay for their takeout and Xbox(whatever the fuck it is now). Those guys are losers. It might be slightly worse to be a loser today than it was 50 years ago, in the interest of charity and having a happy and functioning society it might be worth exploring how we can make life better for losers, but in a meritocratic sense it is their fault. They aren't good enough. It's a low bar, and they tripped over it.
Which brings me to another question I've been pondering across other circumstances lately, what makes a meritocracy good enough? The platonic ideal of a meritocracy, where effort and talent are distributed and rewarded perfectly fairly according to some innate virtue of humans involved with no luck or unfairness whatsoever, has never and will never exist. All meritocracies we seek to implement are imperfect, all meritocracies produced by nature are imperfect, ruined by genetics and circumstance if not by loopholes and local knowledge. But when is it good enough that we are allowed to just blame people for failing to put in minimal effort to succeed.**
The classical liberal/capitalist/equality of opportunity view is that as long as everyone gets a fair opportunity to apply, whoever gets in gets in, what's a little nepotism or inheritance between friends as long as everyone gets to play and we pick the best people who apply at the end? I tend to fall here, and for the most part I think the dating market sits here right now. Everyone can apply, but the people who get in, get in; the distribution might not be fair in the sense that everyone gets enough, but it is fair in the sense that everyone gets what he deserves.
The Civil Rights law/protected characteristic view, is that certain traits can be discriminated on while others cannot. I can discriminate for a job on intelligence, but not on race; by strength but not by religion. An actress hired for her looks is fine, as is a basketball player hired for his height and speed; but Goddess forbid we should limit either opportunity to whites. So the above, but if you refuse to date Black guys that is fucked up; if you refuse to date Jewish girls that's wrong. There are elements of this to dating today, but they are small enough that while I am sympathetic and think they should be addressed {for the happiness of all, Love Hard was the Xmas romcom of the year}, I don't think discrimination as I understand it undermines the basic meritocracy of the system. Some wokes are trying to expand the categories of protected characteristics in dating, to race and weight and height and birth-sex and whatever else people are bitter about. That is just goofy, and undermines the entire point, as they could always just date other ugly people.
The pseudo-Marxist/Kendi/equity view is that a meritocracy cannot be a meritocracy if it does not deliver some reasonable shot at happiness to everyone, no one can be left behind. In dating, this is the view of the body-positive and the incel. The fact that the system offers no shot at happiness to an individual means the system is unfair by definition, a true meritocracy would have to deliver fair (in the sense of livable) results to everyone. The problem here is the confusion of need with want, of living with standard of living, of pride with survival. Make everyone equal on whatever basis, they will find other bases for discrimination.. Hierarchy, uh, finds a way. Maybe there's something to moderating the consequences of failure to whatever extent possible, but to try to equalize outcomes completely is madness and deleterious to humanity.
What's everyone else's opinion?
*In America or the EU, for middle class white men. I can't speak to anywhere else or any other cultures.
**@SaruchBinoza if you think the responses here are anti-male, try posting the same story but for women being unable to find a good man, and watch the claws come out. The responses aren't anti-male, they're anti-whiner. I expect the responses would be the same here if someone posted saying "Maaaan, I just can't find a job, no one wants to pay me enough for my skills!" or "I just can't learn to do math" or especially "I just can't lose weight no matter how hard I try!"
I think there are two kinds of meritocracy. The one you seem to be talking about and which is (somewhat rightfully) pushed back against frequently. And one that's closer to "We should put the person best at doing <x> in charge of doing <x>". Where it's not about any sort of innate virtue or deserved reward, but just that you get better outcomes by putting skilled people in the positions requiring those skills. Maybe you have to pay more to hire skilled people, but it's not the point.
EDIT: To expand slightly, I think of (the latter) meritocracy as a tool for getting things done, and it should be complemented by systems that ensure everyone has a decent life regardless. They're just out of scope of meritocracy as a candidate-choosing strategy.
While I understand the idea that distributive justice can be separated partially or fully from meritocratic selection, such that both run separately, "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" doesn't work when the thing being distributed is the status that comes from being in charge of . Hence the Enemy at the Gates speech.
Even leaving aside incentives, which are necessary to ensure that ambitious people are choosing to put their efforts into getting good at s we actually need and make us happy, people want to be honored, put in charge. And they will find ways to turn being honored and put in charge into other material rewards.
So in the end, I don't think there are two forms of meritocracy, either people deserve things they get or they don't. There's a certain level of baseline humanity, but beyond that it's all status, you can equalize pay people will still fight just as bitterly over status. Sayre's law: "Campus politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small"
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What if I'm not just looking to get laid, though? What if I'm looking for a stable marriage and 2-3 kids with someone whose company I can tolerate, and whose appearance I'm not repulsed by/who I wouldn't be embarrassed to introduce to my friends? That, to me, feels like an almost impossible ask today, despite having been the norm several decades ago.
Especially as the pathway to finding that stability seems to involve having to play the hookup game for a bit and then picking from what you can 'score' from that
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Weird, to me that feels much much easier than getting laid (by someone I'm not repulsed by). Less than a tenth of the women I've slept with wouldn't have gladly taken things farther or been more committed together. And I figure that would generalize, the modal motte characteristics all scream "take him home to mama" more than "drunk food."
Like assuming you had all the economic ducks in a row, the non gender aspects of marriageability, there's way more demand for committed men than there is supply. At churches/masjids/etc especially.
Why do you think it's harder?
I think those requirements are more onerous than they might appear. Wanting a good chance at having 3ish kids alone probably leaves you with an age cap of ~27-28, if you plan to have them 2-3 years apart, and if you need some time to actually get to know them first.
For context, I'm a man, turning 30 this year, and a recently appointed assistant professor in a computational department at a reasonably good school (probably ranked 10th or so in my field). I'm making much less than I would be in industry, but with no debts, and a nontrivial amount of savings, I'd still count that as financially squared away. I'm a few years younger than the average new faculty, so I'm ahead of the curve for my career track.
It's hard to say what's due to sheer bad luck, my individual circumstances, or the broader trend of society, but I've never been particularly romantically successful. but I must be below average in appearance, because online has never yielded any tangible results for me, and the vast majority of rejection I've experienced in real life comes before they've had any real opportunity to know my qualities as a person. There were some worthwhile experiences that in another universe could have led to my desired outcome, along with some terrible and regrettable ones, but I bungled at least some due to immaturity or inexperience. Yet despite having developed as a person, and accruing more accomplishments, wealth, and status, I feel that opportunities like that are growing harder to come by than before. I do agree with the above poster that the game is getting harder to play.
Maybe I should start going to church again, though I've been an apostate my entire adult life.
I'm once again astonished at how awesome and accomplished the people on here are. You sound like the definition of "take him home to mamma" and in every way the opposite of "drunk food" in my spectrum. Basically I figure there are traits that make a one night stand fun, and traits you look for in a long term partner, you have way more of the stable long-term partner ones, a 23 year old woman looking for a husband is probably looking for exactly you. I would predict that basically the majority of women who would want to sleep with a young STEM professor would be happy to marry him, sexual attraction is more likely to be your limiting factor in the whole process. Are you explicitly looking for marriage, or still in the "see what happens" dating style?
Then again, I'm only a year older and I've been married for six years, so what the fuck do I know. Different worlds.
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When people score men or women, they're usually going off looks alone.
Assuming a normal distribution, not inflated like the typical 1-10 scale is, I'd personally vary anywhere from a 4 to a 6, maybe a 7 if I get a nice haircut.
But I've consistently been able to date women significantly prettier than I am, because I have other characteristics that make me attractive in their eyes.
So he could very well state that he wants to date 8s as a 6, if he brings something else to the table.
Aren't you literally a doctor in a society that's a fair bit more traditional/marriage-orientated than the West? Especially since certain characteristics that play well in your home market likely aren't gonna play as well in the West.
You're correct that I'm a doctor in India (albeit I'm almost done with emigration) and that the place is more conservative when it comes to relationships and settling down.
That being said, it's not so conservative that casual relationships, flings and one night stands are unheard of. They're quite common as a matter of fact.
Like I said, I'm hardly the most handsome tool in the shed, but I am tall, broad shouldered, with a deep voice and a rather exotic accent. I also am, if I say so myself, quite funny and charming when I want to be.
These are universally attractive qualities, even if in some more conservative places, they're subsumed by more practical considerations like jobs, financial stability and family background.
I'm quite confident in saying that were I still on the dating scene, I could comfortably punch above my weight class when it came to looks, even if the latter aspects aren't as heavily weighted in Western society.
So OP is hardly hopeless, he's got a good job, and while he might need to work on his social skills, if he wants to date someone reasonably attractive he can do so even if his looks aren't the best. And it ultimately is a numbers game!
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This is still partially true. But I did not let that color my perception when making this post. I made it with the assumption that said worsening gender relations are something for which there is a signal, independent of my personal stake in the matter, which I didn't mention in this post at all.
Moreover, I did not intend to talk about myself in this post at all. But given some people are steering the conversation in that direction, I'll go with it for now.
I don't believe so. Some of those things only exclude 50% of the population, and they are not all mutually exclusive. If you can convince me otherwise, I'm open.
FYI I don't live in America where The mean -1 standard deviation of women is "fat" so that specific standard isn't as all-encompassing as some people think it is. Where I live, around 60% of women would pass that qualifier. I mean no offense to Americans, but you have some FAT people among you; It was just impossible to not notice while I lived in the US for a short while.
I am under no illusion that "SMV" is graded on a point-based system. I know it's an ELO score.
But once again, I wasn't really complaining. I was telling 2cim that just getting A partner is not the goal, getting a good enough partner is. A distinction that is central to this conversation.
An analog being that someone is talking about food price inflation, and 2cim says "gruel is still cheap". Paying for gruel what you used to pay for steak kinda stings.
No. I said that because I genuinely think that is a pattern. Why would I rate younger men higher than older men? I might want to, but I want to speak the truth more. I tried to account for all possible biases and confounders before I put that statement out into the world.
What if I cut your and everyone else's salary in half? But everything costs the same. At which point do you raise the "wait this is getting kinda hard?". Not buying food and surviving hard, but sending your kids to college hard? After all we don't want a life, we want a good life, right?
I am making a similar argument for the dating market we zoomers found ourselves in. The girls are what they used to be nothing has changed (an argument could be made they degraded because there are more fat people across the board now). But you need to be better to get them relative to before. As a result, a growing number of people are not getting any (this is a fact).
And I know this. Because 20-year-old me had an easier time courting 8's than 24-year-old me had with 6's. What gives? 24-year-old me could bitchslap 20-year-old me out of the room.
Once again, I am under no illusion of the dating market being the platonic meritocracy.
In the simplest of words. I am trying to say that, the dating market for zoomer males is actually worse, this time they are not crying wolf, and there are some stats and a sea of anecdotes to back that claim up.
Yes, the people who talk about this one specific problem endlessly (incels) muddy the waters. They might have cried wolf far too many times. But this is not that, it wasn't intended to be that.
Easier than it used to be? For the exact same caliber of girls?
If you are openminded enough, go to /r/dating and run an experiment, to see how many people are complaining today, compared to when the sub was created a decade ago. If you have an explanation that explains that, I'm all ears. Maybe the internet went through some kind of eternal September where the people who used to post on forums 10 years ago were just that good with the ladies.
Yeah. SImilar experience.
4 year break from dating due to longterm relationship between 2018
and 2022Genuinely would say I'm better at every category in terms of experience, weight, career, income yaddayadda and yet it's so much more of a grind now than it was. Both in terms of the quality of girls I can pull despite going from like a 4 to a 7, and the amount of psychological warfare involved in dating. People were generally less shitty 4 years ago
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I hope nobody minds, but I'll be replying to @substantialfrivolity and @hanikrummihundursvin in this comment as well, it's all one big mass of the same questions. And coincidentally, between sets, the perfect theme music popped on my workout mix! "Although you can't see them, or hear their breathing sounds, someone in this world is having sex right now."
I assumed you were American because you cited American statistics from the GSS in your original post. I'm just going to stick with the USA because, wisely, you haven't even told me where you are so I can't really talk about it.* Conveniently, the USA has tried this IRL, so we can look at the results and how people feel about it. Let's look at another, similar graph. And a third, here.** And the bipartisan response, across multiple presidential administrations from multiple parties, has been, not a whole hell of a lot. And the general opinion on the right has long been, Capitalism is competitive, if you aren't you need to become competitive. It's fuck or walk.
You are not the first to draw this comparison, SA did so in Radicalizing the Romanceless in 2014, long before you think things got hard for you.*** And he seemed to think, addressing Feminists who were presumably on the left, that "you wouldn't say this to anybody about work" was a bulletproof argument. But, what if I would say this to somebody about work? What if I'd tell a guy who couldn't get ahead to learn refrigerator repair? Because genuinely, for able bodied American white men, I think both are true: it's not hard to get a job or get laid.
But I'll ask, are you consistent on that analogy? Do you think housing costs are a crisis that should be addressed, or that people get the wage they deserve economically in a competitive market? My feeling is that we need to make sure that the disabled and the very weak can have a livable life, but that beyond that it's all competition, that's the best way to improve society.
So, we should do a little something to make sure they don't starve; but college, for example, is basically a positional good. There's not much personal economic value in having an education, there's value in having as much or more education than those you are competing with. If you can get into college, you try to get into a better college, you get a master's, you get a doctorate, it's all the same treadmill (really, watch that Enemy at the Gates clip, or the whole movie it's pretty good). Same with "hot" women, it's all a positional good, status games {verse 2}. If you can get an 8 you'll want a 9; if you can get a 9 you'll want a 10.
So let's get to the meat of the question:
or to take the fun way
Charles Murray (more famous in these parts for The Bell Curve) wrote this out so long ago I had to do a presentation on it in undergrad. Coming Apart's essential argument was that the divergence between upper and lower class Americans had to do with divergence in values, with upper class Americans showing little or no reduction in religiosity, industriousness, propensity to marry; and new lower class Americans showing marked reductions in all three and more. Part of his argument was that rich white liberals advocate for "freedoms" that work for rich white liberals, but don't actually adopt those freedoms themselves, instead leaving them to lower class Americans who can't hack it.
He has a decent point when it comes to economics and "big" life outcomes, but there's something missing, expanding inequality is all around us, even in fields that are totally unrelated to work or family, hobbies and interests. Look at Frank Sinatra's body in this scene in From Here to Eternity**** Or Steve McQueen literally lifting. Those were two sex symbols of the day, and their bodies would not be shown erotically on camera in a film today.
Or an extended hypothetical I brought up to make the point when I was arguing about it in the gym once. If you took the boys in a high school senior class, from 1960 and from 2022, and took them all to a rock climbing gym. I would bet that almost all the boys, the vast majority, in 1960 after a quick lesson could be coached up a juggy 5.8 or 5.9; a few athletes might be able to hit a 5.10. But basically no one in 1960 climbed, and those who did often couldn't climb 5.10 anyway. The 2022 boys, probably one or two of them would actually be climbers and zip up 5.11 or 5.12 no problem, and the freak athletes are more athletic than ever they'd get up the 5.10s, but a quarter of the class or more would be unable to climb 5.8, too fat or too weak or too cowardly. The numbers back this up too. Stronger and stronger athletes professional and amateur, weaker and weaker populace.*****
We're coming apart everywhere, in fitness, in sex, in income, in talent, in intelligence. Hell, I'd say there are more guys that can cook a beautiful chef quality meal in today's 25yo men, and fewer who can do basic cooking. More guys that can deadlift 500lbs than at any point in history, more men that can't deadlift 300lbs. More 25yos that have read >500 books, more 25yos that haven't read 50 books in their life. Solid mediocrity, in the positive sense, is disappearing in favor of min maxing. What do we blame this on?
It's the opposite of the participation trophy joke typically leveled at supposedly soft millenials/zoomers. It's Ricky Bobby ethics: if you ain't first you're last, second place is the first loser, do whatever you want but be the best at it. More and more men find that if they can't be really good at something, it isn't worth doing at all. And that tends towards more men simply giving up on romance, going herbivorous, retreating into video games and social media and bitter online subgroups. The substitutes are good enough to make the effort seem futile.
The flip side of all the min-maxers landing on "min" for things like fitness, appearance, and romantic skill is that it isn't hard to win over the median in those fields.
*We are really, almost uniquely, disgustingly fat. That is a big throw-off for the whole bit, unfortunately. Glad you live somewhere better.
**This one's from 2016 but amusingly enough while housing costs have kept climbing higher and higher, the federal minimum wage hasn't budged in that time, despite both parties separately taking unified control of both houses of congress and presidency with a stated agenda of helping the American worker. And as soon as lower-quintile incomes began to climb to any significant degree independent of the minimum wage, the Fed sought to induce a recession to prevent rising wages. Go figure.
***I actually did dig up /r/dating top posts from a random period in 2016 and from 2022. I wasn't determined enough to read them all, but just glancing at them and rating as positive or negative on "getting some" for January-May: 2016 14/25 negative/whiney; 2022 5/14 negative (however 11 were deleted in 2022). June to September: 5/25 in 2016, 5/25 in 2022. So I'm really not seeing an increase, though this isn't exactly scientific.
****Trivia: this is the Sinatra movie that inspired the plot in The Godfather with the actor, the producer, and the horse
***** @substantialfrivolity This is what I mean when I say it's easy. Basically everyone used to be decently fit, it's only in recent years that we're seeing obesity and inactivity be a norm. Fewer and fewer men can really help you move, or dig a ditch, or join a pickup football game. I'm not saying it's easy to get jacked, I'm saying it's easy to be mediocre, and mediocrity is all you need to be above median today.
Either you are the fastest typist in the world, or you are taking some long rests.
I cited American statistics because America produces the most statistics, they are the easiest to find, And most of the audience of this post would be American. And of course, because we are all living in America.
I live in Dubai. I'll bore you with some details about the dating market here.
It is Nightmare Elder Child Sacrificing God-level difficulty compared to America*. The male-to-female ratio is 3:2. There is a mix of people from all over the world with a much larger contrast compared to even the most "International" cities in the US or Canada. Maybe twice as mixed as Toronto. You have to navigate language**, cultural and religious barriers. People are overworked to shit (worst work-life balance in the world, i.e some people are just too tired to go out after working 11 hour days for 6 days a week).
Also, people are always coming and going. Given that most of them are tied to their work visa, the churn is relatively high (You lose your job, you are kicked out.). I had to cut things off with the last girl I was seeing because she left the country and LDRs really suck. This is a very common story for young (middle-class like me) people here. They end up losing a large chunk of their friend group as they leave for higher education (very common for people to go to Canada/Europe to get their undergrad). More of my high school buddies live in the state of Ontario than in this country. I suppose Americans can relate to this a bit given that the country is large enough that "moving for work" means effectively moving a few countries away.
OLD is even more winner-takes, the mechanisms for which I am not entirely sure of. But I ran an experiment by setting my location to NYC in Tinder 6 months ago. I got roughly 2 matches/100 swipes (this informs me that I am probably average looking, notice the extremely large variance in answers) with location as NYC compared to 0.5/200-300 I get here.
But anyways, I'm not complaining. I am applying to graduate schools in Canada and if all works out, I will escape this current Hellscape.
*My friends who grew up here but live in Canada say as much.
**Language barriers really suck. I can speak 3 languages but heaven for me would be if all languages suddenly disappeared and English was the only one left. Fairly large amounts of nuance are intransmissible even if the other person is proficient in English but not at a native speaker level. I assume my English is closer to that of a Native speaker than whatsoever the rank below it is. It's a shame that we can't communicate easily with large swathes of humanity.
I never said any way there should be any redistribution of means of sexual reproduction. You can assume that I would be sympathetic to such sentiments/narratives, but I am not.
I write a post that hints at my discontent at this issue maybe once a few months. In real life, I am working, earning, lifting, and doing everything it takes to maximize my net worth (for various reasons).
I am a staunch capitalist in matters of Economics and everything else, but that doesn't preclude me from feeling the plight of the poor. And I can wager I am probably more of a capitalist than You. But I do think, I ultimately want my fellow man (and woman) to live better.
Nature is a Molochian hellscape, Deer die because they grind their teeth out and die from starvation. It's a miracle at all that humans can experience Life AND Liberty AND Happiness. And if we are losing some aspects of that, I don't think it's too unforgivable for some to lament that. First world problems or not.
I got your general point. Winners win harder, and More losers, in all domains.
All the examples you listed illustrate the point. But I don't really need to respond to all of them. Yeah, the best rock climbers now are better but there are more worse ones, same for lifters, bankers, programmers, and {literally everything}.
We are all riding on the waves created by the true greats. This is more evident in Computer Science (I'm a programmer) than in any other field. So it's not that we should want less of this. But at the same time, I do feel the plight of those who will drown.
And on a personal level, I am not unfamiliar with winning at all. I am not going to say what it is because it would be too beside the point and bragging, but I am within the top 5 in the world in a not-too-specific thing. Unfortunately (in the context of this discussion), it's not the kind of thing that nets you massive amounts of wealth (in the short term) or something that you can put on your Tinder profile. But nevertheless, winning is soo good that 1 second of being a winner is worth more than a lifetime of not being one.
That's awesome! And realize that I don't criticize your thinking because I think you're a loser who should recognize that you're an evolutionary dead end and hop on an ice flow to spare us the trouble, I criticize your thinking because I think you're a smart talented guy, and this kind of thinking can poison smart talented guys into thinking they are losers and evolutionary dead ends and convince themselves that they should hop on an ice flow to spare us all the trouble. It's what people around here are fond of calling an "infohazard." One should optimize some of one's beliefs for what they provide you, not always for their perceived truth value, which we are astonishingly bad at recognizing in the moment regardless.
So what do you propose doing about it? Nothing? Recognizing how bad it is but leaving it alone?
The problem with the theory that this will lead to social unrest is simple. It is more or less self-evident that as long as there is a basically meritocratic system underlying the selection process, any rebellion will fail, because the people who would rebel are already selected failures, and anyone who could rebel would first need to make themselves a success. This goes for antiwork and similar communist efforts of the modern left*, it goes for HBDers as per our own @DaseIndustriesLtd , it goes for the incels. Guys who truly can't get laid on the current system are some heavy mixture of short, poor, stupid, introverted and not outgoing, antisocial, ugly, weak. By the time one gets the charisma sufficient to actually lead, he'll be co-opted by the system, and the provision of pussy will soften his resolve to conquer. The Revenge of the Nerds ends when the boys get laid, they don't then need to burn down the other frat house or something to prove their point. For any of them to get energized enough to do anything about it would require acquiring exactly the traits that are still enough in the partial-meritocracy of today's dating market to make good.
PS: Reading your thoughts on Dubai, I apologize for being pedantic about n/10 scoring, it makes more sense if you're talking about your experience in Dubai as being somewhat unique (ie you're an NYC 8 but a Dubai 4 or something like that) which is much more coherent.
*This gets into the conspiracy theory that college affirmative action is primarily an effort of The Man to keep strong Black communities from forming. The Talented Tenth is plucked right out of the ghetto, feted with scholarships and biglaw jobs out of Harvard (or Howard), and coalesces into part of the system. Without affirmative action as it is currently practiced, the Talented Tenth would be leading the local Panthers chapter and building local businesses; with affirmative action they get a DEI sinecure at Blackrock while Blackrock's REIT buys homes in their community and rents them back at a huge profit.
I'm not entirely sold on this line of thinking. Sure, the pragmatic value of a belief is at odds with its truth value. After all, I won't tell my mom she's being a bitch if even she is (armchair psychologists would say there is a lot to unpack there). But outside of close interpersonal relationships, And regarding matters of ones model of The World. I do think, thinking as such as at the root of many of todays irrationalities, the inability to stare at the uncomfortable truth at its face.
Speaking in less abstract terms. Let's say being 'blackpilled' is infohazardous. In so far as it prevents a guy from exerting disproportionate effort towards "getting laid" because he knows his effort is disproportionate. Ultimately leading to an unhappy and lonely life. That's a failure mode for sure.
But one man's infohazard is another man's wisdom. If the non-Blackpilled guy fails left and right, he has a dim chance of figuring out exactly why (assuming BP is true). The BPed guy at least knows how to chisel away at the problem.
Knowing it's all fucked. But having the resolve to carry onwards anyways is a more than good enough approximation of the Heros Journey. Lest we not gimp the strong to protect the weak. The people who "deserve" it the most as per the purest meaning of that word.
I believe absolutely nothing can be done about it; in the absence of forcing people to do things they really really don't want to do.
I don't have a good enough mental model to describe the process that encompasses all the variables. But I intuit that there are many things we want that are tradeoffs against other things we want. For example TFR (weak proxy but lets use it for now) might just be inversely correlated with Economic strength. In other words, it's a control system.
And if we want to be really pessimistic. I don't think humans want it any other way. I don't think the drive to pair bond in humans is that much of strong one (across both sexes). After all, we do possibly have twice the number of female ancestors. In the simplest of words, I got nothing. If I was Tsar, there is absolutely nothing I could do. You can't have an ELO system without losers, its not possible.
But let's assume as a Tsar, my people don't expect too much from me. I am tasked with just restoring male sexlessness to the early 2000's level. Then there is still not much I can do that isn't overtly authoritarian, the cats are out of their respective bags. I might think about this and post a top-level later.
The relationship blackpill is best approximated by the online discourse around "hardgainers" in lifting, which given you're a lifter and online I'm sure you're familiar with, where beginner after beginner hops on /r/fitness or /r/weightroom and announces that they just can't gain/lose weight, it's not working and I'm doing everything right. Most of them are not doing everything right, or even most things right, 50% of self-described hardgainers have their calorie counts wrong, a good amount of the remainder literally aren't doing the exercises they said they were doing if you dig in a little, and almost all simply haven't been trying long enough to say whether they are hardgainers or not.* The lifting community basically rejects the idea of hardgainers because individuals are so bad at determining whether they are personally hardgainers, everyone thinks he's a hardgainers when he isn't jacked after eight weeks or whatever the magazine promised him. I've been around long enough to have seen it over and over in real life, I'd guess that 80% of lifters will at some time think they are a hardgainer, and that less than 10% are true hardgainers (can't achieve an above average physique with reasonable normal efforts).
There are, of course, a percentage of men who are genetically cursed, who simply don't put on muscle from ordinary exercise (just as there are men who put on muscle seemingly without ordinary exercise). But if the lifting community embraced hardgainer memes, if the conventional wisdom online was "if you think you're a hardgainer you're probably a hardgainer and should give up/take steroids" rather than "you're not a hardgainer try harder," what would happen is that the 10% of true hardgainers would say "phew, now I don't have to waste my time on this" and have slightly better lives, but the much bigger group of guys who think they are hardgainers will stop lifting and never find out they weren't hardgainers after all and their lives would be much worse.
The latter is the problem with forwarding black pill narratives online. My belief is that most, if not all, men go through In(voluntarily)Cel(ibate) phases in their lives. I suspect that if I had found the modern, polished black pill discourse when I was 17 I might have thought to myself "yup, that's me" and never grown into myself. And, moral cards on the table, I guess I value the suffering of the true hardgainers banging their heads against the wall less than I value the possible winners who never discover their potential. The former's lives were probably going to suck anyway, the latter have a chance to do something really great. And when we talk about "a bigger percentage of men never getting laid could destabilize society," the latter are the marginal cases and also far more important than the former.
I'm interested to read your ideas on What is to be Done?. Looking forward to it. Just do me a favor and never sell yourself short irl.
*Speaking personally, my "hardgainer" phase in lifting consisted of doing bad rep schemes, and at one point literally being too stupid to realize that my old barbell was 10 lbs lighter and my sand-filled vinyl plates were off.
I don't think it is. Not because of ideological reasons but because I think it's sloppy thinking. Lifting is a points-based system, there are metrics. It's not an ELO system like finding a mate is.
I understand that there is a common factor of people overestimating how much they are doing to achieve said goal. And that's what the analogy is for, well and clear to me.
Nonetheless, I don't think much more needs to be said about this. Because you are arguing from a different frame than what the initial post was about. I don't need to be convinced of a change of mindset at this moment in time.
I'm writing up a post about "The System". As in a more comprehensive model of the "mating market". Any why I think the modern market is somewhat different than it used to be in the past. It's going to be abstract and mathematical.
Spoiler: What is to be done? Get famous.
I'm aware that specific topics give off too many "bad vibes" even to bring up. I recently had a girl tell me I am "too depressing and dark" for talking about the state of the world economy post covid and post-Ukraine war; Not a single thing I was discussing wasn't factual, and the discussion was strictly about the facts. Point is, to speak to the audience.
As for marketing, I'll let the product sell itself. There's not much I can do besides correct information asymmetries.
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As I'm often inclined to do, I'll addend your observations on the lifting community by saying that this exact phenomenon replicates itself in the running and cycling communities. I guess there's an except to that, in that the /r/running community and others like it are kind of rah-rah, blackslappy bullshit that tells everyone they're doing great, and that it's not their fault that they're slow, but that sort of shit doesn't really fly as soon as you're into boards that are actually more performance-oriented. If someone say they're having success running 30 miles per week, the answer is going to be "congrats on the talent, but you'd be a lot better if you ran more". If someone insists that they don't get significant aerobic fitness gains from running big miles at easy paces, the response is going to be, "post your logs and we'll help you figure out what you're doing wrong". Pretty much no one accepts that someone is running 70 miles per week, knocking out legitimate track reps and tempo work, but just stuck at a 21 minute 5K. Doesn't happen, not real outside of legitimate medical issues.
Of course, in both worlds, there are going to be legitimate differences in genetic talent and ability caps partly determined by what you did in early life, but the reality is that the vast, vast majority of people that would like to run decently fast, put on significant muscle mass, or ride up Alpe d'Huez in under an hour can do so with tried and true training methods. The best advice for almost everyone is going to be based on helping them figure out what they're doing wrong rather than coddling people and telling them that it's not their fault.
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That can't be more than, what, 5%, right? Being able to put on muscle would be a hard requirement for survival historically, even in agriculture-time, so evolution should provide it. Now, 'ordinary exercise' would have to mean 'committed weight training + good diet, sleep, etc', as opposed to 'going jogging sometimes'.
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Looks like your pings aren’t working. You may need to capitalize letters or take away the asterisks.
Dammit, my bad. @SubstantialFrivolity
It shows up in the preview so idk what else is necessary.
Yeah the system is pretty messy, I always double check after I post and half the time they’re broken.
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FYI the Sinatra link isn't available outside of the US. Any chance you could post a screengrab?
Ask and ye shall receive. I'm just amazed anyone actually clicked through the link in this stoned rant.
/images/16699847530846338.webp
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I largely agree with you, except for the assertion that it's easy to be somewhat fit. No, it's really really not. If it were, then most people would manage it! I can imagine it's easy for you. And for others. But easy for most? No way Jose.
Now that isn't to say people don't bear personal responsibility. They absolutely do. No matter how hard it is for you to keep weight off, it's still on you if you aren't able to do it. Society doesn't owe you welfare hotties jumping on your dick just because that would be really fun for you, not by any means. But I think that the correct response to people who say it's hard for them isn't to say "it's actually easy, you just aren't trying". It's "yeah, it is hard. But you still have to do it if you want to succeed."
It is mechanically and intellectually easy to be fit. It is easy to be fit in the sense that it's hard to be an expert at ballet or play a sport competitively. It's easy to be fit in the sense that it's hard to get a high-paying job, lead a medium-sized company, or do research mathematics. It's even easy to be fit in the - mechanical - sense that it's hard to execute the duties of a retail job, or win at a difficult video game.
When you say 'hard', you mean it's hard to be fit in the sense that it's hard to "not play video games", hard to "not eat mcdonalds", or hard to "buy healthy food", or hard to not divorce and abandon children. 80% of those who has trouble doing those things would do them easily if they were required to by the state or their job, or if they were directly attempting to be fit. The reason they don't is quite complex - growing up in technological society and school isolates one from taking action for one's own ends, healthy food and "exercise" themselves are less integrated with life and directly useful than they were in the past (you don't need to lift rocks or dirt for your job, normal healthy food kinda tastes bad). But that doesn't make it "hard", it just makes those people degenerate.
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It's easy to prevent yourself becoming obese. Losing it is hard (mainly a matter of consistency and time - which is hard for some) but not as hard to not get fat.
A lot of people in the world aren't really fit-fit as in: killing it at the gym regularly. This sort of insistence on self-development in life and career isn't universal. Most of them just reap the health benefits of not being obese, combined with whatever exercise they get at their job.
They wouldn't run a fast mile but they're healthy and don't have an attractiveness malus.
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The comment you are replying to, in market terms, is predicting a 'crash', for a lack of a better term. The baseline ingredient for a crash is a mismatch of information. Deferring to market standards in a market that is suffering from a mismatch of information isn't much of an argument in relation to what the value of things should be.
The rest of your comment is just a framegame where instead of looking at the issues from a sympathetic view, which from reading your comment seems to hurt your personal sensibilities for sounding too much like incel trutherism, you instead just describe the problem in terms of others being losers.
The problem with this is that the frame doesn't change the questions being asked. To phrase the question in terms that don't offend a person of such a grand social stature as yourself: Why are there more losers now?
Reducing all arguments to group conflict isn't relevant. Sure, there is group based pathology in play like always, but that fact doesn't change the fact that there is also an objective reality in play. Just like many early 2000's feminists were objectively wrong in their assertions about men and women being 'equal' in terms of mental and physical competition in various sporting activities, it can also be true that women who can't find a 'good man' are pathologically complaining about a problem that has less to do with reality than men who can't find a 'good woman'. Just because both 'whines' are pathologies doesn't mean they are of equal relation to reality.
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This one is always an amusing scissor in the rat/rat-adjacent space. Big Yud being the ur example.
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Not a direct response but I'm surprised at the many anti-male responses at this. It's like even themotte can't see women as agentic individual with, at least, a small part of responsibility about the situation: all the effort must be on the male individual and if he does not succeed in satisfying the demand he deserves the pain of failure. Is there a name to this phenomenon or a theory why it happens?
The Motte is probably 99% XY Chromosomal and it's generally more productive as a male to sit down and think 'how can I play in this meta' as opposed to 'waah the meta is fucked due to certain activities'.
99% is way too high, both by comparison to rationalists / other smart internet spaces and by posters who've said they're women, although obviously it's heavily male-biased.
I did specify chromosomes for a reason. Still would expect 90%+ & to further that that like the vast majority of posts/comments will be coming from that side of the fence.
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"Society"
It happens because neither men nor women want women to be responsible for shit.
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Hyperagency for men and Hypoagency for women were terms originally developed in the feminist sphere. They were then broadly co-opted by the Men's Rights sphere where they were applied in new and creative ways such as pointing out gender differences in prison sentencing for similar crimes.
Edit: Some quick definitions of these terms can be found here. Feminists complaining that the term was 'misappropriated' here. Further exploration from a MRA is here.
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The rise of the classical manosphere (Roosh, ChateauHeartiste, etc.), Neoreaction (Dreaded Jim, etc.), and even barstool F-boy-ery (Tucker Max) are all at least 10 years old, and in some cases closer to 20. None of this is new.
Scott wrote "Untitled" in what, 2014? The "women only go for jerks!" meme is not new. There was just a gap between when the millennials discovered it, and when the Zoomers finally hit puberty and started to discover it.
The point being made was that Andrew Tate is mainstream popular. Everyone in my workplace knows who Andrew Tate is. None of them have heard of the other things you listed. The fact he isn't saying anything 'new' to you isn't the point.
Who are your coworkers, and where do you work? None of my co-workers have heard of Andrew Tate, but a few have heard of Tucker Max.
Looking just at any metrics from TikTok, YouTube or any mainstream news outlet Tate is giant in comparison. I live in Scandinavia and there was, for example, a recent segment in the radio about Tate and how 'dangerous' he is. I don't understand where you are coming from here. Tate is obviously much bigger.
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IMO none of these people were even close to as popular as Tate was at his peak.
Part of that might be differences in media - e.g. Youtube wasn't as big in the early days of the "manosphere" - but some of those guys (e.g. Rollo Tomasi) are on Youtube today and don't have his viewership.
Tate is also imo different from the ones who did get as prominent as him, like Tucker Max and Neill Strauss in that he's much more directly "red pill" (or misogynist tbh). Tucker Max was mainly selling funny party stories that were called misogynist but he was a fratbro, not a combatant.
Strauss wrote a book about PUA that ended with him abandoning the space after he saw its problems. It basically perfectly followed the three act structure of most crime/"pitiful nerd changes his life" movies: life sucks, discover this cool thing -> enjoy it for a bit then see the downsides -> extricate yourself while hopefully keeping some of the benefits of your journey (usually a girl - Straus ended the book on a serious relationship). As a story it's flattering to both sides of the audience: the pitiful nerds who want to change or vicariously live through the hero, and the people who think the PUA stuff is bullshit or bad. It's like watching Tony Soprano: everyone enjoys it so long as we know he's going to get his comeuppance at the end.
These guys had a bit of cover.
Tate will just straight up say that women are property and belong to men, or high value men should be allowed to cheat and will just go after his ideological enemies in a way that Tucker Max - who was mainly a hedonist at first - just didn't seem to give a shit about. His model seems to be melding financial guru + Tucker Carlson's "populism" (including anti-vax stuff) + red pill culture warrior.
It's a much more confrontational stance that plays way more into the gender war (which fits the topic of it getting worse). Very different proposition and it explains why he got banned.
The interesting thing is that he rose at all tbh
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The incels who withdraw from general life will waste away on Colorado folk medicine, video games, and porn, and they’ll still be there delivering for grub hub out of their parent’s basement in 30 years. To be frank, I suspect the same thing happened in previous generations, they just used drugs that killed them instead of making them fat and stupid.
The drug overdose death rates are 10 times higher or more now than they were at any time since 1993. At which time the rate increased from 2.8 per 100k to what it was in 2020, 28.3 per 100k.
Your theory does not sync up to reality.
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Plenty of young people are still killing themselves with drugs. Probably a plurality of deaths from my graduating class.
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A few choice cuts from the English Anti-Suffragist platform.
Every time this brand of gender-relations pessimism comes up, I have the same incredulous reaction, and I think it comes down to one underlying sentiment:
We have seen this one before. The anti-suffragists were sure voting would tear apart a fragile equilibrium between the sexes. They asserted the existing division of manual and domestic labor was not only stable, but optimal, and any changes would be disastrous for the State. If TFR data was available in 1910, I imagine it would have been quite the talking point, but without it, they could only mutter about “taxing of energies.” Their confidence was preserved for posterity on the public record, not just in the ephemera of YouTube comments.
So when you suggest that this time, TikTok is going to do what the assembly line could not, that influencers are more reflective of a culture than yellow journalism, that our economic circumstances are more stressful than two World Wars and a Great Depression? I remain skeptical. The fabric of society isn’t as fragile as you think.
But they were right, though. I'd call prohibition, which was a very gendered issue and the major suffragette policy issue, a huge disruptive to the body politic.
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Suffrage did though. Gender relations are permanently changed, no one can come up with a way to combine liberated women and high TFR(and even if the selection hypothesis is true, it appears to just be selecting for women who choose ‘babies’ over ‘liberation’), and the male labor force participation rate did drop and no one knows how to raise it again.
Is it possible that there’s alternative reasons? Yes, but suffrage was an inflection point.
Do you really think, though, that doing away with votes for women is going to make the pendulum swing back? The kind of rainbow hair dye septum-pierced college activist types are possibly not voting, but that doesn't stop them setting up all kinds of campaigns. Would AOC go back to the kitchen (or cocktail bar) if she couldn't be elected and couldn't even vote?
Yeah, women have to take responsibility for what happened, but so do men. The Sexual Revolution was something both sexes wanted; men wanted it for 'free love' where they wouldn't have to marry a chick just to fuck her, wouldn't have to run the risk of a kid they'd have to support (because yay contraception and later on abortion), and they'd be able to play the field, sow their wild oats, and not be held back or tied down by boring suburban domesticity with a wife and kids. Women wanted it because hey, women get horny too, they didn't want marriage and kids off the bat either, and they were being told they should aspire to have the same freedoms as men did in all aspects of their live.
Don't marry without trying out the goods first, how can you be sure you'll have a happy marriage if you find out you're not sexually compatible? Without living together, how will you know that you'll get on together? And only one sexual partner in your entire life? You'll regret this later on, you'll be resentful about missing out on all the great experiences you could have had. And men and women will understand each other better, be more friendly, once they are all frank and open about sex and there are no more taboos or restrictions.
At some stage in their lives, everyone is young and horny and wants fun without strings or complications, and they think everyone else is having all the fun, and they're reading magazines and newspaper articles and seeing movies and TV shows about all the great, fun, non-vanilla non-missionary sex everyone else is having, you could be having that too. Then they bump into reality (not everybody gets to have that) and they are resentful, because they were promised this! They were told that love and romance and sex were the greatest pleasures and the most important things in life, and they deserved it all!
How many 20 year old men really want to get married, settle down, and start a family at that age? How many women? I would wager not very many, because this is the modern world we live in now. Get an education first. Get a good job. Get that career. Make something of yourself before even thinking of permanent relationships. But also have a long-term relationship, because only losers can't get a partner. Contradictory messaging, and no recognition of the hard truth that some people will never have that, no matter how they want it, because they're too ugly or too weird or they are misfits in some way. They don't even have to be "crazy homeless on the streets" level, but some people are fat or short or plain or have odd interests or are socially inept because of personality disorders (very mild ones) and all the coaching in the world and advice about "dress better, eat healthy, lift!" is not going to get them what they want. Men and women both.
I don't think 20 year olds should be getting married, but neither do I think 12 year olds should even be thinking of boyfriends/girlfriends and dating. But we have to teach them all about it, because of course they'll be having sex, because that's our modern world and there's no such thing as "no, you're too young and I have the authority to stop you". Or at least, that's the argument from the great liberal campaign to give everyone freedoms and rights and happiness.
This makes intuitive sense but is straight up modern western bullshit and is not borne out by the facts. See this article here: https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/does-religion-help-couples-stay-together/
Note that is is just comparing between UK women, so it's not like some of the women are in highly repressive societies with little legal recourse if their relationships go bad, everyone being compared here has the same level of legal protection available.
And yet the group that does best long term is one where sleeping around is one of the biggest taboos there is and people only ever cohabit after getting married. The reason behind this is that we have a totally different mindset to what marriage is supposed to be than westerners (e.g. for us it's expected and encouraged for you to change your partner to suit you better and vice versa, while westerners would consider that to be manipulation) and it turns out that our mindset is superior in the long run.
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Well, yes, it probably would. I think the folks who unironically want to revoke women's suffrage are entirely correct that it did, and continues to, radically alter society.
Whether this is a good thing or not is a matter of perspective. But we'd definitely be less liberal and very much less woke without the women's vote.
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I didn’t claim that undoing women’s right to vote would undo all this. I merely pointed out that the anti-suffragettes were correct about what happened.
And, BTW, teach your kids not to have sex and stick to it actually works pretty well, it’s just no one is willing to do it- mainstream conservatives think it’s too hard, and mainstream liberals wrote it off without trying.
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To be clear, I don’t deny that the early 20th century saw radical change in Western gender relations. Whether those were downstream of suffrage or of information technology or of massive casualties is kind of a moot point. Four generations later, though, we’re still ticking, and even enjoyed a couple years of uncontested hegemony.
What is it about TikTok that will push birth rates further than suffrage? Than women’s lib?
Birth rates are already unsustainably low.
No one knows how to fix this. I mean, sure, we could have some kind of radical theocracy. But that’s not going to happen. And considering oliganthropia has always been the Achilles heel of hegemonic civilizations and no amount of foederati or immigration amnesty has ever been able to fix it, that seems like a pretty big problem that got let out of the box, and no one has any idea how to deal with it.
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Except his point is that we never actually got to some new, equilibrium as you're implying. This isn't like Christianity replacing paganism and religious life just continuing on; it's more like the collapse of religion in the 20th and 21th century. At least right now.
In terms of fertility rate we're still "ticking" but it was never fixed. The birth rate is below replacement in most industrialized societies with serious potential consequences
This is akin to saying, of climate change, "yes, we thought it was doom and gloom when we wondered how to feed the horses but we came up with coal. We thought we would have to burn coal but we came up with more effective recycling and nuclear power". Yes, we did. Things did improve. But the underlying issue is unsolved. We're still degenerating, on a climate level.
Why isn’t it like the early Christian days? Or the Protestant reformation, or similar secular upheavals. Everything has serious potential consequences, and yet—here we are, arguing about literal First World Problems. We can and will make it through the current milquetoast social upheaval.
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Pictured, life just continuing on
I specifically put "religious life" in there to account for such a response.
I thought I was being silly with my endless qualifications that always bloat my posts.
You're right, Augustine wrote one of the most important books in Christian theology specifically to help contemporaries deal with the fall of Rome intellectually because it wasn't important and everything was going on as usual.
My response is: and a lot of the Bible was written in response to the disasters against Assyria and Babylon.
Apocalypticism is a result of the failures against the Greeks and Rome which were so bad that many basically decided that the world would have to end - and soon- in order to resolve them. Instead of simply abandoning their faith (like us, increasingly) they found a new interpretation.
Apologetic responses to geopolitical disaster are a part of religious life continuing. That's what religion does. It doesn't - inherently- mean that religion is actually at risk of not continuing.
The Babylonian Exile didn't lead to the abandoning of Judaism, it lead to its creation.
It seems like the bone of contention here is the "just" in "just continuing on" so I'll just retract it: of course there was upheaval and the word implies a more cavalier attitude than intended. What I meant was that Christianity undid the Temples and pagan life but it replaced it with a self-sustaining, alternate hegemonic religious framework (that inherited a lot too). Maybe we will settle on a similar framework ourselves but what seems to be happening is that Christianity is degenerating and we don't seem to have a new hegemonic religious system
Similarly, we haven't actually replaced the fertility regime we had with a self-sustaining one, we simply punted the problem. Thus we're closer to the "Rise of the Nones" situation today than a "Conversion of Constantine".
Surprised we got so deep in the weeds of this analogy.
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I've wondered about the future of this heightened thought and sensitivity on gender as well. The comparison that jumps to mind is the Class Consciousness of nascent and early communism and what that lead to. Class consciousness was a revolutionary lenses you in which to view of history but it was incomplete because it fails to adequately explain how the world works. I think of how schools topics like dialectic materialism were at one time taught the world over and how little bearing they have on the world in 2022; such wasted effort and resources. I think the current gender centered views and thinking is a similarly reductionist social view which offers a novel view of society but is also incomplete. In the future I see gender being more important than it was in the past but I perhaps optimistically don't see the enthusiasm to carry its continued primacy in social thought.
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Most men can work to the point where they find a long term partner. But the question is whether that amount of work is higher than in the past or whether men are putting in less work now. Perhaps both.
There's also a secondary question of whether men or women have to put in more work for that. As a bisexual guy, it was trivially easy to find (yes, long term) relationships with men but very hard to find a relationship with a woman, despite a whole lot of self work and emotional labor (to use a politicized term). Whatever higher-than-average vulnerability I have did not translate into widespread appeal in opposite-sex dating, so I've got to question whether men's lack of vulnerability is what's driving this. Obviously same-sex dating is very different than opposite-sex dating, but that's kind of the point: conventional gender roles demand a lot more of men to become an eligible romantic partner than they do of women.
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I dispute this. I'm basically normal and have plenty of friends, but meeting people just seems nearly impossible unless you are willing to devote most of your free time to it.
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Hell, even the "moderate effort into appearance" thing isn't all that important. I'm a disgusting landwhale and I do OK because, frankly, I know what I look like and don't expect to be pulling Insta-thots.
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Booking a flight requires the same getting-out-of-your-comfort-zone that walking into a bar and talking to the opposite sex does, and I suspect the people who are winging online about sexlessness are willing to try neither. Shitposting and complaining and playing Magic The Gathering with your buddies and watching watching watching endless streams is more comfortable than doing the hard emotional work of changing yourself into someone who gets into relationships.
Yeah, this theory always ignores two factors:
People are more anxious these days. (The corollary being that socially unsuccessful men are probably more anxious)
People have far more substitutes.
In the ancient days more men were more willing to take significant risks, including going to war, just for sex: Islam is sort of the example par excellence in how it built an empire on explicitly turning captive women into war booty men could rape (not that it's a new practice) and doubles down with heavenly houris in case you get martyred.
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No, it is affirming because it requires being chosen, unlike just paying for a service.
Edit: Ignore this, I misread the post i quoted.
Doubtful. Men are so willing to engage in casual sex that it probably feels about as much like being chosen as a starving person telling you that your cooking is excellent. For women, being chosen is obtaining commitment from men, not going home for the night.
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I somehow completely misread your post, i thought you were still talking about men.
No idea how I did this, rereading it's perfectly clear.
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Thrill of the hunt makes all the difference
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What's your age?
I suppose it was clear enough that it's not about sex, it's about companionship and more abstractly ones place in the status hierarchy. But I can only type so many words.
This is very unrelatable as a recent 25-year-old. And from what I hear from men all around these age groups. Men spanning the gamut of all the variables you described.
Sure. If I lower my standards to the floor. If I want a girl who isn't fat, isn't stupid, and has some zest for life outside of Kpop and TikTok inside of her, or anything at all! Or is 0.75 times as physically attractive as me, the equation changes.
The standard red-pill take is that women seek to be hypergamous, meaning that they want to "marry up".
In a traditional society, women are forced to marry their equals. But in the modern society, where the heart knows what it wants, 50th percentile women pine over 95th percentile men.
Being men, these 95th percentile types are more than willing to bed (but not settle down with) 50th percentile women. This creates the illusion that these men are available. And once you've experienced the thrill of dimple-chinned Chad, why would you want to settle for soft-chested Sheldon? The fact remains that most women do eventually settle down with their equals, but are often unsatisfied emotionally and sexually, and resent their husbands for it.
From the male perspective, the solution is to better oneself so that women view you as a superior match. Failing that, marry a woman who is inexperienced enough to not know the difference.
I don't necessarily endorse all of this, but I think there is a lot of truth to this viewpoint.
I come from a traditional society and I don't even mind that much (or even at all) that the woman I'll eventually end up marrying will probably be slightly beneath me.
Women everywhere are hypergamous. This is just a fact of life no different to the fact that we get hungry if we don't eat for a while and it is something that men need to just accept. No amount of contemporary complaining will change something so fundamental to the female human condition.
What's fucked up about the mindset of the western woman though is that she wants to marry someone better than her and then demands to be treated as an equal. For that I have no sincere response except jeering and mockery when it fails to work out.
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Don’t the vast majority of people have a low single digit number of partners?
That includes people who are on Social Security. If you scope it to Millenials and younger, I think the average is around 10.
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I think the dynamics are much different for zoomers. In every zoomer/ early 20's couple, I see the guy is more attractive than the girl. The stereotype of "hot girl ugly but funny guy" is flipped on its head with zoomers.
Also, aren't the stats indicative of something? More sexless/whateverless! men ? I understand its "still easy" if you meet certain criterion but what explanation do you have for the increased sexlessness?
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I would expect this to diminish the effective sex drive of both sexes. Fat women and fat men might have to settle for each other because we're fresh out of fit, attractive people, but that may just result in them electing to opt out.
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There's also the question of the relationship lasting. I think it's fair to say that, statistically, marriages now have less staying power than in the past.
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My impression is that it is directed towards the wealth of distractions that exist in the modern day. Video games, porn.. actually I don't need to list more, that's already enough to remain docile through your 20s.
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I don't know mate. In the offline places I frequent it seems to me that fraternizing with the enemy in the battle of the sexes is still going strong. Don't forget that people actually have two personalities. And you only see one of them online.
In the offline places I frequent, I mostly run into women who say "I hate men" or "I'm afraid of men" with big grins on their faces. Often.
Lol, where do you go?
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What would rate those women on the 1-10 scale?
The hot ones you can ask - "Do you find them attractive though?"
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Sure the majority of young men are NOT sexless. But grand things happen at the margins.
You don't need everyone to be disenfranchised for them to demand a revolution, just enough people.
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(Apparently quoting The Gods of the Copybook Headings is gauche these days, but it's still so good)
More seriously, I find this a fascinating topic, but I also feel this might specifically be a Zoomer/late Millennial issue in the West. I'm in my late 30s and here are a few observations about me and my friendship groups over the 00s and early 10s -
Pretty much all my friends are now married with children, with not a single divorcee among the 20+ married couples I'm in regular contact with.
All my friendship groups from undergraduate to present were very mixed gender, and two of my all time best friends are women (I was actually "maid of honour" at one of their weddings!)
Throughout my 20s, there was a lot of sex had by all, although true one night stands (as opposed to short relationships/flings) were moderately rare.
Online dating in the form of sites like OKCupid was niche but fun, and lots of people met serious partners there (Tinder didn't exist).
Social networks were only weakly integrated with friendship groups (most people didn't notice what others were posting), and functioned more in the spirit of content sharing platforms than true extensions of social life.
This is of course highly selective, insofar as I'm about as outgoing, bourgeois, metropolitan, etc. but in general, it felt to me like the 00s and early 10s were a really good time for gender relations.
On the other hand, observationally, it really does seem like something has changed for younger men and women, really in the last 8-10 years. More and more young men are complaining about sexlessness, Tinder has intensified 'winner takes all' dynamics around sex and made one night stands more common, TikTok and Instagram have created new popular bimboid aesthetics for women (and some men), the culture war has polarised politics between men and women still further, etc., etc..
So I'm curious to hear from others here. For Mottizens in my broad age demographic, were gender relations as good as I remember when we were young and easy under the apple boughs? For Zoomer Mottizens, are things as bad as they look from the outside? And especially interesting, for Mottizens in their late 20s/early 30s, was there a notable transition period when you started to see gender relations getting worse?
Early 40s here. My friends don't have any divorces that I'm aware of but not many marriages either. There's a broad spread of wife'n'kids, stable long term'n'kids, "blended" families, DINK, field players, single with benefits (<-- I'm here)/dissatisfied daters, and the occasional jaded MGHisOW or resigned celibate.
Looking around I'd say, barring one or two outliers, we're mostly where we deserve to be. The responsible and personable people are mostly in stable LTRs and the irresponsible or unpersonable people are either biding time waiting for a better offer that they don't want to acknowledge probably isn't going to come along, or don't care enough to adapt just to fulfill external expectations, or both (<-).
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Speaking in the late thirties, here, and yes, single. Among my close friends group, only one of them is married - and he still had to swim against a heavy current to find someone. The other two that could be married aren't for other reasons - one just doesn't want to get married after watching bad experiences with divorce, another isn't for... reasons? Despite looking. (If I had to guess, it's due to his work schedule.) My brother, younger than me, isn't married and hasn't been looking for years. (When the topic got brought up, he implied heavily that the juice isn't worth the squeeze and they'd bring little to the table, so why bother?)
This is pretty universal from where I'm sitting. The only guy I work with(older than me) isn't married and never has been - my boss is divorced. I can't do a full poll of all of my co-workers, but I know of at least one other guy around my age that's looking and can't find anyone. And one woman who's painfully good looking IMO, who's also single and has no plans to get married.
People seemingly keep trying to fall into a just-world fallacy as to why this is happening, mostly centered around male responsibility and fault. Not just here, but elsewhere. 'Just take a shower, just be well-dressed, just be well-mannered'. I doubt that'll change any time soon.
https://flowingdata.com/2017/11/01/who-is-married-by-now/
This is from 2015, so it's likely slightly lower, but by 40, 81% of men were married.
So yeah, you're in a bubble. Hell, in 2015, you at 33, 70% already were married, so even at worse, let's say only 75% are married by now. Also, divorce has actually gone down since the peak a few decades ago, because the millions of couples who married in 1960 and hated each other by 1964, were able to get divorced.
Sure, there are issues with marriage, but the vast majority of adults in America, end up married by the time they hit 30, at least once.
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As a mid-30s guy, I pin this entirely on the Tinderfication of dating, starting in the early 2010s and increasing since. Dating, even if once not exactly easy, also wasn't arduous. OKC was even kind of fun; a thoughtful message would get attention, and people could and would read your profile.
Tinder shifted this to a pure meat market. Particularly, it materialized a hierarchy in conventional hotness, both by attributing a score to individuals based on the extent of how much others engage with them (not novel; OkC did something similar even early on, and people implicitly do this in real life as well) but, critically, in heavily favoring the presentation as possible mates the people at the top of the hierarchy through the primary channel of interaction (swipes). That is qualitatively different than the past and generates the winner-take-all dynamic you mention.
This is even more pernicious than it seems at first glance, though. There's kind of an evaporative cooling that occurs in dating. The people who are most suitable for long term partnerships gradually disappear from the dating market, because almost by definition they enter long term relationships. The most attractive men are no worse in that suitability, outside of attractiveness, than the least attractive men. I'd even guess they're on average better long term partners outside the superficial aspects. But the ones that are presented to women have been heavily picked over, to the point where the vast majority of those remaining on dating apps are lemons. And when a woman hops on Tinder, she's not typically swiping through hundreds of profiles to get to the less polluted pool. She's just seeing the top of the stack, which is men whose profiles generate a high level of engagement but who for some reason have not left the dating market. Some may be just generally bad; some may be unconsciously disinterested in a relationship; some may have personality traits that make them a bad prospect. The point is that women see highly sought after men who aren't good long term prospects.
This explanation has the advantage of describing both single straight men's experiences ("I never get any engagement") and women's ("the men I meet online are cheaters or liars or commitment-phobic"). Attractive people with long term relationship orientation still pair off with each other and wonder what all the fuss is about, though attractive women had to deal with a bunch of bad apples to get to that point.
Can it explain the decline in gender relations? IIRC something like 40% of new marriages today originate online, and a larger population has been on it. Probably the majority of daters have exposure to this dynamic. Moreover, the existence of it as an option has effects. Serendipitous meetings in real life are becoming more discouraged (e.g. meeting at work, once the first or second most common way of meeting, is now heavily frowned upon up to and including legal penalties). It possibly makes some people less open to meeting people in their social circles, as it invites a comparison to the more attractive people available online.
Why would it be an unconscious preference? If you're the hypothetical 'Chad Thundercock' and just want to get laid, Tinder's providing you with ample opportunities to get your dick wet and generally working as intended. Honestly, so long as Chad Thundercock is direct and clear with his intentions on just getting laid I don't think that's even a bad result for the stack.
The main issue/corruptive agent are people who are working on false pretenses. The hypothetical 'Lovebomber' who presents as down for a long-term relationship for 3-4 dates then bails, who undermines the sincerity of the actually longterm-orientated (and can, frankly, lead to some bizarre expectations where longterm-minded girls assume that their 'sprinting' effort and 110% agreeability is something that an actual longterm prospect is gonna emulate)
There are plenty of men who not only say but think they're looking for a long term relationship but are in practice disinclined to them. Maybe even highly picky guys fall into this category.
The experience for women is still crappy: date someone for a bit, get really excited for them, but a month later get cut off because he wanted to look for something new, even though the breakup was highly predictable given his previous behavior.
I agree that if someone is very clear about their intentions, there's no reasonable claim of anyone having been wronged. A single stack intermingles "hot casual stud" and "great long term partner" and confuses the derived signal, but simply segregating on intention would address part of that. The issue comes when people looking for long term things end up deceived: since a majority of women do mostly want something long term, more guys list themselves as primarily long term than would if most women primarily wanted casual sex. Self deception also plays a significant role here: it's often a combination of a guy deceiving himself about what he's looking for and a woman aggressively ignoring the telltale signs of deception, because of desire.
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I'm maybe a few years younger than you, and my personal experiences broadly align with yours. Zoomer girls do seem more standoffish to me even in everyday social context, but that might well just be due to the 10-year age gap.
That being said, if I rack my brain for concrete changes that are not confounded by my shifting relation to the group in question, it seems to me that among my younger acquaintances it's become much more common to observe girls dating out of their friend group. Where in my bracket the most common dynamic was to have ever-shifting couplings within a clique and perhaps at most including people at its periphery, among younger people I often observe (and sometimes hear the lamentations of the guys) scenarios where the girls snub the guys in their group and then randomly turn out to have a new boyfriend they picked up who-knows-where (in one case I knew a bit more about, it was a two-week internship at some random bank), who doesn't fit in and doesn't really make an effort to integrate with their home group.
As far as I could tell from the few cases where I got to hear the girl's side of the story too, this is not the case of heavensent spontaneous human connection either; in fact with several of those relationships I was taken aback by how little the girl seemed to know or understand about the personality of the guy she picked up, which would have been a bad sign even in an otherwise-"normal" relationship but was outright baffling in the context of her getting on track to ditch all her friends for this guy.
To the extent to which there is a new tendency, it seems very tempting to interpret it along the lines of "knowing less is better"; that is, at least at some crucial stage of relationship formation, the girls are incapable of feeling attraction towards guys in their circles as they actually are, and can only sustain it by projecting some counterfactual quality into the gaps of their ignorance towards a stranger.
If this is true, of course, the interesting question is why this is. Without having time to expand on the thought as much as I'd like to, I'm actually reasonably sympathetic to the idea that the "incel mindset" may contribute to the problem. The male resentment that is amply represented in this thread seems to be a natural counterpart to the "feminist mental health" cluster of views among women (like, the people who post opossum memes all day and launch slickly worded petitions to make the university administration spend more on therapists and set up an anxiety hotline), and I know I find the latter both viscerally and rationally undateable. (Why would you put up with someone whose every interaction with the world is coloured with resentment and who is always a few inferential step away from considering you to be an agent of what brought about that resentment?) At the same time, I find all the incel material to be fascinatingly infohazardous; I can't ever read much of it without finding myself nodding a long and feeling some of that righteous resentment well up in myself, and that's even though it is about as relatable to me as the laments of African orphans are to Silicon Valley EAists. A good half+ of college-educated zoomer women seems to have at least a latent infection with the "patriarchy gave me mental health issues" memeplex; what fraction of zoomer men have one with the "matriarchy wants me to pay for raising chad's bastard" one? If you are infected with it, wouldn't it be easier to hide from a stranger for a few weeks than it would be to hide it from the people you normally interact with?
I think it's more the perceived infinite universe of potential male partners provided by online dating makes it easier to essentially write off males in the friendgroup as triggering whatever 'ick' and/or compare real people against curated dating app images of strangers. I'm also curious how female sexuality has evolved with the modern slate of choices, since even going on Tiktok/IG generally provides a lot of examples of 'I was into X until he did Y that gave me incurable 'Ick'' and it's like... the vast majority of women to live have had vanishingly small pools of possible suitors which makes me skeptical that they were able to operate on such terms.
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Very similar here. I think the OKC/Match era was fundamentally different than today's Tinder environment. There were lower quality partners available, but I was able to date/fuck a couple older or niche women through it while doing the bulk of my dating "IRL".
Every indicator from both genders suggests that the new dating paradigms are more challenging and less fulfilling. Nobody does much about it in terms of shifting back to in-person approaches but boy howdy do they complain about how much it sucks.
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For the most part, yeah, although with the added caveat that our demographic isn't just age, but class and education. Like so many others in our general grouping, I had a mixed-gender friend group and never really had all that much trouble finding relationships, right up until I met my wife. Our friend group remains mixed-gender, but it's now a mixed-gender group of people that are either married or look like they're about to be. The whole Tinder scene just looks like an absolute hellscape to me from the perspective of a guy that missed that timeline by a few years. Sure, we had to experience the real-life version of being swiped-left, but at least it usually came with some sort of interpretable feedback that was more actionable than just swiping into the Tinder void.
That said, I came from a rural, lower-class environment originally, and it seems like a fair bit of my age cohort wound up with broken marriages or out-of-wedlock children. The people that escaped via academics and wound up with decent jobs all seem to have done decently well for themselves romantically and maintained quite a bit more stability. I suspect that this is probably pretty common in the new Zoomer demographics too - the scientists, engineers, attorneys, accountants, and so on will probably do basically fine romantically.
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This just seems wrong to me. Admittedly I'm older, married, and long out of the dating pool. I'd say most guys realize in early high-school they aren't going to be dating the head of the cheerleading squad, aka the hot influencer types. Things actually get better for them as they get older, as other things get valued comparatively more.
Opposite to your claim, I could believe Tinder is enabling more women to sleep with 'surface-level' hot guys (I really like /u/ThenElections post above about the prevalence of lemons on Tinder. I also think mass media has gotten somewhat worse, with crappy romance setting ever-more-unrealistic expectations. And I'm going to guess it's something of an interplay between the two with a large dollop of men being worse because they have the distraction of gaming and porn.
Women think they are entitled to a better match than they 'actually' are, but can get a one night-stand with a hot guy, because Tinder enables that, so they never revisit their expectations. That hot guy is a dick (which is why he's still dating and not in a committed relationship), so they double-down on 'guys suck'.
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Do they though?
Because from my experience when young women are asked to explain their "ideal" guy they describe something similar, but then when made aware of the fact that they are dreaming, the response is "you asked for ideal".
Whereas I rarely ever see guys even playing along with the premise. They usually respond with "big ol tiddies, or she just has to be alive", sometimes you will get "not fat and pretty". Irrespective of how attractive the guy is. They usually don't even entertain the thought.
The former implies to me at least that the guys are more aware of this specific reality.
Really? I think I would have always answered that hard requirements for a long-term relationship are being thin, fit, and fairly smart. The only one I ever got pushback on was people that are somehow personally affronted by a plain statement that I will never find an overweight woman attractive.
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There's also a lot of mockery in the memespace towards guys who would unironically answer that question with something like "Ana de Armas but a cup size higher and a gamer like me". At least, a lot in relation to women describing their ideal. As the line goes, "meanwhile they're just some guy".
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A lot of the complaints I see online are based on perceived double standards. Height vs weight is a cliche in the gender wars.
Incels are the ones that emphasize looks the most and imo it's backwards. They're upset at failing , so they construct an ego protection ideology that states that looks are all that matter (therefore it's not their fault - everyone else is shallow). They did not start out believing it was all-important.
Except the entire "body acceptance" movement and complaining about "unfair beauty standards". People upset by basic inequity in looks exist across the spectrum but the female half seems to be vastly more visible and prestigious.
This is basically the inverse to TRP's "women always want a high value male and many just refuse to lower their standards instead of dying alone" theory. Some of them also say that men are relatively simple about their needs (the implication being that women are almost immorally fussy about dating), just to make the parallel stronger.
I think both of these are dubious and, frankly, there seems to be an element of spite to them. Maybe I'm just an optimist, but I think most people don't hang all their hopes on dating an Instamodel or having Tom Hiddleston make them eggs in the morning before handing them a Centrum and let this actively ruin their actual prospects.
Sure, if you ask them that's what they'd want. If they're just consuming a fantasy (which is what Onlyfans and ads are) then that's what they'll buy but the calculus of real life speaks pretty loudly to most of us, very early.
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I turned 25 recently, So I'll speak a little bit for the Zillenials.
Obvious disclaimer being that my observations are influenced by who I am, and the fact that I was not an adult for the majority of the time period I am going to be talking about. But I will try to recall what I remember seeing and try to fill in the gaps retrospectively.
Things were much better 2000-2014ish. Things started deteriorating around 2018, the same time OLD became the plurality dating platform. But that is confounded by people just socializing less all around, I personally have a hard time "cracking" Gen-Z in that if I were to describe it succinctly, they are not as good at navigating uncomfortable social situations. If things get too uncomfortable they just fall back on their phones or conversationally they seem to put in much less effort and rely on meme speak and cultural references to do the hard talking or them. They have looser standards as well in the sense that ignoring text messages is a faux pas among my older friends but is the norm among the younger ones.
As for getting laid. It's bad. In short, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Obviously, it's not a binary shift but more of a shift of the distribution. In that getting a 4/10 girl now is the same difficulty as getting a 6/10 girl some years ago (all else constant). The reasons for this are multi-factorial and not all linked to the gender war, some of them are entirely unrelated, but at the end of the day, there are more headwinds to fight against as a dude.
Personally, I can reliably attract a girl up to 8/10. I don't bother with the 5/6's any more because they are EXPONENTIALLY more difficult to attract than previously, the 7s/8s are marginally more difficult but its a smaller delta than the less attractive ones. I think OLD is entirely to blame for this. This specific demographic of girls are the largest users of OLD, they are not attractive enough to have men swooning over them in their social circles, but can get men swooning over them and simping for them in socialmedia/OLD. The attractive ones don't need OLD, they can get attractive men in their social circles.
I am not sure exactly what form I expect it to take, but I think "terminally online" is going to trend toward becoming lower-status in the next decade. The Internet and social networks benefited heavily from the fact that users were initially highly educated -- if sometimes socially awkward -- and generally high-status, but Eternal September (I'm not old enough to recall the 1993 event, but I can remember when Facebook was invite-only) has been an ongoing trend in online communities. At some point soon (probably already) in the lifecycle, avid internet use will start having more negative connotations -- see "touch grass", but more generalized -- and some swinging the opposite direction can be expected.
I think that will be a healthy shift, but I'm not too optimistic about it. It doesn't seem impossible though, especially if high-status people start pushing it. Unfortunately, many of them love to be on-line -- fame seems tied to on-line presence for many these days.
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By "up to" I meant, that's the most I could do, my theoretical max. If all the stars align and whatnot. Also 8 = 95th percentile? What kind of mean and standard deviation are you using lol. I meant the 80th percentile.
I would say I am 70-75th percentile among men, Overall. So if the stars really align, I could get an 80th-percentile woman, by lucking out every step of the way. But my realistic zone is <60-65thth percentile. As I said that range of women has become so difficult that my time is better off pushing my luck with more attractive women, the expected value is the same anyways. I would get much more satisfaction from the company of an attractive woman than a mid one.
Of course, all of this is very anecdotal and circumstantial.
Also, I would say you would be surprised. As I have said elsewhere I am saying things that I hear said across the gamut of men, including some very attractive men. What they will tell YOU and tell each other behind closed doors might vary.
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Of course, this trend continuing apace means that all else hasn't been held constant and many of the would-be 6s are now 4s. To be crass about it, I know I'd rather stay home and jerk off than put in effort to attract a fat girl.
This could be a factor on why on paper moderately (6/10) women are so much more difficult than yesteryear. There are fewer of them.
I don't mean to be crass either, but if a woman is ever slightly overweight, she's out of sight for me. I only pursue thin women.
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