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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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However, most nerdy guys I know who suddenly started getting laid easily - myself included - played the field, like a normal guy in that position.

I feel like a huge amount of this is the sheer grind required to 'ascend' and the rejection along the way, especially in the modern dating app sphere. IMO the majority of both gender rock up with more-or-less good intentions, but it only takes a little bit of exposure to the current culture to reach a state of Fuck You.

In my experience, the response of men about this depends on the context.

All male company: We pretend to be more averse to commitment than we really are.

Mixed company: "My favourite things are commitment and changing myself."

I see statements like this a lot on here and they always leave me so confused because it’s so far outside my own experience and the experiences of other guys I know. I’m an okay looking nerdy guy with a mid-compensation nerdy job in the Bay Area, which is apparently the epicenter location/demographic for these kinds of dating difficulties and yet neither I nor any of my male friends experiences them at all.

Ever since I moved here a few years ago there has been a constant flow of good looking, in shape, smart, well educated, my age-and-younger women who have their shit together and want to go on dates/sleep with/get serious with/get engaged to me, with honestly very little effort or grind on my part. Sometimes people don’t respond to my messages on bumble. Okay?

I could go on dates with women like this every day if I had the energy. And they’re almost all nice, not manipulative, not looking for handouts, not romantic climbers at all. It’s the same for all my guy friends. And we’re pretty average / below average in terms of income. Where are all these sexless dudes?

There was a thread on here last week about how the EA movement was basically a way for nerdy guys to meet women. Huh? It’s all so bewildering.

I see statements like this a lot on here and they always leave me so confused because it’s so far outside my own experience and the experiences of other guys I know.

Maybe notice your confusion, and then update your priors based on the data explaining that most men aren't sharing your particular experience and that the data you've got available from your own experiences may not be representative of the larger trends.

I come into these threads and see one side that points at various studies and polls showing "this is what dating is like for huge swaths of the population" and then another that says "that's weird, it doesn't seem to be true in [smaller area]" without really engaging with the information the other side points to.

Teach us your ways! I am a guy with a mid-compensation nerdy job in the Bay Area. I like to think that I am good-looking but I suppose that I cannot quite be sure. In any case, more than one woman has told me that I am attractive. I used to do quite well with women but then for various reasons I took a long time off from pursuing sex. Recently I have been trying to get back in the game and I have had some success - I made out with a few women whom I met at bars but have not gotten laid so far. I have never seriously tried online dating so far but given how often I hear guys say that they are getting good results from it, I think that I am going to actually seriously try it. I should just go ahead and put in the work of getting some good photos and writing up a good profile. At the same time I also intend to keep meeting women offline, since I find that it can be quite exciting and fun and anyway, I already spend more than enough time using technology at work.

How do you usually meet women? Got any pointers?

Also, to piggyback, in my normal life, the vast majority of the people I keep track of from my fairly normal suburban/exurban high school in Florida are either married w/ kids or serially in fairly long-term relationships. Even out here, in supposedly SJW-infested Seattle that's also a tech hub, do you know what I see when I actually walk around in the outside world? Lots of couples.

I really think the current "crisis" is a combination of some bad data (even the GSS data seems kind of flawed) and the type of person who's not getting laid being very loud and overrepresented on the Internet.

Also, to piggyback, in my normal life, the vast majority of the people I keep track of from my fairly normal suburban/exurban high school in Florida are either married w/ kids or serially in fairly long-term relationships. Even out here, in supposedly SJW-infested Seattle that's also a tech hub, do you know what I see when I actually walk around in the outside world? Lots of couples.

The type of person who is able to successfully attract a mate seems likely to be heavily overrepresented in any group where one has loose acquaintances that would even care to "keep track of," as well as walking around in the outside world. How many literally friendless people are you friends with, and more broadly, how many people who has no meaningful friend/acquaintance group are you enough of a loose acquaintance with to "keep track of?" How many people who spend their lives with basically no social contact are you running into when you walk around in the outside world?

There was a thread on here last week about how the EA movement was basically a way for nerdy guys to meet women. Huh? It’s all so bewildering.

I mean, you have to meet them somewhere right? They don’t just show up at your door. One of the most common pieces of dating advice I’ve seen is, “get a hobby and meet women there.” Maybe I erred in assuming EA to be a hobby.

I am starting to suspect that the dating scene in the Bay Area is just different. There was a post on Caroline Ellison’s tumblr about how she never got hit on in public before she moved to the Bay. Maybe once you reach some critical mass of nerdy people in one location they stop internalizing themselves as poorly socialized and become Chads and Stacys.

One issue is that vocal incel or incel-adjacent people tend to be higher income, higher education, and more vocal/online than the mass of men most affected by sexlessness. Sexlessness isn't driven by 30-something software engineers making $300k in the Bay Area; it's driven by 20 year, non-college educated men living in their parents' basement in Akron.

(That said, if you're able to get a date with a different attractive, successful woman every evening as a heterosexual man in the Bay Area, you're certainly in the top decile in how much you attract women.)

Dude you're almost certainly making something like five times the national median household income, you are not normal.

It's still a good rebuttal to the the EA claim, because EAs are also high income / class.

The median EA is probably closer to the 'autist unsociable nerd' side of the spectrum than bay area lothario, though outliers exist.

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