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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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The guys who can't get women

Is it the girls or the guys who have the power on dating apps?

There's bad news about single men everywhere these days. It's portrayed as a societal problem that so many young men don't have the moves, and don't get sex, cuddles or offspring.

And women's "impossible demands" are blamed for their lack of success on dating apps.

The young men feel generous with the number of likes they get on the apps, but don't get the same amount of likes in return. They take it for granted that this little effort should earn them the chance to get laid, so you can imagine the frustration when that wish doesn't come true. Hordes of men whine that the ladies have the upper hand in the marketplace.

So poor young men.

But I'll share a little secret: The demands women have on men are ridiculously low. Here are some examples of what I've heard women my age being charmed by in men:

He was reading a book on the subway. He knew the definition of the term feminism. He moved (even with a smile) when he stood in the way of someone at the bread shelf at Kiwi. He apologized for interrupting someone.

It doesn't take much to get a star in the book.

Yet men who have given up dating often claim that they were ostracized from society by liberated women. For many, liberated women are synonymous with demanding women, who only consider men at the "top of the hierarchy" as good enough.

This hierarchy of alpha, sigma and beta males is the imagined reality of many men. The alpha male is usually at least 6 feet tall, has a perfect BMI and a status job. Preferably money too.

He gets all the women. Often in turn. The rest of the men get none, or have to settle for what they see as the basic scrap of women they don't consider attractive enough.

Below the alpha male you find all the other men. Totally average guys with slightly worse moves on the ladies. Their outfits may consist of yesterday's shirt and gym shorts, and their conversations often revolve around cryptocurrency, gaming or football.

Yet they scratch their heads as to why women are looking in a different direction.

It's the modern version of the romantic comedies of the 80s, where the woman only goes for handsome heartthrobs, while the poor good guy sits at home alone.

The most frustrated young men seek companionship in online echo chambers filled with depression, anxiety and body dysmorphic disorder. None of them have learned to talk about their problems. It feels easier to take what they call "the black pill", the belief that you are genetically predisposed to be ignored by women.

Women become scapegoats for men's existential loneliness. You don't have to visit many comment sections before you come across bitter men posting about insufferable women withholding sex.

Do these sound like nice guys to you? Someone you want to date and save from loneliness and celibacy?

The 21st century dating culture is not for sissies. Dating only through a screen is a poor basis for connecting with others. Of course you'll have delusions about what's expected of you. Of course you feel inadequate.

The difference is that many men's solution to this is to become bitter because women don't lower their standards for them. At the same time, women overexert themselves to meet the demands we think men have on us.

Because listen:

There are plenty of single women who feel just as insecure as single men, but they blame themselves, not the men who reject them. Instead, we empty our bank accounts to buy makeup and skin products. We get up before sunrise to remove every hair on our bodies. We starve ourselves.

Yet I'm supposed to believe that women have all the power in the dating world?

More women succeed on dating apps because they do more to get validation. Looking at women's profiles, you usually get a gallery of smiles and pretty outfits, shiny hair, friends' dinners, hiking and picnics in the park.

Men's profiles are mostly a couple of grainy selfies with a dirty room in the background. Maybe a shirtless photo in neon lights at a fitness center. What women are actually interested in, they don't seem to have given a second thought.

The criticism my friends and other female peers have of men's profiles on the apps usually has little to do with the men's appearance. It's more about the profile and photos being totally lacking in charm.

Women look more often for personality, because they are looking for a connection with someone, while many men only look at looks, because they are mainly interested in body and sex.

The alpha male is an ideal for men, not the dream man for women. On the contrary, I've heard many nightmare stories from bad dates with these types. They sit there and flaunt themselves, and are so full of themselves that they are completely uninterested in the person they are on a date with. It's like the old joke:

No, I've talked a lot about myself. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?

Dating the alpha male are the stories we laugh about most on girls' nights out.

Men on dating apps don't try to meet women's desires

  • -34

By the same token, dating in NYC shouldn't be taken as representative of dating more broadly. Most places are somewhere between SF and NYC in dating dynamics, in large part determined by gender ratios and who you're looking to date (i.e. if you're looking for college educated professionals, you should choose to live in a place with lots of college educated professionals).

That said, "go to NYC, young man" has been by far the most successful bit of advice I've given to struggling men; it's actionable, and when they follow through with it, 100% end up coupled within a few months at most. Any pay cut isn't going to be too significant, and you get better food, arts, and more fashionable people surrounding you to boot.

edit

Baity as it is, this post has something I agree with: men are not accustomed to the rat race that women have been running for decades. Women used to need men for their money (cf. Pride and Prejudice discussion downthread), but if you don't need a breadwinner to support you and your 2.2 children (and why want children, anyway?), why settle for a man that is just average? I've heard that Satisfyer is much better than any man if you only want an orgasm.

If you're a blue tribal around 20 you will probably have to learn all the stuff women have been doing:

  • is my body hot? What can I change to make it hotter? What can I wear to accentuate the hottest parts are hide the not-so-hot ones?

  • is my face attractive? How should I style my hair to make it more attractive? How will makeup help?

  • is my personality attractive? Can I be a good listener that at least pretends to be interested in the topic? Do I know how to talk about things that interest the other party?

  • are my hobbies attractive to women? What do they say about me? Do I have a hobby that lets me meet women easily?

  • are my male friends appropriate? Do I have a cool friend that gets me into places? A wingman I can trust? Do they all look good on camera without outshining me?

  • is my lifestyle attractive? Do I look like a strong independent man that doesn't need a woman in his life to feed and clothe himself and keep his apartment clean and tastefully decorated?

There is no way, based on objective empirical observation, that most women have ever considered their value this deeply and on this many axes for any period of time, much less decades. Almost all of them have always focused on the first two, mostly as a matter of intrafemale competition, and expected men to just like the rest or move on.

The difference between men and women is that for women, seducing a man is is standing in the vicinity of said man. Smiling and being pleasant, and then waiting for the man to actually initiate. Being there is 90% of the battle won.

It's different for men. If you think that the only reason I'm not dating Gina Carano is that I haven't ran into her, then I don't know what to say.

These are extreme examples. But men never seem to do even light versions of this. Some men will stalk specific women, sure, often women they’d have no chance with even under ideal circumstances. But the strategic pursuit of a certain type of woman appears very rare.

I feel like a certain amount of this is just down to how male & female sexual attraction differs. If a male's exposed to a reasonably attractive, friendly woman with similar interests for long enough he'll likely eventually swing her way. If a girl's exposed, far more likely for a permanent 'ick' to form or the window to close of perception.

If a girl's exposed, far more likely for a permanent 'ick' to form or the window to close of perception.

Not necessarily. For me, anyway, trust comes before lust so online dating is frustrating and I'm a 75% of lovers were friends first kind of person.

That said, I do consider most of my male friends unfuckable.

(Note: I read through this entire thread and discovered, along with everyone else, that the OP comment is at least low effort and maybe-probably ChatGPT or Norwegian copypasta. Cool. Still, @2rafa

s thoughtful response motivated my response)

Ulterior motive hobby-ing and socializing in order to date is a very bad idea. As @RenOS states in reply, if you're the guy doing the thing (hobby / career / social event) just to hit on women, you get a reputation as the dude who's just there to hit on women. Because you are and you have sort of concealed that fact. I would argue that if you do this in any way that's even slightly related to your profession, say by joining a "Young Professionals in Old Timey Dirigible Engineering," you're courting disaster. The lines between personal and professional spheres for conduct are very, very blurred (I'd argue this is probably a bad thing, but that's for a different thread and a higher effort post).

The solution to this is to be good at flirting. In fact, that's always been the solution. Flirting is a specific means of communication that lets both parties covertly communicate interest while allowing for exit points constantly without anyone getting too hurt. These days, really, really subtle flirting with slow escalation and a lot of indirection at the outset appears, to me, to be the default. I think this is a symptom of overall social regression due to the rise of emotional hypersensitivity, and, frankly, just a little bit of broad level social skill retardation due to social media. It amazes me how many "conversations" these days are just round-the-table sequences of references to memes and YouTube videos.

Therefore, I see a lot of things in my social group's dating rituals nowadays (late 20s early 30s) that reminds me of what early High School was like. People do track likes on social media as indications of romantic intent. People do have multiple group-of-friends outings where two interested parties are specifically there to be near each other before those two parties go on a one-on-one date. In fact, there are even literal practice dates where one party will ask the other if they want to do coffee / movie but in such a fashion that there's no possibility of it escalating whatsoever. I remember a ritual in High School where you would ask your True Love if they wanted to sit outside in the courtyard to eat lunch together and that this was absolutely necessary before an outside-of-school-in-real-life date.

The elevated risk with current flirting, however, is that incompetence is punished nearly as harshly as the clandestine operation of hobby-ing to date. If you're socially less than replacement level (that's a baseball term, look it up), and go off half-cocked (yes, I'm having a little bit of fun now) and ask someone on a date too early in this process, or announce romantic intent with even a pretty basic - but direct - compliment, you could risk getting the creeper label. The modulators here are 1) how attractive you are 2) existing social standing 3) communication awkwardness. This is where you see a lot of angry TRP'ers and blackpillers raging "WhY caNt womenz take ComPLiments?" Well, if you're so incapable of recognizing social context, cues, and current rituals, your "compliment" is seen as a random mad raving by a whirling free radical that's too dangerous to be engaged with. When the man in three layers of sweatshirts in two layers of urine cologne on the subway salutes me and says "Morning, General!" on my commute, I don't feel flattered.

Well, how does a fellow with underdeveloped social skills go about improving? The answer is to talk to everyone about boring shit all of the time. Master small-talk. "But small talk is bullshit! I want to get into deep conversations! And isn't that also what a mate wants?" Sure, eventually. But being able to make small-talk that isn't cliche ("crazy weather we're having"), or boring, or just you free-associating demonstrates a similar kind of subtle communication very much like flirting.

If you can get a stranger, in 60 seconds, to tell them something about themselves (basic, nothing deep), laugh at an observation, and then ask you a question, you've just made a stranger begin to trust you (in the telling of the something), enjoy being around you (laugh), and take a reciprocate interest in you (the question). And, remembering that being sneaky is bad, you're doing this in a context where you don't already want to have sex with the stranger (or, you preemptively discard that outcome. Sometimes the Barista is cute, but you're not really trying to make it happen).

But, Uncle Toll Booth does kind of think all of this is bullshit. I think traditions had it right. A big part of relationship formation in the West before World War 2 was a clear demarcation between socializing and courting. Sticking with the High School image, the entire point of specific dances throughout the year was do create an unambiguous way for one party to announce interest to another (interestingly, these went "both ways" very earlier ... my Grandfather told me fond stories about his Sadie Hawkins dances where "the girls could do the pickin'" -- you take that however you like, dear reader). These dances were also the monkey-see-monkey do practices for adult courting. An invitation to dinner and/or entertainment was unambiguous as a symbol of interest. A polite decline from the offeree was respected.

[I'm going to skip the part on why / how this changed because I'm already way off topic and want to bring this ramblin wreck home]

I think a massive cause of mutual frustration in heterosexual western dating today is hyperabundant ambiguity. Friends-to-lovers, officemates-to-lovers, hobbying-to-lovers, means that a lot of young women, upon meeting a guy who is perfectly nice to them, think "wait ... is he trying to fuck me?" Not does he want to (which even Grandma had to deal with) but "is he already trying to, but won't be clear about it." Or, if he is clear about it, it's so crass, direct, and awkward that it's not just a turnoff, but, potentially, a cause for mild alarm.

[Self-critique: This post got away from me a little. I hope the Mottizens can salvage some value from the wreck]

That ambiguity is on purpose.

Social mores had to adapt to the forced mixing of foreign cultures, at gun point.

Gone are the days of the real #MeToo movement, when a woman could get any impudent Emmet Till lynched for allegedly showing misplaced interest.

Now the time is at 'what timmy gon do' and the answer is jail time

There would be a lot more clarity in a society that appropriately (violently) dealt with incivility, and where there would be no get out of jail card for every rapist, molester, drug addict, deadbeat dad etc.

I agree that actually meeting the other gender is a critical part of dating success. But I disagree that most men aren't trying this.

The extreme examples obviously wouldn't work for the men the same way as for women, because women are much more sensible to possible stalking, for good reason - male stalkers are much more common and far more dangerous. Any men attempting the kind of things you're listing here would risk being branded as an ultra-creep. Even typing out "strategically pursuing a certain type of women" I feel like I'm writing something about a male serial killer.

But the "light" variant of this is done all the time. "Has lots of women" is a top positive criteria for choosing what to study, together with "pays well". I know several men who have told me explicitly that they chose their field because it has lots of women. Same for hobbies. Hell, I would count that as negative attribute of men; They constantly try to find novel ways to pretend to be into something that women like to get laid under false pretences. "I totally care about the environment babe, please tell me more about it while we make love"

My wife studied psychology and both she herself as her female fellow students complained a lot about suspecting that the men in the course only studied it for dating (based on the few male humanities students I know, I concur with her entirely). One in particular had tried to hit on a few too many girls and now struggled to be accepted at all. As you see, even the light version you risk being branded a creep as a man. So unless you already have a decently above-average baseline of social capability, it is a wiser choice to not attempt it as a man and stick to "safe" options like clubs or dating apps where, if you screw up, you don't risk ruining your entire social circle and several years of your life (one of the prime reasons why men flock there despite the abysmal stats). And what you definitely do not do is admit it to any women (and if you want to be really safe, ideally not even to yourself).

I would even go as far as saying that the light version is done much less by women. No women ever studied a field because it has lots of men - no, that is usually one of the top negative criteria, a reason not to go into a field. I have never heard about a women going into a hobby because it has lots of men, either. And women also do lots of gatekeeping of their fields and hobbies, while men often actively try to recruit women into their hobbies. Back when I took advanced dancing lessons as a teen (in my region, basic dancing lessons are a social requirement), the girls would often complain about how many of the boys dropped out after the basics and just a moment later about how many of the boys who didn't are only doing it for dating and how creepy that is. I dropped out since I already was insecure about myself and that didn't help. None of the girls even cared to my knowledge, so it was probably a correct choice.

Looking back, the broad social dynamic is obvious; The already successful (in the broad sense) men do the minimum social requirement and get out, a minority stay in since they like it or as a courtesy for their girlfriends, some of the unsuccessful but socially above-average stay in to increase their chances to get lucky, and finally the great bulk of average and below men get out before they are branded creeps. The women wanted more of the successful men to stay in, and less of the unsuccessful. Being a bit but not terribly socially awkward I stayed in a bit longer than what was considered appropriate for me, but I got the hint after a short while and also got out before it was too late.

On the other hand when doing traditionally nerdy hobbies like LAN parties or pen & paper, even just a single women being part of such a group was treated as a coveted grand prize. Even as I got out of the nerdy circles into more normie ones, the basic dynamic has never changed in my experience. In college our lab (which itself is ~ 50-50 gender split) played football and people were always complaining about the lack of women, and nobody ever complained about the wrong women joining for the wrong reasons. Most of my time at university there have been more women than men at almost everything, and the few times anybody mentioned that at all it is either seen as a positive accomplishment or followed by crickets chirping.

You have an interesting circle of friends.

The question of where to find single, available women IRL is something I see repeated alot on men-focused forums, reddit included. The conversation tends to devolve down in the same way;

  1. 'Where do I find women to interact with and touch grass?'

  2. insert list of women-focused activities and hobbies

  3. 'I'm not interested in any of those; should I pretend to be invested in them just to find a girlfriend?'

  4. Cue a mixed response of 'Just give it a shot, you might like it!' and the inevitable chorus from online women of 'Ew, you shouldn't join a hobby just to meet women, that's disgusting and women can always tell!'

  5. Cue frustrated response from several men about how they've been told they shouldn't talk to women in a variety of social spaces, so what exactly are they supposed to do?

  6. No response.

itsallsotiresome.jpg

So, yeah. This is something that's I feel has been happening alot as of late, and has been exacerbated by covid. Whether this is all antecedent data or indications of a larger social trendline with ominous implications for the future has yet to be determined.

Ah, yes. I've seen that advice, as well.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone remarking on it actually working, though. Most of the time people comment how nothing ever comes of it, and I've never actually seen it occur in real life.

If I had to venture a guess, this idea stems as an artifact of european style dating, where I've heard a more slow, organic, 'start as friends and become more' is seen as a standard thing, whereas in American it's often considered openly verboten.

That's mostly a wild supposition on my part, though.

I would say it is considered the ideal here in Europe, yes. But it mostly works for the guys who don't struggle with women anyway. If you're an average guy with average social skills you will be able to meet women at bars and clubs and might get lucky. But if you try to weasel your way into a friend group with plenty of women, they will be nice and considerate but simply not invite you to most events except the biggest, which will functionally be the same as the bars and clubs you've already been frequenting. If you try to invite them to something, they will not show up. If you get pushy, they will start actively avoiding you.

I think many women really struggle to process the male perspective. As a woman, as long as you are nice and social and put in just a minimal effort to get along with any guy, he will generally don't mind your presence or even want to actively invite you to every social event he knows. More women is ALWAYS better. As a woman, your main problem is the opposite; You're bombarded by male attention and need to make sure to avoid the lazy fuckers, the losers, the stalkers, the cheaters and so on. Otherwise you'll end up being one of those wifes who does all the house work while also working full time and also caring for the kids, or you will end up having to bankroll your husbands stupid ideas that go nowhere or you will be replaced by a younger model once you're older etc.

As a guy however even woman you're friendly with will by default see no reason to invite you to any social event. All else being equal, a social event gets worse with more average men present. Men will want to come less since they want to meet women, women will want to come less since they want to meet the good men.

As a woman in America I only ever considered the "become friends and fall in love" method.

As a very plain woman I secured a husband by working at a IT Service Desk where I was the only woman and joined a fantasy football team without knowing anything about football (I picked players based on the vibes I got from their name.) I fell for the best man out of the bunch, someone of healthy weight, high intelligence, and emotional self-awareness. He fell for me. It probably helped that by that time half the single guys (and one of the married men) were interested in me, driving up my perceived value.

It took two years of spending time in male dominated spaces, but I think I married the best man I could.

It makes sense, and it's doable, but it's backwards. The bag young men are supposed to secure is resources and social status. They may as well start looting and raping if it takes this much social intrigue to find a decent partner.

In any of your examples, did the women do all this effort to secure a poor, regular height man, with a great personality?

You're assuming male and female attraction is symmetrical/comparable. It isn't.

I'm not assuming that it is symmetrical. But at the "foot-in-the-door" level it's pretty comparable.

Dating apps have a severely skewed gender ratio, so the competition is indeed stiff no matter how much work men put on their profiles. Throughout university and even after graduating, I've always found my dates through shared hobbies and mutual friends. Never installed a dating app on my phone and don't plan to.

The most frustrated young men seek companionship in online echo chambers filled with depression, anxiety and body dysmorphic disorder. None of them have learned to talk about their problems. It feels easier to take what they call "the black pill", the belief that you are genetically predisposed to be ignored by women.

Well I partially agree, though I'm not sure it's easier to take the black pill that you're inescapably fucked genetically instead of just deferring your happiness to the future. "I'll get there but I'm finding myself right now" is an easier coping mechanism than "It doesn't matter how much I lift, how much I read and how much I spend on clothes, I didn't win the lottery at birth and all that awaits me is a lifetime of desolation and solitude". Guys who take the black pill genuinely do believe what they say, they aren't merely making excuses to avoid overhauling their lifestyle and routines. And the only medium of human interaction they're exposed to confirms every negative bias they have about themselves, be it through what randoms say online about them or through "experiences" of men like them. You see this kind of behaviour the most among Asian-centric spaces, particularly South, East and South East Asians. So they give up, because they do believe it is futile to try.

Guys who take the black pill genuinely do believe what they say, they aren't merely making excuses to avoid overhauling their lifestyle and routines.

It wouldn't be a good coping mechanism if people didn't sincerely cling to it. I'm not sold that it's just an empirical judgment and not a result of the fact that trying to dig oneself out requiring high investment and being more than a little demoralizing.

To put it another way: if you see fat activists who've "taken the blackpill" that weight is just genetic and there's nothing they could have done would you trust this as a mere reasonable response to the data?

Forgive me if I'm misreading you, but I take it you mean black pill beliefs don't necessarily stem from reality? If so, I don't really disagree. My point is that the response itself need not be reasonable and there could be more to the data than the OKCupid stats for example might reflect. But if some asocial Asian fellow in an Ivy League school sincerely believes that even if he shoots for a Lanny Joon physique, he'll never match the SMV of an average white athlete in his class, and ends up deciding that it's all too much effort for too little gain that isn't even guaranteed (in his mind), is it really just a coping mechanism or has he prematurely given up on life altogether? There's still a section of woke who'd sympathise with fat activists, but a maladjusted young male who effectively exists as a ghost in society, who can literally disappear today and no one will notice and let alone miss him, is fair game for shaming regardless of his ethnicity.

but I take it you mean black pill beliefs don't necessarily stem from reality?

I think they're catastrophizing - there's a basis for the negativity but it's taken to its maximal extent.

Any individual may be driven from the dating market in despair. The entire intellectual edifice that justifies this as inevitable serves as the cope.

he'll never match the SMV of an average white athlete in his class

Plenty of people can't and don't give up.

is it really just a coping mechanism or has he prematurely given up on life altogether?

The coping mechanism helps him give up on life by emphasizing downside and de-emphasizing upside - kind of like a depressive mindset. The depressive also believes that there's no point in working out cause he's so tired and it'll make it worse. The empirical evidence is against him though.

I feel like there's a lot of truth to this but it's also phrased in a way that's needlessly antagonistic.

I do think the current situation is largely fueled by women misusing their natural leverage, but oh well that's life.

I suspect this post is bait, as some have said, and it also has some characteristics of being run through ChatGPT. Nonetheless I clicked the "approve" button because, well, it is interesting and at least argues something from a non-standard POV.

That said, if this is is your only engagement, @kungen, don't expect that we'll keep letting posts like this out of the new user filter. When something smells like trolling but is just passable enough to give it the benefit of the doubt, that benefit of the doubt is highly contingent on demonstrations of good faith, which dropping a manifesto and then disappearing is not.

I wrote it in a different language and published it on a different site, but translated it and posted it here as I wanted to get some more critical feedback from heterodox folx

Its a verbatim translation of this op-ed from Norway: https://www.nrk.no/ytring/gutta-som-ikke-far-damer-1.16355535

..how did you find it?

And the mystery is solved.

New mystery: why was this posted here?

This is heavy on assertions and light on reasoning and statistics. I suspect you're failing the ideological(gender?) turing test. But most of all it's repetitive. You can condense this down into 3 short paragraphs easily and it would be a far better, if not totally unoriginal, post.

He was reading a book on the subway. He knew the definition of the term feminism. He moved (even with a smile) when he stood in the way of someone at the bread shelf at Kiwi. He apologized for interrupting someone.

This is a list of things that women have told you were the things that charmed them.

I hope you can agree that a person may worry she'd be thought of as superficial were she to admit (to herself or others) that her thought process was "He was jacked and dressed like he's rich".

As described by Robin Hanson in Elephant In The Brain, what we think are our motives are rarely our actual motives. Add on to this the social opprobrium that may come from admitting certain motives to others, and self-reported testimony on this topic becomes highly suspect.

This is true. However, at least some non-trivial fraction of attractive women must be into stuff besides exceptional height/BMI/status/money, since I pretty regularly see men who are average in those things with attractive women. Some women, for example, are into mature daddy figure type men even if they are not physically attractive or exceptional in terms of social status or money.

I don't believe that to be the case for a non-trivial amount of people. Sure, you can justify what you have as being what you want. Or you can make the best out of the situation you felt you found yourself in and settle for someone. But if you give people the anonymous choice between a 9 vs a 6, accounting for an 'objective' height/bmi/status/money, and all else being equal, and neither 9 or 6 will know if they are not chosen so you are not hurting any feelings, people will go for the 9.

I think there are cases where people will intentionally lower their standards due to their own circumstance and insecurities. But if you told them that they could have a 9 that loved all the things they hate about themselves, or a 6 that does the same, I'd say, yeah, we are talking trivial amounts of people who go for 6.

I am not sure about that. Just off the top of my head, I can think of three very conventionally attractive women (pretty face, shapely body with nice breasts and/or backside, skinny) who, for an extended period of time, went out with physically average guys who did not have exceptional levels of money or status. None of them were foreigners looking for citizenship, either. I find it hard to believe that these women could not have easily found men with higher looks/money/status to date for an extended period of time.

Some men do not realize this, but what men want from sexual relations with women is not just sex. Men want at least these three things from sexual relationships:

  1. Sex

  2. Validation (ego boost)

  3. Intimacy (cuddling, deep conversation, etc.)

Different guys want these three things in different degrees. Some guys care 99% about just the sex part for example, but this is probably actually pretty rare. Some guys consciously think that they just want the sex part but actually without realizing it want validation and/or intimacy more than they want sex.

Guys who are mainly driven by wanting the sex have no reason to avoid doing relatively minor things to make themselves more attractive, like grooming and exercise. However, guys who are mainly driven by wanting validation and/or intimacy can sometimes encounter the problem that they want validation for being themselves as they are now, they want intimacy for being as they are now. The whole idea of first having to change themselves to get validation and/or intimacy is somewhat logically contradictory.

I think that the solution for such guys is probably to become more aware of what is actually driving them to seek out sexual relations with women. Seeking mainly validation from sexual relations is usually a bad idea in general if for no other reason than that it makes one's ego dependent on what other people think of you sexually. Seeking mainly intimacy from sexual relations is a recipe to go into the friend zone. So the solution, it seems to me, is to try to be mainly driven by wanting sex as opposed to validation and intimacy.

Edit: If a man is 100% driven by sex as opposed to validation or intimacy, the logical solution is to see prostitutes assuming that the man has no ethical qualms with that. But almost no man is 100% driven by sex as opposed to validation or intimacy.

However, guys who are mainly driven by wanting validation and/or intimacy can sometimes encounter the problem that they want validation for being themselves as they are now, they want intimacy for being as they are now.

I want to take a screwdriver

Mutilate my face

Find a beautiful woman

Make her love me for what I am

Then say I don't need it and walk away

  • Hank Rollins

You forgot number 4: housekeeper, chef and personal shopper.

You have an interesting perspective but I wouldn't break things down into distinct categories as you have. In my experience, the needs you listed aren't unrelated at all but rather all play into each other. The sex and intimacy validate the ego. If you have sex with no ego validation (for example by having sex with a prostitute) it is extremely unsatisfying because you don't feel that your partner likes you in any way, so there is little to no ego validation. This is the same if you have a sex partner you don't feel equal to and feel they only like you for your money/status/power/something other than your intrinsic qualities or physical characteristics.

Intimacy is also a motivation only insofar as it validates the ego. It reinforces your feelings of power and worthiness to be held and admired and to offer admiration and intimacy in turn.

The whole idea of first having to change themselves to get validation and/or intimacy is somewhat logically contradictory.

In my experience it's very gratifying to be able to change yourself and have power over your own body and physicality and then be validated through sex. When I felt very badly about myself I was incapable of having good sex because I hated myself so much that anyone who liked me as I was repulsed me. After improving myself I am much easier to love. If you are so insecure that self improvement points to your weaknesses rather than as a place to improve yourself, you are working against your ability to be loved and have your ego gratified. Men are competitive and will always have insecurities so if you aren't working on yourself you're doomed to be stuck in a mode of self doubt which leads to misery.

I think men who don't appear to be driven by intimacy are insecure about their ability to show love to other people and avoid this part of relationships. It's not that they don't want to feel loved, but they have experience from not being loved in the past or are afraid of their partner rejecting the showing of love so they avoid it.

Seeking mainly validation from sexual relations is usually a bad idea in general if for no other reason than that it makes one's ego dependent on what other people think of you sexually.

Yes, men must find a source of validation from within themselves or else any amount of external validation they get is just not going to work on them. If you've known insecure people and tried to give them a genuine compliment they often reply with bitterness or as though you're attacking them when you're just trying to be nice, it's the same thing.

So the solution, it seems to me, is to try to be mainly driven by wanting sex as opposed to validation and intimacy.

Sex without ego validation is completely pointless. As a gay man I can get so much sex but if I'm not feeling loved by my partner it just feels like masturbation with the extra needless steps of looking for a partner for no reason if they don't validate my ego or provide some intimacy toward me.

I think all men want sex and intimacy as a way to boost the ego. They are not separable. I am a gay man so I don't know how straight men think but I suspect motivations are largely the same.

Sex without ego validation is completely pointless. As a gay man I can get so much sex but if I'm not feeling loved by my partner it just feels like masturbation with the extra needless steps of looking for a partner for no reason if they don't validate my ego or provide some intimacy toward me.

The vast, vast, vast majority of straight guys will never experience casual sexual availability on par with a gay man, though. Like I agree with your statement, but I also feel like there's likely an inflection point of novelty at, let's say for the sake of this, 15 casual partners, where it loses a lot of the luster.

I’ve had around 100 casual sexual partners. I’m engaged now but a strong desire for novelty is still there.

edit

Yes. Because everyone uses dating apps now

I'd like to see some numbers to back up that claim, I know nobody that has used dating apps for anything more than hook ups and even then, that's not exactly common. It's my experience that people find relationships through work/school or mutual friends.

My experience in general with how people talk about relationships and dating online has been one of bafflement. It's always this sturm und drang about how dating is impossible for the average man, women are ruthless harpies and the dating world has become this mad max style post apocalyptic wasteland ruled over by the new supermen. Then I look out the window and everything seems fine, people pursue relationships that aren't much changed from the kind that their parents would have pursued.

I've increasingly come round to the idea that talking about relationships online attracts a certain kind of individual, with a certain kind of world view and experiences and that this lends a certain tint to the discourse.

edit

And yet, the stats are what they are.

Maybe you're the "certain kind of individual"? My own social circles are chock full of men so lonely they've given up on even talking about it because there's nothing to say and nobody cares to do anything to help anyway. And they come from a variety of social classes too.

This post has a lot of red flags. It's coming from a new account with 0 other posts, so there's a nontrivial chance it's a ban-evading troll trying to e.g. harvest responses for sneerclub, which this community has had issues with in the past. The syntax of the post is a bit stilted as well, indicating it's not OC but rather came from something like a news article or opinion piece, although I've put in a few sentences to search engines and can't find anything. Perhaps it's translated? Finally, it's coming from a culture war angle that people on this forum usually argue against. Stuff like "He knew the definition of the term feminism" is a big red flag. Is this asking about a boring dictionary definition of "feminism"? If so, I doubt most people would have difficulty coming up with something vaguely correct. As such, it figures that this is arguing for the sloganeering, meme definition where "feminism" means "the belief that women are people", which is a motte-and-bailey where the bailey is "if you don't agree with all third-wave feminist dogma, then you're equivalent to someone who believes women are akin to dogs or chattel-slaves".

I'll bite anyways since I think it makes for interesting discussion.

This post sounds like the Hollywood Romcom-esque advice that women often give to impressionable men that "if you want to succeed in dating, the most important factor is being Nice Guy". This is flatly nonsense. Women automatically filter out any men that don't meet a certain attractiveness threshold. The most important dating advice for men, bar none is "be attractive, and don't be unattractive". For men, this mostly involves being physically fit, having at least an OK fashion sense, being tall, and other stuff that gets stereotyped as "Alpha male". Once this basic threshold of attractiveness is reached, then other factors like personality can matter at the margins although it tends to manifest in ways that go counter to Hollywood and feminist claims, e.g. being confident and arrogant is almost certainly better than being kind but unconfident.

On section of your post illustrates this quite well:

Women look more often for personality, because they are looking for a connection with someone, while many men only look at looks, because they are mainly interested in body and sex.

The alpha male is an ideal for men, not the dream man for women. On the contrary, I've heard many nightmare stories from bad dates with these types. They sit there and flaunt themselves, and are so full of themselves that they are completely uninterested in the person they are on a date with. It's like the old joke:

No, I've talked a lot about myself. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?

Dating the alpha male are the stories we laugh about most on girls' nights out.

Yes, women joke about arrogant assholes. But notice that the woman went out on a date with such a man in the first place. An unconfident, unattractive nerd doesn't even get a chance.

Even if it is a troll, it is good to have some content like this here to prevent TheMotte from turning into a right-wing circlejerk.

If the quality were higher I might agree.

But if the opposing side is always represented in easily refuted, poorly argued form it's only going to make the right look more reasonable in comparison.

The young men feel generous with the number of likes they get on the apps, but don't get the same amount of likes in return.

I think my local LLaMA-13B does better.

Stopped reading after that sentence.

Yea, that sentence was a head-scratcher.

So you think the comment is AI-generated? That certainly seems plausible.

Yes. And even if it is organically farmed, we should have standards and not engage with something less coherent than a punch-drunk copywriter's shower thoughts.

My first thought after reading that typo was either a foreigner or a content farm journalist, but AI probably works as an explanation too.

a content farm journalist

Yes. From above: https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/ytring/gutta-som-ikke-far-damer-1.16355535?_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

It seems obvious that women tend to have more success on dating apps because it’s inherently a looks oriented medium and women have an inherently easier time leveraging looks, especially through a screen, compared to men.

What does success mean? It is getting what you want. Women have high standards in a number of different, often vague and socially informed attributes like status. Dating Apps are absolutely terrible at helping you to find this out. Even worse, they are by their nature most conducive to casual hookups, which most women aren't particularly interested in. I think it is not surprising that they broadly speaking steer clear of them as a result. Yes they can leverage this mismatch then to make the men on apps jump through ridiculous hoops if they so wish, but it doesn't really mean that women have more "success" in a meaningful sense or that the experience really is more pleasant for them unless they have a specific kind of personality.

Your definition just rationalizes away success, where if someone gets objectively better outcomes, but their expectations are higher, they somehow aren't doing better because the gap between expectations and outcomes is similar.

Inappropriately high standards from women is a thing I like complaining about myself, but that was not my point here. The point is that the look-based nature of online dating cuts both ways: Women can advertise themselves better, yes, but they can't themselves effectively select for the things they care more about, while it is trivial and obvious for men. So in practice women are naturally disadvantaged in online dating - being able to better advertise yourself while not getting what you want is a net negative - and this disadvantage translates into them not going on the platform in the first place.

Instead, we empty our bank accounts to buy makeup and skin products. We get up before sunrise to remove every hair on our bodies. We starve ourselves.

Who told you that that's what men want?

It seems that men prefer thin women but you shouldn't have to starve yourself to be thin. Just have a healthy diet.

Many men don't like make-up, even if for some it translates into liking women that wear 'natural make-up'. Not drinking and having a good diet and good sleep (being healthy) goes a long way for good skin!

One could also see 'we empty our bank account for...' as a red flag. If you need a full face of make-up to just look good enough to go out, that could be an issue.

Maybe it's a self-esteem issue too?

Psychologically healthy women are very attractive too.

1st comment on the account, immediately going for the top level? Straight for the grade A1 industrial-grade rage-bait topic of gender inequality in dating? Plus the obnoxious one sentence paragraphing?

I confidently predict that this is disingenuous trolling designed to get a bunch of people angry and ten + comments. It's good disingenuous trolling, I was tempted. But still, don't fall for the bait!

Obviously your post is full of simplifications (generics) but the spirit is right. I think that the fundamental source of almost all relationship problems - whether romantic or otherwise - is motivational. Even literal morons and maurauding spergs can be very socially adept when they are motivated correctly; I have seen this a lot of times now. On the other hand, I have seen extremely charismatic and gifted men/women screw things up, usually because:

(a) They were using another person(s) to gain some sort of internal self-esteem, rather than seeking deep and enjoyable connections for their own sake. This seems to lead to trying too hard or not enough, depending on the nature of the self-esteem pursued: proving that you are "lovable" as you are (a good way to be lazy and whiny), proving that you're a winner because you got a HVM/lots of chicks/a wife material woman/whatever.

Solution: stop pursuing self-esteem. Self-rating is a really stupid idea, as pretty much all the great religions and philosophies imply. Leave that to God, if anyone.

(b) They have perfectionist aims. It's fine to want to meet the perfect person, in the perfect way, and have the perfect romance, but that's not going to happen, and all love involves sacrifice. And unconditional love is clearly an insane aspiration, when one thinks it through.

Solution: admire the perfect but accept the imperfect. Perfection is for heaven, if anywhere.

As you suggest, it's really a lot easier than most men think. As a basically average-looking guy, it took me about 2 years to go from hundreds of unanswered messages to women to being messaged by hundreds of women, and it was largely just a matter of being motivated in the right sorts of ways. The actual changes themselves (losing weight, better photos, a more playfully written profile) were comparatively easy.

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