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When did you start pursuing women?
I started basically as soon as puberty hit, when I was about 12. It was another 5 years before I had sex.
Having sex at 17 isn't so bad, certainly felt like forever at the time. It was another 5 years and two girlfriends later before I could reliably have sex with new women after just a few dates. It was about a year of me being a bit of a manwhore before I met my now wife and settled down.
It took me about ten years and usually 40+ hours a week of dedicated practice to get good at it. I broke 6 figures in pay at a job faster than I broke into chadhood (and a very mediocre chadhood too, I've had only 20-30 sexual partners, but I was always a little more interested in long term relationships than just sex).
Being able to have sex with willing women is the most difficult thing most men will accomplish in their lives. And I think most of them have only managed it by sheer dogged determination.
And this is fine. Because on the other side of this endeavor is women, and they have at steak the most difficult thing most women will ever do: raise a kid.
Yes birth control exists, but it hasn't sunk into our evolutionarily thickened skulls. And why should it? Raising a kid is still at stake in the modern world. A woman wasting three years dating a loser might mean some prime fertility years are lost.
Improvement is the only option. The progress won't be fast, and it probably won't even be slow. It will be glacial. Circumstances and luck will always play a role, and the best you will ever do is to tilt luck in your favor. At best you might raise a 1% chance to a 5% chance. So instead of striking out 99 times you only strike out 19.
I'm running out of good advice to give to young men, and coming back to the one thing that I think made me successful: I was relentlessly horny and wanted nothing more than willing sex with attractive women. It was only once I got there that my fog finally cleared from my mind. I realized i wanted more (and needed more) after i obtained the goal.
I was 21 when I lost my virginity. After that I've had a "normal" sex life, which certainly doesn't mean a Chad sex life; one-night stands, weird little quasi-relationships, and finally now 5 years of marriage (pushing towards six) with its assorted ups and downs, along with 2 children.
What I remembered most of all from the terrible-feeling years before losing my virginity was not just horniness, though of course there was that, but the overwhelming wish to just be normal. I think that really is a major component of inceldom and all the assorted cultural quirks; the overbearing belief that you're not normal, you're not doing the normal thing that the society is focused on telling you that every normal person is doing all the time, and you either keep reaching towards that normality any way you can think of or give up and start stewing in your abnormality and hatred towards normies as the ultimate form of cope.
Of course, the infuriating paradox of it all is that if you just want to use sex as a tool for normality, it immediately becomes subconsciously obvious to women that you are not normal and not someone to have sex with, which makes it all the harder. Of course I also remember reading things to this effect during my sexless years and them just making me angrier due to the zen koan nature of it all.
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Out of curiosity, is the picture in your profile you IRL?
I would call myself someone with modest but certainly above average success with the ladies, I don't know the exact percentile value, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number of partners I've had at this point in time put me in the 90th percentile for Indian men, even if in absolute terms they're an OOM lower. India is a rather sexless country after all, and a great number of perfectly average men (and women) don't get laid till they're packed off to an arranged marriage.
I certainly suffered from severe horniness as a teen, largely fruitlessly, but in my defense very few Indian teens hit third base, let alone get laid.
It took until I was in med school for things to change, something I'd certainly classify under "improvement", since it indisputably increased my status.
And since I've spent the majority of the last 7-8 years in a longterm relationship of some description, I count myself comfortably well off. While I wouldn't sniff at more ONSs, they're so difficult to get unless you're a 99th percentile dude here it's a bad standard to hold one's self too.
As such, while I wouldn't go as far as to call myself a Chad, I'm certainly further on that end of the spectrum than the other. I still have immense sympathy for incels/average dudes, because I had to deal with raging, all consuming libido for years, and still had dry spells afterwards. I look at the latter, and think "there but for for the grace of God go I". The Chads (and women) simply don't understand what torture that is, how corrosive it can be to your self esteem, even if most of your peers are in similar straits.
Agreed, you have only yourself to blame it you don't at least make an effort. I'm sure there are some poor buggers so cursed by genetics that they still can't get anyone to sleep with them, but the advice is sound for the average man who isn't getting laid much if at all.
Much the same, albeit those trysts usually ended up in relationships. I find myself immensely more successful through IRL approaches than the apps, though I have successfully slid into DMs and charmed panties off. This is likely true for most men, since Tinder and the like are all-you-can-eat buffets for women with 10% of the men getting 90% of the attention, and being hypergamous enough to satiate the needs of the majority of women.
I used to be highly envious of my brother, who got all the handsome genes, and I gape at how asexual he is despite the oodles of female attention he receives. It makes me mildly yet irrationally angry, I want to shake him by the neck and act like a 90s suburban mom telling him that he's doing the equivalent of throwing away his food while orphans starve in Africa. But at the end of the day, he's not hungry, so good for him. I wouldn't wish the curse of male libido on my worst enemy, even if I don't want to remove it (or, I would, if there was an simply, temporary pill without real side effects that did so, instead of the only real options being castration of the physical or chemical nature).
I myself, which distinctly average in the facial department (4-5 if I'm not putting effort in, maybe a low 7 if I am, going by a normal distribution of attractiveness instead of the typical right skew), but every day I thank myself for being tall, intelligent and charming with a deep voice. I appreciate and count the chickens that did hatch, because I see a lot of poor bastards pecking in the manure pile to this day.
As far as pills...the efficacy is not great and it's probably bad medical advice to use them for this purpose, but you're a physician. Surely you are aware of the side effects of SSRIs for some people?
What are you referring to? I'm pretty sure I was the one saying that talking SSRIs to reduce libido is a bad idea.
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Yes, that is me, in India actually. Random museum in Dehli, some back room had that portrait.
That pill is a low dose SSRI. I've had some mild depression my whole post pubescent life. Never really treated it until I met my wife and was planning to settle down. I thought I always had a low level of background unhappiness because I wasn't getting the amount of sex I wanted, or sex with the type of woman I wanted. Once I had that covered and still felt depressed I realized it was something more. It took me from like 9/10 libido to a 6/10 libido. Which is still higher than my wife who is probably like a 3 or 4. I don't know if it would have been a good idea to take it in highschool.
I feel the exact same way. By all metrics I am currently successful. But it certainly felt like it took a long ass time to get there and I was pretty miserable that whole time. I think it is quite likely that I was even viewed as one of those "chads" that just effortlessly got women. People mostly stopped saying things like that because I got unexplainably angry at what they thought was a compliment. No! It wasn't effortless, that was a decade of my life I spent getting good at that! And I was miserable the whole time I was learning! (okay that last one is obviously a lie, there were some fun moments of temporary success)
So you were a depressed teenager, had a grueling ten years, and were still depressed after achieving the socially approved goal. Then you got older, took a pill, settled down, and it got better. Isn’t the obvious conclusion that the aggressive pursuit of sex with women (as opposed to jerking off) was a waste of your time/actively harming you?
Yes obviously. But jerking off wasn't an alternative.
And the end result has been nice.
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Achieving the socially approved goal may have been necessary but not sufficient for the above poster to overcome his depression.
If you replace ‘achieving frequent sex with various women’ with ‘climbing mount everest’ in the story, I don’t think that points to climbing mount everest being necessary but not sufficient to overcome his depression.
A prediction (‘My depression is the result of my "sexual failure", therefore fixing the latter will fix the the former’) was made, acted upon at great cost, and was falsified.
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Oh boy. I had and have mild to moderate depression since my late teens myself, and SSRIs not only didn't work for me, they gave me ED while not changing my libido. Hell, that probably made my depression worse!
They're not a drug I would in any way recommend for that purpose, as the side effects are too onerous and the effect is too unreliable.
I'd say I went from 9/10 to 7/10 simply naturally with age, when getting laid went from a wild fantasy to something important yet mundane. Normalizing something and knowing it's mostly on tap does a great deal to help with the hopeless cravings.
delted
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Eh I guess mileage varries.
It was a sudden drop. The more gradual drop from 10 to 9 happened a year before. And now I'd say I'm at like a 5 or 6. So I've seen gradual change.
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Wouldn’t 25 be in like the 90th percentile of partner count for heterosexuals, if not higher? Most men (and women) never come close, they have a few long term relationships, maybe a hookup or two, then get married. Often these are with friends or friends of friends, with classmates and coworkers and fellow students or with friends or siblings of all the above. Most men aren’t cold approaching women and never have.
I think if you set yourself a target like, persuade 25 very beautiful women to sleep with you as an average guy, that’s probably a hard goal, and might be the “hardest thing” a man accomplished in his lifetime (I mean I hope not, but it depends on what he’s working with, I guess). But that doesn’t really describe the lives of many men.
Its impossible to say. All the data is self reported and both sexes have massive incentives to lie, though in different directions. Short of tracking chips implanted at puberty this one will remain a mystery. I did read some interesting research once about the topic of lying on self report surveys about sex and relationships, hinting that perhaps the dishonesty was somewhat uniform and predictable. I've since tried to find this paper multiple times to no avail and much frustration. I do remember that they determined men tend to double their partner count and women reduce theirs by 2/3rds, but lacking the methodology at present these figures can't be trusted.
No idea what papers you read, but I've seen some research along these lines. I think the most amusing was when Fisher and Alexander found that college women hooked up to a (fake) lie detector reported an average of 4.4 sexual partners, vs 3.4 for women who expected their answers to be anonymized and 2.4 for women who expected their answers to be read.
There are other factors influencing self-reporting (women report more and men report fewer lifetime partners on the GSS when they have a male interviewer? Male overreporting is massive when asked about lifetime partners, large when asked about recent partners, and maybe only 20% when asked about very-recent partners?) but I'm not sure what methodology could let anyone properly calibrate any of this. Bayes says "women are underreporting and men are overreporting" is the most likely explanation of the discrepancy between the two, but either "women are honest and men are grossly overreporting" or "men are honest and women are grossly underreporting" would be consistent too.
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For a lot of American/West European PMC types, sex is the single meaningful area of "free play" in their lives. I think that's where the definition of "hardest" comes in. It's true for me for a certain portion of my life.
Getting into a T14 law school, graduating from it, and getting a job at a well ranked law firm were all "harder" than getting laid in the sense that fewer people can do them. Getting laid was harder in the sense that there were no guides, or only marginally useful ones.
I know a fair number of my classmates who fit this definition, who have achieved amazing things professionally but can't fuck their way out of a paper bag. The K-JD student, extraordinary in talent but on rails in life from helicopter parents to academically strenuous schools to SAT prep courses to selective colleges to LSAT prep to T14 law school to Vault-10 firm associate to partner-track or In-house-counsel at a Fortune 500. Every step of that path is INCREDIBLY hard in the sense that it requires a huge amount of intellectual ability and hardworking discipline, but incredibly easy in the sense that there are prescribed steps you take, guidance from mentors or parents or online forums, and if you complete those steps you get what you wanted.
Getting laid is the opposite. There are no steps. The mentors and online guides are mostly useless or hucksters. It is free play, unguided by society, the rules are made up as you go. You have to figure it out on your own, figure everything out on your own.
A lot of men I've known were very well adapted to following rules and steps, and very poorly adapted to improv. I know a shocking number of men making nice six figure salaries in NYC big law who are sexually and romantically frustrated. Because the things they are good at aren't romance.
Are they hot, though?
Eye of the beholder and I'm pretty heterosexual, but I'd say so? At least fuckable? I mean thinking of my law school roommate, right, he's taller than me and slimmer than me, dresses well, he makes more money than me, can perform intellectual tasks that I cannot, he has clear skin and good posture. ((I guess Korean is a downgrade for some people, but racism can't be that prevalent right? And I feel like I know white/black/hispanic examples but not to the same degree of certainty)) I never saw him succeed with a girl through all of law school, and after law school he's had only sporadic and difficult success with women. It's insane to me.
He succeeded in doing things that most people would find literally impossible, like passing the patent bar. Dating is the harder thing for him.
I think our Korean hero has deeply unrealistic expectations. Is he insanely charismatic: could he become a politician, or not? Is he making or on track to make a million a year before age 35? If not: he needs to be looking for the type of person that can just barely hold down a job and live independently, not thin, pretty UMC women. Passing the patent bar or the USMLE or running a marathon or even climbing Everest are often a lot easier than finding a partner that is sane, not morbidly obese, works a job, and isn't addicted to drugs.
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Can he inspire people? Can you see him succeeding at high end sales or in politics? Also: how tall is he?
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I guess East Asians have a reputation as being less attractive. Koreans are still seen as handsome, though, see Kpop obsessions and so on. I’ve found (some) Korean men attractive but I think if I met a straight-laced Korean biglaw lawyer set on partner track who seemed more trad (socially/culturally) I’d automatically write him off as probably only interested in Korean women. East Asian men who do well with white women often cultivate either a kind of artsy intellectual vibe or a tattooed vibe (male equivalent of ABG, say) I think because it’s kind of like saying “I’m not the stereotype”.
I think it’s interesting to think about the kind of people you’re attracted to. Something that seems true for both sexes is that while hotness is based on physical features, it also has a lot to do with vibe. I’ve seen women go from being largely invisible to men to doing better with them (not just sex but relationships, dating etc) without changing their physique just by changing the way they do their makeup, changing their fashion, acting differently and seeming less closed off to men.
If I look at Cjet’s profile picture he seems like a handsome guy and I know many people who would go for that kind of thing, but I’ve never been attracted to the default American male vibe, even if their facial features are great. I like tall, skinny, sometimes slightly androgynous white (sometimes jewish) guys with pale skin and long dark hair, at the top end maybe men who could be YSL runway models, I don’t know. This isn’t an uncommon preference among women I grew up with and know, although it’s not the norm. Men who could be described and who might even describe themselves as ‘beautiful’, or at least going for that vibe. In my experience, these men always do quite well with women, even if they’re only average looking, because they have a lot of women friends and are into things that women like like fashion, the arts, literature. So it’s possible I have an inflated (or deflated in this case, I guess) view of how hard it is for the average man to get laid, because in general the men in my life who seem to cultivate a vibe of some kind do well, while the plain, default American kind of guys, even if they have good features and height, might struggle.
I’m not going to universally recommend ‘move to Brooklyn, grow out your hair, cultivate an air of mystery’ to young men struggling with women, but it probably would work for a substantial number of them.
Taking up a vibe isn't as simple as you make it out to be though! You have to find a vibe that is solidly in line with what you're working with. As a (presuming from your writing) gorgeous and intelligent woman, you have more ability to take up whatever aesthetic you choose, and being attractive you will carry it off.
For men, it is just not that simple to pick up a new style. It's not as simple as reading a magazine guide, buying the stuff, learning the lingo, and going to it. There are a great many styles that, even if I put effort into it, just don't match with who I am. A big part of my growing up and becoming attractive to women was realizing that the vibe/aesthetic I should be going for was trad all-American boy. Blond, blue eyed, broad shouldered, sweet, well-read, good family; God help me I spent my teenage years trying to be punk and failing completely. When I started playing to my strengths, I grew into it fast.
But finding one's unique vibe isn't easy for many men, and it isn't the sort of thing that one does simply by following orders. Which is where my old roommate failed. He did his homework in high school, studied hard in undergrad, worked incredibly hard in law school. But in his personal life, no one can tell him what to do with any successful odds.
I agree with most of your post. But this...
Isn't really true. He's a tall, skinny, relatively handsome Korean guy in his late twenties (with money)? Kpop-maxx. Clean-shaven, get the cross earings, the Kpop star haircut, the rockstar clothes (but slightly lower-key). There are girls writing fanfic about a slightly modified version of this guy. In NYC? Some pretty white girl will go for it, probably many more than that. He's a rare niche in the middle of a huge cultural fetish. What do you say to a hot white guy who can't get laid in Southeast Asia? "Go outside"?
Sure, he can get the clothes and the haircut, but who will tell him how to stand? How to talk? What to say? How to carry himself? Because after he buys a new wardrobe, he's still going to be him.
I guess there are skeevy dating coaches out there, but nobody bona fide and normal. Having a perfectly congruent frame and style is difficult to learn in a hurry. And for most men, it tends to start with embarrassment and failure, not instant encouraging success.
This is what I mean when I said:
This is a valid application of privilege and standpoint epistemology: you are genuinely under the impression that just obtaining the outward signs of the aesthetic will get you what you want. For an attractive woman, it will, just dress in a way that signals availability to your target audience and if they like the goods they will pursue. It will not deliver that for a lot of men, there will be something missing, some charisma or naturalness will be absent if your aesthetic isn't congruent with your interiority. You can dress, even look, like a rockstar, but if you aren't a rockstar you will not get rockstar results. The old TRPer proverb about women are human beings and men are human doings?
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I'm not sure where I am in percentile amounts. I know men who had hundreds of partners (and I believe them because I've met dozens of their partners in the short time I knew them). But I probably know way more men who have had fewer partners than I have. Being in the 90th percentile wouldn't surprise me.
I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as a cold approach. Like I have never met them before? Or they have no social connection to me? I've succeeded with women I've never met before, but it was often in situations where her friends knew my friends and some even knew me as well.
I had some success with okcupid back when Tinder was a new up and coming dating app. I suppose that is sort of a cold approach.
I think to be in the position to do that, or to just have one successful relationship with a woman can require a lot of work on the part of a man. It's emotional growth, career growth, physical growth, social growth, and just general personal success. Starting from having only a working dick at puberty and getting to the point of being a mature adult is what it takes.
I've talked about this subject before and compared it to getting a job. To some extent getting a job is easy. Submit a resume, have some job skills, and be able to show up and work. But that requires a whole bunch of assumptions, and you realize just how many assumptions when you give that advice to a three year old. There is a decade of learning and growing they need to do before that advice can apply. The same is true of sex and relationships. You can't just tell a freshly minted sexually active teen boy to go be confident and talk to a bunch of women in order to have sex. That boy needs about a decade of growth before they are good marriage material, or sexual chad material.
What seems to be happening in our society is that we have been pushing the age of early teen sexual dynamics later and later. This is maybe a good thing for young girls. But for young boys it means that the moment of their sexual maturity is also being delayed. They aren't doing the growing and learning soon enough.
To clarify why I think it is the most difficult thing:
I consider the completion of a man's sexual journey to be the difficult thing. That means a successful monogamous marriage, or sexual chadhood. They have done what they need to do to either swear off the pursuit of many women, or they can successfully engage in the sexual pursuit of many women.
When a young person applies to college all they are doing is submitting an application. The process of submitting an application is not very difficult. It takes less than a day. However, they can rightfully say it is the hardest thing they've ever done, especially if that application gives them a good chance of getting into a great college. The pre-requisites are the difficult part. Taking all the standardized tests, completing over a decade of school, the extra curriculars, the essays, etc.
The same is true of men reaching sexual maturity. The final steps are usually easy and straightforward. It's the previous decade of pre-requisites that was the hard part. Learning how to be funny, hold a conversation, learning how to read all the social cues, learning how to be a productive member of society, etc.
But many of the most promiscuous (straight) men haven’t done any of the above complex personal work, they’re just somewhat hot dudes who spend their twenties as bartenders or in an unsuccessful band or hanging around the cheaper parts of Brooklyn where they live with roommates doing various low skill jobs. I think this is a misunderstanding of ‘what it takes’ (not that I oppose self improvement for its own sake).
With the exclusion of star athletes or musicians/actors successful enough to have large numbers of groupies, the straight men who have the most sex (with women who aren’t prostitutes) are those who spend the most time around large numbers of drunk young women late at night. I don’t mean in a predatory way, necessarily, just in general. The jobs these people do are almost all low paid. The bartender who lives with four roommates in deepest bushwick and moonlights as an UberEats driver is getting laid more than the banker who lives in Murray Hill, all else (looks, charisma) being the same, just because of opportunity, even though the latter has more ‘of his shit together’ in the financial/career/etc sense.
My suspicion has always been that many men see it as an indignity to have to try to get laid, and that’s where the hangup is. Having to pursue feels like an insult. I don’t have any strict evidence of this, it’s just a gut feeling.
I’m also sure that many women see it as an indignity to have to try to find a husband/boyfriend. After all, it’s something that should just, you know, happen to them. And the thing is, they aren’t wrong, because a well-functioning society puts various structures in place in order to facilitate mating long-term and short-term, so that nobody has to structure their entire lifestyles around finding at keeping a mate with high and concerted effort. At the very least, it doesn’t sabotage male attempts at pursuit in various ways.
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Yes there are some men who acquire sex easily. I have known some. But you can't always be sure some of them weren't previously ugly ducklings.
Indignity feels like totally the wrong word. It certainly feels like a chore or a useless set of tasks after a while. It's also not much of a challenge after a while.
The requirement of a pursuit is a filter, but it's sometimes a filter that has entirely stopped working for certain men. And why wouldn't those men start to view the filter as a waste of everyone's time?
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Counterpoint- pursuing is really, really fun, and our society has to put a moderately high amount of effort into preventing men and older boys from doing so in inappropriate times, places, and manners.
I agree lots of men like it, but I’m talking more about those who don’t or who dislike having to do it.
And also those who have had a string of strikes (starting the vicious cycle of self loathing).
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Maybe we've had quite a cultural shift in the past ten years, but the most recent data I could dig up shows the median number of partners for a man is about 6, and men are probably inclined to inflate that number.
About 20% of men have had 15+ partners, and about 70% 40+, so 25 being 90th percentile feels about right.
See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5795598/ and https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm#numberlifetime
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Is there anything more you can say to elaborate on this?
Prior to my sexual maturity I would say my main goal in life was sex. Afterwards I would say sex was part of my life but no longer the main goal. I could have other goals. Like having a family, a good career, and a happy life.
I think many men live through the same thing. Either they settle down with one woman and give up on the single minded pursuit of sex (marriage), or they can achieve sex so easily that it ceases to be a meaningful goal (chadhood).
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Sex isn’t everything.
Not having it is.
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