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A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.
It's very simple - people hate what is bad, weak, unpopular, and ugly, and they love what is good, strong, popular and beautiful.
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The actual reality is the Sex Recession was either something made up out of bad data, a temporary drop mostly due to women being more worried about COVID than men, especially among single people under 30, or was left-leaning women being more wary of "non-political men" and those men learning how to better sell themselves.
Why do I say this? Because according to the same data people used to write one zillion Hot Takes about how online dating has destroyed young men's ability to get laid, everything is fine - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyOlWt9aUAAYZsd?format=png&name=small
We're back to the only guys not getting laid actually being probably the guys who were never getting laid. Or maybe the incels aged out, and Gen Z, born into dating apps, know how to deal with them better as they enter adulthood.
What exactly is that supposed to mean please?
I happen to have remembered a short discussion in the /r/CultureWarRoundup subreddit about the new GSS data released in November 2021, and it actually showed the opposite if this.
The relevant parts of the commentary there regarding this are these:
And (from a different user):
Having said that, I do believe a) the sex recession is real b) it started long before the COVID lockdowns c) eventually the long-term consequences of said lockdowns will exacerbate it. It's rather obvious that anyone who was in adolescence during the lockdown has significantly eroded social skills as a result, and perhaps the most common complain levelled at young single men is that they lack the necessary social skills to correctly read the nuanced and carefully calculated signals from young women, and to generally navigate the social world and follow its unwritten rules.
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Wow, this is the first bit of good news I've seen on this site in months. Would be interesting to see a breakdown by generation.
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I suspect it's end is bad data/ change in definitions.
People are fatter than ever. Then there's porn.
It'd be helpful to look at hard data on venereal diseases / STDs, to the extent it is even publicly available. If the sex recession is real, and I'm convinced it is, the data should show the following:
A small minority of single men carry a large number of STDs simultaneously.
A large majority of single men do not, and have never carried any STD.
Regarding STD rates, the variance among single women is much lower than among single men.
On average, single women are more likely to be infected than single men, and if infected, are more likely to carry multiple infections than single men.
PiV sex is nowhere near as risky as anal sex.
I believe condom use is quite frequent among this demographic.
What exactly does anal have anything to do with this?
That someone who has a lot of sex doesn't necessarily imply a high rate of STDs.
Not necessarily indeed, but the causation is undoubtedly there. If you're a hetero man, you'll only be infected if you have sex with multiple women, or if your sole sexual partner is having sex with other men.
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The data has always been bad. Sample size is like 150 people (both men and women) in that age group for each year. That leads to so much noise in each observation it's really hard to deduce anything.
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My view is the data was always kind of meh, COVID really messed with it, and maybe this new data is OK, but maybe it's just as bad, but it shouldn't have been used or be used as proof there's an incel crisis or Tinder had destroyed gender relations or whatever.
Tinder enables winner takes all mechanic in dating, which doesn't help anyone but guys great at getting matches on tinder.
Is that even in dispute?
As to why there's a crisis, tinder / sex Revolution is not solely to blame. Few could have forecasted accurately that while porn use was no big deal, having access to a great variety of porn will cause sexual dysfunction in a lot of men. (5-10% is my estimate hard to find any or good data on that).
This is a bit of a ramble, but bare with me.
I honestly think what Tinder mostly did was give men definitive no's when they could've maybe dreamed in a perfect world, they could convince a woman they're the right match.
I'll put it this way - back in 1995, your random guy working a decent mid-level job at Microsoft in Seattle wasn't hooking up with the cute rock chicks hanging out in still super cheap 'n' grungy Capitol Hill, but the fantasy could still exist. Now, that same guy knows for sure it's a 'no.' Now, I do think one thing that maybe should be pushed slightly more is unless the other person has a photographic memory, you have a really terrible profile they'd remember, or you have terrible luck, it's probably fine to try to hit on somebody that swiped left on you six months ago if you come across them. Now, the issue there is you shouldn't probably remember the person you didn't match with six months ago, and that's a sign of deeper issues.
There's no actual good evidence of greater hypergamy among women of this actual hoovering up of all the women by Chad's that people on Twitter and the Internet claim is happening. The reality is, despite what some people on this very site claim is happening, you random average-looking office worker in suburban Des Moines is not swiping no on everybody who doesn't make six figures, isn't six feet, or at least "six inches." Now, maybe this is happening in very specific situations that people online are overrepresented in - ie. San Francisco - but most things people complain about Tinder, have been complained about dating since it became something more than what your parents decided you were going to do.
Now, you can maybe make some arguments about the drop of in-person meeting and such, but I do honestly think the results of Tinder have been overstated because two groups of people that Tinder causes issues in totally separate ways - women who get tons of matches on Tinder and dudes who get zero matches on Tinder, both have outsized voices in their own bubbles. I also firmly believe that there are a lot of dead profiles on Tinder or profiles that (mostly) women leave active to be another form of social media that gives them positive feedback in the form of likes. Now, that might be bad, but that's not a fault of women, since men would largely do the same thing if they could.
Tinder, porn, and general changes in dating are thing people are an '8' on a 1-10 scale and will lead to massive scales of societal destruction, but in reality, they're probably a '3' or '4' and nobody actually talks up the positives. Like, knowing say, whether your partner would be OK w/ an abortion or has drastically different views on their future is actually something that's probably stopped bad marriages, divorces, and terrible custody cases. That's not even getting into the fact the actual big society wide changes aren't so-much US going from people getting married at 24 and having 2.3 kids to getting married at 34 and having 1.8 kids, it's that even places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and most of Africa are having plummeting birthrate drops.
Is it really a definitive no, though? I'm not sure that just because a woman rejects a man based on his Tinder profile, it 100% means that she would reject him in real life. Maybe it's like 90% or something, but that still means it's not a definitive no.
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This is a real and significant psychological effect. In the old days all these “redpills” would sound like rumors or conspiracy theories. You don’t really “get it” until you see a, “you have 121 matches,” notification pop up on your female classmate’s phone.
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Considering who posted this it's difficult not to read it as a thinly-veiled rant. I think the responses cover most of the best answers but I'll add that the phenomenon you describe is very exaggerated online where a subset of users (especially on Reddit) have a rabid hatred of incels, Redpillers, and any group of men who have anything less than perfectly normie, bluepilled opinions on gender relations.
I'm reminded of this thread where a young man sexually propositioned a classmate he was friendly with. It did not go well for him. I think his approach was misguided and someone should nicely tell him that, he's still very young and has plenty of time to learn from the mistake. But many of the commenters jumped straight to "he's doomed to be an Andrew Tate fan or an incel". I think this is a bizarre, almost autistic response. Like telling someone posting about struggling with their faith in Christ that they're doomed to be Dawkins fan. There's definitely some people just looking for an excuse to rag on sexually unsuccessful men. Either women who just use them as an outlet for their rage or men virtue signaling their superior moral status.
/r/Tinder is similar. Every now and then a woman will post a man starting a convo with an overly forward pickup line and the comments will be filled with people saying "ha! next thing you know he'll be complaining about how women on Tinder don't wanna fuck him!". Which is especially bizarre considering that the most popular genre of post on the sub is men trying similar lines successfully. Almost like a low-effort, sexualized pickup line will sometimes get you laid on an app designed to get you laid with as little effort as possible. Shocking.
In general I wouldn't put too much stock into the opinions of people who comment things like this. Worth remembering that a lot of the content you read online is produced by insane people. In real life, women are mostly just baffled when they hear an otherwise normal guy is romantically unsuccessful. I remember an ex being shocked my college roommate was still a virgin and she said something along the lines of "why doesn't he just talk to some girls at a frat party and get it over with?". Which is sort of adorably naive. Though tbf that was in 2017, slightly before that incel discourse had reached its peak online.
It's funny you linked indirectly to that reddit thread as apparently as of two days ago the OOP is back! asking what to do since that girl is apparently in his same major and is in one of his classes again and will probably be in even more in the future. So basically everyone in his major will know. But I'd argue that pulling aside a classmate in the library you're in an informal study group with and saying directly "hey let's have sex, but also I don't want to date you" out of the blue is something that merits inclusion in the informal network of women-to-women conversations that, out of safety, exists to warn others women of potential creeps. The fact he did it as maybe sophomore/junior (21 in college?) within a cohort of frequent acquaintances and in a school setting (the library!) is a major self-inflicted L, not merely an innocent misunderstanding in my view.
I do agree though that online responses to especially dating type questions don't line up super well with real life relationships. Something about the online experience doesn't allow the same degree of nuance and sense that the person you're talking to is a complicated and occasionally self-contradictory person in their own right.
What distinguishes an "innocent misunderstanding" from, well, whatever you think it is? I lean toward "it is an innocent misunderstanding" because that sort of behavior can easily result from uncritically taking terrible mainstream dating/hookup advice at face value, such as:
#1 and #3 taken literally are retarded but they're suggested all the time online, mostly by women. In reality hooking up almost always involves a situation that starts with some plausible deniability and maybe a little alcohol. And women hardly ever complain about the setup after the fact. He might have gotten away with this had he invited her over to his place to study, rushed through a problem set and then handed her a beer and put on a movie. But were he to post about this idea there would be people, some of whom presumably understand signaling and subtext irl, who would accuse him of getting her drunk to take advantage of her or being a creep who tried to sexualize what the poor girl thought was an innocent study session. To a naive young man who doesn't have the experience or intuition to understand that advice on Reddit and from women generally is effectively designed to preserve your virginity as long as possible, the approach he actually took seems much less manipulative and therefore ethical.
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Man, that was a great Motte thread. What’s great about that scenario is that when you read it, you get an instinctive “oh no what is he doing?” response. But when you actually think about it, what exactly did this guy do wrong? No-strings-attached hookups between classmates are definitely a thing that happens. He asked for affirmative consent. He did not hurt her in any way.
Okay, go ahead. Make the argument. Bonus points if you can coherently define the word “creep”. This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to see someone do it.
I will confess I just looked at the primary reddit threads and not the motte side, though they might be interesting and perhaps then I should, so I haven't examined it super in depth yet. But I'm actually more than happy to provide a definition, and I don't think it's actually all that difficult.
My own definition of a creep is someone who deliberately places themselves in situations to get, or verbally fishes for, excessive amounts or types of personal information from women, often largely unsolicited or abruptly sexual in nature. I think that captures pretty well what women mean by a creep. Some women might add an addendum that excessive leering might also qualify. Now, I'll concede that physical attractiveness of the male in question of course warps these standards a bit. We all know that happens (e.g. the HR meme). But it doesn't influence the definition itself, just the cutoff point of what constitutes "excessive" or maybe less often, "unsolicited". The definition I think is fine.
While no harm was demonstrated, he (at least to her view, obviously she didn't receive nor seek out the full story) did affirmatively demonstrate an a) unsolicited b) excessive and c) abruptly sexual interaction. The implication is that he views many otherwise innocent/normal interactions with women in a "I want to score", sex-seeking way. Someone interested primarily in not the personalities of women, but their sexual willingness to the exclusion of other things. That's a predator kind of mindset. Now, it's not actually his mindset (due to a wildly off base understanding of FWBs and a general unfamiliarity with female friendship generally) but you can forgive her for jumping to that conclusion, I think. And there actually are elements there that support the conclusion a bit! She makes a correlation-causation kind of judgement error in shunning him and spreading it around. More pessimistically (and more speculatively), it probably hurt her ego the implication that she's either really easy or she's only good for sex but not good enough for a relationship, so putting him in a "creep" bucket allows the problem to be him, not her.
Dictionary.com uses a bit more broad and uncharitable definition: "an obnoxious, disturbingly eccentric, deviant, or painfully introverted person". I don't like this definition at all because it combines and conflates a lot of behaviors and personalities together without much actual meaning. Maybe similar to what you're criticizing. I think it's grossly unfair to call someone a creep just for being a "painful introvert". What women are actually interested in, for sharing purposes, is to try to count "red flags" and due the absence of good data, often resort to less good measures including stereotypes in an attempt to keep themselves and those around them safe. It's understandable, but often imperfect and of course a bit vulnerable to gossips with bad intentions. The other element in being a "creep" is the "obnoxious" angle, which is the only thing I couldn't find a good way to include but should be, and perhaps also the part that leads to a more slippery slope and overbroad definition and use of the word.
I appreciate the detailed and sincere response.
My core problem with the whole “dating” milieu is that it is fundamentally dishonest. It is dishonest both in that the most common advice given to individuals is lies, and in that any imperfect man must be dishonest about his intentions in order to get laid. Comment 171 syndrome is real, and it’s chewing young men up. Your average introvert doesn’t want to chat up the girl in his class for her personality. That’s what being an introvert means. Our young hero has to either:
Suck it up and live the rest of his life alone.
Say how he feels and get labeled the local creep. Or:
Come up with some elaborate scheme with a false motive for getting together so that he can have plausible deniability when he invites her back to his room — at which point, presumably, sexual advances will no longer be excessive or abrupt (I honestly don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never gotten that far before. There might be even more steps after).
I think your definition of “creep” is bad because it perpetuates this insanity.
I mean, yes, and if that girl is charmed by you at all, she'll have to pretend to care about whatever niche interest you're into. Welcome to normal human relationships.
If you want to be an introvert, the price is, yes, it'll be harder for you to build those initial relationships.
Honestly, a lot of complaints from people in general, but mostly men, when it comes to the dating scene seem to basically be a lot of the time, "I can't act exactly the way I want too, and get exactly what I want." No, but 90% of people in general can't, at least for the person they want.
Wow, normal human relationships suck! I always just looked for things we both liked, so no one had to pretend.
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Yeah, for the men it's like a group of Spidermen pointing at each other. And it's always easy for women to judge as armchair quarterbacks, since they never have to make the first move themselves. Ugh, stupid men, why can't they just get it?
Just read her mind, bro.
I know, right? It's almost cute in a childlike way. "Why doesn't he just ask Santa Clause to bring him a girlfriend for Christmas? Is your roommate stupid?"
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, "courtship and romance are just magical things that happen to [women] serendipitously like Acts of God" while they exist passively, so it's sometimes amusing to hear their (lack of) insights on how the sausage is made.
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In this context this isn't relevant. What is relevant is that the incitement by these particular insane people of hatred, ostracism and violence against "incels" is completely normalized. That should be a huge warning sign.
Warning sign about what, exactly?
A warning sign that the ongoing cultural revolution will be waged with heightened intensity in the future, because the generation that is currently in its teens and preteens is growing up in an environment where this sort of culture war fodder brainrot is, again, completely normalized throughout social media, which is all-pervasive. I think this is self-evident.
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Ironically, the people who say guys who can't get laid must be evil, are typically the same ones who spout Nice Guy rhetoric that "being nice doesn't entitle you to sex", and they somehow don't see the contradiction.
Of course they would never have sex with said guy no matter what he did, said, or believed, but some hypothetical other woman (who conveniently can never be specified) might.
This is usually because they conflate promiscuity with low standards, they're not equivalent
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2 points:
1, I'm not so sure that this is a universal implication that people make about all men who have trouble dating. Rather, I think it's levied at specific communities of (mostly-online) men who complain about having trouble dating, or against men making specific types of complaints that pattern-match to rhetoric from those communities. And then there's a whole rabbit-hole of why people feel those communities are morally suspect, whether that's a fair judgement, whether that judgement is being applied overbroadly, etc.
2, As you point out, the first guess isn't a moral failing, it's a physical/social/economic failing ('fat basement-dwelling loser'). When it turns out that none of those explanations apply, it's natural that people would try to think of some other explanation for what is, after all, a surprising outcome statistically... and if none of physical, social, or economic failings are available as possible explanations, then yeah, some moral failing probably is one of the more likely remaining explanations.
Like, it's not surprising if someone can't succeed in basketball if they're not good at basketball and don't have the physical or mental attributes needed to succeed at it. If you then say 'no actually they're a 6'8" hugely gifted natural athlete with tons of self-discipline and determination and they were born with the resources and opportunities and support structures needed to focus on this and also they still can't make any headway' then at that point yeah you would start looking at less likely explanations for what is going on.
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Because your metaphor is severely retarded. Failing to get laid isn't like failing at basketball, or failing at selling shoes, or failing at running a restaurant; it's like being unemployed. Failing at being a lawyer is like failing at sleeping with some particular girl, or some particular genre of girl perhaps. One criticizes a guy who fails at starting his business the same way one criticizes a guy who strikes out with the sorority girls at a party: for lack of skill and ability. One criticizes a guy who sucks at golf the same way one criticizes a guy who can't score with Asian chicks, for lacking some particular talent.
But we ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY criticize men who fail at every single job they try for being lazy, useless, morally worthless, losers, wastes, effeminate, overgrown boys, the cause of the downfall of Western Civ. Men who are unemployed at 30, who don't have or have never had a real job, come in for exactly the same kind of moral criticism we level at incels. When they whine that no one would hire them, we gesture at the want ads. When they whine that the jobs they can get suck, we tell them beggars can't be choosers. When they whine about the Capitalist System, maaaan, that forces them to work to live...we tell them everyone else has to work too. When they really piss us off, we bring up Second Thessalonians.
We (“we” as in mainstream blue-pilled society) do indeed shame and criticize men for being unemployed (in contrast to how we treat unemployed women), or their insufficient ambition and/or provision abilities in being underemployed or even retired early. Cue Chris_rock_unconditional_love.mp4: “I once heard my grandmother say: ‘A broke man is like a broke hand: Can’t do nothing with it’… even right now, Michelle Obama is looking at Barack, going, ‘What’s your plans, nigga?’”
However, we don’t gaslight such men or tell them pretty lies to protect employers’ wonderfulness. Employers don’t care about intelligence or credentials, they can just tell that you have toxic attitudes toward employers and employment, that your employment search is being conducted in bad faith. You clearly can’t fit a whole employer in your head and need to seek therapy. Just be yourself, work on your toxicity, and employment will happen naturally when you meet the right employer.
We tell unemployed men to get off their ass, start spamming resumes, work on their application/interview tactics. We don’t tell sexually unsuccessful men to start approach-grinding and working on their courtship tactics, as that sounds too gross and red-pilly. After all, advising to approach-grind is unromantic and misogynistic, as it implies courtship can be construed as a numbers-game and that women are NPCs that can be unlocked like boxes for loot-drops.
Employment tactics like exploiting ATS automated keyword searches and LinkedIn search algorithms, having pre-canned responses to behavioral questions, using offers as leverage to receive and negotiate other offers, can be freely and openly discussed in mainstream online spaces in ways that courtship tactics like go-to openers, having pre-canned stories, setting up date logistics to make sex occur more likely and quickly, and exploiting female mate-choice copying cannot. Not that women would fall for such tactics, of course, because women are strong and independent thinkers and because courtship and dating are dynamic processes that can’t be reduced to cheap tricks.
Who's "we"? There's plenty of people and instances telling unsuccessful men just that, and not just your stereotypical PUA types, either. Heck, I'd say that "just keep grinding" (not in those words, probably) would count as the most common advice for such men in our society.
If we want to keep the unemployment metaphor, what we don't have is a subculture that keeps telling the unemployed to just stop trying since they'll never get a job of any sort, to just blackpill and LDAR and what have you. (We do have antiwork types but their message is different - not one of despair but one of conscious rejection - and they're marginal.) However, we do have subcultural incels telling young men just that vis-a-vis dating, every day, on image boards and other sorts of forums.
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Once again, your antiwork crowd would argue that we absolutely do that. The lies are a little different: "If you just work hard at anything you'll get ahead!" "There are plenty of jobs out there in your field, just apply-apply-apply!" "Back in my day..." "Something Something Networking" "Show up early and stay late and be willing to do anything and your boss will notice."
This whole "Compare jobs to dates" schtick suffers from taking what is said in one's own circle and universalizing it. There are still plenty of schmucks running around who think they How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying themselves from the mail room up to the C Suite.
Personally? I have highly limited patience for able-bodied above-average-IQ young American men complaining about lack of either dates or jobs as such in 2023 America. Complain about the quality, or the spiritual fulfillment, or whatever you like, but the opportunities are out there, literally all you have to do is show up at this point. The want-ads are everywhere! Employers tell me they can't find decent workers, women can't find a decent lay, all you have to do is be decent and the world is your oyster.
Funny how these complaining employers and women are totally insulated from criticism under this perspective. Did you tell the women to lose weight, smile more? Did you tell these employers to raise their wages and stop calling their employees cunts?
All you have to do is offer a decent wage. There are of course, plenty of opportunities out there - opportunities to do shit work for shit pay. I don't mind myself - I like work and don't really have much drive or ambition to be rich. But I don't really pass judgment on anyone who thinks the whole thing stinks and certainly, there's nothing to be gained by scorning others or looking down on them.
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Amazing how it's possible for the largest employers who spend millions optimizing their processes to get the best candidates each year fall to for the standard tactics, but individual women would never fall for anything so cheap and base.
Modern western courtship norms are absolutely pathetic. Their whole society needs to be shamed for them. At least I'm doing my part.
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Thanks. That makes sense. It's probably better to have a terrible relationship with a girl that puts you in the fucking hospital with stab wounds than none at all. It's only now that I have realized this. You gain valuable wisdom if you survive and if you don't...who cares? At least she's probably going to pay for it.
Seventy-three men sailed up From the San Francisco Bay Rolled off of their ship, and here's what they had to say "We're callin' everyone to ride along to another shore We can laugh our lives away and be free once more" But no one heard them callin' No one came at all 'Cause they were too busy watchin' those old raindrops fall As a storm was blowin' out on the peaceful sea Seventy-three men sailing off to history Ride, captain ride upon your mystery ship Be amazed at the friends you have here on your trip Ride captain ride upon your mystery ship On your way to a world that others might have missed
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Er no, why would you ever even think this? There are plenty of successful life paths that don't require any sexual interaction with women ever.
I mean, /u/FiveHourMarathon is fairly explicitly analogizing 'failing to get laid' to unemployment, and via analogy describes them as losers, useless, morally worthless, wastes etc.
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Not if you consider "successfull," to be "having genetic children that will themselves have genetic children." Not everyone agrees with that, but we're all descended from those who did.
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This is unnecessarily antagonistic, and also oddly specific, which I suppose tracks.
If you would like to talk about the specifics of your personal difficulties, we do have a weekly Wellness thread. Though even there, you'd need to be seeking advice (and be open to gracefully receiving it!) rather than just venting. I don't think I could draw a bright line between "expressing frustration over CW-adjacent issues" and "aimless heated venting," but your posts seem to lean more toward the latter than the former, and if you can't rein that in, you're going to eat a ban.
I am sorry if I came across as antagonistic.
I genuinely, sincerely believe that it is better to have a partner that might be considered abusive than to never have a partner at all. It's better for a 30-year-old man to have been working shitty, dangerous jobs for $5/hour cash under the table than to have never had a job. This doesn't change if he's killed or maimed on the job. The only real thing that changes it is basically it being highly illegal...nobody's going to think badly of our basement-dwelling hero if his weed guy invites him to run drugs for the cartel and he says that they never had that conversation. It's better - no shit - for a guy to get stabbed in the goddamn lung with a samurai sword than never have a partner. At least this way, the guy's having a relationship. Arguably, it's better that he get stabbed than his better-looking, more socially-graceful (come on. Samurai sword? Neckbeard might've gotten got with his own damn weapon), taller peers. Also, she's going to wind up in the system and as such face consequences for her actions. No different than if our neckbeard hero was working a dangerous as fuck job that paid dogshit and wiped its ass with OSHA regs and got shanked in the lung by a flying chunk of metal or something.
I hope that this clears some things up, and again - I don't mean to come off as antagonistic.
I might agree with the job analogy but you're missing a major piece about abusive relationships. They tend to emotionally damage both people and their inner reasoning to a degree that leads to future dysfunction. As opposed to the other examples, it leaves a lasting decreased ability to succeed in relationships in the future. If you start a business, but fail, you usually learn a lot and are less likely to make those same mistakes again for your second business. If you take a bad job, it might motivate you to get better ones. If you approach a girl poorly, you learn what doesn't work. If you suck at golf, you will probably get better when trying again.
But if the girl you are dating literally stabs you, not only do you have some medical recovery going on, but studies as well as practical psychological research and experience show that the patterns of harmful mental thought that have resulted from the relationship are very damaging to future relationships. It's easy to get stuck in bad modes of thought. Research suggests that victims of abuse frequently find themselves in abusive situations again in the future at dramatically higher raters than can be attributed just to environment alone. They literally become worse at picking good, emotionally healthy partners and relationships (especially without therapy).
Being injured on the job may leave you with a lasting decreased ability to succeed in jobs in the future. That is more or less certain if the injury is permanent. Our hero, after having had his arm shattered after working for Unsafe Ulm's Garage Door Company and tensioning a torsion spring with a goddamn screwdriver and piece of rebar, might be dealing with some mental trauma from that as well as potentially limited use of his arm for life. Same if he gets his lung run through with a piece of flying metal on the job instead of a samurai sword from his girlfriend - there may be lasting physical and mental trauma there.
So too, our shanked hero also has a responsibility to report what's going on, so that Unsafe Ulm or Crazy Carrie don't fuck up any more dudes. They are cannon fodder: it's an honorable niche. They'll fill the emergency rooms and operating tables and yes, the graves as well as better men.
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If he can live on the land without ever participating in the exchange of goods and services, no it's not.
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Fair enough. It seems like... just like some guys are destined to be college educated guys waiting outside home Depot with Mexicans looking for day labor or at best working as temps, maybe homeless while doing so...some guys are supposed to be living with and supporting fucked up women.
With the gender ratio being 50/50, and some women being fucked up, mathematically that’s how it is, yes.
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Being unemployed is seen as a moral failing because someone has to provide for you. Either a relative or your countrymen through benefits paid via taxes. Doesn't really apply to inceldom. Even then we recognize there are people who are unemployable through no fault of their own (the mentally disabled/mentally ill).
Partly. But not completely. A trust fund kid might have enough money to provide for him for the rest of his life. But, I'd still judge him if he decided to spend that life playing video games on a couch.
Is it his legal right? Sure. But I'd be applying a moral judgement, not a legal one.
Ultimately, we're judging people for not living up to (anything close to) their potential. That's why we'd judge the lazy-rich-kid, but not the mentally disabled kid, even if both of them lived superficially similar lives.
Failure stings when the person is failing at something they should be able to accomplish.
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My first guess would be 'psychologically wrong' given the setup. Perhaps they have mother issues and secretly hate women (though it's not always a blocker for success)
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Meh, that's mere technical knowledge. People expect them to require specialization or for some people to be more talented.
Meanwhile, social skills are seen to go together. If you seem utterly incompetent at an important life project like that people will wonder where else in the social world that also applies.
Hmm. That is interesting. Hell: someone who hasn't learned to drive and appears healthy...maybe he's just a lazy bum, but he might well have some kind of invisible disability. So too: if I had to guess, if you put a gun to my head? People with poor social skills AND who are also pieces of shit tend not to last that long in a given environment. Successful predatory shitbaggery requires the ability to conceal it at least some of the time and as such not suck donkey balls socially. Yes, you have the shit tier self-identified incels...but they're also lonely people. The Harvey Weinsteins of the world are competent at being predatory pieces of shit. It's basically Berkson's paradox.
Well, that's true for me. I let 2 learners lapse because I was too busy/lazy to give the exam.
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Surely the obvious answer is that many people's reference class for men "who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships" is dense with men who are also lacking moral virtue. If your reference is Elliot Rodger, or incels.is, or whatever that seems like a pretty natural inference to make.
General complaints about sexually successful men lacking moral virtue are also completely commonplace though.
I think it is possible for people's model of both unusually sexually successful men and unusually sexually unsuccessful men to be dense with men who are lacking moral virtue without contradiction.
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Sure, but this is a bit like saying it's perfectly natural and reasonable for people to assume that every Muslim they meet is a potential terrorist, or every black man a potential mugger.
I didn't say it was good. I think the ecological fallacy is bad all the time. But it is a thing people commonly do.
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Isn't it? When moms tell their daughters to to share elevator rides with strange men, they assume every man is a potential rapist, and everyone accepts this as a reasonable precaution.
I do not accept this is a reasonable precaution.
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Sure, but there's a world of difference between "assume every man is a potential rapist" and "assume every man is a potential rapist, unless he's conventionally attractive and charming", which is what the OP is complaining about. And given that high-status men are more likely to commit sexual assault than low-status men, the latter heuristic is actively worse than the former.
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Relevant recent comment:
It's no surprise that sayings such as "you don't ask a fish how to fish, you ask fishermen" have been gaining ground. A few more thoughts:
The Women are Wonderful effect, Just World fallacy, with a touch of tautology. Only men with the “correct” values and behaviors are attractive to women, as women are only attracted to men with the “correct” values and behavior.
Control. It reinforces the status of women as social and moral arbiters. Coincidentally, the “correct” values and behaviors of men are also those that just so happen to benefit women (often at great personal cost to the men themselves) and abide by mainstream progressive norms: Being just as eager to wife-up women who’ve “had their fun” just as they would virgins, women who are single or divorced mothers (Real Men don’t care about biology) just as childless women, tattooed women just as tattoo-less women, “plus-sized” women just as slim women, old women just as young women. In “mistaken” paternity events (which totally don’t happen by the way, but when they do it’s because you stupid men deserve it), men shouldn’t punish the children and should continue to raise the children (because the biology of it doesn’t matter, as mentioned).
Virtue signaling. If I’m a mid-male who gets tepid once-in-a-month sex with my mid, aging wife who’s already had her fun and is weirdly protective of her phone, at least I can lord my greater morality over you in that I have the “correct” values and behavior and you don’t. If I’m a woman, let me deign to descend from my pedestal to educate you on reasons why you and your icky incel morals suck.
God Almighty, Sloot, reading your view of what women are like and why won't the bitches just open their legs for any guy without strings attached except and until the guy wants to marry a virgin after he's had his fun, it makes me want to introduce mandatory castration for all men, and I generally like men. I want them to be romantically and sexually successful! I want those who want romantic relationships to be able to have them!
What the fuck is it about sex that makes humans crazy?
FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.
I think Sloot represents the cleaned up, highly rationalized anti-women maximize your 'game' rhetoric that we saw get developed by people like Heartiste and Rollo Tomassi. Unfortunately this entire worldview towards dating and relationships grew up as essentially a counterpoint in a mimetic arms race as feminism grew into an ouroboros that began to eat it's own tail when it started trying to feminize men far too much during the early 2000s.
While some men, like myself, were lucky enough to stumble upon less blackpilled, non women-hating writers like Mark Manson and eventually and pull ourselves out of a toxic, anti-social and antagonistic mindset towards women, many other young men who grew up with the internet and /r/redpill telling them how to date instead of a well-adjusted father figure have continued to go down the dark left hand path. The prevalence of single mothers raising young boys can't be understated in terms of causing this phenomenon as well. I know we talk a lot about inceldom and the future of sex here, and unfortunately I think men like Sloot, who from a homo economicus standpoint do have a rational set of values and goals, are going to dramatically worsen the problem of sexual relationships as the gender war heats up.
At it's core the dating market is suffering from a sort of tragedy of the commons issue, or perhaps a prisoner's dilemma. The societally healthy, pro-social approach that Christianity and most religions have endorsed for essentially the last ~10,000 years give or take of marrying young, being loyal to your partner, reproducing and teaching your sons to do the same is at risk. More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.
It doesn't spell a good future for either sex, as far as I can see. I hope that our modern rationalistic worldview can produce an answer as compelling as the old religious framework, or we're in some serious trouble.
Briefly responding to the two comments here from @TheDag, although my reply to @FarNearEverywhere somewhat covered them both:
Uh huh. Let the fatigue flow through you. When sorting by “new” comments, you’re one of the most active commenters here, so it appears you have quite a bit of energy to spare.
“Deranged”, “annoying,” “crazy,” “angry,” “hate[ful],” etc. are all too typical labels lobbied onto wrong-thinkers, as a shaming tactic and an attempt to poison the well, where the targets range from Brexiters, American Trump-voters, white and Asian men against affirmative action, parents questioning the LGBT propaganda in their children’s schools. Nothing novel here.
Not familiar with Manson’s body of work, but I’m glad that some men, like yourself, were lucky enough to latch yourself onto One of the Good Ones, and to eventually transcend such “toxic, anti-social and antagonistic” mindsets in reaching such a state of nirvana and enlightenment.
I suppose I am, to a similar degree to which I worsen the problem of relationships between job seekers and employers, investors and financial advisors, tax-payers and government, by providing advice—or recounting a summary of my personal experiences—on job-seeking, investing, and tax-minimization here, elsewhere on the interwebs, or in person. I've not promoted the Wonderfulness of employers, financial advisors, and governments.
Yes, the mature response is to just be a Decent Person and a Real Man, continue to cooperate in the face of defection, and win hearts and minds by kindly walking women and their allies through issues as if you’re their “boys”, brothers, fathers, etc.
Obviously, I’m not going to treat individual women, or women as whole, like they’re a younger (or older, for that matter) female family member, just as I don’t treat individual men, or men as a whole, like they’re a younger (or older) male family member.
It's indeed all so tiresome.
Thanks for replying! Didn't realize I was one of the most frequent commenters here, I should probably scale that back a bit.
Totally fair point. I get personally annoyed by the argument you put forward because I fell fully into it for many years, and it ruined many of my closest relationships with people which I will never get back. It also turned me bitter and angry at the world for a long time.
At the same time, there was a lot of truth in it. I learned to be more confident and the importance of actually contributing to the world instead of complaining.
I would (with some caveats) generally say the employers, financial advisors, and governments are made up of people who have good intentions. I think the tendency to act as if they've all defected and there isn't a single good employer our there is indeed 'toxic,' in that it's an unhealthy mindset which will only lead to more suffering. Same goes for women.
This is a caricature of my position, and I'm pretty damn far from any sort of actual 'enlightenment,' but you're not necessarily wrong. I'm generally a fan of more civil strategies. In terms of actually doing this it doesn't look like being what you would call a 'nice guy,' it instead looks more like being a stern father. The ability to be truly kind and help others requires a relationship with anger, which I find to be the central issue with redpill esque arguments.
I know I came across as a bit of a dick in my post, but I am genuinely sympathetic to your position. I believed in the same things you believed, once.
Don't do that if you're thinking you're bothering others, imo commenting frequently is fine if your posts are often good and yours are (and often get upvotes). And you're not the most frequent, netstack has 500 more than you, I'm about the same in total.
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In contrast, I find it exceptionally hard to sympathise with this sentiment, given the state of the overall culture. It's been quite surreal to watch various women taking offence at the fact that in a few places online, some of which have been sequestered, men are saying mean, denigrating and in their opinion untrue things about women.
I've seen it put like this: "[This] upsets you. You find it unjust and unfair and unjustifiable. What if that was what you saw when you watched CNN or MSNBC? Read Slate or Salon or the Guardian or the Washington Post? What if it was constantly trending on Twitter? What if your HR department instantiated it in company policy? What if your union promoted it as a true fact that needed rectifying? What if the American Psychological Association, in their guidance for treating women and girls in crisis, was promoting the ideas espoused by /r/TheRedPill and recommending treatment practices based on them? What if this narrative had convinced your country or state to reverse hundreds of years of jurisprudential advances, and return to an era where due process is an inconvenience that should be abandoned? That's what men see when they turn on the TV or open the newspaper. It's what they're confronted with when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, or the mental health profession."
The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations. Such viewpoints have actively influenced law and public policy. And yet a commentator on some nowhere forum online can make @FarNearEverywhere "want to introduce mandatory castration for all men". Well, I suppose in some way you kind of understand how the "extremist" redpillers feel, then.
I understand how this would be frustrating to some women who find themselves attacked when they personally did nothing to contribute to that state of affairs, and I do wish gender relations weren't the way that they currently are. But quite frankly, I don't think many women understand that this kind of thing is just daily background noise for men. And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".
Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.
EDIT: clarity
Well hey man, I actually agree with many of your points here. I feel a lot of sympathy and pity for the anti-social men who turned into red-pillers.
But I think the mature response is to accept the truth, buck up, and work to change it. Change people's minds, especially women, not by hating them but by walking through the issues and appealing to their emotions like their boys brothers fathers etc.
Now is this path much more difficult than just posting angry screeds about sexism online? Absolutely. But it's more effective overall, and much less likely to lead to actual bloodshed or societal upheaval.
Some MRAs are conflict theorists. They believe that relations between the sexes are fundamentally a negotiation, and that women have more bargaining power which makes the negotiations leonine. These MRAs believe that feminism is in fact good for women in at least the short term, and as such they don't see a point in what you advocate - they think everyone already knows the facts, and their difference with female feminists is simply that they happen to be self-interested men instead of self-interested women.
"Angry screeds about sexism" are an attempt by these people to increase men's bargaining power by unionising men, much as they perceive feminism as unionising women (and male feminists as scab workers begging for scraps).
Even within the conflict-theory frame, there are other ways to increase men's relative bargaining power. Unfortunately, most of them are "run away screaming" levels of horrible. Banning smartphones is the most prosocial one I can think of, by a very long way, and I'm not even sure it'd work (certainly, their introduction brought women onto the Internet in huge numbers and thus enabled instant feminist shame mobs, but it's not super-clear whether removing smartphones now would cause those women to log off or merely to buy PCs).
(There are definitely mistake-theory MRAs as well, though, and some who are a bit of both.)
I would not disagree that some MRAs have a view of gender relations that resembles conflict theory (but as you already noted, many MRAs are also mistake theorists or are a blend of both). However, in contextualising this viewpoint it's necessary to note that the predominant feminist view of gender relations is itself an antagonistic one (patriarchy theory), it arose much earlier than MRAs, and much of feminist political activism is informed by this idea. And when you stand in opposition to conflict theorists, you need to understand that they believe they are at war and will treat it as such. Perhaps their belief is mistaken, but through their actions they have created a dynamic that's fundamentally indistinguishable from what you'd see if conflict theory was true.
In other words, the funny thing about conflict theory is that it’s self-fulfilling, to some degree. Once it is believed by enough people and acted upon, conflict theory frameworks then actually become a somewhat correct framework to view the world through, regardless of the prior validity of the theory. So when the primary lobbying group that purportedly works on behalf of women is essentially treating gender relations in this way and actually getting what they want, I do believe that does indeed introduce a strong aspect of conflict to the relationship, and I think the "conflict theorist MRAs" are simply perceiving this fact. Gender relations might not inherently be one of conflict, but in the current environment, they have gained a distinct shade of antagonism wherein one side seeks to incessantly improve the position of "team woman" in some shockingly zero-sum ways, and while they do feed into the gender hostility as well it's clear that the conflict-theorist MRAs were not the primary progenitors of this antagonism. The way I see it, a large part of the purpose of their rhetoric and activism is to create some kind of necessary counterbalance to trends they didn't start, and they're doing this without benefits such as the backing of institutions.
Once again, I don't like how things are going and find the entire thing to be almost excruciatingly tiring at this point, but once someone starts a memetic arms race (and I do indeed place the blame primarily on feminists for instigating that arms race) it's almost impossible to stop.
I think I mostly agree with your position on the fundamentals. I left my post as conditional as it was for a few reasons, including but not limited to:
it wasn't necessary to argue the truth of the premises to get TheDag to understand the logic
I'm too close to the feminism/MRA issue, as both a victim of misandrist child abuse and a 30-year-old virgin, to be confident in my objectivity
I'm trying to follow something like that Doctor Who quote "I help where I can; I will not fight", and arguing the fundamentals would be wading into the Culture War for real (if you go through my posts you'll see that while they're not always taken as such, most of my CW posts at least technically stick to clarifications).
I think nuclear war's fairly likely inside the next few years, and I think there's a significant (if small) chance of AI X-catastrophe by the end of the decade. So a) CW issues feel trivial by comparison, b) raising the temperature of the CW worsens both of those risks because it weakens the West, c) if we do have a nuclear war, a substantial chunk of the Blue Tribe is going to literally die in a fire and the SJ movement is probably going to collapse in on itself, so opposing them now feels at least somewhat moot. Luke 12:20 and the Warcraft 3 introduction convey my attitude pretty well.
And to come full circle, this means I kinda do agree with TheDag on high-temperature actions being a bad idea right now even if I mostly agree with you on who's at fault (and even if I'm too much of a deontologist to actively oppose people fighting for ideals I sympathise with).
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This runs into the problem that the people who are upholding the current state of affairs have a much larger megaphone than we do, and are using their disproportionate authority/power to deplatform those who would ever possibly challenge their position effectively.
So how can you 'appeal to their emotions' when it's your still, small voice vs. a massive screaming egregore of social media/pop culture that is pumped into womens' brains during all waking hours?
How exactly do you change someone's mind when every single social force is pulling them the opposite direction? (without directly attacking the source of the pull, see below)
We have guys like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson I guess, and a plethora of manosphere types that are trying to 'walk through the issues' in a semi-rational matter.
They take on the institutions, and they get literally imprisoned, fined, fire, deplatformed, hacked, and otherwise shouted down by every single mainstream outlet at once.
That is the message that is coming across. "Rock the boat in any way that might actually change minds and we bring the full weight of our combined power down to crush you."
So you say "accept the truth, buck up, and work to change it."
Please, if you think there's a version of "changing it" that doesn't involve directly 'attacking' the institutional power wielded against those aforementioned men, and men in general, and dismantling, possibly via violence, the mechanisms they use to suppress alternate opinions, I'd love to hear it.
Its the whole problem of "why are conservatives/libertarians/populists complaining about censorship online when they should be trying to change hearts and minds and building parallel stuctures?"
Because this response ultimately becomes "Build your own internet/payment system/social media platform" and thus the work required to actually get any change done is a couple orders of magnitudes more than it would be if they were allowed to speak their piece unmolested.
It sounds like a kafkatrap when read uncharitably:
"If you're just complaining about it online and not doing something to change it, you clearly don't care about the issue enough to take action."
Then on the other hand, if you DO take action:
"Whoah buddy, you can't just directly go after the people and institutions that you think are responsible for suppressing male concerns and preventing any response to issues facing men, that makes you look like an overzealous psycho! Work to change people's minds first!"
Yes yes, work to change things.
But can we be, perhaps, REALISTIC about the amount of effort and strife that 'changing things' will entail, given how TPTB are quite happy to keep things the way they are?
Societal upheaval seems like an unavoidable outcome if things continue on their current trajectory (never a guarantee!) though.
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To be fair, it wasn't men who defected first, men are finally playing catchup after women have been defecting for the last 60 years and men have finally realised that women aren't going to stop defecting. Unfortunately everyone is worse for it.
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Correct. And, as any libertarian knows, the way to solve the tragedy of the commons is to privatize the commons.
Likewise, the way to solve the Woman Question is to make women property again.
The pro-social approach Christianity endorses is only viable when women's sexual choices are controlled by their fathers, then their husbands.
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I'm always down for a "total scrote death, when?" circle-jerk, however:
As an authority on myself, I must disagree to this highly uncharitable well-poisoning and strongly so. And you're extrapolating far too much.
I consistently bang the drum that men are not entitled to sex and that attraction is not a choice (the latter notion that I recently expressed to... you, apparently). I'm hardly under some illusion that: if I were somewhat shorter, less jacked, with less online social media proof, the outcomes I've had with women would be the same. Nor do I feel entitled to get laid if I don't approach, whether virtually or in-person, just as I don't feel entitled to get fed if I don't buy food and/or cook for myself. A sentiment I regularly express, indirectly or directly, mostly descriptively but sometimes prescriptively: For the most part (pretty much the whole part), men won't get laid unless they make it happen, with or without strings attached.
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People who weren't "crazy" about sex did not reproduce; we are not descended from them.
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I don't see how you read this into his comment
Is this a rhetorical question? I feel like you could answer this
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In addition to what Astranagant and doglatine have said, it may be viewed it as part of the common phenomenon of some people wanting to act like the victims of stigma and abuse deserve it. You'll see this in any bullying. The victim will be portrayed as a somehow bad or loathsome person by the bullies. This serves a few purposes. They can justify the abuse to themselves and to others (often, an aggressor's view and feelings towards another person comes more like a justification of their own previous acts, rather than as a pre-existing reason), and recruit others to the effort. Bystanders' thinking goes from "jfc, it could easily be me next, they should be stopped" or "the world is unjust and terrifying" to "oh, there was a reason, let's go with it or look the other way".
And I'm not saying that incels are necessarily innocent nice people all the time, and I'm not saying that anyone who derogates them is a cruel bully necessarily, but you do observe women who seem like they want any below average sexually attractive man to be sent into the frozen wastes, and thus it is useful to make the incels look worse than they really are.
Are you telling me that a subset of weird angry jackass feminists invented the goddamn Hock many years before I did? Independent invention, eh? I suppose if you chucked a bunch of unattractive dudes into the Alaskan wilderness, those that survived would on average be more attractive than those that did not, and they'd all at least be fit and determined.
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I've never heard anyone suggest that it was a moral failing. That sounds like a completely made up strawman to victim oneself against.
Obviously the reverse causality makes sense: bad people should be less datable. But i e never even heard anyone suggest this should is an is as it's plainly not real.
Where are you getting this moral failing narrative from? You need to justify the premise, because it sounds like extrapolated wallowing or self-loathing.
Literally every feminist on Reddit. It's ubiquitous. Guy asks for advice or sympathy about his dating/sex troubles, immediately gets pounced on by everyone saying "actually it's your lack of confidence and your bad attitude that you're entitled to sex." Every time.
And they claim that things like looks have no effect on dating. "I know one guy who's short and bald and gets lots of dates, therefore your lack of dates mean you must be an evil misogynist". Or they'll tell guys to "take a shower" as if every unsuccessful guy is an insane hobo who never bathes.
Ok link me an example of that.
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Doing it on the meta level is pretty funny, I have to admit. 10/10
But like others who point it out in this thread I've seen it both online and in real life. Consider how "incel" went from a morally neutral descriptor to a moral condemnation, with the absurd side effect of married men people want to denounce constantly being called involuntary celibates.
Self loathing is certainly bad, but it seems fair to notice that romantically unsuccessful men are about as low on the totem of sympathy as you can get. Even criminals and prostitutes are more sympathetic. You have to get to pedophiles or something to find people with less cachet.
I can't consider it because I've never seen it except in these scenarios where i'm assured it's true by its detractors. I especially haven't seen this in real life.
Again, Ive never seen this. Get better friends people. Romantically unsuccessful men are to the contrary some of the most sympathetically talked about people I know. Even where it's not sympathetic and just pathetic, that's not the same as immoral.
If you're contorting my comment into moral repudiation of someone for specifically being poorly undatable, I think we've found the disconnect.
This looks like nothing more than a victimhood mentality looking for a bully.
Even if it were somehow morally (I'm not) maligning the OP it's not for being single or unlucky in love.
If a Jewish guy stands up in a movie theater and shouts, 'AntiSemites are trying to silence me!!", His point isn't proven when people shush him.
Similarly, if you come in and say, 'how come I'm morally maligned for being undatable!", I'm not proving your point by repudiating that claim.
You misunderstand, the meta moral condemnation I'm pointing at is precisely the idea that such complaints could only come from victim mentality, which is pretty clearly a moral error. This is different from the question at hand but it is funny because it's the same fallacious mechanism operating.
You're justworlding too: you haven't seen something bad happen so despite multiple people telling you it's happening it must be because of something inherent to the victims.
Just world theory has nothing to do with my skepticism.
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https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/ben-shapiro-calls-joe-biden-the-kurt-cobain-of-politics/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nAaZvlYc71w&t=205
https://www.thedailybeast.com/sarah-silverman-savages-pathetic-incel-elon-musk-on-daily-show
https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/incel-elon-musty-backs-out-of-fight-with-incel-mark-zukerberg.5352488/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xGGKJ3REusg?si=PnJxvLZlcauYMGxs
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/jordan-peterson-cries-olivia-wilde-incel-hero-dont-worry-darling-1235388024/
https://thespectator.com/topic/delete-facebook-zuckerberg-incel/
A cursory Google (I'm on my phone) to provide examples of public figures being described as "incels". All of these men have been married at least once, all but one of them are still married, all of them have fathered at least one child, at least one is known to have fathered multiple children by multiple women, and at least one is known to have had multiple extramarital affairs.
Elon has ten kids from adult to under 2…. Calling him an incel is literally retarded. Clearly this is not a man who lacks for sex.
I completely agree, but there's no shortage of people flinging that accusation at him anyway.
Occasionally it'll happen that someone will say "omg X is such an incel" and I'll point out "X? You mean the happily married man with two kids? How can he be an incel?" and the person will reply "well he just gives off incel vibes" which is vague enough that it could mean anything.
It seems like one of those situations where people go through a superficially logical chain of thought but commit a bunch of fallacies along the way without noticing.
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It seems to be the same kind of definition creep around "racist" or "fascist" where it is now simply a general term of abuse or denigration towards someone who is disliked or does not share the same political views.
Like, if you read Eliot Rodgers quotes online, you can see why he failed so badly with women and friendships, and it had nothing to do with his looks or his ancestry; he was so self-centred and so hung up on his image as the 'perfect handsome gentleman' and yet the way he says things and the things he says, you can see why nobody wanted to spend longer than ten minutes in his company.
There's a complicated problem here with people who are, to be blunt, losers in life not due to their own choices but due to genetic lottery failing them when it comes to looks, intelligence, ability to be not-weird, and so forth. And the problem won't get solved just by "be yourself", but it's too cruel to say "yeah, you need to work hard on making yourself more of a sale, and even then you won't get very high quality in return" even if it's true. Then there are those who put the blame for their own failings (like Rodgers) on "it's women, they're bitches" and that engenders the angry and mean responses in return.
I don't have a solution. Government-mandated girlfriends won't work, because if you want someone to love you for yourself, then someone who is being paid/compelled to spend time with you isn't what you want - they don't care about you really, they are doing their public community service in pretending to like you for the 'girlfriend experience'. Telling people they have to resign themselves to being alone even if they want love and companionship is hard and seems cruel, even if it's true. Telling people if they do X, Y or Z they'll get that girl of their dreams is lying to them. Maybe readjusting expectations? This is not the 60s and the first flush of the Sexual Revolution anymore, historically a lot of people never got to have love and sex, there were always a lot of bachelors and spinsters, the idea of having tons of great casual sex in your teens and twenties and then finding a suitable mate and settling down for marriage and children only worked for a limited time (because you could sleep around, or you could get married, but unless you were rich or very charming, you couldn't do both) and now the sexual market has adjusted to the new conditions.
Really, Elliot Rodger seems like the victim of his own coping mechanisms. His inability to attract women (and same-sex friends, by extension) seems to have been entirely social in nature - as he correctly noted in his video, he's fairly handsome, he was only an inch or two shy of six foot, physically fit, obviously of above average intelligence. Unlike many incels, he couldn't blame his lack of success with women on a physical deformity or a learning disability. There are many incels who, one suspects, would have had just as little success with women had they been born 100, 200 or 500 years ago, but I would not put Rodger in that category: born in another context he could well have ended up content and thriving.
Because socialising didn't come naturally to him, he must have found it awkward and discomforting. In the past, he would have had no choice but to power through this initial discomfort, awkwardness, and platonic & romantic rejection, and had he done so he most likely would have ended up a more or less well-adjusted young man. (This is no mean feat! By "initial", I recognise that it might have taken years of persistent honing of his social skills with very little immediate reward. But it would be quite surprising if he didn't eventually get over it.)
But because he found this awkwardness and discomfort absolutely intolerable and because he was born in the West in 1991, he had the option to, rather than powering through, instead opt out and retreat into online spaces, in which he had absolute control over how he presented himself and with whom he interacted. Spending time in these online spaces made it even more challenging and distressing for him to interact with people in meatspace, creating a vicious feedback loop. Besides depriving him of opportunities to develop his social skills, the other big drawback of spending time in these online spaces (social media, porn, video games) is, unbeknownst to him, how heavily curated and idealised their depiction of the real world is, which resulted in what Rodger wanted out of life becoming concomitantly unrealistic over time. As a teenager, he probably thought to himself "I just want to meet a pretty girl who's nice to me", but by the time of his rampage his goal had curdled into "I want a 10/10 blonde bombshell with DDs, and anything less is a travesty on a galactic scale. 'Everybody' of my social status has that, why can't I?".
Really, the modern "therapeutic" social paradigm criticised at length by Freddie deBoer among others - in which every discomfort or obstacle (no matter how trivial) is an injustice to be remedied by fiat; in which the powers that be must go to great lengths to ensure that every individual feels "valid" and "empowered" at all times; in which adversity is not a potential opportunity for growth, but something always to be ameliorated or avoided under the auspices of "self-care"; in which smartphones and social media to connect with like-minded people are an effective coping mechanism for the "neurodivergent" - seems tailor-made to produce an army of Rodgers. I've spoken to Americans younger than Rodger who've grown up fully immersed in this milieu, and they genuinely seem to see no distinction between "this made me unhappy" and "this is a social wrong". They legitimately talk about the guy they like not texting them back as if their civil rights were being impinged upon. I fear for this generation.
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People like to believe that the world is fair and just; this is why the gambler's fallacy exists, this is why the concept of karma exists. The idea that someone can do nothing wrong and still fail through sheer luck is abhorrent to most people, so they will grasp for a reason as to why the failure is actually justified, up to and including inventing things as necessary to preserve their belief in fairness. If a perfectly fine young man can't attract a date, there must be SOMETHING wrong with him, it can't be that the world is simply arbitrary and unfair, that would be too painful a world to live in.
Among the people who are most likely to say this also, ostensibly, believe that the world is dominated by a white heternormative patriarchal tyranny, or something like that. They claim to believe the world is deeply unfair and they relish pointing out this unfairness everywhere, even when it makes no sense.
But even this "unjust" world is ultimately just in their belief system. Otherwise the concept of being "on the right side of history" would be incoherent. The good guys are destined to prevail in their eschatology.
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Right, and to acknowledge that the world is deeply unfair even for many straight white males would cause their worldview to crumble.
When women, people of colour etc. don't get what they want out of life, that's because of sexism, racism, bigotry, transphobia and so on. When a straight white male doesn't get what he wants out of life? Well, if even the white cisheteropatriarchy doesn't think much of him, he must not deserve it.
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I think /u/Quantumfreakonomics has it right. Despite ostensible public morality being deeply Christianised and emphasising our treatment of others as the polestar of morality, our deeper human concept of virtue is deeply bound up with the concept of personal excellence. A straight man who is failing to be attractive to women is failing in the same way that a slow cheetah or weak oak is failing, namely lacking in the distinctive strengths associated with his nature. Yet because of the deep penetration of Christian and (especially) non-conformist Protestant values into modern Western society — exacerbated by wokeness, a Puritan project in all but name — most people either lack the vocabulary or brazenness to say out loud, “you’re a lousy weak male, and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
Instead, that impulse has to be sublimated into the ethical vocabulary of slave morality, with lack of excellence being converted into lack of morality. The only spaces that call out this male weakness explicitly tend to be those that have explicitly embraced modern master moralities (in however confused a fashion). That’s where you’ll find sexually successful men making fun of incels as weakling feminised soyboy beta cucks etc.. Most other people are thinking that, but lack the self-awareness or honesty to say it.
But this isn't a case of lack of brazenness or vocabulary. A so-called incel will never be called upon by feminists and NPCs to stop being weak, be strong, learn to be a real man etc., because it's not his lack of strength that they find deplorable, it's his open rejection of feminist ideology.
Nominally, yes. But would they care about his open rejection of feminist ideology so much if he were stronger? In my observation the answer is usually either "yes, but not nearly so much" or "possibly, but they'd keep their opinions to themselves, at least around him", which amounts to the same thing from his point of view.
Attractive people (of both sexes) just get cut a lot more slack for their opinions and treatment of others.
An attractive man today has zero incentives to reject feminism as it exists as a sociocultural reality, much less openly question feminist ideology. In fact, if you're an attractive hetero man who doesn't particularly want a family and isn't terribly concerned about the future of his nation, feminism is in fact great. As a result, you're not likely to encounter an attractive man who rejects feminism, so answering your question is actually rather difficult. This largely explains the cultural staying power of feminist dogma. It's high-status men who women notice, not average men, and those men don't question feminism.
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It’s a pretty straightforward syllogism: moral virtue is that which cultivates “the good”. “The good” is that which is desirable. Therefore, someone who is not desirable is lacking in “the good”, and therefore is lacking in moral virtue.
You can try to poke holes in the argument, but there is a certain logic to it.
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Competence and self-direction are virtues in men, so we expect men to get attainably competent at things that are important to them.
Our hero might not start as an amazing shoe-salesmen. But, I'd expect him to get good enough to hold down a retail job at a shoe store, especially with a few years of trying.
Applying that to dating: The background belief is that it's not that hard for an otherwise healthy guy to get into a relationship, or at least go on some dates.
So, if a guy isn't dating, then the assumption is that he has a lack-of-ambition issue (he's not asking anyone out), a lack-of-skill issue (every woman rejects him), or a lack-of-interest-in-adult-women issue (... what is he interested in?). None of those are especially flattering.
There are plenty of people here that could not do this: not even if they were as dedicated to their craft as say Paul Ekman was dedicated to the study of facial expressions. It would - I shit you not - be easier for some of the people here to become literal rocket scientists (or at least aerospace engineers). I am not joking.
This seems silly and self-aggrandizing.
I don't believe that otherwise healthy people are putting engineering-degree levels of effort into learning to hold down basic retail job. If someone's telling you that they spent thousands of hours, with engineer-student level focus, and can't hack it at Payless Shoes, then I think they're lying to you.
Maybe he could hack it at Payless Shoes because he's an hourly worker that just has to know a bunch about shoes and show up on time in clean clothes. But selling something like insurance or used cars? There are a fair number of engineers that wouldn't be able to do that.
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Because men are assumed to be the ones who have agency in this regard. Men act, women are. And therefore if something goes wrong it’s men’s fault.
Adding to that that many people, especially women, have experience with men whose approach to dating is morally undesirable, but no experience with men who are unsuccessful at dating for some orthogonal reason. Yes, men with morally undesirable approaches to dating are generally doing OK for themselves romantically, but that’s often what women have to go off of.
As for OP, there are many women in the Philippines and Ukraine who would be happy to have you.
To be blunt, a lot of men in the past who were just average guys with average jobs got married mainly because women had little to no choice but to settle for a guy in order to be economically secure. They had decent marriages, nobody expected a grand love affair or swinging from the chandelier sex lives, they got on okay, had families, lived together in old age. It wasn't fantastic, it wasn't awful, it was just how things were. So long as he didn't beat you, didn't drink, didn't run around with other women and brought home the money to run the household, what more did you want? And for the men, so long as she kept the house, was a good mother, and did her marital duty in the bedroom, what more did you expect?
People have much more inflated expectations, and much more choice, nowadays. Women can have jobs and support themselves and generally don't need to marry in order to survive. Men expect the swinging single lifestyle of sexual exploration when they're young, to have plenty of choice and plenty of opportunity, until they're ready to settle down. Women expect to have the same sexual opportunity as men. Somebody's going to be disappointed.
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BTW, OP shouldn't see these women as "lesser" than western women given that they're more likely to say yes to him. I don't know about Ukranians/Pinays specifically but I would venture to say that they are probably going to be more loyal, invest themselves more into seeing you succeed and make a better mother than their equivalent western counterparts (ofc bad apples exist everywhere so choose with care). When you're 50 what will matter is the bond between you and your wife and how secure your relation with your family (children if you want, in-laws), not how hot or desirable she was at 25.
This is another benefit of getting your parents/other elders to at the least shortlist a bunch of people they think would make good partners for you and then you choose from this set rather than choose completely by yourself. In the latter case you'll be more focused on the short term benefits of your potential partner than the lifelong ones they provide and are more likely to end up choosing a suboptimal person when averaged out over your whole life.
I think part of the problem of discontent is that people are not thinking of marriage and family life in their 20s (and maybe even 30s) because that's redolent of their parents and they don't want to think of themselves as being in that slot of the stage of life yet. They want the fun that our sexualised society tells them is out there - if you're in college, or college-aged, you're going to parties and banging hot chicks/studly guys! You're having all kinds of exotic sex! You're not tied down yet, because society as a whole agrees it's your right to be young and have fun. So if you're not getting that, why not? It's your right. It's owed to you. Someone or something must be to blame.
And that can be the patriarchy or feminism or Women Are Wonderful or Rape Culture or Toxic Masculinity or the Cock Carousel or something. But it must be something to blame, because the old conservative rules were too confining and stuffy and we've agreed to dump them in the name of self-expression and liberty and happier, better lives. So why aren't we getting the happier, better lives? If only women were traditional and submissive to men! If only men were in touch with their emotions and feminist!
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With respect to Ukraine or any other nation which suffered through the Eastern Front of WW2, it's mostly a simple case of a lopsided sex ratio favoring men (in current Western societies, it's the opposite case), and women there being socialized accordingly.
I was thinking about this in college and after; I remember vividly working in a hardware store after graduating college and looking at washing machines, fantasizing about twenty years from now looking at washing machines with a blunt, abrasive, caring, fit wife. Then, I still thought that sort of thing was realistic.
I think you meant to reply to a different comment.
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I happen to believe in this theory:
Garbage IN, garbage OUT.
Consider the type of person who will willingly endure a relationship with someone they are disgusted by in order to lift their family of origin out of poverty. An admirable sacrifice, to be sure - but wouldn't you feel some resentment? BurdensomeCount: I'm assuming you're a straight dude. Imagine if your whole family got, say, AIDS or cancer or something. But there was some rich gay dude who would save 'em if you married the guy. He's ugly as hell and kind of smells bad, to boot. Would you take one for the team/your family? What kind of resentment would you have for him? How would you ultimately feel about the sacrifice - and it is a sacrifice - that you are making?
Hold up, you're significantly changing the situation by making it a homosexual relationship. I can have children by marrying a very ugly woman, I cannot have children by marrying an unpleasant man.
OK, assume he'll spring for surrogacy; he's rich, after all. Does that change anything?
Mildly, somewhat, eh. There's a pretty substantial step when you cross from someone who is the sex you're orientated towards into an entirely different sex that I think breaks the comparison. It should be plenty to get the point across that it's a particularly repulsive woman. Even just on the child rearing element it matters that the kid(s) would be biologically both of ours and raising them together creates a bond.
I propose a compromise of a trans man who is fully reproductively intact. And I think I wouldn't actually be resentful of this transman if they also took the relationship seriously. Even this version is kind of lacking because I think our perspective savior is likely to be willing to change some things about themselves at the savee's request which kind of interferes with the repulsiveness of a transman to your average man because the transman would at least make an effort to be more feminine to the preference of the savee.
That said I do find the whole mail order bride thing intuitively distasteful in a way I can't articulate well. Something about the transactional nature. Perhaps Disney has just too thoroughly colonized my mind.
Okay, they're a trans man. They're also 450 pounds with atrocious personal hygiene. And they're a trust fund baby.
I take issue with the bad personal hygiene and trust fund status. The usual complaintants are usually well funded through their own personal earnings and frankly the hygiene thing never did at all in my experience, high functioning people who question they're success aren't low hamging fruit like bathing. Seriously, the idea that this is someone earning well enough to sponsor a family coming over while also not having figured out that inoffensive smells factored in is a venn diagram containing only the severely autistic. It's nearly disqualifying that you actually unironically reference it.
I do accept them being 450 lbs and repulsive, but I think there is still room to feel love there. But I think merely very obese would be more fair.
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Also I should add, non-Western women could be just as rich as Western women (and some of them, say from e.g. Saudi Arabia or Qatar, are) and assuming they had a good upbringing that taught them to value what is really important in the long term they would likely still be more attracted to you (assuming no cultural dealbreakers like you not being willing to convert) than their equivalent western counterparts.
It's about values fit, not about lifting people out of poverty.
The problem for women, then, is the men who expect to be able to bang hot chicks when they're 25, then when they're ready to settle down, get a woman who'll put up with a man not on his looks etc. but on other values, while the guy still expects he'll be able to marry an attractive woman.
If it's both parties accepting that "you take what you can get, and kissin' don't last but cookery do", then it works. When it's one partner expecting to eat his cake and have it, while the other partner isn't permitted to do so, then the resentment builds up and feminism is the logical outcome.
Feminism is nothing more than women taking on the role of the partner expecting to eat her cake and have it, while denying men the ability to. That similarly builds up resentment, leading to a never-ending cycle of hate.
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Women are only attracted to the top 20% of men. Any society where the majority of men are getting married is a society where the majority of women are lying back and thinking of England. If you are uncomfortable with that, you can either try to become Chad or you can accept being an incel.
I'm comfortable with it; it worked fine for my ancestors, and if I am performing my duties as a man by providing and protecting then it is perfectly reasonable to expect a woman who will perform her own wifely duties. Whether she enjoys it or not is her own affair.
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The difference is that non-Western women have been socialised differently and will not feel disgusted by a man who isn't the best looker. The things that disgust them are very different from the things that disgust western women and I would say that their "disgust set" is a better fit for long term thriving than the standard western one (no different to how someone who is disgusted by blood and feces is more "fit" for thriving in the world than someone who is disgusted by fresh food and water).
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I won’t disagree that moving in an east India direction would be an improvement for US courtship norms, but just suggesting it is about as helpful as ‘we should hold singles dances on the moon to help people who have no success on the apps’. It’s just not going to happen often enough to constitute a societal norm.
Eh, once there are enough of us in your country (through either immigration, higher birth rates or shorter generation time) it's going to start happening outside of the subcontinental community purely because of osmosis, and especially so if we make up the upper classes in your country (as people like to ape upper class behaviours). No different to how all Americans started eating Italian food once there was a critical enough mass of them in the US.
Sure it won't help white people in the current generation (and probably not even the next), but eventually they too will benefit (ofc this assumes no AGI, if AGI happens there's no use in predicting anything from that point onwards, it's called the singularity for a reason).
Or, more likely, Indians will acclimate to US norms.
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They started eating the American version of Italian food, which is not necessarily the Italian version. And parents etc. setting the standards for marriage used to be the norm in the West, also, until it was overthrown by the ideas of romantic love being the only reason to marry, and more corrosively for marriage, easy divorce.
You yourself have given some indications that you want the best of both worlds: westernised women who will be happy to date and sleep with you so you get to sow your wild oats, then when you're ready to marry, a traditional marriage arranged by your parents. That's not really sustainable. If the USA does move back to the "nice girls don't, wait until marriage, and your families will settle the marriage" model, you and your peers won't have the opportunity to play the field anymore.
Maybe past me wanted that, current me has seen the error of my ways and thinks playing the field is a net negative for society as a whole and nowadays I have brushed off opportunities because I know there is very little cultural and values compatibility between me and the girl. I will not soil myself or her any further.
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Ukrainian women aren't in Ukraine; they're in Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic living their best Tinder lives and sampling the local carousel.
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That's kind of a cheap shot.
Speaking as someone married to a Filipino woman, I don't see it as a cheap shot. I think it's excellent advice. Modern Western gender relations are deeply confused and toxic at the moment, and the gap between public rhetoric, professional rules, and private preferences all requires a greater-than-usual degree of reading between the lines to successfully navigate. By contrast, the implicit deal in many non-Western societies remains comparatively clear: the husband will provide some combination of social status and financial security, and the wife will create a pleasant home and family environment. Given this, I think choosing a non-Western wife is an extremely good option for many men, especially non-neurotypical men who struggle with the elaborate courtly cognitive dissonance required over here. That said, just because the rules over there are relatively more clear-cut doesn't mean they're totally transparent, so it's not something to blunder into without appropriate contextual knowledge. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where you're shocked, shocked to find that your Filipino wife expects you to bail out her brother's failing business back home, or your Ukrainian wife expects to be provided with the means to keep up a glamorous wardrobe.
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If he was a first time poster about this particular issue I would agree with you, but after getting warned downthread for single-issue posting about this topic it seems like ‘dude, go to the Philippines if you have that little success in the USA’ is exactly what he needs to hear.
So like, at what point do men in the Philippines start picking up on this? If it really is such a "traditional" culture, shouldn't we expect Western sex tourists to start getting the Bataan treatment from locals?
The men with the most say are probably the most supportive of it: the immediate family of the courted woman. If she marries you, some of that American money will invariably end up in their pockets. Which isn't anything bad or duplicitous: in less individualistic cultures, of course you help out your inlaws with money when necessary.
It doesn't extend everywhere; Filipinos are much more open to foreign marriages than, say, Mongolians (don't even consider trying it).
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In a traditional culture, getting a wealthy and stable but kind of boring guy for your daughter is a stroke of luck, and young guys who might be interested in her don’t have to like it- they have a lot less say in it than she does.
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Rich nerdy white guys who have trouble in the western dating market aren't really engaging in sex tourism. They're actually bringing a lot of legitimate value to the table in the context of more traditional marriage markets. They're not going to get the Bataan style treatment from locals because a lot of the locals actively want to get picked up by a rich nerdy first worlder.
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I have seen men get accused of being immoral for complaining about and criticizing women online, but I do not think that I ever have seen a man get accused of being immoral just for not doing well with women.
What makes you think that economically successful but sexually unsuccessful men are being routinely suspected of lacking in moral virtue?
You're missing a key piece of the puzzle, which is that people who complain about and criticize women online are called incels. This includes well-adjusted, married conservative men on twitter. "Incel" does not really mean something about being alone, it really does mean immoral anti-feminist.
Sure, but OP is implying that men are routinely getting called immoral just for being economically successful while at the same time socially unsuccessful.
I'm not saying that it's good that guys get called immoral just for criticizing women online, I'm saying that I'm not sure OP is actually right that what he claims tends to happen actually happens often.
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https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
Admittedly our culture has moved on from this specific discourse, but in 2013-4 the "Nice Guy™" debate was all the rage. The essence of the debate was intelligent, gainfully employed but nerdy men complaining about being unsuccessful with women, sometimes for the claimed reason that they are "too nice" or "women don't go for nice guys". In some cases the claim was a bit hard to take seriously ("fuck u u dumb whore ur ugly anyway") but in other cases the lonely men in question gave every indication of being kind-hearted individuals who treated men and women alike with unshakeable respect and decency.
The stock retort from feminists in this era was "of course women go for nice guys. If they went for assholes they'd be all over you", an argument which still occasionally gets trotted out as recently as this year on this very site. Note what this framing implies: that if a man is romantically unsuccessful with women and has the temerity to feel even a little bit upset or frustrated by this, he must be a bad person i.e. exactly what the OP is talking about. This was a key tenet of internet/nerd feminism for years.
The one caveat I add to this discourse is that "nice guys" were being "nice" in specifically the way society had taught them to be. Respect women's boundaries, don't talk over them, don't yell at them, open doors for them, treat them as 'equals,' and never, ever, ever hit them.
That is, they did each and every one of the behaviors that they were explicitly and implicitly told would eventually get them romantic interest from women in their vicinity, even if the guy wasn't particularly handsome, physically fit, wealthy, etc. And for huge swaths of them, this didn't pan out, and they literally watched as guys who transgressed against the behavioral norms were 'rewarded' with attention from sexually attractive women.
So basically, their entire strategy was failing and they could either invest in it further and try harder, or try and figure out why it wasn't working.
In this view, for many of the 'nice guy' men the anger was caused by the complete mismatch between the expectations they'd been sold and their actual experience and was merely being directed at women since... where else would it go?
It wasn't the case that men were putting on these nice-guy masks solely to pick up women. They were earnestly adopting the persona and living it out, only to learn this had given them a distinct handicap in the sexual marketplace. Which was quite the betrayal.
If you haven't already read this short story, I think you will love it: https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/
I feel that in my soul, even if my situation wasn't so extreme.
Only missing piece was mentioning how he'd been raised mainly by his mother and his dad was either absent or extremely passive in the relationship.
The running theme always seems to be the lack of a positive model of masculinity and assertiveness to learn from so they become an anxious, uncertain doormat and revert to passive behaviors (which he may have learned from dad!) that are unlikely to succeed, but won't get them scorned or attacked.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. I would also strongly recommend Tulathimutte's first novel, Private Citizens (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Private-Citizens-Tony-Tulathimutte/dp/0062399101). It's consistently laugh-out-loud funny, piercingly perceptive and compulsively readable (I read the whole thing in 2 days).
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Hmm. Around that time I simply concluded that what the disability theorists called desexualization didn't just apply to visibly disabled or deformed people but also to very low-status or unattractive ones as well, and that the RtR crap was just one more kind of desexualization: how dare you even want sex or relationships: know your place. Now. This applies to unattractive women just as well, it just manifests differently.
RtR?
Radicalizing the Romanceless
Oh durr, thanks
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It is instictive. Women naturally fear men who have low quality genes. Rapists are often portrayed in media as rich men but in reality rape is a measure of last resort. Rape is the worst tactic for reproduction if a man has a choice. Women don't just find unappealing men not interesting, they find them revolting. Most guys don't really feel anything towards an unfortunate looking women. Life isn't meant to be fair, logically consistent or objective. We don't have a supremely rational and detached mind. We often rely on gut reactions based on what is evolutionarily advantageous. Throughout history women who avoided bottom tier men did better than those who befriended them.
Yeah - which is why desexualization is a thing. It is very possible for our unappealing hero to make a Faustian bargain: find a way to signal - loudly - that you know your place and are not interested in sex or relationships, but instead in something that is prosocial and noble. A doctor who is "focused on medicine". An engineer who spends all his time when he's not at work focusing on building water filters for impoverished Africans and says that he is more or less married to his work.
Becoming a eunuch or being homosexual are two other increasingly popular options that are also totally-coincidentally considered prosocial and noble by tribes that make more Faustian bargains.
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This whole "incels/nice guys are actually rapists" thing gets trotted out every time this debate comes up, and I'm still not buying it.
No, they're guilty of something else that might be morally bad or fucked up if you squint hard enough. We as a culture don't have the balls to just straight-up tell awkward nerds that they're gross for wanting sex or relationships; maybe there's something valuable there, too.
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So I clicked on the link and took a look. I don't disagree with the findings of that study, but I think there's definitely some nuance warranted here.
If we define 'sexual predation/assault' according to 21st Century feminist terminology, then the cited research is definitely correct. After all, I think it's self evident that it's usually not low-status men who make - and, presumably, get away with - 'inapproriate' sexual advances, do sexual acts without specifically asking for consent etc.
However, if we use the word 'rape' in the original / based / non-normie sense of the word, i.e. rape-rape (h/t to Whoopi Goldberg), a brutal and violent act, then I think we're safe to say that low-status men are more likely to perpetrate it.
Even with this disambiguation, I'm still not buying it. The phrase "low-status men" is kind of ambiguous, so I want to focus on the specific question of "who presents a greater risk of violent rape to a woman - an 'incel' or a sexually active man?" because the debate started with the claim that women think incels are evil specifically because they think they're rapists (or because they think they're more likely to be rapists than non-incels).
The Intersection of Men’s Sexual Violence Perpetration and Sexual Risk Behavior: A Literature Review:
The review is really long but I think I've made my point.
"Women think incels are evil because they think incels are more likely to be rapists" may be a factually true assertion, but several people in this thread seem to think that this belief is well-founded. It isn't. The more sexual partners a man has, the more likely he is to engage in risky sex, the more likely is to have concurrent sexual partners, the more women he's fucked on the first date, the more prostitutes he's had sex with - the greater the risk he is of committing sexual harassment and violence. Based on this evidence, women have far less to fear from the average incel than they do from a guy who has plenty of notches on his bedpost.
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I think it’s just because of the experience gap. Many women have rejected someone for being creepy, very few have rejected someone for not bothering to try, and so at the end of of the day ‘he can’t figure out why he keeps getting rejected’ turns into ‘he must be a creep and not realize it’. Nevermind that most rapists are not suffering from niceguy syndrome, far from it.
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I have seen this written online several times before but have seen zero evidence of it. I have, on the other hand, seen men be friends with women who seem to have zero or little sexual interest in them. Why would the women be friends with them if they found them actively revolting?
I'll add some nuance. Women find such men revolting if they make sexual advances i.e. basically expect to be treated as sexual beings.
I'll add another layer of that - which is that very unattractive people are just considered, rightly or wrongly, to be straight up transgressive for wanting sex and relationships. That this unattractive MF'er had the gall to point that already gross, already-transgressive desire at YOU is just an extra scoop of shit on top of the steaming hot shit sundae.
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I think there is a disconnect between the guy who hangs around women hoping that 'friendship' will ripen into romantic attraction, and the women who take on face value that the guy is a friend. Then if he makes an advance, she rejects him, and he drops her. She's hurt and disappointed and angry that 'he was only pretending to be my friend in order to get sex', he's hurt and disappointed and angry that 'she friendzoned me'. She characterises him as the kind of Nice Guy who treats women like penny in the slot machines - put in attention, get sex out - and he characterises her as what the redpill warned about all the time - women have it better in every way and are favoured by society.
Women and men can be friends, but this needs to be clearly understood from the start. If you're hoping "friend" will become "lover", you're likely to be disappointed. This is made worse, of course, by the "friends with benefits" style hookups, where people are vaguely friendly and have casual sex now and again. Observing this from the outside, no wonder some men think that being 'friends' will automatically lead to sexual relationship.
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I've been meaning to write a blog post which touches on this topic for months. Here's the bullet points:
And before anyone starts urging me to secure a mail-order bride, I'm in a happy relationship with a conventionally attractive woman. You don't have to be an incel to empathise with them.
That's a very good and insightful post, thanks!
I've recently been rewatching the mid-2000s TV show "The Good Wife," and it's one of the few creative works I've encountered that grapples with the issues you discuss. I suspect that some people on this forum might dismiss the series out of hand because it features a guest appearance from Donna Brazil and because the sequel, "The Good Fight," is a Trump Derangement fugue and woke fever dream—and would encourage you to reconsider. Especially after a romantic plot is resolved in the second season finale, the show turns almost exclusively to Julianna Margulies' titular good wife confronting exactly the good person/nice person conflict you're talking about — both in others and herself.
It really is well worth your time
I had to watch one episode of it in college and it seemed unusually intelligent and thought-provoking for a legal drama. My parents love it.
They had a great habit of casting against type. In the season four premier, one character says of another "maybe Mao isn't so bad if he works for you."
Mao is played by Nathan Lane.
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Yeah, thinking about it more, you do have the issue that the disability theorists call desexualization. Very unattractive people transgress social norms by being openly interested in sex or relationships.
That is an interesting one; from what I've seen, they generally come to believe that they are misunderstood and secretly valuable but fundamentally unlikable/repulsive. Sometimes there is bitterness and resentment, sometimes resignation.
Yeah, of the two most common failure modes, "nobody likes me because I'm scum" and "nobody likes me because they're envious of my brilliance", I'm honestly unsure which one is less psychologically healthy for the individual. I've met a few nerdy men who I suspect were bullied as children and to console them their mothers told them "don't mind them dear, they're just envious of how clever you are", and they seemed to have really internalised this. The "former gifted child" phenomenon often referred to on Tumblr and other places like that has a real ring of truth to it.
Couple the two: scum tier outside, serviceable to brilliant inside.
I've seen that - once - with a girl who'd been burned in a house fire. She was a nice enough person but thought (at least in high school) that guys would only want one thing, and then only with a paper bag over her head. Very bitter, very cynical, very blunt.
That poor woman. Hard to blame someone who's been through an experience like that for feeling bitter.
Yeah - although she was too young to remember the fire, about a third of her face looked like Freddy Kreuger. She was fit, liked mountain biking, very nerdy and wrote a lot of fanfiction. She was interested in me; at the time, when we were in high school, I found her sadness to be a turn-off. I didn't mind her face. If she'd been confident and not cared what people thought I would have found that extremely attractive. Now...I'd date her and be happy about it. Time has altered my worldview to be more like hers.
She was not a bad person. She was instead a smart, kind individual who had met an unfortunate fate that was in no way her fault. I suspect that a lot of gifted but awkward people - or just awkward people in general - think that they're OK to good on the inside but that their presentation sucks donkey balls. Hell - that's what my aspie nerd friend thinks: he's awkward as fuck, but thinks he's a decent enough guy. Not god tier by any means but he's a decent guy.
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Case in point: Peter Thiel. Dude is an absolute asshole, but by god do I like him. Same with MBS.
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I think in part it would be the Just World hypothesis as @The_Nybbler indicated.
But I would also wager it's because almost all moral intuitions are tied into feelings of disgust or distaste which can be 'prerational.'
Consider the Halo Effect, where pretty people are assumed to be more moral, just, good, whatever. Positive affect towards a person in one area flows into positive affect in other areas. A guy who has successfully gotten married and maintained a relationship for years on end could turn out to have been a remorseless sociopath the entire time, but I wager most people would assume they're a good, well-adjusted person merely by seeing that some woman is choosing to show them affection. "If she likes him, he must be alright."
This can also work in reverse. A guy who is maybe less than perfectly handsome and has been single for a while and who complains about it even a little is likely causing a 'disgust' response in others, just enough to lead the onlooker to the conclusion that this person must be morally deficient and/or hiding some repugnant factor about themselves because obviously if they were a good person they'd have a partner already.
This is at least part of the reason why "incel" as an insult implies that the target is also ugly, because apparently being sexually undesirable is enough to justify the fact that people never show them affection/sexual interest.
Now, to stretch my thinking beyond what I can actually support, I think it is simply how people choose to resolve cognitive dissonance and 'manufacture' a consensus about a person's worthiness for affection and social acceptance.
Seeing someone without a partner, especially over the long term, is the sort of signal that nobody else considers them worthy of receiving romantic affection, which is to say they've been 'socially selected' against for a long time. And thus you, as the person who cannot detect any obvious reason for this, must be missing something. And so there's a tendency to jump towards:
And assume that they've got to be at best eccentric and at worst an evil, twisted person who cannot be trusted. So rather than assume that the unseen masses who have previously rejected this guy got it wrong, it's easier to manufacture your own reasons for why they may have done so and resolve your cognitive dissonance in a way that DOESN'T violate the (apparent) group consensus.
Or to put it more bluntly, few people (women especially) want to be the person who 'takes a chance' on the weirdo reject even if there is literally ZERO articulable reason for why he is worthy of scorn, because social reality means this is a risky chance to take, as you could cause the group to turn against you as well.
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I think your entire premise is wrong. People don't generally assume that someone who is unsuccessful with romantic relationships is lacking in moral virtue. That might be the case, but there are many other explanations: he's terrible at dating, he has unrealistic standards, he just doesn't put himself out there enough, he has some baggage that becomes evident once a woman shows interest (not necessarily the same as "lacking in moral virtue"), or he has so convinced himself that he's undateable (because he's short) that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yes, there are men (and women) who try and try and fail and never find love. That's very sad. But it's never because of any one thing (like height).
Look dude, ima be honest. You've been banging this "Short men can't land anyone but a morbidly obese hag" drum for a while now, to the point that you've actually been warned about giving it a rest. It's tiresome, and when you refuse every bit of advice that's been given to you, starting a top-level thread to pose it as a "general question" about why short men who can't get dates are treated so unfairly, it's no less tiresome.
This post is... okay, I guess. If it were anyone else posting it, it would be fine. But seeing your name, I immediately knew what the post would be about before reading it. So seriously, give it a rest. Yes, consider this an invocation of the single-issue posting rule.
It's not just short guys. I'd argue it's the invisibly disabled and essentially those that look at least decent on paper. The physically disabled and deformed get a different but somewhat adjacent kind of bullshit.
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Without any clear limits this seems like a blanket justification to mod any post for any reason so long as the poster recalls the same themes, which literally everybody here (and everywhere) always does to a degree.
Le Comité better think about what they're doing on this one, because focusing on a handful of issues to a weird degree is almost the sum total of this website's content.
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Is this how the single-issue posting rule is going to be applied? I see multiple comments on non-dating subjects in /u/SkookumTree‘s first two pages of comments.
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It's ancient wisdom from the before times. I think many languages have a saying to the effect of "there's someone for everyone", so if there's really no one out there for you, you must be really messed up. Of course, when people came up with these sayings, the dynamics between the sexes were a lot different.
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In short, the Just World hypothesis. Combined by bias in favor of women.
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