faceh
24m ago
I was being descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Me too.
Descriptively, women are, on average, miserable (especially millenials and Gen Z). What good is all that extra leverage doing them?
As for your points, I think you are overestimating how disenfrinched the average male is.
If you limit it to men under 30, They sure feel that way.
South Korea still lives on.
Objectively, they will not be a functional society in <60 years without something historically unprecedented occurring.
I also don't think much can be done about this.
Well better hope the AI thing works out then.
Oh so we'd expect most surveys on the topic to be an over-report on the men's side.
Okay.
Interesting that young men are claiming fewer sex partners and less sex, recently.
What changed? Why'd they suddenly stop overreporting?
By your logic, the sex recession among men is EVEN WORSE THAN IT SEEMS from this data.
(women remain more steady on this, btw)
I have yet to see a SINGLE data point that goes against the "lots of women are actually hooking up with relatively small portion of men" talking point. And the dating apps seem to have exacerbated it.
China saw it as such a huge problem so they've taken drastic action.
faceh
42m ago
All that extra freedom and they're less satisfied than ever.
Its almost like the female gender is a real-life utility monster. Almost.
faceh
44m ago
Women have more negotiating power and they are using it.
Which makes it odd that they're
Less satisfied with their status in society
Are more likely to be single and childless
And are overall less happy than they were 50 years ago
(married women are happier, BTW.)
Oh, and a huge portion of them claim to hate men even though the reverse isn't true.
Does that seem fine to you?
All that negotiating power and they claim they're worse off than before. Odd.
Hell it may even improve women genetically because only the hottest women would get laid with hottest men.
That would require them to have actual children. As it turn out, if women control more wealth, they have fewer kids.
I think the opposite of what you're expecting is happening... since as stated in my original post, more educated women have fewer kids. So the most genetically fit women are the ones burning the most time on education and careers.
Whoops.
Anyhow, What do you think happens if 50+% of the males in a society are no longer bought in to its success because they have no stake it future generations?
Who fights your wars, builds your machines and buildings, maintains your power plants and roads.
I beg you, I PLEAD with you, consider second and third order effects. We have built the most functional and successful society the planet has ever seen on the norms you're asking us to discard.
Best justify it.
Yes, I've had every single iteration of this discussion a dozen times by now, I think I can address any argument by simply pointing to data I've already cited and comments I've made in the past.
I keep engaging with the gender wars/fertility crisis topic even though its slowly driving me mad. But its too important to ignore.
Actual title of a paper published today in the Cambridge Press, by a Norwegian research team:
Not paraphrased or exaggerated. Apparently published by a team of two males and a female. I don't even mean to attack the authors, the paper doesn't seem to be 'slanted' in its presentation... and this implied solution just appears to be the sort of blunt facial honesty that Norwegians are known for. I'm not attacking this paper.
We had the discussion just yesterday where a German Police Chief (himself male) says women should avoid relationships with men for their safety. My commentary is on the larger cultural trend.
Now, the paper itself draws some specific conclusions using data from the last ten years. (i.e. when the gender wars really accelerated) From a twitter thread:
Women's freedom is strongly correlated with declining fertility.
About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men. I have to interpret "most promiscuous" as "most attractive," because very, very few men are able to be promiscuous without being hot. Likewise, this looks VERY suggestive of a broader 80/20 rule in place.
Ultimately they suggest that solving the TFR crisis means getting single women to have more kids. Hence the 'marginalization' of men.
This paper so readily confirms almost everything I've talked about in here I'm worried its designed precisely to trigger confirmation bias in me, specifically. Read it and decide for yourself, I guess.
As I've said, going off of the last 10-20 years of data:
Women probably only view about 20% of men as 'people' worthy of attention.
Women who got to college and enter careers tend to have the highest standards... regardless of their own suitability as a mate.
Lotharios exploiting the current gender dynamics for low-commitment sex are a problem.
Of course I note that every single bit of this is explained by shifts in female behavior, which is to say there's not much shift in men's behavior, so the overt focus on men's alleged failures seems... odd.
I do not find it pleasant to believe all these statistics and their implied conclusions, but no matter how much I ask for challenges, every bit of data just adds on to the pile of confirmation.
I'll throw out hope spot because there is a small bit of data that contradicts the overall narrative... South Korea is actually seeing a bump towards increased fertility!. I am watching this very keenly to determine if there is much hope of pulling out of the spiral.
I've genuinely got very little new to say on this topic. Its beaten to death. Its a bloody pulp, we're standing ankle-deep in the putrid mix of entrails of this topic as the waterline slowly rises every day. I've very interested in workable solutions, though.
I am a very reasonable person. I do not get angry at mere insults easily. Call me whatever you want to my face, your words have no power. But what sets me off is when someone pisses on my leg and tells me its raining, when I can look up and see there's not a cloud in the sky. "Men are horrible, and it is socially good and necessary to marginalize them." The insinuation against my person doesn't bug me. Its the blatant lie contradicted by all available information. It is simply false (especially in the West). It is epistemic malpractice. And it seems intentional and malicious, on some level.
Every. single. day. I am faced with a loud cultural message that (unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed. And, as a kicker, that 80% or so of men are unattractive to women, so its the majority of them who are marked for evolutionary failure.
Today its this paper.
Yesterday its Mr. German Policeman.
The week before it was that Manosphere documentary.
Last year it was that British Miniseries.
It is a neverending cascade. And of course there's zilch, zero, nada content produced in the mainstream that examines if female behavior is becoming more toxic and suggesting intervention.
Me, I have the mental fortitude to put all this in context and ignore it as an influence on my individual behavior. I have my internal locus of control and the self-confidence to believe I will succeed anyway.
Yet there's millions of young males who are vulnerable to this message, and it is killing them, metaphorically and often literally, and nobody with any authority is doing anything about it or even talking about it without also piling on with the exact same rhetoric.
I simply don't see how one can claim that there's any true 'Patriarchy' in the Western World when government officials, scientific papers, nationally broadcast documentaries, and general everyday people can happily proclaim that men ought to be marginalized for everyone's good if they can't accept a lot in life that amounts to being a second class citizen in their own country... while women are elevated to the level of landed aristocracy on their backs.
Meanwhile the main voices speaking on the other side are inherently outsiders like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
I don't even think we have a matriarchy to be clear, it really does just seem like society is organized around the "women are wonderful effect" and the average person is psychologically incapable of deviating from this programming.
Where does this end?
faceh
3hr ago
And, likewise, dad needs to be in the picture in some substantial way.
I'd bet, and it is just my hypothesis, that the epidemic of single moms raising kids means many girls making atrocious choices in boyfriends and this causes their downstream hysteria around men in general.
And of course, dad has to have some semblance of authority, ideally with legal backing, to act to remove bad suitors from the picture.
faceh
17hr ago
Which, given historic DV rates, they're not actually better (especially husbands).
Nah, the issue here is that its not a random selection.
Its like the stat that more people are killed by cows than sharks every year.
There's a lot more cows, and humans interact with cows far more often. A shark is, all else equal, much more dangerous to the human.
So a stranger can in fact be more individually dangerous, even if the perpetrator of an incident of abuse is more likely to be someone they know.
If a woman interacts with her husband daily then of course the husband is the most likely person to commit any abuse. Doesn't mean he's the most dangerous male she actually encounters.
faceh
22hr ago
The main point that I absolutely give the feminists is that physical abuse by males is far more dangerous for women, in terms of the actual harm that can be inflicted, casually.
Likewise, a male is much more capable of raping (in the most basic sense, literal forced penetration) the average female than the reverse.
Now this is based on the differential in physical strength between the genders, so acknowledging this issues dismantles almost all of the rest of the feminist perspective, but I accept it as truth.
So we are faced with a situation where male abusers are a far greater risk factor than female ones, all else equal. And they're absolutely able to deceive and manipulate their way into a position to be abusive, they don't wear a giant tattoo on their face saying "I <3 punching females" so its not trivial to pick them out of the crowd.
Okay, some of them DO wear the equivalent of such a tattoo.
I'm fully on board with the need to heavily police male behavior... but that has to be done by males. Such males ALSO have to be selected to not be abusive, so you want them to be males that also have some skin in the game, some investment in the safety of the females in question.
Sooooo: Fathers. Brothers. Husbands.
Sigh.
faceh
1d ago
Something something society-wide "Women are Wonderful" effect.
faceh
3d ago
From the purely pragmatic/actuarial standpoint, if the gap is 10 years or larger, you as the male had better make some kind of preparations that will ensure financial security for the family if you die, and definitely to cover those last few years of care.
I mean you should in any case, but doubly so if you're asking them to sign up for a very high chance of spending their twilight years alone and unable to earn much.
faceh
4d ago
It gives me no happiness to report it, but my generalized experience with women is that by age 26, their personalities aren't ever improving from what they've displayed up until then.
This is not to say a single woman automatically becomes unmarriageable after that point! If their personality is good, its probably going to stay that way too.
But that age appears to be when the traumas and bad decisions will pile high enough that they can't be suppressed so long.
The Hail Mary of having her pop out a kid and see if that unlocks the nurturing part of her brain has many risks.
Its such a cruel/weird trick of nature that the age of 18-25 is when men should be doing their best to gain life experience and toughen themselves up... whereas women should be doing their best to avoid getting debauched and should be protecting their general positive life outlook as long as possible.
And under current social paradigms, we basically encourage the opposite arrangement.
faceh
4d ago
If they're considered mature enough to sign contracts, they should be considered mature to have to follow through on them.
And therein lies the problem. If they're not mature enough to follow through on them (as the facts in evidence show), why are we assuming they were mature enough to understand them at the time they signed them?
Females in particular might have a hard time grasping compound interest.
And yes, bankruptcy is an answer in many cases... but the practical point there is that banks won't lend to people who are likely to declare bankruptcy.
So that becomes the de-facto maturity test, whether a bank considers you credit-worthy.
faceh
4d ago
So who should be held liable when an emotionally immature 18-19 year old signs a contract and then has a breakdown when they're unable to complete their end of it.
Haha but you see the issue there.
Bill Belichick isn't married.
Leo DiCaprio doesn't marry his girlfriends.
Nor does Toby Maguire.
Likewise, consider the rise of Sugar Dating as an informal institution.
This is my point. It actually relieves the pressure to marry these women since they lose any real leverage they might have had.
They're getting to have the cake that is off-limits to normal guys, and eat it too by having no legal or social commitment obligations imposed.
Yes, which is why I somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggest the ant-glove test as an option for figuring out if somebody has control of their emotional state.
A decent test of emotional maturity is putting someone in an objectively painful/uncomfortable situation, and require them to 'suck it up' and not break down in tears or flee. Sound familiar? Its all just testing emotional regulation, the ability to react proportionally/not overreact, and to endure discomfort to achieve later rewards.
We also have the marshmallow test, which could be adapted to something that would tempt adults too.
"I'm giving you a $100 bill to put in your wallet. If you can bring me back that exact same $100 bill in one week, you will get a second one." I expect low-impulse-control individuals will spend that sucker inside a day or two.
Same difference, ultimately.
The singular best green flag I can see in any woman, if she passes the other basic filters, is NOT being utterly addicted to screentime. And specifically, not having instagram, tiktok, dating apps, or certain other apps that do little but feed mental distress. If they have a loop of checking their phone every 30 seconds, or being stuck on it for long periods, or are addicted to posting every detail of their lives/choreographing things for maximum appeal, I tend to write off any further interest in them as a partner.
I've had the displeasure of watching behavior shifts in real time of young, 18-24 year old women who were generally pleasant to be around, and through a combination of the corrupting influence of algorithmic feeds AND the massive influx of digital attention any attractive woman gets if she posts herself online, basically becomes entitled, narcissistic, and usually fairly dismissive of her IRL relationships in favor of cultivating the online following.
I, personally, have spoken to a depressed, anxious young woman who knows she is mentally unwell, and knows to some degree that the apps are driving her down a bad path, and I had literally said "hand me your phone and I'll delete every one of those apps off of it for you" and she balked and did that Gen Z stare thing, said 'no thanks' and then walked away to do something else.
faceh
4d ago
Yeah.
I think there's an oversupply of lonely youngish people with decent-paying jobs who enjoy living vicariously through a streamer they identify with/find sexually attractive. Parasocial behavior is a bit under-studied I think.
faceh
4d ago
I suspect that the current age-gap discourse actually serves to benefit powerful/wealthy older men, as they become the only ones with enough clout to ignore the social shaming... and the only ones with enough appeal to convince a woman to ignore the social shaming. Acquiring a hot young girlfriend thus becomes even more of a flex and proof of their own status.
And of course it encourages them to keep it on the downlow, and this also suits the guy because she won't be pushing him as hard to make them 'official' or 'public' and gives her less leverage to push for a marriage.
And finally, by making it taboo, it actually becomes more appealing for a certain kind of woman to seek it out.
Bill Belichick is simply not bound by by same standards as your average guy. And because he isn't bound by them and can't be influenced by shaming, the shamesters won't target him, they'll go after the class of males they think they CAN influence, who were less likely to be able to attract a young lady anyway.
So as with many other things, the main effect of such social rules is to restrict behaviors of the middle group of men who are cowed by status games and shame.
And of course the bottom class of dude who is so outside the normal status hierarchy that it doesn't effect him will go after younger ladies regardless.
The trouble is that it's just so hard to find a woman in the West who is (1) not obese; (2) not a single mom; and (3) not into woke progressive nonsense. Sadly I am not 6'2" with a chiseled jawline, so I have to compromise.
This really is the issue.
In many cases there's not a huge, noticeable 'maturity' difference between a 21 year old woman and a 28 year old woman. One will just have a lot more 'baggage' than the other.
There's definitely an experience difference... but rarely does a woman take those experiences and learn good lessons and improve from them, i.e. mature. Oftentimes it just spirals as she justifies further bad decisions as a mere incremental step from what she previously did. So if the choice is between a 21-22 year old or a 28-29 year old, you're signing up to deal with an emotionally unstable partner with a naive idea about how the world works either way.
But the latter is also going to be bitter and have higher expectations and be more judgmental, and the former is more likely to be pleasant, inquisitive, and eager to experience new things. The light hasn't been snuffed out yet.
I had the very dark thought recently, that it would be very helpful if we could develop amnestic drugs of some kind that a late 20's woman could take that would 'reset' her memories and mental states back to its youthful state. Literally have her forget all the previous mates, all the hookups, all the horrible breakups and emotional trauma and debauched decisions she's made over the past decade.
If she's otherwise physically attractive and now has the attitude of a 20-year-old, she's suddenly much more appealing as a mate. Unless she has a kid, can't easily remedy that issue.
faceh
4d ago
But the socialization about what is expected of those age groups changes much faster than law.
Especially in the age of social media.
One factor that I'm seeing with the rise of streamer culture, a lot of the streamers (i.e. the role models many of these kids are glued to) are getting into their 30's and are still 'stuck' in a loop of playing video games all day, going out and partying and drinking, using light drugs (or hard ones), and obsessing about social drama amongst their cliques.
And they make good money doing this so there's no clear reason they should stop.
A handful of them make good eventually, but those who get families and responsibilities... tend to drop out of streaming.
So kids are getting socialized by role models that don't even know them, in social groups that only exist online, and whose norms are basically that of a particularly low-class high school, and that are incentivized towards anti-social activities, more often than not.
I don't blame the streaming sites for this per se, but I don't think our core social structures were prepared for the rise of this alternative culture that scales internationally.
If we should have universal age of adulthood, that tracts onto everything (alcohol, crime, sex) where would it be? Currently, all of these have different ages (21 is for alcohol if you are in the US). What do you guys think?
My position is that we have the technology to directly test for capacity to engage in the behaviors in question. So the legal proscription on, e.g. alcohol consumption, sexual relations, gambling, taking out loans, etc. the 'incapacity' we impose on minors can be lifted on a case-by-case basis rather than an arbitrary birthday fiat.
There's additional mechanisms I'd attach to this, but it makes good sense to me. Some sixteen year olds are probably mature enough to handle parenthood. Many twenty-four year olds are probably not quite mature enough to grasp why buying lotto tickets it not a sound financial decision. And capacity for one of those doesn't inherently imply capacity at the other. Rain Man probably understands odds/statistics enough to let him gamble, but maybe doesn't get how sex works.
The age at which they are competent to do these things is unlikely to be the exact same, based on their brain development, life experiences, and emotional maturity.
And I like the idea that if there is an 'objective' testing process in place to gain 'adulthood' privileges... then this gives kids incentive to study and prepare for these tests... meaning they actually work at grasping the topics and mentally engaging with them, rather than just expecting to gain them with passage of time.
This is not dissimilar from requiring teens to pass a driver's test before being permitted on the roads (inadequate as that may ultimately be).
I think this is an interesting view into the CEO of one of the most important companies.
Is it one of the most important companies? I honestly don't know, it certainly gets enough press for it recently.
No, seriously, I don't know what exactly they do, certainly not how I mostly know what SpaceX, Google, Meta, Apple, and the rest do. Probably in large part because unlike most of those previous companies, they don't have any real consumer-facing presence, no products that 'regular' people integrate into their lives. Even looking at their history its like they took a bit of tech used in Paypal for fraud detection and adapted it to analyze, effectively, any given database you might plug in? And it kinda stuck around in a stealthy startup phase for like 10 years, then started getting various DoD/Government contracts, and then finally IPO'd in 2020, so seems like it took a long time to find footing, and during that time the founders kept tight control of it and kept adding funding to it even while it wasn't clear what the company would do.
I am not in fact critiquing them on this basis, I'm just saying it is opaque to me why this company is important in the same way that Boeing, Eli Lilly, or even Amazon is important. If they disappeared tomorrow, how would i most obviously notice their absence?
And if detection of fraud is a core feature, I'm definitely confused as to why all the various fraud schemes in Minnesota, California, New York, and elsewhere just went undetected for so long, or at least unremarked and prosecuted.
Again, not a critique of the company, maybe a critique of how gov't actors have been using it, but certainly me wondering the value being provided here.
And since as far as I can tell they do make some sort of platform that allows use of AI analysis, but they do NOT build their own AI models... what would make them more important than one of the frontier AI labs, or the Chip manufacturers, or any given major player in the energy sector?
As for the the manifesto, I guess I'd ask for it to put out something more 'actionable' to really offer a opinion on it. I think I see what it is gesturing at, but the actual, positive vision for what the world should look like hasn't been laid out here.
This seems to be the most concrete point:
- National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
It also does that annoying thing by pointing out that U.S. "adversaries" will keep trying to undermine U.S. interests. Great. But what does the actual threat model look like? There's an easy list of countries that are 'adversaries,' and none of them are able to launch a land invasion. None of them can (currently) threaten U.S. energy independence, or disrupt citizens' lives much without exposing themselves to much worse reprisal.
Realistically the U.S. is going to bring itself down through self-inflicted wounds before any of its adversaries can mount an effective attack that actually cripples the country. And this seems to be part of the thrust of the manifesto but what does it say we do? Are we rejiggering the constitution to function in this new era, or just ignoring it where convenient, and where, precisely, do they want the ultimate balance of power to end up, with regard to sovereignty over the territories that compose the U.S.?
faceh
5d ago
I've debated this myself at length and I don't think there's a good publicly agreeable definition of the term.
But I'd use a working definition of "a situation which creates or encounters an edge-case in constitutional interpretation that demands either you ignore some clear constitutional rule, or adhere to the rule in a way that causes some serious harm to the country or its institutions."
I'd argue that the 'crisis' implicated in such a case would be that we end up with enough individual states adopting and insisting upon differing interpretations that it reduces the willingness to accept the entire instrument.
The most central example I could imagine is congress issuing a rule that, for instance, forcibly conscripted residents of only certain states for military service, and explicitly exempted others, maybe arguing that certain states were more critical for manufacturing or technical knowledge whilst others had higher populations and thus could bear the losses easier. And a divided Supreme Court upholds this in a 5-4 decision, and the President carries it out with aplomb.
This would be pretty 'crisis-like' because the Constitution does grant the authority to "raise armies" but doesn't explicitly lay out the limits on that power... and if given coalition of states could use their legislative heft to pass such a law over the objection of the 'victim' states, that would probably trigger some rebellious murmers and resistance. But if there was an active war that demanded conscription, rebellious states are also posing a national security risk.
Yeah, the overlap of military powers and state sovereignty are probably the areas most ripe for crisis territory.
Thus, I would absolutely argue that the Civil War was the original Constitutional Crisis, with the fundamental conflict being the fact that slavery was acknowledged... but not condoned in the original instrument, but also it would be impossible to remove it without the cooperation of a large contingency of states that were pro-slavery. And that there was no explicit right of secession outlined in there.
Bad news there, even Africa is on the decline
This is why I consider the problem too important to ignore. The "organic" solutions are not solving.
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