pigeonburger
20d ago
Something we can all relate to
Were the guys that they refused to make introductions for lacking social proof? The guy they've never seen in a relationship before, even if a good guy in other aspects of his life is not a known good party for a relationship, he's an unknown, untested, possibly one that has some red flags that scare women away because increasingly as a man gets older from a woman's (mistaken) point of view it should have happened at organically if there was nothing "off" relationship wise with this guy.
Once a guy has just one relationship that wasn't completely disastrous done, only then have I seen women willing to endorse him.
pigeonburger
21d ago
Of course, but while it's not as strong as men's, they do still have it. I know because I know some women. I'm married. I have friends with wives and girlfriends.
I would not consider it strange for a single woman to, in her 20s, have a strong urge to fuck, at least once every two years. I'm not judging women by the same standard as men here, because frankly when I was single and in my 20s I had that strong urge weekly.
Combine that with opportunity, and it doesn't look extraordinary to have 5 partners in 10 years.
pigeonburger
22d ago
To be charitable to @faceh 's point, I think it could probably be described as 9-10 men string along 6-7-8 women (otherwise good marriageble women) without pairing with them. 6-7-8 women believe, both because they get some attention from 9-10 men and because society keeps repeating it to them, that they are worth 9-10 men and should not settle for less. 6-7-8 men find themselves unable to find a 6-7-8 woman to pair with, so they end up single or pairing with 4-5 women. 4-5 men face a similar dillemma and at the bottom you find men without even the option of settling for less because there is nothing left.
pigeonburger
22d ago
Have you not heard about the recent, RADICAL political polarization among young women?
These women ALSO largely refuse to date conservative/Republican men.
So men don't HAVE to filter these women out, these women are filtering THEMSELVES out. And they go on social media and aggressively police other women on this issue.
No, they say they refuse to date conservative/Republican men. What they actually do is refuse to date conservative/Republican boys.
pigeonburger
22d ago
Very arbitrary. A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.
Yeah, I've been single for a long time, and if it had been "as easy" for me in my moments of peak horniness/loneliness to go out and find someone at least acceptable looking for a one-night-stand that no else has to know about as it seems to be for women, my body count would have effortlessly cracked the double digits. And I'm far from a libido monster.
5 by 26 for a single girl seems like a girl with a good amount of restraint to be honest.
How does a woman make it to her 30s without landing in a stable, committed relationship?
Quite easily. I'll let you in on an insight most men haven't realized yet.
You know how you often hear women complain "Where are all the good men?" and then totally a catch yet perenially single nerdy guy complain "Uhhh, we're right here, you just ignore us!"
The equivalent women exist. The equivalents to men who have hobbies and friend groups that don't intersect with the people they probably should be matching with. Dating's "dark matter", the women we all imagine probably exist yet no one can find. The problem is that men expect that the equivalent for women is within the same hobbies, that the match for lonely nerdy guys into anime should be lonely nerdy girls into anime. But nerdy girls into anime are rarely lonely. But I found them. I found the elusive missing good women.
The equivalents are nerdy bookish/library girls. There are a lot of women who spend their time in libraries, reading high or low brow stuff. Recently I had to do some work for a client that works in the library space, and I quickly realized that 90% of the employees there were quiet, nerdy (and no, certainly not unattractive) girls. I had to deal with pretty much all of the employees and most of them seemed shy and unaccustomed to dealing with a "normie" guy like me.
Had I made this discovery in my bachelor days, it probably would have completely changed how I approach dating.
I went and fed the initial criteria I listed through Gemma 3, had to correct it for one misunderstanding it made. It gave between 4.3% and 11.2% of the US male population.
I fed it through a Deepseek R1 Distill to see if a reasoning model went about it a different way. The reasoning chain, the way it tried to guesstimate, was wild. Still, it came up with 5-10%, so roughly similar.
Strikethrough: Sorry, just realised I also forgot to tell it this is of SINGLE men, so the numbers are probably significantly lower. I'll prompt again.
And I'm sure I could add criteria. I forgot to ask them for cishet men, I forgot to tell them to exclude men above a certain age.
If you want to put a ceiling on body count for women, it'd be fair to put a floor on it for men; at least 1 partner; virginity is not attractive for men, it's lack of social proof. Maybe if we wanted to be more fair we could put a specific age to them. A floor of 1 partner for men after 20, a ceiling of 5 partners for women before 25.
*SUBSEQUENT EDIT: I reran the numbers with SINGLE men and cishet, and it gave less than 2% of men fulfilling these criteria. Note that I don't trust AI estimates for these since it uses extremely simplistic analysis and can't really account for correlation between criteria appropriately, and tends to mix specifics in ways they shouldn't (compared US-wide salaries to rents in highly inflated high cost of living areas) but I think for both men and women, with my and your criteria, we're probably both in single digit percentages.
If you want to see this as a blackpill, go ahead, but I think both criteria sets probably are too restrictive. Women probably shouldn't be looking only for men who are financially capable of being single income breadwinners, men probably shouldn't be looking at education debt and >5 body count as dealbreakers.
As for the large contingent who fall short of these criteria, they'll end up matching with one another.
pigeonburger
22d ago
What proportion of men are:
- Making over 50 000$ in a profession with enough employment prospects and stability that they could possibly support a family. I guess this can vary depending on location, so you could replace it with "makes enough money to not use over 1/3 of his salary to pay for a 2 bedroom living space, be it house, condo or apartment, in a neighborhood where children could safely grow and thrive".
- Emotionally stable. Most importantly: not violent.
- Not obese / is at least in minimal physical shape to offer some sort of physical protection for his family.
- Not going to cheat. Hard to know, but it's important to note that not cheating means jack shit for someone who does not get any and never had the opportunity to.
- Responsible financially and don't blow their entire discretionary income on hobbies.
- Not somebody's baby daddy already.
Not including but probably should:
- Not drug abusers
- Not a degenerate gooner (does not subscribe to an only fans; it's only fair to judge the people who enable the sex work as well)
- Again, IF HE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY, would not have a body count over 5 partners? (I understand it's less of a dealbreaker for women than for men)
- We mentionned hobbies already, but what proportion of men are not deeply invested into women repellent hobbies? That depends per generation, but for some generations it's manga/anime, for others it was video games, now it's probably like being terminally online on racist or "red pill" forums.
I mean, I could probably keep going and match all of your points with equivalents.
I've gotten a bit obsessed recently with the idea of one bag for travel. I got a 30L backpack I stuffed it with an absurd amount of (carefully chosen, but still far from "essential") equipment that would be enough to and it all fits very comfortably, leaving room for 3-5 days of clothing (assuming I will wear on myself the heaviest, bulkiest clothing while traveling).
And when I say an absurd amount of equipment, I mean stuff that would make any minimalist shake their head. I have a laptop, a mechanical keyboard, a folding laptop stand, a travel router, and optionally I bring a portable second monitor.
I have a hard time understanding how I ever needed checked baggage, let alone feel constrained by only having an allowance of one.
*EDIT: A sketchbook (and pencil and eraser), tons of electronic security related gizmos, a game controller, chargers and cables for everything, 2 retractable ethernet cables and 1 retractable HDMI cable... An international solution for plugging in and charging everything. I'll grant the bag is probably heavy, or so I've been told by people trying to pick it up, but while I'm not exactly in good physical shape, one thing I've always had for me is being a pack mule, the bag weighs subjectively very little to me.
pigeonburger
28d ago
Every airport I've been to recently still has carts you can just pick up and use for free, and they work much better than wheeled luggage.
I'm sure luggage makers love the wheels though, because they break and make people want to buy new luggages much more often.
Yeah, wheels add volume and weight to the luggage that is not required at all times (most of the use time of luggage is spent not being wheeled around). Weight and volume that travelers pay for in one way or another. The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality, with little way for the customer to know whether this luggage's wheel are durable, or if they will start blocking and dragging everywhere after 3 trips.
Though my experience of wheeled luggages breaking all the time might be personal; coming from a city with a lot of snow and ice, slippery surfaces are dealt with with pebbles, sand, salts/other chemicals, which remain on streets, sidewalk and indoors floors where people come in with their outdoor shoes (airports, shopping malls, hotel lobbies) for a significant portion of the year, even after the snow and ice are gone. These wreak havoc on small wheels.
pigeonburger
30d ago
I'll tell you what the real scissor statement part of that story is - I can't possibly have been the only guy to read this guy explain how he told his girlfriend he was cold and immediately think 'cuck' can I?
Cuck might be an overstatement, but yeah. That definitely had me raise an eyebrow. At least, the way the story is told, it sounds like something he volunteered. I'm not sure I would admit it to my wife if I were cold and she asked, but I am certain I would not bring it up myself, and if I were on a second date I would marshall all my self-control to suppress any possible tell that I am cold.
It might be terribly old-fashioned of me to say, but men don't bring up their personal problems for their SO (and even less a date!) to resolve.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Yes, but that does not mean the opposite people are not also successful.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
I would say it's true. It's just that "trustworthy" is a bigger concept to unpack than it looks like. Being trustworthy is not like dateless guys thinking they're a catch because they're a "feminist ally" or because they think that it's all so easy not to be an asshole and that if they had a girlfriend/wife they wouldn't be abusive to her and wouldn't cheat on her, etc...
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested. It's easy to think you'd never ever cheat, if you've never had the opportunity to, if you've never been on the receiving end of an attractive woman signaling she'd be up for no-strings-attached sex.
Being trustworthy means being reliable and having your shit together, and making women at ease in your presence.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Maybe the solution is Junior Assistant District Attorneys who Don't Kill the Baby, but feel tortured enough about it that they won't start imagining fake babies about to be killed everywhere just to simplify their job or justify other non baby-killing related preferences.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Rap culture, basically. Rappers love flaunting what they percieve to be classical signals of old money, like gold jewelry, fur coats, european designer brands. Cognac is another one of those that they picked up. It being relatively rare in the US market until rap culture made it popular means to a lot of americans their exposure to cognac is almost exclusively mentions in rap music, making it seem like a Black-coded thing.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Of course, and the people advocating kids being thaught to use and encouraged to carry weapons also hope and believe that the kids would only ever use reasonable force, only in situations where it's reasonable to do so, and wouldn't use them for anything like griveously hurting a classmate due to some run-of-the-mill bullying.
The students in Harry Potter mostly use disarming or stunning spells in combat, but they do separarely also learn fire spells, explosion spells and a lot of other spells which would require only a tiny bit of imagination to turn lethal.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
That's an interesting way to frame it. So it's the vigilantism equivalent of financial punishment/reward: "I don't trust the institutions to deal with this properly so I will financially reward the side I believe should be winning here".
Ultimately the only way to hold both pro and anti establishment views is to also hold to a steadfast belief that there is a very narrow and clear line between a benevolent establishment you should yield to, and a corrupt one you should resist. Which is to say, you shouldn't need guns, except if you live in Nazi Germany or know for sure that your government will turn into Nazi Germany within a few years. If Vernon had suggested that Harry asks Professor McGonagall, a "good coded" authority figure, would have Harry laughed him off?
But even that is hardly followed in Harry Potter. As while it's hard to know what would have happened if the heroes had yielded, the books seem to make a very broad anti-establishment point frequently, rewarding the heroes rebelling against the orders of even benevolent authorities. For instance, not sheltering when ordered to by Dumbledore and fighting a troll to save Hermione.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
There's a 0% chance Rowling meant people to take the lesson that children should learn to defend themselves effectively with deadly weapons, and if people actually took that lesson I am sure she would be horrified.
Of course, she didn't mean it, but she still wrote it, in detail, over multiple books. Her hand didn't slip. When writing a world that made sense to her, she basically wrote children should be carrying and training in the use of weapons that range from tasers to bazookas, in order to defend themselves both against direct attempts on their life, and in case their own government becomes tyrannical.
She would be horrified to hear that's a takeaway from her books, but it still is an opinion that she persistantly expressed. I think it's not a meaningless accident but a fascinating window into discordant beliefs she holds (ie: mostly a clash between "Trust the Institutions" and "Fight the Power!")
pigeonburger
1mo ago
2rafa did mention the unconsciously based in passing, I was just pointing out that I don't think it's an exercise in mental masturbation to analyse it but rather a window into an internal conflict in the author. I wouldn't be so quick in saying that JK Rowling doesn't believe unconsciously that real teenagers should be armed. She probably will never admit it. But I think her bedrock beliefs would lead her to that position, because when she tried to write a story in coherent universe she built herself it naturally led her there. She will only persist in claiming the opposite because the anti-gun/gun control was strongly imprinted onto her by the society she grew up in.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
I know, I'm mostly expanding on the aspect 2rafa mentioned with:
mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.
Which is likely the case with JK Rowling. I just think it's a very worthwhile aspect to analyze in media, and likely the result of an author not examining their own beliefs honestly, and not just an empty thought experiment. Not every children's book ends up making an accidental case for teens carrying guns to school.
mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.
I mean, I am I completely misreading in Harry Potter the real world implication of the good guy position being that teens need to learn to fight while carrying their deadly weapons (wands) and it's only the bad guys that want to keep them unarmed, weak and vulnerable?
I don't think it can be read into everything, but I think there's definitely instances where the narrative strength of a trope that the author consciously rejects still forces them to argue for a position they abhor. Sometimes, especially when the author has strong cognitive dissonance in their worldview, a story wrestles away control of its own messaging from the author.
But the factors are not beyond their control. Guys can decide to start going out, making friends and meeting them IRL. Just because society won't push them to do it as it maybe once did (it's debatable), doesn't mean it cannot be done or that it's even harder than it used to be. It's the same as weight issues; sedentary lifestyles and easy/cheap hyper-palatable high calories options means that if someone doesn't make any effort, unless they've been blessed with excellent genetics, they will gain weight. But it's hardly an immutable prophecy, people can have a good diet, can exercise. In fact, having a good diet and exercising is even easier than ever before in history.
Having a diverse social life is the same. Internalise that locus of control. CHR is a stat that needs exercising, just like STR.
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