urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
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User ID: 226
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
10d ago
I think you're correct that most of the change has been due to ambiverts becoming introverts and the overall range of socialization going down, but I'd add to it that there's a phenomenon where increasingly women who go out socializing are not interested in meeting men during that socializing, even in traditional spots for that kind of thing such as bars. I'm not really speaking from experience here, but we've had several posters talk about how younger women tend to stick together and just spend time with each other at bars/clubs/events in a way that wasn't necessarily true in the past. I don't think that's most of the effect, but there does seem to have been a change in how people socialize in public, even when they do.
That said, I'm in the "my idea of a good night is World of Warcraft" personality cluster. I found a partner who's part of the "my idea of a good night is Netflix True Crime documentary" personality cluster. We met each other in college, and I would say our relationship pushes us both to get out of the house more, do fun things, go on a fun date, go for a road trip, although we enjoy snuggling on the couch just as much.
She sent me some screenshots from this video the other day, and texted "We're the 0.74%. I'm glad I met you in college, it was the correct time to meet someone." I think introverted people tend to disappear into the ether after college -- that's true of me -- as the structured time with a cohort of similar-aged people ends after years of school and college. What's left in terms of "obligatory situations where you can meet people" is basically the workplace, especially for the increasingly irreligious who aren't 'joiners,' and that's... fraught, even on a good day.
A big part of the argument for coeducation back in the day was that it made it possible for men and women to meet in a shared collegiate environment instead of the old tradition, where the fraternity boys would throw parties and the girls at the nearby women's college would show up. The joke in conservative Christian circles is that women go to college to get the esteemed Mrs. Degree. My mother was actually recommended by her pastor to go to a regional Christian college because she'd had an engagement that blew up and still was eager to find a man to settle down with; she took the advice, and Mr. Urquan Sr. capitalized on the opportunity.
As for how you meet people after college, that's where it gets startlingly fraught and the modern, internet-enabled attitude of "if it's not required, I won't be there" becomes destructive.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
I can't speak to the apps, but I can say that the worst time in my life was when I had a strong desire for romance in early college, and felt desperately lonely. I was already struggling socially, and I tried to go and meet people anywhere I could, and I just felt like I was getting nowhere. What you said about perseverance is very true, but another thing that I'd note is that, because the male dating strategy is inherently a numbers game, the more you put yourself out there, the more your oneitis gets sanded down. But the flipside is that this means the passionate romantic hope you might be able to experience for a new woman get sanded down as well, and if you're a romantic-type man you start to lose motivation and people start blending together into an amorphous mass. I remember when I was a teenager I could feel such passionate crushes and such intense butterflies, but by the time I made it through college I couldn't really feel much of that at all. It just felt numb.
I'm really sorry.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11d ago
Whereas I don't think I've ever been approached by a woman when I was in a bad mood and/or "stuck in my own head".
I was, once. I was in high school, in speech and debate, and I was sitting alone at a table in between rounds staring at my phone. A girl approached me and asked for my number, and I was so surprised that I went, "uh... why?" She responded, "well, you look like you're alone over here so I thought you might want someone to talk to." I can't remember what I said next but it was basically some version of, "no thanks?" I probably came off as a massive asshole, but I was running on 4 hours of poor sleep (as all debate tournaments go) and my brain was fried.
I couldn't tell you whether this was actually intended to be a flirt or not, but if so, it... wasn't a great one. I was actually years later, after college, that I realized, "oh crap, that was possibly an approach."
To an extent, gay issues like "don't criminalize sodomy" and "gay marriage is legally defined" have won, but that's just as much due to sweeping changes in straight culture as a gay cultural victory. "Sodomy" is typically defined as both anal or oral sex, and anal sex has become aspirational in more prurient strands of straight culture, while oral sex (both ways) is exceptionally normalized to the point where I wouldn't doubt that it's more common than intercourse. Whenever our Irish friend comes out confused by the frequency of oral sex in younger generations, I have to chuckle a bit to myself. If only she knew how frequently young women demand oral sex from their partners as a feminist issue, or realized how often popular culture depicts men who don't do it well as unmanly...
It's also pretty... cheap to talk about the "sanctity of marriage" after the massive divorce-fest of the past 40 years and resulting social chaos. Young people are starting to view marriage as a legal headache rather than a social benefit, and cohabitation is skyrocketing massively. "Let's let the gays participate in the meaningless ritual that nobody takes seriously and just causes legal headaches" is incresingly the view of the young left on the issue, and most of the arguments against it stand out to the center as hypocritical.
Civil marriage hasn't even approximated the Christian view of marriage in a long time, to the extent I think it's a different institution. SSM just stands out to me as the final nail in a coffin, not a grand transgression of how sanctified marriage is in a world where the Republican president is on his third model wife after divorce. My impression is that this is generally the view of the young right, even among Christians.
That said, a decent chunk of social opprobrium continues to exist in the center, particularly oriented towards the promiscuous behavior of gay men. In a way, even out gay men understand they have to keep their full sexuality in the closet and put a face on Shoggoth. Straight men keep a respectful distance, and straight women maintain friendly relations by make-believing in their head that gay men are universally sensitive, passionate, artistic, sweet and pure love boys like in yaoi who just need a wishing well. The actual destructive elements of gay culture are rarely acknowledged except inside the LGBT umbrella, and even then usually aren't aired to outsiders for solidarity reasons.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
In other words, the outcome of nuclear war is everyone loses.
If they are a true 103 IQ country then they’ve probably hit below their weight for centuries.
IMO, I think they have.
I continue to believe the dumbest geopolitical naming change in the past hundred years (maybe secondary to the Turkish umlaut disaster) was the Iranian decision to tell the Anglophone world to call them "Iran" instead of "Persia." "Iran" just has no purchase in the Anglophone world, it doesn't mean anything, it just makes Anglophones intuitively place them in the same category as the other four-letter 'I' country, Iraq, which is not good company. The closest thing that Anglophones have to "Iran" meaning something is, of course, "Aryan," which is also not a word with good connotations for the West, however long the Persians have called themselves that. "Persia," however, calls to mind ancient empires, deep history, conquest, power, mystery, adventure, Zoroaster. Even at my not-so-great primary school in the US, we learned a surprising amount about Zoroastrianism and the Persian empire (alongside the Mesopotamians).
The Arab conquerors gained great prestige by claiming the mantle of "Egyptian." Why the Iranians don't realize how much prestige they lost from their enemies by demanding they stop referring to them by the name that carries the legacy of their ancient, powerful forebears, I will never understand.
Switching from "Persia" to "Iran" reduced the country's soft-power inheritance in the Anglosphere. That made it easier to frame Iran as a hostile "regime," rather than a venerable civilization. "The Persians have nuclear enrichment" feels iconic. "The Iranians have nuclear enrichment" sounds like a problem.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
- Scientists are serious people with important tasks; they should dress accordingly in public 2. Fanboying over latex-clad skimpy pin-up girls is sort of tolerable as long as you’re an unserious young dudebro; when you’re older, not so much; by that point you should marry some frumpy woman and throw such clothes into the garbage
I think you can collapse these two into "it's culturally a blue-collar, working-class, thing to display sexuality nakedly in a workplace setting, and it violates white collar social class expectations to do it, so it signals either utter social obliviousness (which is generally strongly discouraged in white collar settings; how you comport yourself is just as important to your job as the 'work') or an active, resolute attempt to counter-signal against the taboo on sexual display in a workplace setting, which is intensely off-putting to normie women (and therefore that the counter-signal is designed to actively and knowingly repel women).
Scientists are assumed to be basically intelligent, so a big part of the feminist debate here is to shift the overton window from the obliviousness assumption to the active, resolute counter-signalling assumption.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
Galaxy brain moment: make Miami the ruling capital of Cuba and run it as a colonial extension of Florida. Reunite the Cuban diaspora. Little Marco for Floridian emperor. I hear Florida even has a widely-recognized castle he can live in.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12d ago
It was probably the Tea Party movement that was the direct trigger.
I still don't understand what the Tea Party was angry about, except that Barack Obama was a Democrat and the Democratic Party had a trifecta.
See this Jezebel screed as one example.
That was... a read. "I'm right because I'm right, if you disagree with me it's because you're wrong." Holy question-begging, batman!
You could make a ton of really good arguments about the particular issues she discusses, like arguing that employer-provided health insurance is a standard product and it's an implicit religious test for employment to provide non-standard health insurance that doesn't include certain treatments based on religious values, which discriminates against employees who don't share the owners' religious views and thus violates civil rights law.
But you're right, this is proto-woke; instead of actually making the argument, she just assumes her argument is correct and proceeds to shame people who disagree instead of trying to build a moderate coalition. This is "the OU student who wrote a college reflection assignment on how trans is demonic"-tier writing.
In this specific case, it wasn't so much that I said something controversial as I said something that I had put some original thought into. I think she was agnostic (heh) on the question, but the point was that I was the sort of person who thought deeply and independently.
It's hard to describe exactly how this resonated if people don't know me or her personally, but I can say that she likes being the devil's advocate and challenging assumptions based on evidence. Some ladies are hot for professor, and I can be... professorial.
I can't recommend or extrapolate from this to give generalized dating advice, other than to say that standing out and taking risks can be rewarded, and at least one woman admires taking intellectual/social risks in that way that I did on that night. But I think I was just in the right place at the right time, and met someone who was looking for an intellectual companion.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13d ago
I'm so sorry. I've been fortunate to have mutual love at least a couple times. What I can say is that it's so worth it, even though it's hard to find. Dates a man can find, and relationships he can attain, but love is happenstance, sweet sweet happenstance.
In some cases they were initially ignored or rejected. Usually they were able to do something that marked them as highly skilled or high status within the social context they knew each other.
That's actually helpful. Rather than competing against every other theoretical male out there, you just have to be near the top of the local hierarchy in whichever subculture you identify with.
Yeah! That's a big advantage. It's also, like you said, a better matching mechanism: if you're both in the same subculture, committed to the same thing, have shared interests/passions/ideals... well, it's likely that your personalities are going to be more similar and compatible than a random person you'd grab out of a bag.
When my girlfriend talks about meeting me, she says what impressed her wasn't just that I said something controversial, but that I thought independently, resisted going along to get along, and did things my own way even if people disagreed. Those are all personality traits that she admires and wants to live up to. We also both like historical debates. That's something different than intimidation or game, that's social alignment: being high-status in a particular way a particular woman wants to be like. The spark of love is that someone can look at you and say, "being close to this person will bring me toward something I want to move toward." That's fire.
I don't think spouses have to have all the same interests in common (though I don't think it's a bad thing), but you do have to have that certain je ne sais quoi that makes you personally compatible in values and orientation towards life. I think about the strongest relationships I've had, and in those we forged new interests that became "things we do together," and it meant that we enriched each others' lives with new things and grew together.
The problem is they try to be both. The people who are interested in hookups are mixed in with the ones who are more serious and there's some incentive to lie and obsfuscate.
Part of the issue is that the apps take no responsibility for (lack of) filtering your matches for people who are truly interested in relationship vs. those who are idly swiping or just want a hookup. They don't even try.
And they don't give YOU the tools to effectively filter. Its a laughable abdication of responsibility.
Yeah - both men and women hate this outcome. I believe the growth in places like Bumble and... wasn't there a new one? Hinge? was driven by the reputation of Tinder as "the hookup app," which it never really could shake, and now of course those apps will be busy building their own reputations for seediness.
I think that’s fair — the instigating “this person is impressive” feeling can be after you’re already aware of someone, but not close with them. Looking back, I don’t recall any flirtations like that, so I guess that’s my blind spot.
That said, I think my point is a little more subtle; I suspect that with many of your friends in those relationships, there was some initial level of spark or interest or “this guy is attractive/high status” even before the flirting started. I’m not a mind reader, and I could be dead wrong.
If you naively look at my dating history, you’d probably say the same about mine — in all cases I knew the person for at least a bit before we started dating. But, in hindsight, it was clear that attraction existed from the beginning. It’s possible that some level of “getting to know you” was necessary — just not nearly as much as I let play out, either because I was scared or because I was ignorant.
I’m mostly picking on myself here, as my experience is that I often didn’t act on my romantic interest after signals of mutual attraction were present, either because I couldn’t read them, or felt like I hadn’t ‘earned’ any kind of attraction by doing something bold.
But what you definitely can’t do is be unimpressive, boring, standard, and ‘merely nice’, and expect any attraction to develop. Most guys who are of the “get to know someone for a bit before you express romantic interest” perspective are of that type, and often naively believe that their presence or emotional availability expresses their romantic potential. It doesn’t.
That’s my main point: impression has to come before relation.
Dating apps are definitely an unfortunate means of meeting someone, because a photo reel and a short bio does not a person make. Nevertheless some people find a great partner there, I just honestly never tried because I believed they were just hookup apps, and by the time I realized people were meeting their spouses on there I was already in a happy LTR by the grace of almighty God. Maybe telling a room full of atheists that the US is a Christian nation was a meritorious act, I don’t know.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
14d ago
My preferred mode of forming relationships, particularly romantic ones, involves knowing the person in some personal level (at least 'acquaintance,' possibly 'friendship') before actually initiating romantic intent.
I'll say that this is my preferred mode too, but I also am wary that the average woman feels the same way. When I look back on my dating history, even back to secondary school, I can't remember a single time when "this person is attractive, but I want to get to know them as a person first before expressing romantic interest" ever actually worked out, or ended with a relationship. Inevitably, if I decided I liked the person and I would be interested in knowing her romantically, any expression of interest would just be rebuffed -- typically politely, but still.
You do often see women online complaining about "I thought he was my friend, but then he asked me out and he was just lying about being my friend to get in my pants," as though being friendly and engaging with someone as a person instead of immediately asking them out is a kind of duplicity that can only be understood in a prurient manner. I don't know if those exact thoughts run through the typical woman's head, but it does accord with my experiences being friends with and dating women.
I'm not always a fan of their methods, but I do think the redpillers are descriptively correct when they say that women generally have a separate mental track for "potential romantic interest" and "potential friend," and you have to behave in a certain way to be put into the first category rather than the second. Every woman I have ever seriously dated expressed -- either with their body language and flirtation (when I got better at reading this), or in hindsight, after we were dating and she would look back upon meeting me -- that I did something that impressed her the very first time I met her.
It was always something that was more than just "urquan was really nice and friendly," it had to be, "urquan was the class clown and I thought his joking was really confident," "urquan proudly said he was a Democrat when the teacher in poli sci class used him as an example of voter registration," "I liked how urquan made jokes that built upon each other when we talked and incorporated things I was saying," "the way urquan writes about what love means to him was so romantic, it makes me feel like I'm in a romance novel," or "urquan gave a lecture to a college atheist club where he made a historical argument that the US is a Christian nation because of the large influence that Christianity has had on its history," which, to use her words, "made me think you had your own independent thoughts and didn't just think what other people wanted you to think."
There was also, of course, the time in school where I was waiting for someone in the lunchroom, a girl that sat at the table and I started talking, and I absentmindedly and unconsciously started suggestively flirting with her and thought so little of it that I blacked it out of my memory. (The only thing of that flirtation I can recall is she was eating a banana, and, well, schoolboy-tier phallic jokes were made.) What a surprise when I subsequently did the, "I'd like to get to know her as a person before I express any interest" thing, having forgotten that I'd implanted the mental image in her brain that the fruit she was eating was my fucking penis, and then 3 months later she drops a note on my desk as she shuffled out of the classroom that told me she was in love with me and asked 'would you go out with me?' Man... the high of reading that note was so intense that I'd compare it to heroin, if I knew anything about what heroin makes you feel like.
You should note that, in all my examples, I did something actually impressive in some sense: I was confident enough to say something controversial, or to take a stance proudly, without reservations, or to state how I felt about something in beautiful and moving words, or to express my sexuality clearly and unapologetically. I wasn't nice, I wasn't friendly, I was confident, without fear of rejection. Confidence is the engine of attraction. The engine!
The other thing I note from my dating history is that, of course, in most of these situations I subsequently did the "I really just want to get to know this person first before I express any romantic interest", enough that multiple relationships of mine have started because I did something impressive enough, and was subsequently intransigent enough in my withholding of romantic interest, that eventually these young women took matters into their own hands and directly stated their romantic interest in me out of sheer desperation. Obviously they would have much rather preferred that I ended my sequence of impressive acts of sheer confidence by confidently suggesting something romantic. That's how you get swept off your feet.
The reality is that women want to be impressed before they do the "I just want to get to know this person" thing; it's just how their attraction works. Men are actually the same way -- it's just that their attraction is more visual, and women's is more an attraction to the gestalt of a man.
So, if you're attracted to a woman, you do nothing impressive, subsequently become her friend, and then later decide you like her enough to ask her out. The read she has of that situation is: "well, you did nothing to impress me or to trigger my attraction, and now you're springing this on me, why are you making me have to romantically reject my friend after this time knowing each other?" They see "being friends before suggesting any romantic interest" as a failed strategy -- in which case it's pathetic -- or a covert attempt to "let her guard down" before she knows what all you want out of her, in which case it's considered creepy, like espionage. I think that's a harsh judgment, but it's the kind of judgment I think is being made.
I think in most cases men don't mean it like that, and it's not so much a strategy as men just being slow to warm up to someone, even if they're attracted to them. Men's romantic interest is much more gradual, while women's is much more binary, in or out. Hence why men are more commitment-phobic than women: they escalate from "cute" to "beautiful" to "worthy of adoration" to "eternal and undying love" more slowly.
(Evopsych terms -- maybe men's up-front sexual attraction is the thing that bridges this gap ancestrally? Women ramp up sexual availability slowly, men ramp up romantic/emotional availability slowly, both are withholding something the other wants, so they have a reason to stick around with each other and try to build it up?)
I guess what I'm saying is, I feel you. But some element of the obligation to "bring that enthusiasm to the date" is that you have to impress as a man, or you've already lost. I got really lucky, in that a few times in my life I've just been being my stubborn, headstrong, fiercely intellectually independent, and paradoxically public-speaking-enjoying self, and a woman has taken note of this and found me attractive when I'm being what I consider to be the best version of myself.
So, perhaps "Just be yourself," and "be confident," really were the best pieces of dating advice, because the best relationships come from authentic attraction to personality.
It's just that this assumes that "yourself" is attractive or impressive in some way, and additionally is horribly mismatched to a world in which men and women are less and less interacting organically, in the real world, where real personalities and authentic strengths are present. The end result is, well, the Game.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
15d ago
When I went to school there, there would be ads in the Pitt News advertising that you could rent a room in South Oakland for $200-300 a month. My general sense was not that it was a slum or anything, but that the general behavior of college-age people made it such that it made no sense to live there if you were older than 23 or so. I had several classmates who rented places there and would throw parties on the weekend. The general model was that you would pay $5, they would give you a red cup, there was a keg in the kitchen, and you would fit about, idk, maybe 100-150 people, into a 2 bedroom row house. The music blared and you couldn’t hold a conversation, then the neighbors, quite reasonably, would call the police. The police would show up and everyone would scamper away through a back alley.
I think I might have been to 4 or 5 parties that fit that description before deciding it wasn’t my scene and spending my weekend evenings doing other things. My general sense from walking around is that there were several parties like that per block in South Oakland on your typical Friday and Saturday evenings. The idea of actually living there as a college-age student didn’t appeal to me at all; the idea of some poor adult living amongst that, idk, it struck me as insane back then, and it still does.
Peak college town energy, lol.
I went to a public uni with a similar vibe. Partying was never my scene, but you could tell that it was the scene for the whole campus. I ended up often just going home or (after we started dating) hanging out with my girlfriend on the weekends. I really enjoyed the academics there and I met many profs I got along with well, but the social scene of campus was so draining, the mix of preppy and normie, I guess. I ended up transferring somewhere closer to home after a mental health crisis. Sometimes I joke that it was the Tale of Two Cities time in my life: the best and the worst of times. Sometimes I wish I could have the optimism of that era back.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
I'm in a similar boat to cablethrowaway. What things on a resume would help someone stand out?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16d ago
The problem that affects young people with career searches is the same problem that affects dating: the proliferation of internet matching has made automated, algorithmized, and impersonal selection not only the default, but the preference. This creates a market where you don't just have to compete with those in your social circle -- you have to compete with everyone who has access to the internet. Boomers like to talk about "meeting people in person," and "submitting your application in person," but neither works today. Increasingly employers will laugh at the idea of submitting a paper resume, just as women will increasingly give you dirty looks if you try to ask them out in person (even if its an appropriate situation in which to do so).
Both have become a selector's (read: employer's) market, and those are always immensely painful for selectees, particularly in that they're thralls to the algorithms and the AI that are used to delineate the worthy from the unworthy. And, of course, to the dehumanization that being a PDF or a set of stock photos and a bio does to oneself. But the powerful prefer it this way, where hiring can be made impersonal and optimized -- and therefore any negative feelings that come with active rejection can be minimized. Illegibility is strength.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
To some extent, although from inside my personal experience is less about who was worthy, and more about who could have a thing done, in a way that worked successfully. I haven't exactly had an easy or good time in gay dating spaces. But I don't get the same 'learn a foreign language' feeling.
Hm. I guess this is one of the lines in your posts that I find hard to parse... could you expand on what you mean, with the "who could have a thing done" thing?
you get some chasers that think that trans-femininity is going to mean a ultra-submissive barefoot-and-in-kitchen trad-wifing that doesn't seem to actually be that desired by that many trans women
Yeah - that's what I was gesturing at with the "cis women are bitches, I'm going to date a *trans-*woman" protests. I think there's some level of belief some folks have, as in the motte post I quoted, that dating trans women is a kind of Konami code to unlock "super extra real hardcore femininity mode" and get the goods that cis women aren't giving them.
That said -- I recall once reading a reddit thread where a trans person actually endorsed that framing to a degree, to many upvotes. I tried to find it, but alas I couldn't. If I recall correctly, it went something like:
We should assume that as the cis dating world grows increasingly rough, that some portion of straight men who are open to dating trans women will start seeking us out. The best relationship I've had in my life started because I met a guy on grindr who said he was a straight man only looking for trans women.
That was definitely surprising, and went contrary to my understanding of how such things tend to go.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass.
I think this is the "draw the rest of the owl" kind of problem.
Another issue is that a lot of people who grow up with these sorts of traits have trouble making friends, especially in youth. I think the cause of the kind of fantasy we're talking about is a disconnect from the social world as much as from the physical one, and atypical traits make that more difficult. Motion/body disconnect is often part of a syndrome with social phobia; I myself often have experienced a kind of hyper-body awareness in certain social situations that are particularly anxiety-provoking, where you kind of move manually and are dissociated from the normal coherence of your body, like when you consciously start to control your breathing -- as you are now, that I've mentioned it. That's common among people with social phobia.
I think masculinity is fundamentally a good thing, but I think there is a real tension between the broad male phenome -- the sum of all the ways in which men are like -- and various models of masculinity. A common underlying set of traits is hierarchical competition, or resource provision, or physical strength... but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat. IMO, a great deal of the extremely online stuff we see is caused by people who have suffered (or perceive themselves to have suffered) social defeat trying in some sense to construct a social hierarchy where they can win. See, for instance, NEETs playing competitive online games.
I think the main issue with any model of masculinity is that it's typically enforced in one of two ways: the carrot of women's attention, and the stick of men's violence. You can see that, for instance, in the military, where boot camps, strict regimentation, and obsessive hierarchicalism force men into a mold. In World War I, the British government ran a program allied with prominent suffragettes in which women gave unenlisted men white feathers in a shame ritual calling them cowards. I hold that one of the major reasons the USA became unable to run a successful conscription campaign for the Vietnam War is that the military lost the support of young women, who began rewarding rebels against the system with adulation for their courage. The same I think is true of gang violence in minority neighborhoods; men enforce compliance with guns, and, often, the women from these communities reward status in organized crime with attention. You get from men what men enforce and women reward.
So any model of masculinity and positive male role models have to have women and girls on board. The issue is that, in the West, it's not clear what women and girls are on board with, and in fact the dominant social mode of discussions of masculinity are to discuss its abberations and possibility for harm, or occasionally to praise men for doing things according to what women desire of them (and not praising them for being masculine on its own terms). The people who do talk about masculinity on its own terms are often selling their own inane fantasy, like the bodybuilder RAW MEAT influencers. The social inflection behind "man" as a category is incredibly negative; it's no wonder to me that some young men are going, "well, that's not me! Teehee!"
I don't think it's just about wanting to be with women, but I also think the kinds of men we're talking about place a high premium on being seen as fundamentally good by women; the "creep" designation, in a sense the white feather of the day, carries so much stigma precisely because "being a threat to women" is considered deeply wrong by both men and women writ large, for good reasons. But I think young men feel like there's no stable and broadly-recognized way to do this. Sometimes religious subcultures do a better job at this than the secular world -- I often noted when I spent time with the young Catholics group at my college that the men and women got along much better than those outside, and generally considered each other trustworthy and worthy of respect -- but it's not guaranteed, and in a world where the Church is optional as a social institution and increasingly at odds with secular assumptions, "just leaving" is an option that many people are going to take. As, obviously, transitioners tend to do.
The grass, of course, is never greener on the other side. I never struggled with gender identity issues -- clearly I'm a man, the idea of being a woman seems nebulous and foreign to me, and has no appeal. I know enough from having female friends that women are entangled in their own thorny world of backstabbing and status competition about which I'm not jealous. Even if someone could transition perfectly, magically, I don't think that men would find women's social world astounding or grand in the way they imagine.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
If you've ever lucid dreamed (I haven't, sadly) then that demonstrates the ability to be aware and at least partially conscious during REM sleep.
I've never lucid dreamed, but I do experience vivid dreams in a REM state and would describe it as a variation of consciousness. I usually forget my dreams, but immediately after waking I can typically remember the whole narrative experience of a dream, which felt real while I was in it. I tend to think of REM as a state of consciousness where sensory input is turned off, things that would set off "this isn't normal" alarms are somehow disabled, and conscious awareness is redirected to... randomness? emotionally unprocessed experiences? fears? Something like that.
With how vivid my dreams are I do experience them as places where I am making decisions, they're just decisions that are enthralled to the content of the dream. Lucid dreaming is the ability to know you're dreaming, and thus control the content of the dream to an extent.
I don't know how that lines up with current neuroscience, but that's my impression of how my own dreams work.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
19d ago
Alex was adrift. He often misunderstood social cues, and his habit of talking like a college professor made him seem pedantic.
Young men such as Alex tend to prize autonomy, be it intellectual, creative, or physical: they react badly to being reined in.
Certainly, for jockish boys and the girls on the cheerleading squad, the purported gender/sex distinction isn’t of any particular interest. By contrast, many of the smart kids, gamers and hobbyists who spend a lot of time inside their own minds, may already be aware that they don’t quite fit in, and often being bored and underchallenged, have more time to spend on the abstract mental game of “What if?”
There’s a useful word in the German language, fachidiot, that describes a particular kind of cleverness. The first syllable, fach, translates to “subject” or “field of study,” as well as “drawer,” implying a distinct category of knowledge. The second part means—well, it means “idiot.” Fachidioten are specialists who can describe in mesmerizing detail the many reasons for the collapse of Byzantium, or the mechanics of pasteurization, or the influence of African rhythms on the various musicological substrata of modern jazz. Yet while they hold forth on such arcana, a petty thief walking past might ask the Fachidiot for his phone, just so he can “make a quick call,” and the Fachidiot will cheerfully oblige. When the parents I spoke with impress upon me how gifted their children are, they are not suggesting to me that they are intellectually overbearing or arrogant. Just the opposite: Many of them are keen to stress that their boys couldn’t successfully make a doctor’s appointment, or catch the right bus. As Rosalee puts it, “He couldn’t even tie his laces.”
As a toddler, he burst into tears in a diner because the ceiling fan wasn’t turned on. Ceiling fans are machines; machines should work; and the fact that it was just sitting there doing nothing indicated that the world had somehow fallen ever so slightly into disrepair.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
Never considered gender transition, though. I think my cohort was a bit too old for that. I'm also enough of a weirdo that I'm suspicious of putting myself in any category, even the weird ones, which I guess was protective.
What I'm confused by is MSM who prefer "feminine" men. Naively, you'd expect that they'd want the most masculine gay men they could find. If you like femininity that much, why not just sleep with women? Why seem out "passing" transwomen or ladyboys or twinks or...
find it easier to sleep with other men. Solve for the equilibrium.
I think you came to the answer on your own.
Another element that 2rafa doesn't mention, but I think gestures in the direction of, is the whore/madonna split. There's some fraction of bisexual men who see women as beautiful angels deserving of devotion, nothing as icky as raw sexual lust, but see twinks/femboys/trans women as essentially fallen women by default, and therefore worthy of sexual instrumentalization. Add to that the fact that the folks in this group are often unironically eager for sexual instrumentalization in a way only a minority of cis women are (and even then, they need foreplay and trust first), and well, the opportunity to derive gains from trade (my favorite of all Scott's jokes) emerges.
As self_made_human has realized, getting sexual attention from gay men is trivial, and so is both easy to obtain and less valuable per-interaction. So madonna/whoring your mindset and searching for disposable sexual attention from men (whores) while seeking out reliable partnership with women (madonnas) is something you can do, if you're so inclined.
The other thing is that gay men, particularly ones who are interested in companionship more than disposability, often feel trapped by the expectations of gay dating, and are jealous of straight men for whom long-term commitment, exclusivity, and broad social acceptance feel like table stakes. So bisexual men can be "traitors": taking from gay men whatever they can get from them and then fleeing to the arms of a woman when one arises.
This has been somewhat sexualized lately, with the "femboy bf"/"femboy hooters" meme culture which prompts great recrimination in the ongoing femininine-man/trans-woman civil war, but of course that also comes with the corollary memes of "breaking up with my femboy bf because I met a real woman." (I have no idea what the actual prevalence of this stuff is, I'm just way too extremely online.)
Intriguingly, this pattern seems to mirror many complaints about women's sexual behavior from men, and women's complaints about the sexual behavior of extremely attractive straight men: if sexual attention is abundant, using it for temporary affirmation while utterly disposing of your partners' interests and needs is a real possibility.
There's also a bit of the "cis women are so awful, hoeflation is abysmal, women are terrible whores who don't know how to please a man" -- I'm not pulling these out of my own head, these are things I've been told by people in this orbit -- both on the offering and the receiving end of this kind of transaction. There's an element to this subculture that's kind of the male version of political lesbianism.
This very dynamic actually showed up on the motte once, several months ago:
As dating grows more complex, and sometimes risky for men, we’re seeing the rise of alternatives: AI girlfriends, VR porn, sex robots. Add to that a growing visibility of trans women in romantic spaces, and a strange new question emerges:
What happens when women can no longer command attention?
I think of this memeplex as the "strong independent man don't need no woman" imaginary rebellion, but of course it involves consorting with men, because for these guys somebody's gotta appease the sexual appetite they're angry at women for not satisfying.
As I wrote back then:
Sometimes straight men like to proclaim, "maybe I will go gay!" like a kind of protest, same way that women annoyed with men sometimes start investigating political lesbianism, but same-sex pairings are just different in important ways due to biological and cultural factors. The grass is rarely greener on the other side. Fantasies aren't going to save you, and trans women aren’t your fantasy. They’d be the first people to tell you that.
Almost uniformly, trans women of the HSTS/transmedical bent are massively and uncompromisingly angry about the whole thing, and a decent amount of the discourse around trans chasers is trying to imprecisely talk about this dynamic. Obviously, "you're my substitute for a real woman because real women are hoes and I'm looking for the poophole loophole" isn't exactly what this demographic has in mind when they talk about wanting romantic attention from men. In particular, they tend to strongly dislike gay culture, to which this dynamic is directly adjacent, and if you'll excuse a purile pun, into which it penetrates without commitment.
Some fraction, however, of femboys, crossdressers, and twinks are more than happy to play along with it though -- especially if it means they pull a straight man. Or a "straight" man.
(AGPs, however, are obviously not particularly interested in men anyway, and themselves have kind of a madonna/whore thing going on -- where women are madonnas, and men are whores, and they wanna be madonna: "like a virgin." Some of your confusion may have to do with the fact that the West often glorifies and literally angelifies women as innocent and fundamentally decent, in ways that the rest of the world doesn't, and we're now dealing with the cultural fallout of a world in which this is colliding with women attaining positions of power.)
Whenever this discussion topic comes up, I always wish I had a "summon gattsuru" button. I usually understand... at least half of his posts, but on this topic he's far more familiar with the terrain than I am.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
20d ago
Ok, the fact that she shared an obviously staged Xbox account is a hilarious unforced error, like Elizabeth Warren getting the genetic ancestry test. They realize she has a perception problem, but instead of just... ignoring it, as one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they insisted on trying to appeal to it. They legitimately could go, "she's not from gaming, but she's a good leader, and we think she's the best for the role," but instead they have to try to make up word salad about gaming passion and fabricate a record of gaming. Gamers are going to hate Microsoft no matter what they do, it's just in the culture, why are they trying to appeal to them? Make some good games and it won't matter whether a trained seal is in charge of the gaming division.
I'm very much a cis male, but I do find this relatable. In some ways the impulses of male sexuality are annoying and distracting rather than fulfilling.
But in my case there are a lot of hypotheses that can easily explain it without reference to an etiological mismatch: religious upbringing, teenage dissatisfaction, but especially being inundated with feminist memes from tumblr when I was young, that have me walking on eggshells to know what's helpful. In a sense you could say that every superegoistic (to borrow without endorsement a Freudian term) influence on me has been about how my sexuality could go wrong, so it's very, very hard for me to intuitively know where it could go right. It's a lot easier to eject sexuality from your conception of the self if you see it as corrupting rather than enlivening. Repression and/or viewing sexuality as egodystonic seems like a common result of that kind of pressure, as it sometimes is for me.
I do wonder if some of the 'flight from masculinity' you talked about some men having has to do with that; the male sexual role asks much, and in modern times with limited and radically contradictory guidance, and I think it's much harder for men these days to understand who they're supposed to be than it might have been in the past. I feel like I have to be a different man to different people, and in particular how I have to relate to women romantically and -- especially -- in the bedroom in order to please them is profoundly distinct from how I am in every other avenue of my life. I have a hard time integrating those things. I actually think this is much more common than you're suggesting.
I've been meaning to write an effortpost on how male sexuality and male romanticism align or sometimes don't align, but I'm often reluctant because, as much as my posts here are highly confessional, I worry about exposing too much of my internal gears to culture war analysis, and anyway I'm concerned about reinforcing the belief that men are walking sex pests whose sexuality is inherently disordered rather than simply a biological urge that you can deal with in a healthy or an unhealthy way.
Do share.
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