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Downthread, in the discussion on cheating in college and the decay of institution, @hydroacetylene brought up a frequent topic: is the college-to-work pipeline good for society and for women? Rather than the high-level moral or strategic view, I wanted to look more at the countervailing forces here. Even assuming that early family formation is good, desirable, and pleasant for women compared to schooling, why would they choose college? Not to bury the lede: I think it’s risk mitigation.
A woman’s life is, not to an infinite extent but nevertheless to a great extent based around vulnerability. She is especially vulnerable to men, who are stronger than her and yet want something from her. A man who wants something from her more than he cares about her is not a curiosity but an active threat. Even if no such threat manifests, her very nature makes her vulnerable. A pregnant woman, or a new mother, is incredibly dependent on those around her. If any part of that support should go away, she could be in serious trouble. Women’s life strategies, unsurprisingly, center around mitigating these risks.
These strategies fall into two major camps: finding a center for her protection and support, and making damn certain that she has excellent control over that center. (For men this is simple: he is his own center of protection and support, always. Everything else is just a fallback for extenuating circumstances, or part of his larger ambitions.)
For her center, a woman can choose, in essence, a man, an institution, or herself. For herself, she will obviously be unable to reproduce. This is a fallback, the spinster’s last resort. No more needs be said. An institution is impersonal and uncharitable, but (say) a widow will find it tolerable, and she has some modicum of control. If she follows the rules, support will not be retracted. So what is preventing her choosing a man? Her lack of control over him.
Men are famously fickle. A man will sing a woman’s praises to the moon, and maybe even believe himself, and vanish as soon as he gets some. He will spend the family’s money on dice or drinks. He will say that whatever he earns is his by right, and ignore the duty he has towards the flower he plucked in the prime of her life in an explicit contract to care for her forever (till death do we part). Even if he is one of the rare, dutiful ones, his simple preferences become domineering imperatives, and you have to think on every one: is this worth fighting over, if he might just leave? To say all men are cads is to go too far. But there are cads out there, and their attentions are disastrous.
(I know women who have had their men: get fired and refuse to work, get addicted to painkillers and refuse to work, allow their mother to browbeat their wife, and support an entire separate family in another country, off the top of my head. I also know women who have had loving husbands with no problems who are in old age. But would you want to simply gamble on the outcome here?)
So what women need is leverage. Historically this was twofold: the highly salient and important labor they performed, and their tight bonds with their (and their man’s) immediate community. For reference, before modern textile production, a woman would quite literally make the clothes on her husband’s back and the food he ate. Were he to get them elsewhere, they would be much more expensive and less tailored to him. This makes any argument inherently easier for the wife to win. He depends on her, too. Meanwhile, if he were to stray, her connections to the local wives, perhaps including her own parents and his, or moral leaders like a priest, would allow her to bring wide-ranging pressures down upon him. Or, say, if he were to romance her but fall short of his duty to propose to her, a brief word between their fathers would end in a joyous wedding officiated by shotgun. I’m not trying to imply the distant past was a glorious feminist utopia, but these were to the best of my knowledge the mechanisms of women’s power back then.
Woman’s work was eviscerated by the Industrial Revolution, and her community was shattered by the car. Bluntly, there is nothing coarse and material that a housewife can offer a man in this day and age which he cannot get for an acceptable amount of his own money. Food and cleaning are trivial, and the only real limitation on sex is whether porn is sufficient (it generally is). The only things she can offer are on a more sophisticated or higher plane, like the abstract of a continued legacy through childcare or loving intimacy and affection. These are important, but have a lower valence than the material, meaning that the man’s opinion is dramatically privileged. And in a postwar suburb of friendly acquaintances, in and out of the house on errands and excursions, there’s nobody to drop in on and talk to and organize with - and even if there were, why would the man not simply get in his own car and leave to find those who “understand“ him better? As the last nail in the coffin, the pill and the Sexual Revolution deny women even their power over sex. If it’s pleasurable and has no risk, what right does she have to demand that her man do something in exchange - except pay as her john? With pregnancy on the table, it’s obvious: he risks what she does, together with her. But without, it’s harder to argue the obvious truth that she is risking time, because he does not have the same pressure to make the most of the flower of youth.
This is the foundation of our current moment, and given the premises women choose independence. They do not perceive a reasonable alternative by which they can have a marriage where they are respected and equal. The life plan changes accordingly, and becomes: go to college (to protect you in your most vulnerable and desirable period and increase your status and the treatment you can demand), take a job with a good healthcare plan (including maternity leave), find a man who sticks with you for several years (while you are on the pill, and proving he is not a cad), and finally, around 30, get married to a man you TRUST to support you and your children. Of course, this costs a huge amount of time and money, but it’s more palatable than taking a dive for the first schmuck on the street with no good way out. (And even if he is a good man, get stuck in a suburban home near HIS job with an infant or two and an absolute dearth of friends to see during working hours and little sense of what you’re really bringing to the table. At that point, why not just get a job working alongside other ladies and stick the kids in daycare?)
So that’s my analysis. College is just a means here; if it were not available, women would go for anything else that could protect them, probably an employer. The problem for women is that they feel like the whole deal is raw, that they’re going to struggle to get a man who works for them and supports them and who they can influence. Unless they feel their own power in their own relationships, they will scrabble for every edge they can get. If you want to fix this on a personal level, as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily. As a woman - can’t comment with quite so much authority, but valuing men for their private (i.e. directed at you) virtue over their public (i.e. abstract and status-seeking) virtue might help. On the societal level, focus less on pushing women into childrearing and more on pulling. What are the advantages? How do they mitigate risk? And what’s in it for them, on a practical and day to day sense?
Long-term I feel this will shake out. Men and women who figure out how to bond and partner quickly and effectively will be aspirational and fruitful, and they will be the new model. But for those of us alive now, I think it helps to be intentional about our own lives.
Interested in the opinions of married mothers on this (I think we have a few). I’m a happily married father, so I have some insight, but it’s all third person to me.
I think that the job of housewife is on its way out, and has been on its way out for the last century.
Back in 1800, with no washing machines or fridges, it was a full-time job to take care of the needs of a family (especially as family size was large due to lack of contraceptives). A man (or anyone) who worked full time simply did not have the time to take care of washing his clothes and cooking his meals.
Luckily, we made these chores much less time-consuming and freed women to do more useful work. And they do. There are mothers who are teachers, physicians, clerks and a myriad of other professions.
Naturally, the markets (especially housing) have reacted to this reality (plus a ton of other factors), and the age where you could raise a family with a single income from not-highly-specialized labor is over.
As you point out, social changes have made the strategy of just marrying a man and relying on him to provide for you high-risk, because if he is rich enough to pay for you to stay at home and watch the kids, he is likely also rich enough to replace you with a younger, more attractive woman in a decade or two.
I think that a big point of both men and women going to college is the signaling value both towards employers and towards potential mates. Roughly, the same qualities which are valued in an employee (somewhat smart, willing to submit to an institutional system, ability to achieve long-term goals, etc) are also good qualities in a partner. A degree, especially in a strongly regulated field like law or medicine, will significantly update your estimate on the earning potential of a person. Then there is education as a mark of social class. A man from a family of academics will probably not marry someone who dropped out of high school. (Sure, there will always be some men who prefer to marry 18yo village girls, but "I will just wait for some Trump-like man to marry me" will not work for the vast majority of them.)
I agree that there are probably bullshit degrees pursued by women who really want to graduate college with an MRS degree, but I think that the answer is not not cut down on women in college, but to push degrees which can actually earn money.
The pattern "Earn a degree, get pregnant at 30 and then become a stay-at-home mum" is obviously not very efficient. But I don't think we will go back to "get pregnant at 20 and then become a housewife". What society should aim for is "Earn a degree, get pregnant at 30 (if you want), re-enter the workforce a few years later (e.g. part-time)".
I guess your point on romantic signaling is probably true, though I hate signaling and reflexively oppose the position on principle.
But I actively disagree that the most important thing is to push moneymaking degrees, on a couple of points.
First, the whole degree-to-job pipeline is overrated. The degree is a proxy for, roughly, intelligence, and as long as you have the real meat you will be able to leverage the actual work. (This is my life story. Started in humanities and trivially switched to work in STEM. I’ll admit software makes this easy.)
Second, while cash obviously matters, I think the most important thing is to learn wisdom and be a good and broad-based parent to your children. This is what my parents were to me. And while I decry the sorry shape of the liberal arts in universities, the actual subject I consider paramount. So rather than just add work training for women, I think bringing refinement and rigor back to the degrees would be better. (And helping people who have no business being in college get out. That’s another topic.)
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The thing is that cooking and washing were compatible with childcare, while teaching and medicine generally are not. Children benefit from stay-at-home moms; I did, anyway. And if your values differ from those of the broader culture, daycare is likely to drag your kids at least part way to that culture.
I know that this isn't practical for all families. But we should try to make it practical for as many families as we can. And for those couples who are on the fence about what to do, we should let them know that it's good for them and their kids.
Edit: Since this discussion started with college, I'd like to add that the liberal arts are valuable for most intelligent people -- the actual liberal arts, not activism in a skinsuit. Making those available in a way that is culturally and economically compatible with housewifery as a life path is a worthwhile goal in itself.
I believe you, but I would still argue that there are opportunity costs. A one-year-old requires a caretaker 24x7, and presumably might benefit from that caretaker being their mother. A ten-year-old requires much less adult supervision. Someone to cook dinner and make sure that they either attend or have called by then is certainly helpful, but 24x7 supervision would be actively harmful.
Now, if your model stay-at-home mom starts having kids age 18 and then has a child every other year for as long as nature will allow, I will grant you that she will have her hands full taking care of her kids for a significant fraction of her work life. But in most Western marriages, it is not like that. Instead, she will have two or three children, which will keep her occupied for a decade, but once her smallest child goes to school, she will have a lot of time on her hands for the better part of her work life.
I am not arguing that working 40h a week is the only valid model of how to spend your life, and if someone is happy playing video games or join some club or have an OnlyFans career or dedicate their life to gardening, who am I to tell them that they are wrong? Still, having opted not to have earned a degree seems somewhat likely to limit your options at self-actualization, and earning a degree remotely at age 40 is likely going to be harder.
I think that this is unavoidable in general. I would advise to raise kids in a culture you are at least halfway comfortable with. Even with homeschooling and everything, you can not completely shield your child from the local culture. Sure, there are some who try, like some Muslim families trying to raise their daughters according to Sharia law in the middle of Western cities, but I think that their success is mixed at best.
Personally, I would not fret overly much about it. I was raised (mildly) Roman Catholic, and it did not stop me from seeing the light of Igtheism at 15 or so. While I am sure that there are some horror stories about some overachieving kindergarten teacher telling white kids to hate themselves, I think the median version of the SJ creed taught to kids is much less harmful. Like Santa Claus, blank-slatism is the sort of lie which is unlikely to harm the development of a kid much. They can still learn about the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis and HBD later.
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Bring back the dame school, but don’t let feminists within 100 yards of it.
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I think this is leaving out another viable life path that satisfies all the criteria you're ascribing to women:
Have a kid with a man who has proven wealth/means, then demonstrate his paternity or marry him. Then have a court of law require him to pay for the child's upbringing until age 18. If married then you can get some alimony too out of the divorce. And a bonus there is you can then find another man who might be willing to pitch in some support too and 'double dip'. For some reason the term 'divorce' doesn't appear anywhere in your original post.
And from the man's perspective, either of those is probably a worst case scenario.
Either the man is a cad who doesn't WANT to support kids and is now tied to them for years on end.
Or it was a man who really wanted to have a family for the long term, would have supported them anyway, and yet gets them ripped away on the say of the woman he trusted, with no real recourse.
Woman gets her support and control, man gets...
And we're seeing the emergence of a strange additional option as well:
Pop out a billionaire's kid on the downlow and he pays a very generous amount to keep you and the child in comfort even if he's not particularly involved, as long as he thinks it is actually his kid. I won't pretend this path is all that common, though.
This really goes AGAINST your point here, though:
The 'reproduction thing' seems to come easiest to men who are the least trustworthy, most ruthless, most wealthy, and generally most 'aggressive' about what they want. Yes, some of them can ACT like they're trustworthy, but only as a means to get what they want. And this works about as well as being 'actually' trustworthy.
Being 'trustworthy' just makes you an easier mark. You'll accept a woman you believe is committed to you, do EVERYTHING you can to prove your commitment, and she can still leave on a comparative whim and hang support obligations around your neck on the way out.
The game theory here is not favorable to being the guy who truly commits, when the risk is the woman has no reciprocal investment and can defect at will, and 'retaliating' against her is legally forbidden.
In short, I think you're arguing as though women shoulder most of the risks in the current romantic equation.
When there's a serious argument that it works the opposite way. Society is built around protecting women from any and all threats.
This includes the threat of homelessness and poverty. Men, generally, foot the bill for all this protection, and yet are also forced to pay out to the particular woman who defects from them on top of that.
And so the man is risking HUGE sums of his personal wealth (bought by his own time, efforts, sweat, etc.) to TRY to keep the woman around.
And men have to offer some extreme value ON TOP of that protection (because the protection is provided as a baseline by society) to acquire a woman's commitment, and even then he has no recourse if she decides she doesn't want to stay anymore. And if he married her, she gets to siphon off resources from him to support herself and her kids ANYWAY.
Leaving out this side of the equation makes your overall argument here more dubious, in my opinion.
(and I will surely admit that women DO risk being severely injured or killed by their partner, but this is strongly mediated by factors that she can also control).
You’re right about divorce as a path for extremely cynical women. If I were writing about the man’s perspective, this comes front and center. He’s devoting so much of his life to her! What if she just takes it from him, with the blessing of the courts? It’s genuinely unsettling. But, in that other hypothetical post, I wouldn’t be talking about cads. I don’t think (or hope) my audience is cads, or people interested in cads, and the same goes for the female equivalent.
Divorce is honestly another point of risk for an honest woman, just like it is for an honest man. Risk hitting your mid-thirties with no loyal man, and either no children or worse - children? It’s kind of awful to think about. But the post was already meandering a little for my tastes.
Yes, of course I agree a man needs standards. I have standards, and I insisted my wife meet them (kindly and firmly in the dating stage - and no, not about petty things like how I wanted my breakfast cooked).
But that doesn’t undercut the fact that what underwrites those standards is a man’s reliability and character. I’ve been performing a little personal ethnography on this forum, and in my own life, and the men who are happily married tend to be extraordinarily solid and secure in their opinions, thoughtful and caring about women’s perspectives (NOT a dogwhistle for mainstream feminism), and with a great focus on their own ability to be trusted. And this is something that good women, women who clearly enjoy the high opinions of their husbands and of me (should I meet them), deeply desire.
Anyway. I don’t think women have greater risks in dating, or that men do, for that matter. I tend to agree that the risks are mostly around discerning good from bad, and that’s hairy both ways. But learn good from bad one must do, or at least learn the methods of getting wiser friends to help, if one wishes to make anything of oneself. But I’m sympathetic to your worries, and hope you find a woman who allows you to lay them aside.
I'M not the one you have to worry about.
The Zoomers are not okay.
And the women are not happy.
Your platitudes appear to be missing something LARGE, and it really isn't explained by men being inadequately reliable.
It’s entirely possible that the women are unhappy because gen Z guys(I won’t get into the discussion of what qualifies as a man) are inadequate and that their standards are either very reasonable or only slightly high. Porn and gambling addictions, for example, are much more widespread in this generation than in the previous ones, and male employment is often less stable.
Its MORE likely that Gen Z guys are "inadequate" because
A) They've grown up in a society that both teaches them they're worthless AND that women are inherently better than them. (also gives them almost no real 'purpose' to contribute to)
B) The women they interact with have ALSO ingested that same message, and will reinforce it to those men.
C) There's literally no reward for resisting this message, and fewer women are worth BECOMING adequate for.
I dunno, I think that's the basic causal situation. There's literally no other way you can spin it.
And this just swept up young guys on its own? A bunch of guys just UNILATERALLY, for no reason whatsoever, decided not to become worthy? Just like that?
Why?
The end result being that women are unhappy seems incidental to the devaluation of masculinity.
"What's the reward for passing the years grinding hard and working on yourself?"
"If you're lucky, maybe one day you'll meet a girl who'll settle down with you after she's had her fun."
"What's the reward for passing the years gooning and goombling?"
"If you're lucky, maybe one day you'll meet a girl who'll settle down with you after she's had her fun."
"Well then..."
Well that's the first time I've read the term "goombling.'
But yeah, and the second course does at least offer a small (vanishingly small, but present) chance that you actually hit it rich and can, if you're halfway smart, parlay that into some semblance of 'happiness.'
The former course has a lot of fringe benefits, yet the task of convincing another human being to come into and stay in your life for the long term does NOT become much easier the more effort you put into it. The social pressures you're fighting are simply beyond what any one person could oppose. Hence even billionaires don't bother.
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Ha yeah. A good instance of "Should you reverse any advice you hear?"
The struggling young man who finds it plausible that he needs to be more trustworthy to attract women instead needs to dial his perceived trustworthiness down and "toxic masculinity" way up—and to see as examples, "am I fighting for a spot no one wants??!!" or "somewhat cute, non-threatening appearance" from the "guy who likes you but you're not quite attracted to him starterpack."
The modal trustworthy husband and father of two gets deadbedroom'd and is invisible to other women when he's not wearing his wedding ring; a husband and father of two who murders his wife and daughters gets love letters in prison:
Must be bro's elite trustworthiness.
Yup.
I happen to think being trustworthy will in fact help you find a good woman.
But it won't hope you attract women in general.
Which is a necessary step in most cases.
I've realized that the 'cheat code' is buying a motorcycle and getting ostentatious tattoos and at least one (1) subversive piercing. Nips, large gauges in the ears, Prince Albert, I think even nose piercings 'work' for guys these days. Its an old, OLD trick but it still works if you're willing to at least LARP the part.
This signals enough riskiness to get the initial interest going.
Meanwhile, if you're good looking AND you work as hard as you can to be perceived as 'safe' and 'reliable' you're effectively squandering that natural advantage, and you're more likely going to be defected against when she realizes there are no consequences for doing so, you won't even raise your voice to yell at her.
I watched it happen to a buddy of mine. He was the literal pinnacle of 'ideal' hubby. Successful (heir to a large regional chain of interior decor stores, pulling down six figs), charming and witty, even though he's not an Adonis, popular among his friends, takes the wife on trips, indulges her whims, but also makes sure he has time for his own (nerdy) hobbies. Not a pushover, but would never dream of striking or upsetting her. Marries a very mid but definitely cute wife. They have an expensive fairy-tale wedding, honeymoon, etc. etc.
And three years into the marriage, for no reason that I can even decipher, she just up and leaves him, he tries counseling, gives it every single try for reconciliation, and no dice. THANKFULLY it ended up being an 'uncontested' divorce with no kids (despite him being VERY CLEAR up front that he wanted kids, remember that family business he's got).
In an 'ideal' world this should never happen, he played everything 'by the rules.' And still lost.
A good woman, of course, won't do this, but if you're a safe, 'boring' type of guy then you won't have your choice of woman to even try and zero in on the 'good' ones.
If you choose a couple stats to max out, trustworthy probably shouldn't be one of them.
In recent years, I've wondered if this will soon come full circle and being tattoo-less and piercing-less (especially the former) will become the rebellious and subversive thing to do, given their overall saturation and their increasing association with numale-adjacent caricatures. In the MMA realm, for example, I've seen Costa*, Dricus, the Russian Muslim fighters, etc. get confused praise (in the unironically "wtf I love [x]?"-type sentiment) for being tattooless in a sport where tattoos are commonplace, like a "fuck you" to mainstream Western trends and a greater signal of confidence to not hide behind ink. Although if you're a famous MMA fighter, your stats (tattoos or not) are already high.
* Costa actually has at least one tattoo, but it's hard to see so people think of him as tattooless. He's tattooless-passing, I suppose.
The mainstream rejoinder would be that your buddy must had been No True Trustworthy Husband or his wife would never have left him—that he must had become lazy or neglectful after marriage-trapping her, was financially or emotionally abusive behind the scenes, or thought of her as a broodmare for the family business. He's not entitled to her as his wife and she's free to change her mind about children and the marriage after the wedding; YTA for having such a potentially abusive man-child with his nerdy hobbies and faMiLy bUsInEsS as your "buddy."
Yep. But I spent a lot of time hanging out with him in a variety of circumstances and I have not gotten an INKLING that he was anything other than what he presents himself as. Never heard a whisper of an accusation of abuse.
If there was ever a paradigm of the "non-toxic" masculinity that feminists proclaim they want (I know, I know), he was it.
The biggest critique you could level against him is that he is a bit of a manchild when it came to hobbies. But he had his life completely in order otherwise, he was REALLY GOOD at his hobbies (Magic: The Gathering is one of them) and perhaps most importantly: his wife was into nerdy hobbies too!
While they were married his wife went and got her Master's Degree, so I could have ascribed their split to her getting 'overeducated' compared to him. But shortly thereafter Bro went and got his MBA so he was matching her beat for beat.
Learning what happened to them soured my last bit of optimism for forming relationships in the current era. She was a 6 at best, raised in a traditional family, had a relatively low body count (i.e. they met while she was in college, around age 21, so she hadn't had that much time to sleep around), she was a sorority girl (and not the blonde bimbo stereotype), he had tons of money, was willing to spend it on her, no red flags, and while they were together they pretty much presented as having everything they wanted. And it wasn't enough to make it even 4 years into a marriage (they dated for about 2.5 before they got engaged).
My one theory is that she watched a few of her friends go through breakups and complain about their men and got incepted with the idea that either she could do better if she left him (i.e. she married too early) or that he was going to become an abusive monster at some point and she better get out before then.
Sounds like it's a college/no-kids problem to me. Why didn't she want kids with this super financially stable, nice guy? She mustn't have really loved him. Expensive wedding is also a bad sign. Obviously you know more about this matter.
Sometimes you just roll a bad woman, I think she wasn't the right class for him. There's a certain kind of highly educated woman who just wouldn't divorce a nice guy like that due to how unseemly it would be, who acts rationally (aside from more politics/feels stuff), who's well-off but doesn't need an expensive wedding. There are gradations in the upper middleclass where you find such women. On the other hand, these are the kind who'd never settle with anyone with an MBA, the kind who looks down on investment bankers for being too stupid and greedy since everyone in the social circle is assumed to be rich. Rare, perhaps vanished breed.
Problem is she presented mostly green flags.
A lot of anxiety lurking under the surface, but she carried herself well, was active in her Sorority, held down a job, had a decent education background, and close family too.
I spent a lot of time with both of them over Covid times since it was very hard to socialize otherwise and we lived close to each other. I would have judged her as a woman with a "good head on her shoulders" and generally "responsible." Slightly antisocial but was not unpleasant to be around.
She's pushing 30 now, and I have it on very good authority that she spends most of her evenings playing MMOs and other video games, no social life to speak of. Its very much a damn shame. Just never gained maturity?
Its not clear what she was 'fleeing' from in the marriage, other than perhaps the ultimate expectation that they would have kids and raise 'em together.
(Absurd simplification) Oh, so she's [platonically] transgender, got [by that definition] gay married, and it just didn't work out.
She might have been running from (or in this case, devoured by) that thing.
It's very hard to describe what that thing is. People call it "anxiety", but that's just a symptom (or how it manifests) and not the actual problem. I am, related to, and know a higher-than-average number of people like this.
I legitimately think it's related to sociopathy in the sense that predicting and manipulating human outcomes is important, and a skill that we have, but whereas sociopathy typically manifests itself as "I don't care lol, just be as destructive as possible" this is "I actually care a great deal about positive outcomes (and will create them whenever possible) and have an absurdly internal locus of control (and start malfunctioning when this is disrupted for no good reason- these people tend to be political contrarians for that reason too), but the prediction software that returns answers for how other people will react to me is failing to come up with the correct answer".
In technical fields, people call this "burnout". The symptoms are the same and what causes it is... also the same- software people will recognize this as that thing that happens that makes you far more tired than usual if you make no progress on a particular problem for a long time (configuration problems and poor documentation tend to trigger this).
That thing is what happens when that burnout generalizes to human beings when you have that defect that makes you see human beings as indistinguishable from other systems more generally. Everyone else has instincts to deal with this, or doesn't deal with it as hard because the volume is turned down, but we don't.
I don't have a solution for that thing other than "find other people who are also afflicted with [or understand/have a lot of trust in people who exhibit] that thing, then stick close to them". That is likely no longer an option in this case.
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This is simply the best way of putting it. The conversation on these issues is always completely upside down. When it comes to reproduction, women hold virtually all of the power. Holding men more accountable for it will have little effect, save only though indirect splash damage at best.
I would add the caveat that women hold most of the power over the majority of men WHILE a particular class of man is still able to ultimately get what he wants and ignore the consequences at will. So women can still CLAIM that men are privileged and running things b/c at the very top levels, this is still true.
And this is the lesson I 'fear' young men are learning. If you're an average man, your life is going to be subjugated to female whims from birth until almost death. If you piss off, harm, or otherwise insult a woman you will be pilloried and probably locked out of the reproductive success game entirely.
UNLESS you're in the top 20% of males by status. Wait now its 10%. Now its 1%. Now its .1%. Those guys can flout social rules, laws, and ignore female complaints to just take the thing they want at will. Its good to be the king.
Guys who grow up being viscerally aware of the game and their place in it are either going to compete AGGRESSIVELY to take one of those top slots, and thereby keep raising the level of competition to even higher levels, or will drop out entirely rather than support the 'rigged contest.
The nasty part here is that a lot of the hazards you mention have ceiling effects that allow defectbots to ignore them at the margin. A career criminal can't have his income garnished because all his income is off the books, he can't have his career damaged more than it already is because he already fails background checks and criminals don't care, and he can't have his dating prospects damaged because they already consist solely of "women who don't realise, or don't care, that he's a career criminal" (with admittedly an exception for time he actually spends in jail if he's caught raping/beating his girlfriend).
This is a special case of the more general issue that if you grade on a strict pass/fail with stringent conditions for passing, then the middle road and low road lead to the same place, which is a big problem if you want people to pick the middle road over the low road (and for all values of "you" that are thinking consequentially from the standpoint of society, you do; you are not God making a judgement after the end of the universe, which means that simply exterminating everyone who didn't pull off the high road tends to end badly and even if somehow implemented is likely to kick you below replacement).
Yep.
There's a 'clumping' effect on the bottom end when there aren't strong incentives to stay in the middle road (due to that not getting you what you want, and STILL carrying the risk of losing it all) and its too hard to climb to the top rungs (without a ton of help).
You either have so much wealth that you can afford to lose tons of it, or you have like NO wealth, and don't give a single care due to having nothing TO lose.
And as you indicated (and as young men are noticing...) if you can't catapult yourself to the former position of fuck you, then it starts making MORE sense to drop down the to latter, lower position, because at least you can do what you WANT to do, rather than play by rules you can't change and punish you heavily.
If the middle position is the only one where punishments matter, very few will want to stay there, even if its overall best for the collective.
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I would definitely agree that risk aversion is behind the pitch of college and jobs to young women. Part of that is rational- the bottom whatever percent of both sexes is less appealing than it was in the fifties(and this goes for men too), and how are you supposed to make sure you find a commitment-oriented ‘good’ guy anyways? I predict that, contrary to the usual pattern, a dating app which vetted the applicants on basic questions(stable and full time employment, criminal record, etc) would have more women than men, at least if it wasn’t just a matchmaking service. Part of this is also irrational; there’s a cottage industry dedicated to convincing young women that the risk of being mistreated by men is much higher than it is, so don’t get too wound up about the commitment you desire.
I maintain that the risk of Mr and now-Mrs good enough marrying, provided that they’re basically compatible adults seriously intending to make it work, is very low, but that many people ignore one or the other or the third condition. There are simply fewer Mr and Miss good enoughs than there used to be, it seems like modern secular(here used in the sense of ‘in mainstream society rather than a subculture’ rather than to mean ‘non-religious’) dating worries more about vapid nonsense than about big picture compatibility, lots of people don’t have the serious intent of making it work no matter what, etc.
I don’t have a good solution on a society wide level.
This seems like an unavoidable but broadly ignored factor.
The rough numbers really suggest the supply of 'marriageable' women is shockingly low. The demand is as high as ever. A young, stable, fertile woman is desired by men of almost all ages, even if they have no intention of marrying her.
And I'm sure its also the case that when it comes to sheer reproductive fitness, men have become lower quality too.
I do have some, but they're not politically viable (until they are).
I have wondered if we could create a new version of the marriage contract: "Enhanced Marriage," which both parties can opt into that makes it MUCH harder to get divorced AND adds additional legal duties on both sides (and presumably some additional benefits) so that they are tied more strongly together. And maybe this starts to shift the equilibrium.
But this probably doesn't address the fact that there are just fewer relationships forming in general.
There was an attempt at this with covenant marriage, but it doesn't seem to have accomplished much. That said, it'd be interesting to hear from mottizens who live in states where that's an option. It looks like it was watered down to make the law acceptable to the mainstream and undermined by the availability of no-fault divorce in other states.
And, while I can't speak for all social conservatives, I'd be reluctant to support any new version of this so long as Obergefell stands.
From "The Right to Marry" by Sister Y:
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I’m interested in your view on how the quality of men and women has gone down, and as a treat, why. If I were to give a description, I’d say that the lowered quality was literally that they weren’t interested in making things work, rather than separate elements. That sort of intentional, serious attitude towards life is basically what you want out of a partner as table stakes, right? That they’ll have the hard fights with you and want to get through them instead of taking them out on you, that they’ll commit materially sooner rather than later, that they’ll stick with you if things aren’t breezy. Obviously material concerns matter too, but people (in my circle, maybe unrepresentative) make plenty if they’re even slightly dedicated. What’s your take?
I think to be honest most Americans are, to borrow a phrase from the Chinese, unserious as a people. Their need for an easy life and for getting exactly what they want exactly how and when they want it. It’s the mentality of a child. And I think this harms dating and marriage because being in a relationship with another living person requires work and compromise and commitment that more often than not people are less willing to accept.
I'm not convinced that the Chinese are so different as a people that they don't try to get exactly what they want exactly the way they want, whenever they can. Just look at the way media is altered for their market.
Sure the Chinese are not immune to “fuck you, I got mine” but at least in the past they were generally pretty capable of buckling down and sacrificing personal desires for the good of the family or the nation. Whether they still are remains to be seen, that hasn’t been tested on a large scale in quite a while.
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Is that what the Chinese say? I’d be interested to read a translated article or whatever if you happen to have one.
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I mean, to start with the obvious, the things that past generations would have considered important are just present at a lower rate. Stable full time employment is down among men(and this is the rough equivalent of 'access to farmland' that would have been very important in ~1850, don't @ me about how way back when jobs weren't important because they weren't really a thing). Women are fatter, more mentally ill, less religious, worse at home ec, and, yes, higher body count(not as high as redpillbros and incels seem to believe, but higher than in 1950). Pot in the fifties was fairly rare, and regardless of your opinions on its effects for the median user, it does seem to turn at least a substantial minority into giant losers when they weren't previously. Gambling addicts back in the day before draftkings were obvious. And it was just understood that if you were seeing a girl you proposed in a matter of weeks, maybe months on the high end(I'm not exaggerating the timeframe), making commitment up front more of a thing on offer from the average guy.
Now some of that is feminism(let's not kid ourselves about first wave-second wave-third wave- it all bears some responsibility, even with delayed impacts). Some of it is new technology(vape pens, gambling websites, gig work). Some of it is other societal trends, such as lengthy education and glorifying mental illness. Feminism definitely bears the blame for societal unwillingness to even talk about the problem; most people actually want a relationship in accord with fairly conventional gender roles and feminism at every stage has invested itself in abolishing gender roles, even in little stuff(women wearing pants may not, at the end of the day, matter very much, but it was a controversy in its day).
Gender roles are important, at the end of the day, this just basic set of expectations that each spouse has their job which comes before anything else. But at the end of the day, a 'just get rid of x' solution is almost always woefully insufficient. At a guess if we just threw feminism out we'd be wanting it back- probably because Andrew Tate would be the replacement. The structures which made a nonfeminist society- the strong gender roles- have to come back first.
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If true, this sounds like a business opportunity, and not a particularly obscure one at that. Dating apps are basically all trying to figure out ways to get more women to use them, but I can't think of any apps that have tried this kind of verification. The closest I can think of are things like "The League", which requires users to submit an application (which consists of your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, apparently?) and have it approved by the company before they can use the app, which is much different in that presumably they're not evaluating "basic questions".
Oh there are some with that kind of verification, but they're usually for rich people.
That would be very ironic, since I imagine the kind of woman who would most value full time employment and the lack of a criminal record in a man would be unlikely to be described as "rich".
I suggest you go to the local courthouse and observe the number of women in felony rooms waiting for a man they are not married to to have his case called.
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Given hypergamy, I wouldn't be surprised if a woman's wealth - or at least her earnings - are positively correlated with how important she considers her partner to be gainfully employed and to lack a criminal record (which might not lower status in all contexts, but which would provide greater risk in the man's ability to keep earning money).
My (admittedly clumsily made) point was more that rich women's male peers, including their matches on the apps, are almost universally employed and non-criminal, so such verification would be mostly useless. The distinction would be more useful for underclass women, for whom the verification system would reveal actual information about their potential male partners.
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Can you rephrase the first bit of this? I'm not following.
‘The tail risks of marriage(abuse, divorce, infidelity) between reasonable and eligible people who are compatible and committed to making it work regardless of the cost are lower than commonly believed’.
Ahh ok I see. Yeah thanks for this! I like to think I'm a good fit for marriage, but the tail risks definitely keep me awake at night. It sucks.
Women tend to take after their male partners; if you're dating a marriageable woman and the two of you know you're compatible then don't worry about divorce, just pop the question, because she'll copy your 'just make it work, no matter the cost' mentality.
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If you have a woman who you’re dating who is a good candidate, learning to trust her goes a long way, and trusting yourself the rest. “Learning to trust” is not an abstract journey of the soul. Select things to trust her, and yourself, on, and see how they go when things get hairy. Stressful situations are effective here!
Buyer beware: I’m not recommending a good time, here.
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You know, maybe that would be good advice if the circumstances were different, but you have to remind yourself that picking up 30 year old women who have had multiple partners is signing up for a high divorce rate and possibly raising the children of others. All in a society where all the shit you've accumulated over years of not actually getting any from these women can just be handed over to them through divorce.
Men would happily sign that deal blinded by lust, but it's 30 year old women we're talking about. If you're a trustworthy man, you either are lucky enough to get married young or you're fucked. That's just how it is now. Blowing up marriage has consequences.
Changing the incentives means radical social reform that actually forces people to pair bond before they have economic independence. Anything less is simply going to be as unsustainable as what we have now.
When you say
I think you are misreading what OP said:
The "ideal" state described is not waiting till 30 and then figuring out who to pick. It is to pick around University and stick with your choice. The children (and marriage) wait until the woman feels safe both by herself (that is she has education and a job to support herself and potential children, if something were to happen to her bf/husband) and with her bf/husband. That is he proves that he is reliable etc.
This is certainly not ideal when it comes to having (especially many) kids. The biological window is limited (not only for women). But it is a perfectly rational choice of action fo women if you want to mitigate the risk of having a terrible husband who will not treat you well.
But that's my point. This desire for safety is antisocial.
And before we start arguing that this is an unreasonable or special demand, let me remind you that men can still, to this day, be forced to fight and die for society.
If you want your society to continue to exist, you're going to have to sacrifice some comfort and take some risks to make sure that there is a next generation of your people. Or we can just live in anarchy and have no loyalties to each other until we get conquered by more sensible people. I so far see no reason to believe there is an alternative.
I understand you are not American. From my very American perspective: yes, I registered for selective service, which is our national male military draft program. I volunteered for some hypothetical draft. I predict if they ever to use the draft in anything other than an apocalyptic impossible situation in which mainland America was invaded, it would be an unmitigated shitshow. Our culture used to have a commonly used draft. A significant minority of American men were called to military service including in peace time to maintain a standing military. The Vietnam War ruined it beyond recovery.
What if Vietnam was just because the US govt didn't really care about Vietnam? They cared a lot about Vietnam and it wasn't a small war... but Vietnam doesn't really matter to the US in any direct sense.
Imagine that anyone who protested the Vietnam war was sent straight to prison. Burn your draft card? Straight to prison. Publish unpatriotic journalism? You'd better pray it's only prison.
When a government really cares about winning, they conduct a full mobilization of society, they align the media and everything so it all points in the right direction. Good old fashioned atrocity propaganda, not Jane Fonda.
Now the machinery might not be there to do this anymore, I foresee problems in trying to mobilize zoomer men for gruelling industrial drone war. But it's possible in principle.
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Speaking as someone who is against the draft, I am also against forcing women into performing an equivalent sacrifice.
We're in the age of automation and exponential productivity growth. Surely the solution is simply to guarantee security and flourishing for everyone. I cannot imagine any version of the world where solving that engineering problem is actually harder than convincing millions of women to sacrifice their security.
For goodness sake, we're already most of the way there!
As for being conquered, I'm willing to bet everything on NATO. A planet-spanning military alliance that spends more on weapons than the rest of the world combined will not be overcome so easily. China might get Taiwan back, but they're not going to land troops in San Francisco any time soon. In the long run, AI will change the nature of the game in a way that makes population dynamics obsolete long before any power rises that can credibly challenge NATO.
First, this seems entirely unprincipled given that NATO (and its proxies) relies on conscription ultimately.
Second, I see here no reason to believe that AI or any sort of productivity improvement changes the base reality that it is people who exist who shape society. Japan's automation strategy is a pragmatic mitigation but doesn't change the destination of their society.
What the hell kind of twisted definition of "flourishing" are we using here that people being so secure and domesticated they won't have children counts? It's a zoo you're building.
Some of NATO's proxies rely on conscription, but I think that NATO itself doesn't, at least as long as it only cares about defense and not taking the offense. I think that nuclear weapons by themselves are already sufficient to guarantee NATO's security, and maintaining an effective nuclear deterrent does not require the labor of so many people that a developed country would ever realistically need to use conscription to get the necessary manpower, as opposed to using less forceful means of recruitment such as money, patriotism, and the mystique of nuclear weapons.
I don't understand why people are so keen to forget that Korea and Vietnam were both very much in the atomic age. I can understand people in the 50s thinking nukes would be the end of war, but we're surely free of such illusions? At best they're the end of world wars. Maybe.
Being generous you could place the end of mandatory military service and the West's choice to rely on professionals in the 60s, which is less than a century ago and did not result in an end of conscription laws being on the books. If it reverted it wouldn't be the first time something like that happens.
I wouldn't exactly take it for gospel that you'll never be handed a rifle, not when you can lawfully be handed one right now on a whim of "national security".
Korea and Vietnam were not wars of national defense for the US, USSR, and China. My point is that nukes are probably sufficient to deter other powers from launching major attacks on your own territory, not that they are sufficient to put an end to all forms of war.
Also, I phrased my comment poorly. I was not trying to say that NATO does not or will not use conscription. Clearly, some NATO members already use conscription right now. I was trying to say that NATO, insofar as it actually is a defensive alliance, does not actually need to use conscription. But to some extent it uses conscription anyway.
That said, maybe I'm wrong. I do not think that NATO would abandon, say, Finland or Poland to a Russian invasion out of fear of nuclear war - since this would mean the end of NATO as a viable alliance. But certainly a country would prefer to be able to fight off an invasion in the first place, rather than just relying on waiting for a NATO counterattack to liberate it at some point later.
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One thing to note is that in WW2 people were ultimately forbidden to volunteer (in the British Army, anyway). Relying on patriotism creates big bulges of recruits that are hard to process at the start of the war, after important event etc.
Conscription works much better for any serious war because it allows you to stagger your intake, make sure the impact of losses is spread through the country, and get a wider variety of applicants.
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I should note that Japan too has recently discovered the joys of ActuallyIndians. If you go to any convenience store or quite a lot of chain restaurants, all the staff are Indian now and have been for several years. Maybe since Covid?
It’s less so outside Tokyo but I imagine that’s a matter of time.
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I can agree on the broad strokes here, but the marriage + baby boom that happened in the 50s is a pretty evident counterexample. The Industrial Revolution was mostly played-out by that point and there were plenty of creature comforts and trappings of modernity, yet the marriage rate ticked up by quite a bit. Any story on birthrates or gender relations that is just a broad trend of the modern world sucking, and which doesn't take into account the booms that happened in the 50s is woefully incomplete IMO.
My take is a bit different from yours. It's that second-wave feminism in the late 60s and 70s let women earn their own keep, which meant marriage became far less of a necessity for basic survival. This made women choose men more for "love" than provisioning, which made us regress to our biological roots. Women all naturally want a high-value man and so they broadly chased after the same small percentage of guys (in other words, women's standards went up). These lucky few men got their pick of the lot and could treat women like barely-sentient fleshlights. The dating market effectively got worse for everyone except the lucky few guys, and now women broadly hate men since their opinions are formed on the small % that have the least incentive to commit. This led to a collapse in marriage rates, which ended up collapsing birth rates as well.
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
Baby boom was in a sense a last gasp. Huge wealth changes the equation. But it was the specific experiences of the baby boom that sparked feminism; when second-wave feminists deride the life of the housewife, they are and can only be specifically talking about the baby boom housewife. Daughters saw what life was like for their mothers, and they wanted out. You can’t declare feminism as a premise; feminism was, like any social movement, a reaction to prevailing conditions. Those conditions were, first, the Victorian era and second, the baby boom.
The advice is distilled from my own life and my successful friends and coworkers, who are by and large married and with or currently having children. It’s not advice on how to get laid, or how to attract women initially (I have opinions but consider it besides the point), but how to convert a relationship into a companionable and loving marriage with children, which is what I consider valuable. Take it or leave it, I guess.
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This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
There's a fair criticism of pickiness, and not to put unspoken words in your mouth but if you're implying it, you're only implying it, that the righties wouldn't want the chainsmoker at the bar. A lot of those young men are picky, but it's turnabout from the woman being more picky. Not to cast blame here because there isn't blame, the behavior from both sexes results from society. But blaming society is also a folly, might as well blame the sun for rising, for the good it can do to change it.
You're right and you're wrong. We're in the most narrow slice between past and future where you will approach rightness. Some of these men couldn't get dates if they were born 10 years earlier, or 20, 30, 40, 50--except far enough back and then things change, because dating is a hyper-modern activity, as is equally the degree of autonomy that men and/but far more women, have in romance. Go far enough back and dating doesn't exist, it's courtship, a bit farther back and courtship lands between betrothal and marriage. Farther back and it's pure arranged marriage, and far enough back and it's men dragging women and girls away from the primitive domiciles of their slain husbands, brothers, and fathers.
That violence is so relevant. Most men never reproduced, each of us is the legacy of those few who had many wives and many children. Because those were the traits of our most ancient forefathers, this urge courses through our veins. We're happier and better as couples, but even while you are (I assume) a married man, and to cast no aspersions, I assume you still notice the beautiful waitress, or young woman at the gym or working as a paralegal. You're not blind, you appreciate it viscerally because it's biological. Or maybe you're better than me, which I probably believe myself; wiser, more mature, and you actually don't really think about it. Still you would understand generally men are like this, even the most faithful of husbands.
Most women did reproduce, but up until the 20th century, pretty much no women anywhere on Earth -- not enough to change the behavior of the sex -- had a choice in who would be the father of their children. Men ravished, women were ravished. This is our nature, it is what our environments selected. There was never environmental pressure nor enough advantage conferred for men, as a sex, to apprehend some ineffable and holistic quality of "wife and mother material" beyond the purely physical. She's young, she has wide hips and nice breasts, good enough. Equally, there has never been a reason for women to acquire the mirror of that trait, just as men didn't get to reproduce, women didn't get to choose not to.
Then very, very suddenly, for the first time in the history of our species, most women became the ones who chose. I don't like a lot of the points I could branch to from here, but what is certain is that no less than 50% of women simply lack the good judgment to make that decision, and oh boy is that rate identical for men. See I don't think the damage is autonomy itself, not dates, not those men who can't get dates. The damage comes from a beast of many facets, all of them culture, but the cruelness in its eyes is named fictive love and soulmate. Women look for it, men look for it, who gets it?
Based on divorce rates, the answer seems to be not very many.
Do you seriously believe this? Have you read what people in those eras write? Let’s stay recent, if patriarchal. Tolstoy is exquisitely clear that, in the upper classes of the time, courtship was expected to be somewhat mutual. Marriages where the woman was unenthusiastic went much worse. You see echoes of this in Austen, or Dickens, or any of the other 19th-century European authors of note.
OK, how about further back? Maybe the age of chivalry? Wait a minute, isn’t the model of chivalric love a man trying his utmost to get a woman to cheat - where she can say yes or no? Sounds a lot like she’s controlling who she has kids with, and indeed genetic testing has started to indicate that female infidelity is truly a woman’s way to choose when more traditional methods are removed from her. And that’s not just the West - circa year 1k in Japan the courtly literature is clear on infidelity or intrigue driven by women’s desire.
Obviously there were major cases of rape or abduction. They matter. But women’s choice has been a driving factor in sexual selection for forever. Why else do you think teenage boys so actively, so instinctively, try to impress the girls around them? It sounds like your impression is based less on actual people and more on some BAP fantasy of the Real Gritty Past. And I hope you see how that ignorance could seriously mislead you.
Violence was only a factor in deciding mates in inter-tribe conflicts. Within tribes itself, women will have enough social capital and there would be courtship rituals to have a choice in selecting their own mates. Even in cultures where women are considered to be less valuable than men, they still some some amount of social capital, and especially did so historically because a lot more social cohesion was required for human survival and thriving. People would know everyone else in their tribe intimately. Each woman would typically have many siblings (and brothers) and a father and uncles for her protection. Rape was recognized as a crime and morally wrong inside tribes, it was only not recognised as morally bad when done to your outgroup.
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If this is true you have a golden business opportunity starting a matchmaking business for overworked SF nerds with more money than sense. But my experience talking to people who do this kind of thing is that even those kinds of women have become unreasonably picky.
They found a solution
I naively would have thought some significant minority of them would go for all the transwomen we work with. As best I can tell no one does. It must be more than zero, but so low I somehow don't notice. I certainly notice all the asian wives and half-asian kids.
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I don't think SF nerds are thrilled about:
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This seems directly contradicted by the various attempts at measuring the frequency of baseline human relationships. My understanding is number of friendships, number of relationships, number of sexual partners, number of marriages, number of young people who've never had sex, age of first sexual relationship and so on are all trending in the same direction, and the trend is not a subtle one. If significantly more people are actually spending their lives alone than previously, it doesn't seem possible to me that this part of your argument stands.
The odds are good but the goods are odd part, though, seems perfectly accurate.
Why would the existence of undatable people in every era imply that their frequency must remain constant over time? That's true if datability is entirely genetic or if it's strictly relative (e.g. datability = being in the top 70% [or whatever]). But if animal courtship rituals involve complex, learned social behavior, then you could easily have cultural and environmental shifts that would reduce the number of people with the social ability to do courting effectively, regardless of their motivation or desire.
For instance, it strikes me that in every era, when you see intelligent young people who grew up like Extremely Online young men today (that is: indulged but also isolated, mostly sedentary life between school and home, 0-2 siblings under the care of a pampering mom or nanny, pressured to study hard with no economic constraints well through their early 20s, socializing largely virtually or in adult-controlled spaces, allowed to pursue status by developing obsessive, frivolous solitary or same-sex hobbies) - the introverted ones also commonly end up unpartnered or childless and a little eccentric. That's the H.P. Lovecraft story and it seems like practically the median trajectory for Gilded Age scions especially, but you can find instances all through history and across cultures.
So as more people are raised like this, you'd expect the ranks of the undatable to grow over time, assuming that some level of charisma or social confidence are necessary to inciting female desire in the absence of countervailing factors. It's just the "zoo animals can't mate in captivity" or the "my dog doesn't get along with other dogs" problem.
My understanding of the claim was that the proportion of undateable people wasn't changing:
If the proportion of undateable people is increasing, then it's entirely possible that if you can't get a date now, you could have gotten a date before. That's what it means for the proportion of undateable people to increase.
No ifs about it. It is increasing.
If you look at the WW2 color photos the government commissioned of daily life, grotesquely obese people were pretty rare back then, basically you can't even spot any, and there's maybe a few mildly overweight ones.
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Right, but OP was specifically critiquing
The point of the trad dating vision, at least as I understand, is not "If only it were The Past, I could have become a more socially adept man, then they'd want to date me." Instead, it's "if only it were The Past, I could have access to more desperate women, then they'd have to date me."
And I think that latter claim is wrong: women's standards are variable above a certain threshold, but there's also a hard limit of interpersonal function below which instinct just says it's better to go it alone.
The parallel question is also interesting to investigate for heterosexual male desire. For instance, if every woman (including every woman in porn) suddenly weighed 4x more, what proportion of men would just opt for permanent singledom? Would any?
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This is only a feature of the mid to late dating app era, this was not the norm until dating apps because these unusually attractive men just could not be in enough places to create the pickiness.
There was a lot of hatred of men already appearing before dating apps really took off.
It isn't a feature of the current era, either, but an excuse guys who can't get dates use to justify why it isn't their fault. Dating apps are easy mode compared to how it used to be. Yeah, you may have a better chance of getting that cute girl to talk to you if you ask her in the real world rather than like her profile on a dating app, but in the real world chances are you aren't going to cross paths. In the real world there isn't a seemingly bottomless well of single women advertising their availability. In the real world you might get a prospect once every couple months maybe she'll go out with you if you ask. I doubt there are many people who had a ton of game pre-app and are now getting nothing but crickets.
I don't see how this makes any other point than that the apps spoiled you as much as the women.
Single women absolutely were advertising their availability. There not being a "bottomless well" effect is exactly what made it better than today.
Do you think the complaints are about the top 1% with a ton of game?
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..were you even alive back then? People went drinking and to clubs and hit on girls there. Most everyone was paired up. I recall reading fucking complaints about how 'everyone is dating someone' in mid sized towns in Germany, by some clueless feminist.
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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.
Women date and, to a lesser extent, marry and reproduce with lots of untrustworthy men. That doesn't mean that the men they don't date are trustworthy, but it does suggest that trustworthiness isn't the primary blocker. And if you're a man who can't get a date and wants one, it's better to focus on changing other aspects of yourself than some fuzzy concept of trustworthiness. Those other aspects being those that fall into the broad category of attractiveness, almost tautologically.
What kind of woman does that? Would you consider her in your league? In the college league?
Besides, this was advice for reproducing, not dating. Dating advice is a different kettle of fish.
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This seems like it's veering towards a No True Scottsman sort of thing. As in "if women don't want to be around you, it's clear they're not at ease in your presence, which is what trustworthiness means, therefore you weren't trustworthy to begin with". We can generally infer "trustworthiness" by how people act in other areas of their life, if they follow the rules and don't cheat, etc. Of course men could behave differently in contexts that involve women, but we'd generally expect a pretty strong correlation. Yet there are plenty of men who are trustworthy in other areas often don't find much success in love.
Here's my own personal take of what it takes to be successful with women:
Being "reliable" isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't say it's an overriding concern most of the time. Perhaps a lack of reliability could be seen as sufficiently negative that a girl who would date a guy wouldn't want to marry him, but I've never seen it be a proactive concern beyond that.
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An appreciable number of women (at minimum) go for guys who observably aren’t reliable and don’t have their shit together.
Yes, but that does not mean the opposite people are not also successful.
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I don't think your observations are at all incompatible with the fairly standard antimodernist narrative. i.e.: that Modernity started hacking away at everything old and sacred without any sense of what was load bearing, and eventually had to hit things that truly were.
The antimodernist narrative is too broad. It typically takes the position that the past was uniformly better than the present, and that it linearly decayed towards the present day. Then antimodernists use this as a cudgel to attack almost anything they don't like about the modern world (HR, woke, college education, etc.)
I'm more of a fan of Arctotherium's take about a really specific aspect of modernity being the root cause, rather than modernity broadly being at fault.
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Well, if you're 'just trustworthy' (and able to provide) I'm confident that you'll be able to have and raise children. Maybe not your own, but...
tee hee =)
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