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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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Women as a Monolith is Wrong

I am having a lot of trouble defining this argument I want to make, because its a classic motte and bailey situation. In the bailey is some version of "women are like x, and x causes all sorts of terrible things like less attraction from men, less kids, and ruination of society". In the defensible motte there is something like "of course not all women, there are some that remain virtuous, but maybe not enough to matter on a societal level".

The Bailey

Addressing the bailey feels trite, but also necessary.

There is a very real contingent of male youths that do not have enough exposure to feminine circles and social ability to navigate it in a way that allows them to acquire life partners. Men without sisters, female cousins, young female friends, etc. Maybe only their mothers and an aunt or two. They fully do not grok women as people and cannot understand them as anything other than sexual objects or distant uncaring scolds. They live in the bailey of this argument. A sad existence. Others only visit to make a point, but they are truly here in a hellish landscape of misunderstanding.

I've seen a few people extricated from this motte. Specific tale: A 6'3 male virgin that mistrusted all women as gold diggers, despite his painful lack of income. He participated in an obscure sport I play. One female participant in the sport was getting married. Invited 6'3 man, and suggested to one of her promiscuous female friends that maybe he just needs to get laid. The 6'3 man is laid at the wedding, turns out much more chill about women afterwards. Can even start dating, if not successfully, at least without full blown conspiracy theories about women trying to steal his non-existent money.

I personally grew up having a bunch of the hallmarks that make this bailey impossible to sustain. I have a younger sister. She was prom queen, sought after constantly in high school, guys in my grade were dating her. I have a mother that was very open to me about her per-marriage dating life. I had female friends that i managed to not sexualize, mostly because they were dating my male friends, and it felt very wrong to go after them. I had one or two ex girlfriends that turned out to be lesbians/bi. They were sort of off limits after i dated them and acted as a reality check on certain male-female interactions. I had female cousins of a similar age that I knew during puberty.

All of that culminates in a vague understanding of the opposite sex. I would have probably summed it up with these not so groundbreaking insights:

  1. Sexual stuff is real and emotional, it does effect them, and you.
  2. Social expectations and behavior matter. if their friends are all hooking up they will too, and vice versa.
  3. Hormones be crazy yo. PMS is real, but dont talk about it, you always lose. Also you are horny as fuck and it is screwing with your mind, her giving you a pencil for a test does not mean she wants to suck you off after class.

I think of these as not so groundbreaking thoughts. But teenagers do have to learn these things. And I do strongly believe that some teenagers are not learning these things or similar basic lessons. It leads to online personalities that feel pretty alien to most adults. We can't fit them into a normal model of human interaction without assuming them to be incredibly anti-female.

The Motte

This is obviously way harder to address. For a reminder, the motte in this case is something like "not all women are bad, its a small number dragging down the reputation of the virtuous ones, and leading the uncertain ones astray"

Any good motte is a spectrum. At the extreme indefensible end you have "basically all women are uber sluts". At the other extreme you have something like "some women are uber sluts, and it makes it hard on the many precious angel good christian girls to find their proper good christian boys for marriage".

Many ways to go after this, not any of them obviously correct.

  1. Fight the Margin. Go after the extreme indefensible case. Point at stats that religiosity has not declined that much. Point at stats that sexual promiscuity has actively declined. Stats that teenage pregnancy has declined etc.
  2. Go all the way after the 'precious angels'. Cite stats on good christian girls being sexually promiscuous, even in self report surveys. Pre marital sex questionnaires. Basically put them on the ultra defensive.
  3. Flip the board, reject the game. The whole christian edifice is unsustainable. We need to make women unequal and lesser, nothing without that will lead to solution of the problem.

I've posted some extremes. You probably will want to quibble with the details. That is expected, its rare to be as extreme as the extremes. But maybe not rare around here.

Again any good motte is a spectrum. If you are somewhere on that spectrum you are in the motte.

I'm not saying that as some kind of "fuck you for being against feminism". Being stuck in the bailey is sad, and I think you have missed out on some formative life experiences. Being in the motte is defensible by definition. But I still want to argue you out of it. Call me a stubborn idiot for that desire.

Sieging the Motte

Any good strategy on a fortified position requires multiple avenues of attack. Or at least completely overwhelming force on one of them.

I will first present possible avenues of overwhelming force.

Women are Humans

For certain avenues of Humanist and Christian thought this should be an overwhelming slam dunk. There is a responsibility on them to figure this thing out. If they need help they should request it. If they are failing they should acknowledge it. If they need more from men they should ask it. If they think what humanity needs involves changing their role in society they should discuss it. Its a sort of virtue ethics writ large.

Men are Broken

One of the big answers to "whats wrong with women in society" is always "well men suck". It is not automatically incorrect, even if something is truly wrong with women.

Men could have evolved for an environment too unlike the one we inhabit today. The stresses of adapting on the cultural and evolutionary level have overwhelmed us. We are seeking the quick bust of a nut, the ephemeral pleasure of a harem over the realistic pleasure and comfort of a loving wife.

Sieging the Motte pt2

Overwhelming force might not be so overwhelming for those steeped in the culture wars. I felt very disingenuous writing that last part. I don't think it is untrue. I do genuinely believe those aspects often overwhelm the brains of most people that get involved in this issue. Its just that for any budding medieval engineers that have heavily considered the aspects of motte defense and offense, they feel juvenile and half baked. Obviously that is where you start on the male and female culture wars. You must remember that there are normies out there that have not advanced as far as the enlightened folks of themotte.

We cultured few can explore the more subtle defenses of the motte. When overwhelming offense does not take the day.

Men and Women are Different

The first thing you might be wondering is "why is this not in the above section?". For most people, obviously men and women are different. There are biological differences based on hormones and genes. But I think what is different is a subtle and key distincter that makes this much less of a forceful offense, and more of a subtle one.

In my mind there is definitely a bunch of science and research that makes it obvious that women are better caretakers from ages -9 months to ~3 years. But there is also evidence that the absence of a father in the following 15 years has a negative impact on the child's earnings and general well-being.

Men and women serve different roles in society. 'hey cjet, why don't you say more obvious crap in your word vomit'. Its sometimes just necessary to state the foundational things. Because sometimes they might not be foundational to everyone.

I do remember having a debate class in high school where one of the proposed topics of "debate" was boys vs girls in sports. There was basically only one girl in the classroom willing to take on the girls side of the debate. Our teacher, a 5'3 self described 'wall flower', had to turn her down. Sometime before or after the story of her single-handedly breaking up a girls fight in the cafeteria by hulk pinning both of the girls to the wall in a stranglehold. Fucking awesome.

Its the algorithms

Its not ladies fault that they have been tricked into wanting so much D. Nor is it men's fault that they can't settle down for a lovely lady. No its the fault of the apps and the algorithms. They simple present too much available D and P. How can human brains overcome such alluring genitalia displayed in front of them and available for their easy consumption via quick hookups?

How about some self control? Crazy idea, but maybe we aren't the first generation to be presented with the concept of hookers. Maybe its called the world's oldest profession for a reason. The time to worry about this is not now, but about 10,000 years ago in ancient Sumer.

I think hookerdom is basically the price of short-term thinking. Choose the hot lady now right in front of you. Or the better match, the less crazy one, the one earning money in her career for the long term option.

If anything we have become too successful at not producing hookers, and not producing men that choose hookers. Or hookers adjacent.

Birth control is too effective

This is what the thought experiment of the last problem inevitably leads into. Ok, we have a hooker/slut culture. The obvious output of such a culture should be a bunch of babies. This doesn't happen because birth control exists. Ergo problem birth control.

We need to remember that birth control is a voluntary choice among at least one of the participants in sexual activity. To get rid of it means we want to substitute intentional choice in offspring for random chance. Which is fine if you are looking for raw numbers, but crappy if you want quality selection and upbringing.

The culture is just like messed up man

Kind of a last ditch psychological warfare against the defenses of the motte. Something is just icky and wrong with the culture. It just feels all wrong. Where is all my sweet strange puss. Why isn't my girl worshiping my hard schlong whenever it happens to get hard. Why aren't enough of my peers acknowledging how awesome and sexy I am.

You are thinking 'hey cjet, don't be an ass', but I'm just typing out thoughts I've had.

I do think there is a basic male urge to have it all. The strange puss, the loving baby maker, the children that look up to you as god, etc. I just also have an economics degree and i realize there are tradeoffs in life. Mostly I am in the "dad" spectrum of tradeoffs right now, with all that entails. Earlier in life I was in the "bachelor" spectrum of tradeoffs and that was fun for a little bit.

There is a philosophical conception of having as many of the nice aspects of tradeoffs as possible all at once. But I'd say that is generally unrealistic for most men. Figure out where you are in life, maybe figure out where you want to be, and adjust life accordingly.

Sieging the motte p3 / Sally forth from the motte

I probably didn't hide it that well. But I do think there are good defenses to the motte in this case of women.

To attack out of the motte, even past the bailey, I think it relies on the uniqueness of women. This goes back to women being human. Women are unique like men. Dumb statement, but also necessary.

Women are among the ultra religious, the ultra slutty, the ultra political, etc. We even shockingly have women that participate in themotte discussions.

I find myself always bothered by themotte discussions on dating. I have an abnormally female contingent of near relatives. One brother one sister. Cousins on my side 8 out of 15 female. Cousins on my wife's side 9 out of 16 female. 3 daughters no sons. 6 nieces, 2 nephews. As closest "grandparents" for my kids, 3 ladies, and one man. Nearest neighbors are a bunch of families with girls and no boys. Some slightly farther neighbors do have boys.

It all comes back to personal experience. I've known many different kinds of women in my life. I'm not a lothario that has dated them all. Simply having a large family has provided a wealth of experience. Any lack of experience there was made up for in the friends I've had over the years.

In general I'd suggest not viewing women as a thing to conquer/trick/subdue. There are intelligent women out there that would make a great partner in your life goals. Especially if those life goals involve family, happiness, well-being.

Adjusting to occupation

Okay the women armies have conquered you, what now? This is an abridged section. I'd like to add more, but its like super late and its been a few too many hours since I started writing.

I think there are significantly different groups of women. Lumping them all into a category is ok if you are going shotgun strategy at a bar. But it us much better if you can learn anything about them beforehand.

I think there are three general axis in modern society for women, and probably for men too. They are also human. But I know more about trying to date women.

Religious/Structured vs anti-religious unstructured

Spiritual/Neurotic vs atheist/rational

Left/Right

Different things will work for you. Different tradeoffs for each. I can think of relationships where one or sometimes two of these are fundamentally at odds but still works. Three off is definitely gonna fail, but probably produce some interesting kids. Speaking of kids, no guarantee they share any of these fundamental axis with you. Good luck raising them, relationship tolerances still apply.

Maybe I was supposed to be positive at some point. Suggest that the war of the sexes will be resolved. or that peace will eventually take over. Nah. That is up to you. There is definitely a trad wife out there for you. I believe that sincerely. You may need to compromise on how trad you want to go (amish anyone?), or how trad she needs to go (maybe she can have a job).

I have helped a few friends find love. I do have a knack for searching and accepting. If you are willing to take help in those directions I am willing to assist. Don't count out your lady friends. Or don't count out your dude bro lovers. I hope for a continuation of humanity via the mingling of genders and the traditional usefulness of penis in vagina cumming.

Feels like an odd thing to end on. But yeah, go humanity.

To all the commenters, given the general outlook on the dating market, do you intend to arrange marriages for your kids and if not, why not?

Yes.

Assuming a person wanted that, how would he go about it? You need all parties to be on board, and I don't see a lot of young women agreeing to this. Among the men, the ones who want this the most are often the least desirable too, which is hardly a good sales pitch.

If a solid culturally-accepted arranged marriage market existed I'd definitely be interested in it. I met my wife through online dating but it was an almighty slog, and I'm not optimistic what the environment is like in 20 years or so when my kids are navigating it.

There are high-fertility communities around you.
If this is something you care about, just drive around town until you see some families that look like you in a minivan. Or go ask the local Honda or Toyota dealership. Or look up local homeschooling groups on Facebook.
Then make friends with these people and have your kids mingle with them and when you'd be thinking of sending them off to college or what not, start talking about it with these people.
It may be impossible, it may not work, but if you care about your kids' future and you spend time doing things like picking which school they should attend, it should be a no-brainer to take some steps to get them a spouse.

I think you misunderstood the “all X are like Y” thing. It’s not literal. All men like sports does not mean literally every man likes sports, it means that that the median man will enjoy sports, and most men will follow sports. So if you’re making a prediction about the interests of a human male, sports in some form, whether playing or watching is going to be a pert of that.

Most modern secular women are exactly like the stereotypes suggest. And so if you’re dating a modern secular woman, you can roughly expect her to behave like a modern secular woman. And so as MSW are the most common women in a modern secular culture, you should roughly expect that the women you are dating is going to have those qualities and beliefs. And so you can either choose to look for places where women are religious and raised to be at odds with modern secular society.

It seems like the median modern western woman is not so upset about being a whore and more upset about being a concubine.

For those in the back, a concubine is a woman who is sexually exclusive and usually dependent on a man without getting the social privileges of his wife, or a formal wedding... but has identical obligations. Remind you of anything in the modern west? You know, like a recent trend? One with a large happiness gap vs married couples driven largely by female satisfaction?

Most women aren't out there whoring, even if they dress like it. The average partner count is, like, three, and it seems like this is more driven up by a handful of very promiscuous women than it is down by female virgins? But most women in America do suffer from lack of ability to get married- it is the man's job to propose, after all.

Of course coupling is down as well- but part of that is simply that the apps have no economic incentive to actually produce stable long term relationships(an app which simply charges for matchmaking would be both very lindy and solve that problem, of course- but the gods of copybook heading haven't returned sufficiently to fund it). Dating apps which try to produce stable and happy couples go out of business.

What you can do? Well, try to set your single friends up, and that may include some amount of 'well, yeah, you ain't gettin' scarlett johansen who never disagrees with you/Pride and Prejudice is a work of fiction'- and you'd be surprised what people are willing to overlook when you can reassure them this person is not a serial killer. Pressure your cohabiting, or seriously dating, friends, to get married(and if you are a man doing this to male friends you do have a real role to play). If you're cohabiting with someone, change that- for the men, you can just buy a ring(most women would rather a smaller one than none), and for the women... uh, if he won't propose, what exactly are you getting out of it?

I don't think concubines had the obligation to be responsible mothers, did they?

Concubines had identical obligations to wed wives in regards to motherhood. Those obligations are, by today’s standards, not particularly responsible parenting.

To quote a line usually attributed to Kissinger: “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

Man would know. Mao once jokingly offered the United States ten million Chinese women, and Kissinger responded by proposing to study their “utilization and allocation”. Presented with ten million prospective ABG baddies, the man commissioned a feasibility study. You can take the professor out of Harvard.

His name was also literally Kissing-(h)er. He'd know.

I, as a rule, tend to avoid the gender wars. I have too much sympathy for the opposition. I’m half-woman on my mother’s side.

I am fond of women, as a whole. Their strengths, as a class, seem reasonably complementary to mine. So do the weaknesses. I am sure there are men capable of independently organizing socialization, remembering the kid’s vaccines, and keeping track of the miscellaneous errata that constitute a functional household. Some of them probably even know when their bedsheets were last changed.

Women make this look effortless, at least until they explain, with considerable justification, how much unacknowledged effort goes into making it look effortless.

Look ladies, I open jars. I get you flowers. I work like a donkey to be a good provider. I even come with bad puns. Some might call me emotionally aware, with the usual parenthetical qualification: for a man.

I appreciate that this doesn’t settle who’s booking the dentist.

So you’ll usually find me sitting on the sidelines, sighing, and wishing we could all get along. Or get it on, given this is an age of declining TFRs.

Unfortunately, “have you considered liking each other?” is an inadequate explanation for how we got here. If I had to offer an overarching, semi-evidence-based account, it would go something like this.

First, the economic necessity of a husband has declined.

A woman with her own income, access to contraception, and some institutional support has substantially more scope to remain single than her grandmother did. Marriage can become something she evaluates on its merits. Is this particular man going to make her life better? Does she actually enjoy his company? What is his position on discovering where the laundry basket lives?

What do you offer her over a dildo?

This is quite rough, given that your grandfather’s principal qualification was “has a job”.

There are obvious benefits to being wanted. There are also uncomfortable implications for those of us who might previously have got by on being needed. A man can be perfectly decent and discover that his contribution no longer clears the threshold. He's competing with the life she already has, including her friends, her peace, and so on. Women tend to be happier without a man than vice versa.

Second, a great deal of socialization has migrated online, taking courtship with it.

The American research showing online meetings displacing introductions through friends is real, even if “online” is a broader category than Tinder and America is not the entire planet. Once enough people go somewhere to find partners, everyone else acquires a reason to join them.

Even the conscientious objectors feel the pressure. You might prefer meeting someone through friends, at a party, or during repeated accidental encounters that gradually become less accidental. Unfortunately, your friends are busy, the party is next month, and the attractive stranger has headphones in.

Your phone is right there.

The apps are seductive because the next attempt costs almost nothing. The cumulative experience can cost quite a lot. You can only resist so much solo, if everyone else caves.

They also make certain qualities much easier to evaluate than others. Height photographs well when expressed as a number. A capacity for affection under adverse circumstances requires considerably more demonstration. Being funny helps, but so does having someone around long enough to hear the joke.

A man who becomes attractive after six ordinary conversations may struggle in a venue where he gets half a second.

Third, expectations can adjust more slowly than circumstances.

Women’s educational and professional gains create some awkwardness for an inherited script in which the man is supposed to be at least as accomplished as his partner, preferably a little more so. If you want someone educated, successful, attractive, available, and enthusiastic about you specifically, the intersection can become rather small.

The female doctor and the well-paid electrician may look financially compatible on paper. Whether they meet, share friends, enjoy the same things, and recognize each other as plausible partners is another question. Money, education, and status overlap without being interchangeable. Men participate in this sorting too. Most of us are wonderfully open-minded about dating outside our milieu, provided the opportunity happens to someone else.

None of this requires a conspiracy. A lot of individually understandable preferences can produce unpleasant collective results.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t heavily weight gender-war rhetoric as a guide to what people actually want.

A surprising number of the angriest voices seem perfectly willing to shack up if they meet Mr or Ms Right. Their sweeping denunciation of the opposite sex contains an exemption clause for someone hot who texts back.

I suspect much of it functions as a fashionable costume for status-signaling, or as emotional armour. “I have rejected this entire category of people” feels rather better than “I would quite like one of them to choose me”.

Specific tale: A 6'3 male virgin that mistrusted all women as gold diggers, despite his painful lack of income. He participated in an obscure sport I play. One female participant in the sport was getting married. Invited 6'3 man, and suggested to one of her promiscuous female friends that maybe he just needs to get laid. The 6'3 man is laid at the wedding, turns out much more chill about women afterwards.

Oh boy.

Call me cynical, but I suspect being 6'3 had something to do with how readily this intervention could be arranged.

Height carries a lot of... uh, weight.

I recognize some of the emotional territory.

My childhood and most of my teenage years were spent rather starved for feminine attention. I was either at an all-boys school or attending extracurricular tuition. There were girls at the latter, but the grind is a harsh mistress.

I spent years bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t getting laid, finding solace mainly in the observation that neither was anyone else in my cohort.

The exceptions were a handful of cool kids from socialite families, apparently operating under a different licensing regime. Everyone else understood that college was where you acquired a reasonable hope of getting poon. If that failed, well, you would eventually get married.

A surprising fraction of Indian men don’t have sex until then. Older research on Indian youth is consistent with premarital sex being far from universal, though self-reports on a taboo subject deserve the usual raised eyebrow. The restrictions apply to women too, of course. Parents tend to loosen the leash once you’re away studying or working, partly because surveillance becomes less feasible.

I remember the angst, the horniness, and the desperation. I remember how much of it subsided once I started having some luck with the ladies.

To this day, I have considerable sympathy for incels in the original, technical sense. It sucks to want a meaningful relationship and be unable to find one. The absence of sex is unpleasant enough. The suspicion that nobody will ever voluntarily make you their person reaches considerably deeper.

Then some well-meaning soul tells you to enjoy being single.

Yeah, thanks buddy. I have the experience, which is why I've avoided it the moment avoidance was an option.

I look at people who struggle and think: there but for the grace of $Deity go I. I could have been dumber, shorter, less funny, less fortunate in where I lived or whom I met. It would be flattering to interpret my eventual success as evidence of outstanding character. I wish.

And then I look at people who seem to have it all, who get laid effortlessly, and grumble to myself.

The cosmic irony of my gay brother being the handsome one is not lost on me. When we went clubbing in the UK, we seemed to attract exclusively feminine attention.

At gay clubs.

Bruh.

The disparity rankled more when I was younger and doing less well. Having experienced both the resentment and its gradual attenuation, I find it difficult to treat the resentment as either incomprehensible or particularly trustworthy.

You can notice a real unfairness and still spend far too much of your life staring at it.

This is where I would advise men to tend to their own. Quite literally.

Working out, getting a better job, dressing presentably, cultivating friendships, and simply putting yourself out there are all rather boring suggestions. They are also things you can actually do. Going on a grand crusade against sexual inequality brings about negative dates.

I understand why self-improvement advice irritates people. It can sound like an assurance that effort will eventually be rewarded, delivered by someone whose reward arrived before he had to test the proposition very seriously.

There are no guarantees. Some people try hard and remain lonely. Some have disadvantages a haircut won’t meaningfully address. They deserve sympathy without first presenting receipts from the gym.

But you still have decisions to make about tomorrow.

You can improve your chances while improving the life you inhabit between attempts. You can become more socially connected, more competent, better dressed, and easier to live with. Those gains remain available even when a particular woman declines to cooperate with your carefully constructed redemption arc.

The global equilibrium is largely beyond your control. Your own contribution is somewhat more tractable.

And I have trouble imagining what winning the gender war would even mean. Everyone becomes sufficiently suspicious and exhausted that they stop bothering? The sexes retreat into separate camps, each enjoying the satisfaction of having correctly identified the other as the problem?

I look at South Korea and feel little enthusiasm for exploring this possibility.

Face it. If you’re going to be k-selected, lean into it.

I use the term loosely. I mean the strategy of becoming a viable long-term partner, finding someone you like who likes you back, and investing heavily in the resulting arrangement.

I’m the product of quite a lot of this. Coached most of my life to be a Good Indian Boy: get into med school, get through med school, get into a specialty. Sex and love be damned secondary tertiary.

There were drawbacks to this upbringing. I have mentioned the horniness.

But I think it has worked out for me. I didn’t need the comfortable backup of an arranged marriage, and I appreciate that most people reading this don’t have that option. I also benefited from luck, including the sort you only recognize after meeting someone whose presence makes your earlier disappointments feel less consequential.

It really does take one lady you like, who likes you back. Then you bump uglies.

You can still notice the men with better cheekbones, the easier lives, the apparent abundance. I certainly do. But having someone whose company you actively want makes the rankings considerably less urgent. There are flowers to buy. Someone needs to book the dentist. With luck, there will also be some bumping of uglies.

So try some self-improvement. Give other people repeated opportunities to discover that you’re good company. If that doesn’t work, we can drink some pity beers together. I mean that sincerely.

Otherwise, I would like people to chill the fuck out a little. Enough of this battle takes place in your head that it is worth inspecting who keeps sending in reinforcements.

I’m half-woman on my mother’s side.

Quick aside: this is a great turn of phrase I intend to shamelessly steal for my own use.

"I can no more remember all the books I've read than I can all the meals I've eaten, but they have made me nonetheless."

Feel free!

Women’s educational and professional gains create some awkwardness for an inherited script in which the man is supposed to be at least as accomplished as his partner, preferably a little more so.

This is not a script, right, but a built in preference of women - like the equivalent of men liking well endowed 22 year olds? Is there any society in which women don’t go for men of higher social status or means, however that may be defined? I don’t know the answer, but it does seem that social status is really low on the list for men, and that elevating the earnings and educational outcome of women above men made a large swath of the population undatable.

Men do seem to care about the social status of their partners. Women care a little bit more, but it's not like height where many to most men see it as an irrelevancy and most women have strong preferences(although this preference is for 'taller than her' rather than 'being 6'3' and- gentlemen- cowboy boots are cool right now, you can add two inches for $200 with significant resale value and they never wear out).

For me(n?), status only matters to the extent its a signal of shared experience/interests and a baseline level of maturity (is she going to want to go to museums or discuss interesting books with me? Will she tank the family finances with irresponsible spending? Will she be able to help our children with their homework?). Social status only matters in itself at the extremes (I'm not bringing a stripper to meet my parents), and in that I have a slight aversion to dating someone who makes substantially more than me (I work at a non-profit, so I've made my peace with the possibility of being slightly outearned, couldn't abide a situation where I felt financially dependent). If anything, her father's social status is more important, because it speaks to how she was raised and how she likely intends to raise our children, as well as what her expectations are for me.

Elementary school teacher is the single most attractive profession for a woman, in my opinion. It's a respectable middle class career, not highly remunerative or prestigious, but strongly signalling an affinity for and skill working with young children, as well as with hours/benefits ideally suited for raising children if she chooses to continue working after starting a family. A "high status" job like doctor or lawyer is slightly unattractive, because it sends opposite signals. I'm not looking for someone to help finance expensive vacations or get me into exclusive parties, I'm looking for someone who I enjoy spending time with and who will be a good mother, which if anything slightly anti-correlates with a high status career.

I think what matters to men is what status correlates with. A woman raised in a trailer park with low-status parents is more likely to be either obese or on drugs, most likely covered in nasty tattoos, foul-mouthed, may have had to exchange sex for housing. All traits that a lot of men might not like.
On the other hand, a woman raised by absent professionals might have similarly damaging personality traits, but might be more effective at concealing them (having parents bail them out, paying for abortions, etc).
The ideal for a regular guy is a humble woman who was not raised in desperate circumstances but with strong conservative family values. Unfortunately these women usually get taken pretty quickly.

I think it's more accurate to say that upper middle-class established men care about the social status of their marriage partners.

Well, it's true everywhere I've cared to look. Definitely everywhere I've ever been.

At that point, biology becomes the most parsimonious candidate.

Considering how many women fall for musicians and gang members, it is clearly not as simple as men liking well endowed 22 year olds. "Money and accomplishments" does not make you attractive to women the same way as "Young, fit, nice tits and ass" makes you attractive to men.

Considering how many women fall for musicians and gang members

The common characteristic here is “Has lots of social status”. A man can get this by either being a pillar of the community or the nastiest gang member.

This is, alas, an inherently scarce resource as it runs on a ranked rather than an absolute scale, whereas “tits and ass” is, at least in principle, something every woman could acquire.

It could also be ambition, drive, initiative, spontaneity, and ability to stand your ground.

Good post. I wanted to make something similar but much more narrow. I keep reading the whole "women trade sex for resources" talking point repeated as dogma here. I feel like that fundamentally misses that women are also human. They like sex and love and relationships too! I've dated girls when I was broke. They probably spent more on me than I did on them. But they thought I was cute and liked spending time with me.

Grammar tip, «its» is the possessive of it, like his to he or your to you. «It's» means «it is».

That aside, I would say I broadly agree with your points.

Religious/Structured vs anti-religious unstructured

Spiritual/Neurotic vs atheist/rational

Left/Right

Definitely. With one caveat. The assortative mating coefficients of religiosity and left/right are high, but the coefficient for big 5 neuroticisim is low with the rest of big 5. Intelligence, however, is very high. So, instead of spiritual/rational, it should be dumb/smart. Smart people are effectively the definition of rational anyway. I agree with the subtext here that assortative mating is more important than game or women as monolith, and understanding its importance undermines most gender discourse.

Men could have evolved for an environment too unlike the one we inhabit today. The stresses of adapting on the cultural and evolutionary level have overwhelmed us. We are seeking the quick bust of a nut, the ephemeral pleasure of a harem over the realistic pleasure and comfort of a loving wife.

This I also agree with. The way to win in the gender wars is marriage to a partner that is well assorted on the traits I mentioned. A lot of male complaints are just men trying to figure out why having a Tinder harem is not working when they work in a warehouse. It's not wrong for them to point out that women are hypergamous. Any who are willing to join a Tinder harem are basically the worst in this regard. Only a subset of women are willing to do this and they effectively see it as a way to break out of their biological class.

Its the algorithms

Dating apps don't work. In large part because they attract bad women. One study found iirc that the median Tinder girl was almost -1 SD on the decent wife scale. Specifically they have more tattoos, higher body counts, lower SES and intelligence and on top of that looks than the general population. Looking for a wife on Tinder is like looking for a genius in the Baltimore hood. The best solution to this problem for internet natives is to be willing to marry someone who is far away, and to commandeer non-dating social media apps for dating purposes. You date online and you hopefully work remote and can move to her or else you restrict your search to someone who will move in with you.

“I have a younger sister. She was prom queen, sought after constantly in high school, guys in my grade were dating her. I have a mother that was very open to me about her per-marriage dating life.”

On Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs type analysts she’s high enough in desirability that a lot of negative female traits will not show up in her. She won’t be a gold digger because she’s dating at a point in the market naturally where money isn’t an issue. Won’t be a slut because she doesn’t need male attention.

If you change something like lower her IQ 20 points and put your family’s financial situation at the 20% and she’s suddenly a sugar baby. Or put her in Pataya or make her an asylum seeker from Venezuela in Miami.

The scary thing today due to modern communication tech is the nice local prom queen girl whose in the top 10% of everything gets exposed to the instagram world where she now feels like she is in the bottom 20% of society. And yes DiCaprio types bombard them with DMs.

The simplest rejoinder:

"Women" as a collective are more monolithic than men. That is, they are more likely to cluster around certain values or ideas or, similarly people on pure instinct than men are.

A side effect is that women are better at organizing around their collective interests. If there's a cause that would benefit womens' material wealth or status, they tend to naturally group around and advocate that interest. In the worst cases this causes mass social hysteria and we get bad policy changes in response.

And technology over the past 30 years has vastly increased the ability for loose social organization to emerge and coordinate around group interests across large distances.

So I would posit thus:

  1. Judging women as a collective/monolithic group will be more accurate as to the ground truth about them as individuals than would judging men. One still has to account for individual characteristics.

  2. There's been a positive feedback loop where women instinctively use their social organization to advocate their own interest, more status and power accrues to women, this increases their leverage, which allows them to make bigger changes in their favor, and lock in old ones. As a result, policy changes are a one-way ratchet.

And women are very unlikely to admit to being so powerful even if you point out how every single policy change in the past 30 years (in the West) has massively favored them.

For some reason, fewer of them believe that women are respected in society

I want to reiterate, an increasing amount of women believe their status is decreasing, despite this being objectively incorrect by almost any metric you choose.

A huge portion (again, more monolithic!) of women harbor a belief that is the direct opposite of the truth.

So the third implication:

  1. It is all but impossible to reason with or bargain with the female collective to make changes they think might harm their interests.

Which leaves us precious few options to try to work towards a better equilibrium.

In general I'd suggest not viewing women as a thing to conquer/trick/subdue. There are intelligent women out there that would make a great partner in your life goals. Especially if those life goals involve family, happiness, well-being.

This is encouraging but an incorrect statement of the problem.

The problem is there are not enough intelligent women who would make good partners to go around.

Run any kind of estimate you want to narrow in how many "appealing" women there are, vs. the number of men you're competing with to locate, attract, and lock down that woman. Any LLM can give you a fermi estimate and range of likely single women based on whatever criteria you can supply.

THAT Is the nature of the struggle. And you can't solve this by addressing men, the only answer to a supply crunch is to increase supply.

Guess what, this means addressing women.

There is definitely a trad wife out there for you. I believe that sincerely. You may need to compromise on how trad you want to go (amish anyone?), or how trad she needs to go (maybe she can have a job).

If you can turn this into an actionable statement of how to go about finding them that actually accounts for the aforementioned difficulties, that will be more persuasive.

I've been doing active spouse hunt for about 4 years now. I have tried literally every tactic that has been suggested, and seen precisely why each one fails. And the failure mode is fundamentally due to the above stated issues. Women are more coordinated around their own interests, even when those interests run counter to the general social interest in people getting romantically paired up and families formed. And the general pool of single women is less appealing, by and large, as partners.

So the pool is smaller, while the demand for a good female partner is still extremely high, and females remain the bottleneck through which reproduction flows. Which means fewer women are being born, so the supply crisis gets worse. Men's behavior can't overcome an utter lack of marriageable women. Full stop.

If you are not willing to consider solutions that involve removing a few privileges that women currently enjoy I do not think you are serious about solving the problem.

As for my take, I think we're getting a technological solution before we get a social or political one.

Women aren't monolithic. They're polylithic- that is, they reflect the values of their local communities more strongly than men do... but there's many local communities women might belong to.

I've been doing active spouse hunt for about 4 years now.

What have you tried, exactly?

Dating apps, on and off (because they are psychologically corrosive).

Dance classes (going to one tonight, actually), referrals from friends, bars (of various types), hosted gatherings at my house, gone to speed dating events, gone to car meets, church, social media, the gym. I'm currently pursuing a random DM I got from an (apparently) real woman on twitter that I already know isn't going to work out.

I am able to get dates. But the quality of woman I find is generally lacking, and they will ghost you without any warning even if you're 3 or so dates in. The norms around appropriate behavior are in shambles. Because women will accept zero correction of their behavior.

It is very expensive to keep paying for all these whilst seeing such poor results.

I've done everything except a Matchmaker or going abroad/mail order bride, basically. And I actually DID do a consult with an AI matchmaking startup, Keeper.AI and one of the founders himself told me "check back in 3-6 months" because they had no truly viable matches (as per their system) out of the 1.25 million women in their database.

The nearest/best one was a bit overweight for me, I was told. Ozempic to the rescue?

Do you still discriminate based on body count? If so, I wonder if that is actually being too strict. Like it or not, hook-up culture is highly pushed on young women, to the point where most who are capable of participating will do so for some part of their lives. If you sort out women based on whether they have slept with more than a handful of people, you risk removing a ton of otherwise dateable women from your pool of potential partners.

It is possible that body count in the modern world is simply a bad (or at least unattainable) heuristic for figuring out whether a woman is relationship material.

I've become a bit more strict about body count because the girl I almost married I met her during her 'hoe phase' (which she was open about) and thus I knew she had some history but was willing to take the shot anyway. She did end up cheating and leaving and to this day remains unmarried, 5 years later. She turns 31 shortly.

Its a signal that one cannot ignore, especially with how women will seek to hide it.

But you have to be flexible on that point. However, society becoming flexible on that point (thanks, sexual revolution!) is a large part of the underlying issue.

I wouldn't mail order but I would go abroad if you're in the anglosphere. Dating culture differs significantly within a country and between countries. In one place I dated for 2 years and never got stood up, in another place I got stood up frequently, in another I actually found a wife.

My top advice is just selection effects and heredity over everything. Men need to sample from as many places as possible through pure online dating but other than that you especially need to sample from wherever has the women the most like you politically and intellectually.

It still took me probably over a year and that's not counting the time I spent not using this strategy (that would make it several years), so 4 is not really out of the ordinary. Hopefully you will find something soon. The reality is that the system is messed up because it's all too costly and annoying in time and money even when it works out. What age bracket are you dating by the way? Marriage rates are down but young marriage is especially down so if you are dating under 25 it's clearly a systemic issue.

going abroad

This is hiding alot of assumptions; for one, you need to either be rich enough or have the right sort of job to be popular abroad. Not exactly an option for regular joe schmoes that are hurting in the dating market, so guys able to take advantage of this are still in the upper percentile range.

Second... Look, I'm not going to belabour passport bros thier options, but the idea that there exist places where I'd absolutely slay just because I'm white and American sounds absolutely ludicrious. I don't fucking beleive it. I suppose the only way to test this out would be to go over there, but, see point one.

Third, as faceh points out, it just exports the problem to that country.

Fourth, I'm a horrible racist and want my kids to look like me, so that nixes most Asian countries. I suppose, in theory, that means I should be going to the region of Eastern Europe, but, well... see points one and two.

This is hiding alot of assumptions; for one, you need to either be rich enough or have the right sort of job to be popular abroad. Not exactly an option for regular joe schmoes that are hurting in the dating market, so guys able to take advantage of this are still in the upper percentile range.

Frankly we need less regular joe schmoes in the world so I'm not that concerned with this. Although it's not how I'd prefer to do it, my eugenics are less cruel than the incidental eugencis and dysgenics of feminism. I would just have a one child policy for the bottom 67%.

It's not about slaying but rather about escaping the East Berlin that is putting up with the abusive bullshit of the worst populations of Western women. One can go to a less degenerate population and actually receive the decent treatment one should have gotten back home. Slaying is not necessary rather just an escape from absurd upsidedownism and sexual tyranny. Just like no one running out of East Berlin is expecting to be a billionaire in the west. They just want a decent life -- by historical standards there is nothing slaying about marrying your looksmatch and having 3 kids. But many high quality men are running out of the Anglosphere and similar places like refugees from communism just to get this.

Third, as faceh points out, it just exports the problem to that country.

Just become loyal to that country if it makes you feel so bad.

Second... Look, I'm not going to belabour passport bros thier options, but the idea that there exist places where I'd absolutely slay just because I'm white and American sounds absolutely ludicrious. I don't fucking beleive it. I suppose the only way to test this out would be to go over there, but, see point one.

I mean you're not necessarily teleporting to 10/10 but generic white male goes from being neutral in most Western countries to an active plus even in places in Asia where there's not a massive incentive to go passport hunting. Between exoticness, norms around height/gender roles being different etcetera.

I wouldn't mail order but I would go abroad if you're in the anglosphere.

I sort of reject this solution because it exports the problem to that country. where are THEIR males supposed to go?

I mean, if I take a trip for other reasons and happen to find a wife, whatever.

Men need to sample from as many places as possible through pure online dating but other than that you especially need to sample from wherever has the women the most like you politically and intellectually.

Yes, and the political gap between young men and women is the largest its ever been. The women have flown off into la la land and nobody is correcting this trajectory.

Hence, the pool is too small.

Hopefully you will find something soon.

I have no reason to think I will.

However, that is also not a reason to quit.

But understand that I AM OTHERWISE WELL SITUATED. I own a house. I make six figures in a decently high-status job. I am extremely physically fit. I am a martial arts instructor (i.e. I can physically dominate 90% of the male population), I am well liked, I can repair stuff, I'm not bad looking. And I'm six foot two.

There is zero reason I should be struggling.

And if I'm struggling, I can only imagine how bad it is for guys not so well situated. And I think its best to help out their plight too.

What age bracket are you dating by the way? Marriage rates are down but young marriage is especially down so if you are dating under 25 it's clearly a systemic issue.

Basically anything above 21 and still in decent child-bearing shape. If I got my pick I'd aim for 25-27 (I'm most comfortable dealing with women in that bracket) but I have DIRECT EVIDENCE that I can pull 24-year-olds too.

But as to the filtering issue, finding a woman who is GENUINELY serious about getting married and is marriageable is the big one. There's no pressure on women to actually get married, and serious pressure on her to delay until she has her fun/her career is established. I don't think any individual guy can defeat this social pressure without a lot of assistance.

And I'm six foot two.

Man, how many 6'2" lawyers are around here? The 6'2" law firm could be unstoppable.

I sort of reject this solution because it exports the problem to that country. where are THEIR males supposed to go?

They marry your women. Go look it up you can find plenty of that, if you can't you are probably shooting for too low of a country. Don't marry a fillipina or cambodian.

Yes, and the political gap between young men and women is the largest its ever been. The women have flown off into la la land and nobody is correcting this trajectory.

You should assort on genotype and not phenotype. If you nail the genotype converging in your relevant beliefs will be easy. The easiest way to target genotype is to simply target a percentile among women. You do the same thing for height if you want tall kids (I don't recommend assorting on height now as that's frivolous and the market is in ruins) and intelligence. I believe that the median female is 4 IQ points dumber than the median man (a lot of people run denialism on this point but idk their issue), on top of greater male variability, which means that if I wanted to marry an at least 130 IQ man I can actually marry a woman with an IQ of only 121 or so.

They marry your women. Go look it up you can find plenty of that, if you can't you are probably shooting for too low of a country. Don't marry a fillipina or cambodian.

There's plenty of affluentish countries/social clades in Asia that are a great place to marry into (even a Filipina/Cambodian if you get a fairly-wealthy Expat Chinese the calculus is a lot different) and whilst AMWF seems to be slowly ticking up it's far from being an 'even trade' at this point.

Which countries would this be? Argentina and areas of not-indigenous S America? Indian/E Asian a little bit but still skewed heavily male taking female.

Even Bill Gates daughter took an Argentinian so definitely an equal play place.

Yes and the Catholic/southern parts of Europe are noticeably better than the US or UK when it comes to women. The protestant Continent is in between. He should probably start learning Spanish and French.

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Don't marry a fillipina or cambodian.

Funny enough I have met a good number of white male-filipina female pairings that seem pretty happy! The women can apparently be fiercely loyal too.

Unfortunately it'll also produce kids that are shorter than average, which might be bad for any future sons.

I might consider Singapore.

I've got an AI agent set up that is specifically designated with helping me both identify good places to go and try and meet women, AND vetting the ones I do find at least a bit.

I am at the point where I am willing to 'cheat' like crazy and pull every string to just get this process over with, but I also have to be realistic about the general odds.

Singapore isn't a great idea for finding a woman. Essentially same pool of people amongst Malaysian Chinese but less Western norms and Singaporean women have essentially all of the Western culture stuff going at full speed.

Orientals have weak genes, assuming you're white it'll just breed out.

Unfortunately it'll also produce kids that are shorter than average, which might be bad for any future sons.

Fortunately not. Filipinos are not genetically short; the nation's average height is mostly a result of malnutrition. I've got some tall cousins who attest to this (both families were short, and the European side definitely not due to malnutrition). I guess hybrid vigor is another possibility.

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For the first part I think there is maybe still a conflation going on. Not all women's interests consistently align. I do agree that they seem to be good at coordinating.

You can easily see this kind of divergence in a workplace. For example a workers union does not help all employees. It generally only helps current employees. It often actively hurts prospective employees to make these gains.

Same can happen with women. Sexual liberation in the workplace. Women advance up the ranks. Once they achieve high ranks and are at risk of being replaced by the new hotness, they coordinate to shut that avenue down via the me-too movment.

This can also explain how women feel that they are decreasing in status. Status is a zero sum game, and the main competition in status for most women is other women. A couple boss ladys hoarding all the status and rewards is a fully consistent story here.

For the second part, I'll reiterate what I said elsewhere. That I think there is a trad wife out there for you dear reader. Not that there is one out there for everyone. If my essay / rant were to become widely published and read by millions I'd need to strike that line out.

For actionable things to find her, I'd suggest changing your social setting. You've no doubt already done this, at least in minor ways. Usually it takes a long conversation to tease out where you can switch, and what places might advantage you. I know 4 years probably feels like a long time to be looking for a wife, but its not. Ten to fifteen years is a long time. Its also why I'd suggest starting when you are about 15, or at least by 20.

If you are not willing to consider solutions that involve removing a few privileges that women currently enjoy I do not think you are serious about solving the problem.

I was wondering what this would mean and afraid I wouldn't be able to bite the bullet. But hell yeah to that suggestion. I am the true feminist, equal treatment under the law. I'd be happy to take an axe, or a can of gasoline and a lighter to a lot of the privileges women enjoy from the government. I'm not willing to go handmaidens tale or something that extreme. But many things short of that seem reasonable to me.

Again though, some of this feels like specific groups of women lobbying for specific things they want without consideration or care for women as a whole and what they might want. I don't think they just mistakenly advocated for something they thought all women would want. I think they didn't care and advocated for what they wanted. Similar to how a union is happy to make firing bad workers incredibly hard, even if that screws over potential employees (since the employer is now going to be ultra careful about who they hire). The union will of course claim to be in solidarity with all workers. But that is the lip service. They aren't idiots and they know exactly what they are doing and don't care.

Not all women's interests consistently align.

This is almost irrelevant. What is relevant is if they BELIEVE that they do.

For example a workers union does not help all employees. It generally only helps current employees. It often actively hurts prospective employees to make these gains.

Yes. My point. Do workers BELIEVE that forcing the boss to give them more pay for fewer hours is in their interests? Usually yes.

They are less likely to notice that this means more of them are fired, they get fewer breaks, the benefits get worse, etc. etc.

Status is a zero sum game, and the main competition in status for most women is other women. A couple boss ladys hoarding all the status and rewards is a fully consistent story here.

Nah, the real likely explanation is that women disregard the bottom 50% of men and see the top 10-20% of men as the actual competition. As long as they're lower status than THOSE men (read: they can't secure commitment from such men) they can easily BELIEVE they are decreasing in status, even if they continue to make more and more gains on the other 80%.

That's a consistent explanation I've yet to see refuted.

That I think there is a trad wife out there for you dear reader. Not that there is one out there for everyone

Great.

But the dear reader is still competing with everyone.

I'd suggest changing your social setting. You've no doubt already done this, at least in minor ways.

Be more specific. More actionable. What social settings are you talking about? I've tried bars (of various types), dance classes, hosted gatherings at my house, gone to speed dating events, gone to car meets, church, social media, the gym... the women are OUT there, but they aren't interested in being approached, or they are zeroing in on the top guys in the room, or they're already taken. You can automatically assume that they've got 50 matches in a dating app at any given time.

The problems I mention infest everything. And the fact is, no matter where you are, you're still competing against the options a woman thinks she has on the dating apps.

I am the true feminist, equal treatment under the law. I'd be happy to take an axe, or a can of gasoline and a lighter to a lot of the privileges women enjoy from the government. I'm not willing to go handmaidens tale or something that extreme. But many things short of that seem reasonable to me.

So what are you willing to do if we tell women "we're making it harder for you to get loans and go to college" and they all break down in tears and call you a misogynist pig and/or threaten to vote you out of office? How much of a hardass can you be when female tears are involved.

(Funny enough, the Trump admin may have found an end run around the problem)

Yes. My point. Do workers BELIEVE that forcing the boss to give them more pay for fewer hours is in their interests? Usually yes.

The fact that organised violence is needed to prevent scabbing suggests that the answer is "only the workers who are correct to think this do so".

Look, I don't know you. I suspect the advice I can give is inapplicable because I'm handsome enough that chic-fil-a cashiers randomly hit on me(despite the increasingly obvious age difference). You could lower your standards, or commit to a given community. But you've got to do something. Men are the gender with agency. You can't just sit there complaining and expect it to find you a wife.

You can of course pay someone to find you a Moldovan wife.

Be more specific. More actionable. What social settings are you talking about? I've tried bars (of various types), dance classes, hosted gatherings at my house, gone to speed dating events, gone to car meets, church, social media, the gym... the women are OUT there, but they aren't interested in being approached, or they are zeroing in on the top guys in the room, or they're already taken. You can automatically assume that they've got 50 matches in a dating app at any given time.

You need to go somewhere where you can be in the top ten percent of men in the room. I can't get more specific and concrete without knowing you personally very well. If you are a loser in a space you are wasting your time. Getting to be a top ten percent guy in a space is going to take some dedication and effort. That is why it is a useful signal for women to look out for.

Not all women are on the dating apps, if they were the apps would probably be a much better place to actually find women.

I am not politician material. I'm a libertarian. Yes I've told women to their faces that they should get less benefits from the government. Yes they have brought out the "you don't care about me if you say that" card. No it didn't change my stance.

I have three daughters and I've become even more immune to female tears. If my beautiful sweet children that I love aren't gonna sway me with tears some random lady ain't gonna do it either.

I can absolutely be hard nosed about them. I also have absolutely no chance of getting elected. The two things are probably heavily related.

You need to go somewhere where you can be in the top ten percent of men in the room.

COOL. Now which of these rooms are likely to have higher quality single women in then?

My problem is not being that guy, its finding a place where its worth the effort of being that guy.

My repeated experience is that the women are just not up to snuff. I'm not looking for hookups so I'd rather not burn effort in places where the options aren't great.

But they all THINK they deserve to get "that guy."

I think you need to find smaller niches. Somebody already mentioned that every app is a dating app. Linkedin is a dating app. Pinterest is a dating app. Goodread is a dating app. Youtube is a dating app. Themotte is a dating app if you're into lawyers and AI-doomers.

Think of the most female-coded hobbies you can think of and find some kind of gathering point for them. There, find and befriend a somewhat representative example of a woman you wouldn't mind being married to. She's probably already taken, but this is to give you an idea of what you want.

That woman may have friends, cousins, sisters, built on roughly the same model, that are not taken. Another aspect of it which you are probably aware of, is that you have to completely hide your awareness of the woes of the dating market. Take some kind of imaginary bluepill.

Then once you find somebody good enough, go for it.

Doesn't all this normally count as online stalking/harassment in the eyes of normies?

Maybe. Call it online stalking, I call it intentional dating.
In which case, don't get caught? There's a number of pitfalls, like verifying an actual adult female before offering a meeting.
I'm not saying you should launch a bot that automatically creepily propositions every female within a given radius.
But just consider that most people spend a fraction of their leisure time online, and that usually means that they are not available for a chance encounter out there.

Normies as in the kinds of people who write comments on Reddit, or normies as in people you run into in your day to day life?

The first group would consider it harrassment unless the other person is into it, basically no matter what you write. The second group has somewhat more tolerance for trying as long as you take no for an answer and aren't too crude.

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Sexual interest and compatibility is probably one of the most important parts of a long time marriage partner. Hookups are a fine way to start a relationship. My now wife and I started dating by basically hooking up first. Then we started going on dates.

Women have to maintain that outward facade of confidence because realistically they are going to feel pressure to settle at some point. And when that pressure starts kicking in they want their baseline "settling" outcome to start high and then slowly go down over time.

Chances are by just being in a relationship with them for a few years is enough for them to decide that any guy they are with is good enough. Even if they wouldn't have thought that when they started.

But objectively most hookups are not leading to relationships or marriage.

And I can see why. It would not be DIFFICULT to maintain a roster of booty calls, and the incentive is in favor of doing so because of the aforementioned ghosting behavior. The easy solution to flighty women is to have backups.

But once you have a roster, how to choose one worth settling for?

Once again, the quality of women on offer is not promising. You HAVE to address this shortage.

I'm getting a distinct sense that you are mustering arguments against (some) single men's perceptions of the women currently in the dating pool, and not even these same men's perceptions of women in general. If that's so, then accurate observations of women in general are not all that relevant.

Judging partnership traits of all women by looking at the single-and-looking women is like judging work ethic and know-how of all workers by looking at the unemployed-and-looking. Almost all current workers have passed through this stage, many more than once. Those with great, or even reasonable, work ethic and know-how quickly get jobs and become unavailable to other employers. The pool of the unemployed is therefore over-represented by those who have something unemployable about them.

Exactly the same observation explains any griping you hear about the men in the dating pool as well.

At some point in my long ramble, I had intended to address this. I do think there are distinct groups in the dating pool. And that there is a problem that is similar to encountering bad drivers on the road.

If you are an average speed driver you are paradoxically least likely to encounter other average speed drivers. The people you are most likely to encounter while driving are speeders who are passing you, and slow pokes who you are passing. The more of an outlier they are in their speed, the more likely you are to encounter them. Meanwhile all the other average speed drivers ... you'll only encounter a few of them that you are driving alongside of the whole time.

I think something similar happens in the dating pool. You are more likely to encounter the promiscuous fast movers going through many partners (speeders). And the technically single but rejecting all advances (slow pokes).

The other main determinants of the dating pool seem to be based on age, location, and culture.

Even a completely true statement about dating in New York City, might be completely wrong or backwards if you drive a few hours west to a small town like Batavia. Or college age senior, vs one year later working professional. Raised catholic vs raised baptist vs raised muslim etc. 2nd gen immigrant vs potential memberships in the SAR/DAR.

So I think a person in the dating market has a heavily skewed perception of who else is in the dating market. They are probably encountering speeders and slow pokes, but they are also probably heavily stuck in a specific subset of the dating pool. The speedsters/slowpoke problem seems inherent and unavoidable. But being stuck in a cultural subset is absolutely avoidable, its just not easily avoidable. I attribute my few dating success stories (where I helped someone go from single and frustrated to in a happy couple) entirely to just getting people to move out of their subset of options that don't fit into another subset. Convincing a guy that was only using dating apps or hookups with coworkers and getting him to try a kickball league. With the employment comparison this would be like looking in the wrong industry for a job when you are a better fit in a different industry. There is often a lot of momentum in staying in the same industry/social setting. But just making people aware of where the grass might be greener is enough to get them to move.

There is definitely a trad wife out there for you. I believe that sincerely.

You are asserting that there exists an injective function from the set of heterosexual monogamous men to the set of heterosexual monogamous women such that every woman prefers being paired to her corresponding man over remaining single or holding out (there are additional conditions, but this seems like the easiest one to break).

People underestimate how difficult the gender wars/dating problem is because they don’t think about it in the proper mathematical terms. The thing that we are looking for is a binary relation between two distinct sets that satisfies certain properties. It’s easy to make a bunch of observations such as, “men are like this, but women are like that.” Okay, what does this tell us about the function space?

'Pass' is totally a normal and reasonable option- at a certain point, the corresponding man to a given woman in the 'would you want your child in a relationship with this person' scale is literally incarcerated, while the woman still has a clean record and is in full time employment(probably at walmart, but still). Rather being single over dating a convicted felon who doesn't have a job is an entirely reasonable decision, and if you don't think so get back to me when you have a daughter.

I'm willing to admit that there's a problem with average women turning up their noses as merely slightly above average men. I live in a bubble with very different issues with the marriage market, but I'm willing to believe it and there does seem to be corroborating evidence. That doesn't mean every woman should marry her corresponding man. The point at which they start to beat you and drink away all the family money is higher than the woman being unmarriageable.

I didn't say everyone. I just said there is one out there for you dear reader. You are special for having read my spiel. You are endowed with knowledge that others of your gender do not have.

I even believe I can give you a leg up on the competition. Note, that in a competitive space someone is losing out. The people losing out are the ones without my advice.

No mathematical contradictions here, just a simple misunderstanding of not taking me literally enough.

You are special for having read my spiel. You are endowed with knowledge that others of your gender do not have.

This is a little chunibyo.

I had to look up what that meant. Think of it as closer to tongue in cheek.

But I also don't think people need a significant leg up on their competition in the dating market to go from 'hopeless' to 'will get married within a decade'. I think both sexes could level up their game by just knowing a bit more about themselves and the opposite sex. But good advice is hard to come by for them.

If 30% of prime age females opt-out in their 20-35 years to be fun for chad, richer, and high status men then you completely change ratios within the dating markets.

And you cause issues that a SMV 8 male can’t find a SMV 8 female for a relationship and instead chooses to be the Chad of 6’s he doesn’t want to commit to.

Also just a lot are opting-out of dating whatsoever due to low-moderate unfounded terror. I know plenty of beautiful mids through my wife's social network who essentially never enter the dating market except for very sporadically downloading a dating app for a month or two out of boredom then deleting it the second they have a somewhat-meh experience or some other part of their life makes a demand of them. They're expecting somebody to cold approach them socially and yet frequently don't really have hobbies (and if they do they are 98% female), plus most reasonable people aren't going to brave work approaches these days. There's also a decent population of Chadwidows, but in my experience the failure scenario for most of the women who I'd consider to be 'wife material' is the above.

People just overfocus on the perpetual Situationship ones since they're more vocal on social media and more visible on dating apps.

We need some sort of system where male and female hobby groups joint sponsor mixers like they're single-sex boarding schools. We need yoga studio/mma gym bar nights, knitting circle/Roman history kickball leages, etc.

yoga studio/mma gym bar nights

This is an even better pairing than it appears at first.

Jiu-jitsu is sometimes referred to as non-consensual yoga. Given how women’s sexual fantasies commonly feature non-consensuality, this could be a match made in heaven.

The first MMA gym leader who realizes that yoga/pilates/barre studios are full of eligible single women and can rally his men behind him could be the next Genghis Khan.

You are asserting that there exists an injective function from the set of heterosexual monogamous men to the set of heterosexual monogamous women such that every woman prefers being paired to her corresponding man over remaining single or holding out (there are additional conditions, but this seems like the easiest one to break).

It's called Gale–Shapley algorithm. Oh, wait, I see what you mean: at some iteration women will start valuing staying single over the next batch of men asking them out.

Yeah, I think the closest thing to a solution would involve substantial government pressure to form heterosexual couples, potentially including criminal punishment for cheating.

This might not work and might have bad side effects, but every other proposed solution also wouldn’t work and would have bad side effects.

Last weekend, Aella and friends hosted SlutCon at Lighthaven in Berkeley. Described charitably, SlutCon seeks to heal gender relations by teaching socially awkward nerds how to flirt by giving them a sandbox of semi-professional “flirt girls” to practice on. This caused a lot of controversy in the community for reasons which people tended to dance around, but which boiled down to, “I don’t want the socially awkward nerds in the community to be trained to flirt with me.”

Uh, isn't slutcon basically just whoring routed through a different payment structure that isn't illegal?

It's hard to say. All first-hand accounts of the event deny it, but of course that's what one would expect them to say. Keep in mind that we are dealing with levels of autism that shouldn't even be possible.

Your link is a wall of text, but this bit certainly sticks out:

Obviously, it's not slutcon's job to 'fix' any overly-pushy men. It wouldn't be possible to. But is slutcon making things better in teaching them skills, or worse in emboldening them to try in the first place?

Yeah, that's the problem: there are some men who are "overly pushy" but are also so timid that they aren't trying at all. LOL.

I'm pretty sure on the aggregate the overly-pushy men are going to get more success than the overly-timid, anyways. Sure a certain amount will overstep lines and get pilloried, but also you miss every shot you don't take and more chance of finding somebody reasonably-agreeable to say yes if you just chronically go for it.

I feel there is a non-zero group of very vocal women who's core argument against stuff like this basically boils down to that they hate the idea of men having to 'learn' to be 'chads'.

They don't want to find out that the man who managed to get with them used to be a socially messed up and worked hard to be charismatically smooth. They want a natural. The guy who just 'gets it'. Like, how the hell do they expect regular and/or awkward guys to learn this stuff? Yeah, I know socially extroverted people who make connections as easily as fucking breathing, but the rest of us have to put in the effort at it to atleast pretend to be normal, or atleast not an asocial retard.

Like, how the hell do they expect regular and/or awkward guys to learn this stuff?

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die"

That is, they don't, they just want regular/awkward guys to disappear and never bother them. Preferably doing something out of sight that helps them in some way, but the "out of sight" is the important part.

This is true for most signals. Guys prefer "looks effortlessly beautiful at 9am with her hair disarrayed" over "drops from an 8 to a 6 at night when the makeup comes off".

Most of these signals are about fundamental fitness, so faking them is both natural and something people select against.

I feel there is a non-zero group of very vocal women who's core argument against stuff like this basically boils down to that they hate the idea of men having to 'learn' to be 'chads'.

They don't want to find out that the man who managed to get with them used to be a socially messed up and worked hard to be charismatically smooth. They want a natural. The guy who just 'gets it'.

I hesitate to get involved with gender wars, but this particular tendency I think is very understated and much wider than merely "non-zero". This has to be a large part of why women's advice on dating their own sex is so infamously useless/counterproductive; it's less that women are evil bitches colluding in a cabal to put down even their own flesh and blood, and more that natural instincts are not always your friend when elevated into the be-all end-all of attraction (never settle, slay queen, etc). The damning part that exudes the ick is not when you don't follow the advice correctly (which to be fair also happens), it's the very fact that you need advice in the first place, or generally heed any sort of external information to improve your chances, that seems to often be taken as deception of the most craven sort whenever it comes out. Crude analogy: when people tell you "just be yourself king", the unspoken emphasis is on king, not on yourself.

Ozy agrees with you.

Autistic people I know are vastly more likely to make the opposite error: to become so self-effacing romantically and sexually that they never express romantic or sexual interest in anyone, and end up loveshy.

In general, sexual harassment is caused by:

(1) A person believes incorrect things about dating in general (“women secretly like it when you crudely compliment them”) or about this situation in specific (“that person is so into me that they want me to hit on them even though I’m their boss”).

(2) A person knows they’re coercing someone else into sex or a relationship, or knows that they’re making someone uncomfortable, and is doing that on purpose because they want to.

Now, you might assume that #1 is a thing autistic people do, because it involves misunderstanding social situations. It is mostly not. Autistic people like following clearly laid out rules for social interaction. “My illegible social intuition says I can override the clearly laid out rules for this social interaction and it’ll be fine” is an allistic social problem.

@Quantumfreakonomics

It's literally me.

Being a homeschooled kid for everything before college already put me on poor footing, but attending college in the mid-2010's meant:

  1. exposure to university- and media-driven feminist messaging implying that all approaches were inherently [suspect, predatory, unwanted; from hereon out, "predatory"]
  2. the looming threat of turbocharged MeToo accusations for any fumbled encounter Additionally, I made the mistakes of:
  3. listening to a shrink who I now would classify as "body-positive" who told me looks didn't matter much (I wish I had embraced self-hate earlier instead of accepting affirmations from deluded authorities; at least I'm not fat anymore)
  4. hanging out with a D&D group for my social needs, a group that, on retrospect, I realize was socially policed with terminally Tumblr-brained women who collected left-coded quirks like the cowed men who dated them collected Magic cards; this group introduced me to the memeplexes surrounding subreddits like /r/niceguys and /r/inceltears, which led me to believe that there was no winning, since per those memeplexes, things like "trying to not be a predator" and "complaining that there's no winning because you are branded a predator no matter what you do" are also reasons to be mocked and branded a predator. I still catch myself thinking like this.

Thanks to all these factors, the risks of any approach were exaggerated (or more conservatively, were implied to be exaggerated) by authorities and by the groups I chose to associate with.

At this point I'm a wizard and just hoping I'll get over the hurdle of self-preservation soon; I can't talk with shrinks about this because despite the seeming pointlessness of life, assuming I do find a purpose to living I am provisionally maintaining a stable job, and I'd like to keep it stable with no employment gaps or institutionalizations to my name.

If any staff member would like to ban me, I think I'm going to keep using this forum for venting, at least as context and drive permits, and that is trite.

I'm a lot older than you, and: It won't get better. The people who tell you it will are high-functioning, capable of navigating modern dating, and they pattern match "my life is intolerable" to "I feel you bro, it's been a few weeks since I got laid, too." The real world does not mete out suffering in a balanced way. And men in pain are not a problem modern society even acknowledges, let alone tries to solve. As you've mentioned, shrinks are legally mandated to make your life even worse if you're honest with them.

I have a few relatives who I stay alive for, but as I live a very unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle, I'm kind of looking forward to dying of a heart attack in a few years, alone as always. (Ironically, I do not think we're all going to get killed by AI.)

If any staff member would like to ban me, I think I'm going to keep using this forum for venting, at least as context and drive permits, and that is trite.

Why? Nothing you said seems remotely objectionable. You are sharing your experience, which is not against the rules.

Single-issue posting is against the rules, even if it's intermittent rather than constant. 1 2

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the seeming pointlessness of life

This comment seems relevant.

I linked the wall of text because it recaps most of the better arguments that were had. I probably won’t make a full post on the subject since everyone’s getting in their dating takes in this one, and a separate thread would just be dunking on Aella.

Speaking of: Singapore's govt dating app runs on Gale-Shapeley

Another demonstration of the incompetence of governments who also "want" to address the dating crisis but avoid this obvious solution.

This won't behave how we'd naively expect.

Let's take two hypothetical countres:

Country A : 1.5 men per woman

Country B : 0.75 men per woman

Mathematically, we'd expect the women in country A to want to pair since they will have higher quality matches available.

In country B, we'd expect women to resist pairing since high-quality men are scarcer.

Yet, the opposite behavior appears to be true. Given an abundance of thirsty dudes, women will often reject even high quality mates. See: San Francisco.

The supremacy of probability & statistics driven evolutionary psychology over specious econoreasoning. Gale shapley does not apply because women can be single and preferences are not stable in men. Women wield singleness to wait on the top men in the area for their temporary turn. They will do this in country B and A and this behavior means at any given time more men per capita in B are getting laid than in A.

high quality mates. See: San Francisco.

Sorry to burst your bubble but if wealth + intelligence is your only metric for high-quality mates you have a weird skew. As the saying goes: "The odds are good but the GOODS ARE ODD". Autistic nerdy men who happen to make 7 figures do not high quality mates alone make.

It's almost a tautology at this point, but the Bay has been known for this sort of male population for a long time. So if men in the Bay are still struggling then it would behoove you to update your model on what is actually considered high quality (different than high status) instead of what autistic nerds would like to be considered high quality

It's a nice story, and I agree with your assessment on status, but it doesn't hold water.

  1. SF has a bad ratio. This is the core of the problem.

  2. The same man who strikes out in SF/Seattle goes to NYC and drowns in female affection. It's a well-known phenomenon. There is no magic soil in NYC that makes men less autistic.

We don't have to make broad sociological observations. It's 90% just the ratio.

The same man who strikes out in SF/Seattle goes to NYC and drowns in female affection. It's a well-known phenomenon. There is no magic soil in NYC that makes men less autistic.

Meh. They'd probably have a better shot in NYC than the West Coast but I'm skeptical that moderately cashed up Indian Product Manager with low-mid 7 figures in RSUs at a height of 5'4 is suddenly the alphadog of NYC

Meh. Don't ever start a comment with Meh. Meh yourself.

Yes, obviously your example is not going to bag a Swedish model. But he'd easily bag a 5'2 Indian Project Manager in NYC. In SF, she's already been bagged by a 5'8" white dude.

One would wonder why no women from NYC go to SF/Seattle. Why do we never reach equilibrium between two unequal states unless transfers are one sided or the transfers that are happening aren't the problem population.

It's a well-known phenomenon.

Theoretically, but among my remaining friends in SF/Seattle, including some who took 6 month hiatuses to NYC for this reason, I have not seen drowning. It's hard to prove or disprove this as phenomenon with relying on anecdotal data because while its theoretically possible its too multivariate to quantically determine it.

It's a good question. My guess is that the women who move to SF for love tend to be mercenary and guys get the ick.

But dating is puzzling. For all the complaining, most people are barely trying. Why don't fat women use a GLP-1? Why do men take pictures with fish?

It's a good question. My guess is that the women who move to SF for love tend to be mercenary and guys get the ick.

I think it's more down to those women generally joining the hunt for the top tier of eligible bachelors and increasing the logjam instead of really meaningfully increasing the distribution of potential partners down the stack.

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Because women are low-agency.

I would also wonder how many of the men in san fran are not looking for, uh, female companionship vs NYC, given the reputation of san francisco...

Yes I have noticed this. I know 2 types of conservative-ish women. Those who think that since they are the woman, the man should come to them, and the type that knows what they want, and puts themselves in positions where the more compatible men are.

However I've noticed this equally applies to a sub-section of picky men, who refuse to make some level of actual effort that might require some sacrifice to get themselves into a place where their preferred partners exist. So "women are low-agency" has become more just-world fallacy to me.

In SF, age 25-39, it's 52.8% male. In NYC, it's 48.8%.

While that doesn't SOUND like a huge difference, let's say 80% of each group are open to a heterosexual relationship (with the remaining 20% being gay/not looking). Then let's pair off 70% of the remaining women with men.

In SF, there are 1.4 single men for every women. In NYC, its 0.84. The difference is stark.

But in the modern world, men will always be at a disadvantage. 51.2% of people are born male absent any sex selection. It's supposed to get down to 50% by the time men breed, but we don't kill each other with sticks as much anymore.

Are those the overall sex ratio numbers, not age specific ones? The ones for NYC get skewed heavily by the older cohort of women if you use overall numbers, and it doesn't do the average 25yo male much good that there are loads of single 50+ women in NYC (jokes about cougars aside). You said 25-39, but those sound more like the overall ones I remember.

edit: this one I was thinking of is old data. I wish I could see an update with moveable sliders like this one has. Set to 20-39 and the oversupply of women seems to vanish.

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Given an abundance of thirsty dudes, women will often reject even high quality mates. See: San Francisco.

Uh, in San Francisco, many dudes are thirsty for each other.

True. And it still remains the worst urban dating market for heterosexual men.

Pour one out for all the Chinese families whose lines are being ended because their one son ended up in Silicon Valley.

Honestly I've always been vaguely jealous of the Indian arranged marriage setup since it makes a lot of sense for socially awkward good provider guys. I'm sure there's horror stories, but the Upper class variety I've seen friends of both genders engage with just seems like a super useful social technology that'd broadly benefit the average Mottizen.

The jews have it to, apparently. I've been told that the mormons have an informal one.

AFAIK the Jews aren't quite as strong with it, though I think it depends on which particular geographic region you're in. I've got a Jewish friend who seemed to get kinda-setup with his now-girlfriend who's smart and I think considerably better than he'd achieve on the open dating app market, but I don't think it's as frank and mercantile as the Indian system.

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I've always been vaguely jealous of the Indian arranged marriage setup

I second this, having watched my socially awkward Indian friends fail at western dating but then have the cushion to fall back on arranged matchmaker setups, and get marriageable, family-approved women with good jobs and prospects, often fairly attractive with such comparatively low effort, I can't help but being a bit jealous. I went through the fucking trenches of the dating wars to find my girlfriend.

Yeah. Sheer size of the Indian population and access to a hinterland of conservative women in the home country probably helps the system work, but it can't be that hard to work out something similar for other demos.

I saw recently that Singapore has created a dating app that uses Gale-Shapley, so maybe there is mathematical hope for the monogamously-inclined. I'm legitimately curious how that will go for them.

ETA: Curious which variant they're using. The bias in the method is well-documented, but there are egalitarian forms.

I'd be up for debating you on the other side of this, not in a "please help me break out of my shell and get laid" kind of way, but more like "finally, a chance to talk about weird sociopolitical theories online".

Feminism found itself arguing a basically equivalent version of your motte-and-bailey fifteen years ago, but about men instead of women. "All men are rapists! Well, maybe not technically ALL men, but enough to matter. Imagine a bowl of M&M's..." These arguments tended to fall flat in the face of actually observing what most men are like, so they found a more compelling equivalent: "rape culture".

In terms of today's discussion, it basically goes like this. When you sleep with a woman, you're also forced to hand her one of those big red imaginary buttons from a thought experiment. If she presses the button any time in the next 10 to 20 years, you die a painful death, and she receives a million dollars and the universal admiration of everyone in her peer group. (For classic MRA types the button was often labelled "divorce", with maybe a spice of "common-law" for good measure. For modern volcels it's usually "accusation". Society offers many flavors of button.)

It's not really the fault of any individual woman that this is the case--certainly not any of the women you'd be handing buttons to. Maybe if you dig hard enough you could find the specific key members of the feminist movement that architected this system, but for all intents and purposes it's just a thing that happens that you have no real control over. You can't even blame them for pressing it, really; I'd certainly be tempted to.

Some people accept that risk, and that's okay. (Like people who enjoy skydiving or African safaris, I wish them all the best with their needlessly dangerous hobby.) Maybe some people have enough clairvoyance to accurately identify women who will never, ever be tempted to press the button; maybe some people have enough money or power to withstand the effects of the button, like those billionaires who hung out on Epstein's island.

But you're not either of those things. ("I'm not?" I've confused myself about what pronouns to use for this thought experiment, sorry.) The expected value of dating is pretty freaking bad, compared to the other options modern society offers for satiating loneliness. The longer you ("I"?) continue with this strategy, the less attractive it looks; the costs of reorienting your life towards dating increase and the probability of success decreases. (Maybe you/I will get wizard powers at 30, or become way more attractive at 40; we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)

Don't hate the player, hate the game!

Maybe this is where the right and the left end up agreeing, but I do believe ALL men are rapists. I have rape fantasies. Though they’re mostly like being an explorer and having captured tribal girls - Columbus had an account of giving one to his buddy. No rape fantasy of raping within my tribe.

The thing I would disagree with the left is its “rape culture”. No men will just rape in a state of anarchy. It’s actually civilization and tradition and policing power that reigns in men’s sexual thirst. There is an “anti-rape culture”.

Though I’m religious from a cultural viewpoint I like to think like I am playing Civilization and when I choose a religion it comes with certain buffs. The American religious buff in the mid-20th century was a strong middle class by reigning in both male and female sexuality to monogamy.

The thing I would disagree with the left is its “rape culture”. No[,] men will just rape in a state of anarchy. It’s actually civilization and tradition and policing power that rei[n]s in men’s sexual thirst. There is an “anti-rape culture”.

Your failure to include a comma inverts the meaning of that sentence and makes it inconsistent with the rest of the paragraph.

Maybe this is where the right and the left end up agreeing, but I do believe ALL men are rapists. I have rape fantasies. Though they’re mostly like being an explorer and having captured tribal girls - Columbus had an account of giving one to his buddy. No rape fantasy of raping within my tribe.

Well, at the very least here’s a n=1 disproof with myself as someone who hasn’t had anything remotely like that and who finds rape porn less arousing than consensual. (Rape porn with real actors is actively a turnoff.)

More generally the vibe I get is that men on the whole really don’t get off to rape.

I’m not saying that modern man is a rapists. I am saying it’s in our nature.

We live in a society where we have strong socialization not rape. Men with guns prevent us from raping.

If you were a dozen strong men with pointy sticks in prehistorical times and you came across 6 weak men with wives you would probably kill them and take the girls.

You say you wouldn’t rape but you have been cultured not to rape. I believe you that you wouldn’t rape.

This is our ancestral reality. Anthropologist goes into Amazon to live with tribes untouched by modernity. Finds they are all violent and rapey.

https://x.com/sfliberty/status/2104696760799031713?s=46

Thats an extreme simplification of Napoloen Chagnon's research.

The best dating advice for a teenage boy is to tell them to start selling drugs.
Unless you're religious, in that case you'd better start working on the arranged marriage.
There is no logical argument not to defect in the society-wide prisoner's dilemma if there is no recognized objective morality.
Do what you have to do and let the journalists decide if you were a good criminal or a bad cop.

I no-joke think that the current rape culture cases du jour, Clavicular, The Tate Bros. and The Cornell 7 are going to probably dissolve the last illusions around the female sexual selection process and will probably finally nuke intergender relations, or force some kind of reckoning. We're basically re-litigating "MeToo" but with a very different social environment.

They're mostly very noncentral examples of 'coerced' or nonconsensual sex.

In the first, she went out to the budding celebrity guy's house, stayed there and never asked to leave, drank alcohol willingly (she claims he said it was water, but that claim doesn't hold any), and the 'worst' he is accused of doing is penetrating her while she was asleep, already in his bed. And apparently continued to try and engage with him (in hopes of boosting her streamer career) for up to a YEAR after the interactions.

In the second, its more standardized human trafficking allegations, among which is the threat to withhold a passport in exchange for sexual favors, but again, very little evidence that these women were not understanding the nature of the other party.

And in the final one, it was again a case of someone agreeing to sex, including threesomes (being clear, SHE alleges this! She's saying she just lacked capacity to consent!) after AGREEING to take various psychoactive drugs, and otherwise being very open to the activities but then coming back and deciding that no maybe that was not what she wanted after all. So most of these circumstances lack any element of physical coercion or incapacitation, and some have clear indicators of consent present!

Every single one of these situations required the young ladies in question to actively put themselves in the situation for the ultimate allegations to result, and yet to disclaim any agreement to the act at the time.

Any young guy watching these matters unfolding is going to be left in a complete quandry as to when exactly you can legally have sex with a young woman. They're learning:

  1. Don't invite a woman to your house alone and offer her alcohol ever. (i.e. how every successful date ever normally ends)

  2. Don't take a woman's agreement to sex as actual legally enforceable consent if she's the tiniest bit inebriated.

  3. Don't fly a woman out of a different country and then try to seduce her.

  4. The accusations can come flying in months or years later even if you've gotten more confirmations of their consent in the interim.

The risk of engaging in sexual relations is thus extremely high, even if these actual outcomes are rareish.

The rough conclusion they might draw is that a guy can't bang a young woman ever unless she openly initiates it and he just lies there passively, which is the opposite of how women want sexual encounters to go!

Basically, we're kind of hitting the apotheosis of whether women can ever be held accountable for their own decisions or not. If young women can't be trusted to control their intake of alcohol or drugs, and will continue to hang around frat houses, around famous streamers, or around known abusive pimps and 'agree' to sex with them despite not actually wanting it... OR if they're going to agree to such and then utterly lie about it later,

Then why exactly are we giving such creatures any autonomy around their mate-selection at all? The outcomes speak for themselves.

And this is all on the tail of the Lindsay Clancy affair.

The Clavicular case is taking place in Massachussets, same place as the Clancy Trial. How would the media react if he raises the insanity defense, that he was just overpowered by his hormones and wasn't in control of his actions at the time? The cojones it would take to make that argument.

Hey, if its a viable defense for allegedly murdering children I don't see why it couldn't apply to sexual assault.

(also, look at the female support for Clancy, including from the jurors themselves to back up my assertion that women are more monolithic)

Don't fly a woman out of a different country and then try to seduce her.

This used to be called "transporting a woman for an immoral purpose" and was illegal in most places into the 1980s.

Now you're sounding like some kind of reactionary who wishes to oppress women and minorities with traditional sexual morality. See for example this paper arguing laws like the Mann Act are racist because they "police Black male sexuality."

Author seems like somebody who used to be kinky and now has a lot of cats. Curious.
Is there any decent research on the effects of Toxoplasma Gondii on political beliefs?
I suppose there is a little bit of chicken-or-egg effect here, is it pre-existing personality traits that cause catladyism or are the personality traits from the stuff in the water turning the frogs gay?
Why are rationalists so focused on AI alignment when they haven't figured out woman alignment yet?

In the first, she went out to the budding celebrity guy's house, stayed there and never asked to leave, drank alcohol willingly (she claims he said it was water, but that claim doesn't hold any), and the 'worst' he is accused of doing is penetrating her while she was asleep, already in his bed. And apparently continued to try and engage with him (in hopes of boosting her streamer career) for up to a YEAR after the interactions.

In the second, its more standardized human trafficking allegations, among which is the threat to withhold a passport in exchange for sexual favors, but again, very little evidence that these women were not understanding the nature of the other party.

And in the final one, it was again a case of someone agreeing to sex, including threesomes (being clear, SHE alleges this! She's saying she just lacked capacity to consent!) after AGREEING to take various psychoactive drugs, and otherwise being very open to the activities but then coming back and deciding that no maybe that was not what she wanted after all. So most of these circumstances lack any element of physical coercion or incapacitation, and some have clear indicators of consent present!

It's well that you're willing to dig all these details up but unfortunately the average young guy isn't. He is likely to be indoctrinated by mainstream liberal lipstick feminism, as are his parents. He's an NPC normie who usually only reads the headlines. If not, he maybe reads or skims through the article itself but again, it's likely to present a lipstick feminist perspective on the whole issue. Only a tiny minority will go down the rabbit hole and investigate the incident at hand, digging up online reports, public police or court documents, reading posts about it on dissident and decidedly anti-feminist sites etc. Most normies will only care to learn the most basic details and then dismiss the entire matter as another case of evil, toxic, woman-hating chuds violently raping unsuspecting blameless virginal women they first got drunk or something. Again, I want to believe you and I think you have a point about larger long-term trends but I suggest that we be realistic about this.

It's well that you're willing to dig all these details up but unfortunately the average young guy isn't. He is likely to be indoctrinated by mainstream liberal lipstick feminism, as are his parents

The current crop of Gen Z males is the least feminist of any currently-living generation.

Clavicular, in particular (hey that rhymes!) is a MAJOR public figure in their world. And he has the ability, if he wants, to publicize any particular detail of his case he wants.

The current crop of Gen Z males is the least feminist of any currently-living generation.

Which...isn't exactly saying much. Also, this survey seems to actually merely prove that this crop is the least feminist when compared to their female counterparts, doesn't it?

And he has the ability, if he wants, to publicize any particular detail of his case he wants.

...which is only going to be watched by his loyal fans who already believe in him.

The current crop of Gen Z males is the least feminist of any currently-living generation.

Your linked page appears to say exactly the opposite—that they're tied for first place.

People in generation defining
themselves as feminists (%)		FemaleMale
Baby boomers3928
Gen X3729
Millennials4632
Gen Z5332

How does Fanduel or Draftkings make gambling transactions stick on an inebriated person with the model of consent used for sexual assault in these cases?

I more broadly wonder who one can consent to gambling if they can't even understand what the odds mean in true numerical terms.

Should one have to pass a statistics class to legally place bets? MAYBE!

Even if you know the odds going in, if you're inebriated and have any outcome regret then Fanduel has Financially Raped you.

Being a more-conservative-woman-than-average feels like a life hack in the current environment.

My husband says one thing that drew him to me was that I wore modest clothes??? That's such a super easy thing to do, way easier and less expensive than figuring out make up hacks. And I didn't worry about being raped because I didn't drink or meet men alone. I reserved sex for marriage so my choice of spouse was probably more clear-eyed than most these days. And we still love each other, 10 years and 4 kids later, partly because I do the old fashioned things like have sex with my husband and try not to blow things out of proportion.

The advantages to behaving like a lady are so great, I don't understand why more men and women don't try to give their daughters this advantage. Do they just not know? Do they think this behavior is incompatible with also being intelligent, educated, and highly-paid? Do they think it's just too hard?

Do they just not know?

At least among my cohort (elder millennial PMCs), they have no clue what ladylike behavior is or how they would teach a daughter that behavior. Many of them have daughters who are barely housebroken because the parents seem to view any restriction on the daughter's behavior as oppressive or crushing her delicate spirit or whatever (they do not appear to apply that same rule to their sons, curious).

I know one woman who is very ladylike (and as you say, it's a ridiculous advantage to getting the world to bend to her will), but she's a solid Xer who is 10 years older than me and was raised in the South. Other than her, the women I know range in how traditionally feminine they are, but none would count as a lady.

In my experience the vaguely-conservative sensible friends of my wife and dating app encounters I had whilst I was on the market just kind of struggle to get places in the modern environment. Lots of expecting cold approaches in person from a society where the main people cold approaching are chronic cold approachers, or in a dating app environment a lot of kinda-awkward go nowhere situations since there's no chaperone or sufficient social pressure to really take it from the 'first couple dates of socialization' to 'expecting marriage'.

I was fortunate enough to get with my wife after a decent amount of first dates, and just based on the ones I've still got on social media a lot of the conservative ladylike women I might have met once or twice are still single 4-5 years later.

Do they just not know? Do they think this behavior is incompatible with also being intelligent, educated, and highly-paid? Do they think it's just too hard?

It's hard to speak in universals, but:

a) many are simply not acculturated to this particular set of norms. "Ladylike" behavior is, mostly, normative framework for a particular subset of upper middle class, and the groups most likely to promulgate this values set have started rebelling against it for other reasons.
b) many feel the whole ideal of the "lady" is an imposition that makes it women's responsibility to manage men's sexual aggression and entitlement - part of a broader view in which women are expected to remain in a defensive crouch at all times lest they be victimized by men (and quite possibly blamed for it as well after the fact).

The advantages to behaving like a lady are so great, I don't understand why more men and women don't try to give their daughters this advantage. Do they just not know? Do they think this behavior is incompatible with also being intelligent, educated, and highly-paid? Do they think it's just too hard?

Our culture, in general, believes that almost any suggestion to not maximize pleasure in the moment is evil and oppressive. That is a lie, of course, but it is one which is widely believed. So many parents of daughters don't try to teach them to act ladylike in the way you described, because they have been deceived with a lie that this would oppress their daughters and make them unhappy.

IMO the big issue with females being a lady is access to appropriate men. A lot of the sober and meet a lot of men to find a partner third-places are closed.

College/MBA still exists. If you study engineering in college you will do a lot of group projects with a heavily male group to get to know personalities that you may like. MBA is probably dying but elite full time MBA’s in the past provided strong access to ambitious men.

Church is dead for most Christian sects. I would guess Mormons and Jews still have opportunities in this regard. The workplace is largely too risky now but it was possible at one point.

Frat type scene and it’s 20-something equivalent still exists but it’s not great for the trad personality.

For a tradish girl I would guess the dating apps exists if you are good at choosing. And realize that just because you match with every guy that doesn’t mean you can snag those guys and most would need to pick someone with a third or even fourth tier profile of what they match with.

I would guess Mormons and Jews still have opportunities in this regard. The workplace is largely too risky now but it was possible at one point.

Odds are bad for women among true-believing Mormons - allegedly because the expectation to go on a mission causes a lot more young men than young women to drop out of active Mormonism around age 18.

Odds are also bad for women among high-fertility Jewish sects because Jewish norms are for a moderate (c. 4 years) age gap, and there are significantly more 18-year-old women than 22-year-old men if the population is growing.

Yeah if you miss the bus on college/high school there's really not a great pathway for mild introverts especially if they've got trad values towards sexuality. I've seen trad girls get 'chewed up' by Dating Apps where they gave too much to guys who were too good to be true then went full 'all men are pigs' and pingponged wildly. Others where any turbulence just means 'delete the app, maybe try again for a week next year'

Broadly I agree but there are all kinds of localized incentive. For example, say you work a professional job and live in Manhattan. There are obviously standard ‘trads’ in New York City but they tend to be lifelong members of conservative religious communities that you are either born into or won’t join unless you’re a giga-LARPer.

In that case, who are the conservative men? Basically, they’re supporters of Donald Trump (notorious hedonist), libertarian Palantir / Thiel / tech types, or secular urban/suburban ‘blue tribe’ men who just have some right-wing views because they were exposed to moldbug, BAP, /pol/ and or incel/looksmaxxing online content or streamers, ie negative views on women. Optimizing to attract these men (deliberate and open contrarians in a liberal environment) is likely not optimal. Meanwhile plenty of very much immodest women around you settle down with attractive, successful and kind men.

I agree that modesty is the smart move, but more because a lot of liberal sexual modernity exploits and humiliates women for men, not because it makes much of a difference in finding a good husband.

My husband isn't conservative or progressive or half as religious as myself. He's just normal. He dislikes politicians, plays video games and board games (but not too much) and otherwise just wants to raise good humans with me. I would guess that most men are like that, the vocal and online ones are the outlier.

board games (but not too much)

What constitutes too many board games but not too many video games? I've never heard this qualifier constructed in that way.

Too many board or video games would be so many that it distracts from work or family life. And yes, it is possible to get too into board games to the detriment of the family.

The advantages to behaving like a lady are so great, I don't understand why more men and women don't try to give their daughters this advantage. Do they just not know? Do they think this behavior is incompatible with also being intelligent, educated, and highly-paid? Do they think it's just too hard?

It has been my experience that many of them think it is oppressive. The idea of having and maintaining behavioral standards that might sometimes (or worse, often) conflict with one's immediate impulses is routinely presented to young people as evidence of sexism or even racism. The replacement of "no sex before marriage, sex after marriage even sometimes when you're not in the mood" with "sex whenever you want, and only when you want" is an example of this shift in expectation development. Everyone reacts to these developments in their own way, but broadly speaking I would say it has resulted mostly in a great deal of hurt and confusion among young people today.

Yep.

There's a undercurrent of "literally any rule that might restrict or punish any given behavior is bad, even if I don't actually intend to break that rule" in everything now.

I noticed this year that almost ZERO women worse Sundresses for the summer.

They're sporting jeans and often baggier t-shirts. So not dressing traditionally feminine OR dressing in a way that appeals to the male gaze. Okay occasionally you see cutoff jeans that showed off the legs.

Its like they coordinated specifically to not show much or any feminine appeal this year, outside of their pilates classes or their staged instagram photos. Someone claimed to me that women decided that sundresses were porn-coded or something, possible downstream effect of e-girls exploiting various 'sexy' identities (including goth girls) to draw in customers so the only option to avoid the implication that you sell yourself online is to not be too sexy at all. I don't know if that's the right explanation, I'm just annoyed that "Sundress season" never manifested.

If you were the one 'defector' girl wearing a cute dress and actually entertaining the male gaze in some way you would have it SO EASY if your goal was to get dudes to approach with interest.

But if you told one of these women they're not "ALLOWED" to wear sundresses or that they shouldn't wear Goth girl outfits, they would throw an absolute shitfit at your attempts to restrict a behavior that she herself was choosing to refrain from.

Must be different worlds man. I saw plenty of sundresses all over deep blue New England. Also being a raver, I get no shortage of E girl fashion. Goth girls, frilly dress girls, anime style girls. They all want to look cute for each other and everyone else. And they're dating. I'm also in my 20s so maybe that changes shit.

Oh yes, if they're going to an event they'll wear the outfit! But wearing it out day to day where they might meet a random guy? Much rarer in my experience.

I am glad to know that New England is still observing tradition.

But if you told one of these women they're not "ALLOWED" to wear sundresses or that they shouldn't wear Goth girl outfits, they would throw an absolute shitfit at your attempts to restrict a behavior that she herself was choosing to refrain from.

That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. I don’t smoke and have no interest in smoking, but I would strongly oppose any attempt to ban cigarettes. Likewise, I rarely drink, but I think Prohibition was quite the government overreach.

But if someone criticized a smoker because its bad for them, sets a bad example for kids, or its corrosive to the public good, without threatening legal consequences...

Would you feel the need to jump to their defense? Or to participate in solidarity events demanding smokers be left alone?

Quoth me:

there was a point in time where women were fighting to be able to (in theory) bare their breasts online and in public.

And yet, the vast, vast majority of women aren't pulling out their boobs on instagram. They just don't like being told they can't or shouldn't do it. And that was literally just Instagram setting their user policy! Not a legal restriction!

Women do that when anyone tries to police female behavior, anywhere.

We JUST CAME OFF THE LINDSAY CLANCY TRIAL, where tons of women, including jurors expressed solidarity with a woman who killed her own children.

Are you THAT libertarian? I assume no. So if we can't bring legal consequences down on a woman who kills children, what CAN we do?

I'm going to push back on this some:

And yet, the vast, vast majority of women aren't pulling out their boobs on instagram. They just don't like being told they can't or shouldn't do it. And that was literally just Instagram setting their user policy! Not a legal restriction!

Women do that when anyone tries to police female behavior, anywhere.

Nobody likes having their behavior restricted, men or women. Maybe it's an American thing, but it certainly isn't a women thing. I have no desire to paint my house bright pink, but if my city tried to pass an ordinance forbidding that, you best believe I would be at the meetings protesting. People of both genders don't like being told what to do, whether or not they intend to do it.

I reserved sex for marriage so my choice of spouse was probably more clear-eyed than most these days.

You say so, but the other narrative is that when people didn't have sex before marriage, they just snagged whoever was available because they were horny.

when people didn't have sex before marriage, they just snagged whoever was available

The silver lining was, practically everyone was available! Archie could go out with Betty one weekend while Reggie was on a date with Veronica, and then date Veronica the next weekend himself, and that was how things were (in the ancient comics, anyway; I gather the recent TV version may have been more "modern"). "Going steady" was a later relationship upgrade and was a big deal. So by the time you were getting off the market you'd probably actually had a decent amount of experience interacting romantically with the opposite sex, figuring out what types of person you were compatible or incompatible with, figuring out what categories of your own behavior were individual personality quirks to the right person versus what types were just universally attractive or repulsive, etc., and you could pursue someone or judge someone's pursuit accordingly.

Trouble is, that system only works if having sex before marriage is "fornicating" and is literally listed as a "mortal sin". If instead the "third date rule" for sex is normal, or even if it's just perceived as normal, dating around carries different weight, right? Increased jealousy and STD risk make "my date's been banging other people" feel much more serious than "my date's been seeing other people" alone could ever be. The obvious defense is to have the "exclusivity talk" ASAP, rather than be left with those worries. But then each time that happens you're with just one person from that point until marriage or breakup, so the same amount of time spent dating limits you to fewer people to date, and a heuristic like the 37% rule translates those limits into greatly reduced selection on who to snag.

It seems to be a collective action problem. Staying a virgin longer sends a signal, and unless you're in the shrinking communities where the signal received is still "they're probably properly devout", the signal is likely to be "she might be frigid" or "he might be a loser".

Teen dating is actually a pretty recent thing- before about the thirties, dating was a serious matter for adults looking towards marriage(which of course didn't mean none of the young women doing it were teenagers). The fifties casual dating culture was a brief moment in time.

Also a lot of societies you just didn't have a ton of options as a woman unless you got married to a guy. My dad's almost 80 and his 5 sisters were all married by 22 at the latest, due to a combination of the shotgun and life as an unmarried single woman in a poor part of Europe with no particular professional or educational prospects just kinda sucking when you're 1 of 7 siblings in a one-income household.

It's hard to imagine that teens weren't fucking around regardless. They'd just have to be discreet about it and have deniability.

Once they were going steady, sure, but at that point, many of them just went ahead and got married. Teen marriage rates peaked in the 1950s, which also explains why the teen birth rate was so high. But any girl who slept around before going steady would have gained a reputation for being easy.

Oh, definitely. How does the old quote about shotgun weddings go? "The first baby can come at any time; after that, it takes nine months." I think sex generally came after the "going steady" phase, so wouldn't greatly change my point, but with something that wasn't openly talked about it's hard to say for sure.

Oops babies aside, there is a whole lot that teens can do together that doesn't result in pregnancy or hymen loss, but most definitely isn't chaste.

And those things genuinely appear to have been relatively rare in historical societies- unmarried men visited prostitutes or, uh, lady palma. Respectable women might not have waited all the way til marriage, this was definitely acknowledged by relevant law codes even into the twentieth century- but these same societies listed 'asking for a blowjob' as grounds for divorce.

I thought the problem is sexual incompatibility: realizing your partner doesn't turn you on or has a different sex drive.

You can figure out that your partner turns you on without taking off any clothing.

As far as different sex drive, that is way overstated. Just have sex when the other person wants it. It's not some weird violation to have sex with someone you love just because it wasn't your idea. And if you're the partner who wants sex more often, put in extra effort to make sure the other person has fun.

A mismatched "sex drive" isn't physical/biological. It's value-based, and you can work out values verbally.

That too.

I think you should snag someone available. You should settle a little. Otherwise you end up with grass-is-greener, waiting for Prince Charming, until you're 45.

But it wont feel like settling because you don't have anything to compare against. As long as your choice meets the baseline to live a decent life, such as the needed amount of diligence to hold down a job, the necessary amount of playfulness to spend 10 minutes with your own kids, etc, everything above that is gravy.

I knocked out 3 suitors within a month of dating each because they didn't meet the bare minimum to me, and then once there was a guy who did meet the minimum, I went all in. Don't regret it for a minute.

Why am I not surprised that you thought it necessary to add that the destitute male virgin in your story is 6'3.

If he had been 5'3 that would have been worth noting as well. For different reasons.

I'd not say his height is his best characteristic. He is a kind soul and an exemplary person. But his most noticeably attractive trait is probably his height and build. It's an athletic 6'3 not a fat 6'3.

Most of all this fighting is not about the bulk of human relationships. It's about dating, which is heavily selected for people who are bad at relationships and good at getting laid. Most people dip into the dating pool a couple times, then settle down. People who stay in the pool for a long time, and thus do the most dating, and thus make up a majority of most people's failed dating relationships, are not the norm. The Professionally Single are a small and pathological part of Heterosexuality, but they get a lot of press.

The whole structure of dating is not some eternal truth, it's a specific social ritual invented in the last century and fast outrunning its usefulness. It's a sort of conspicuous consumption.

As long as there is marriage, there's always going to be some transition between being single and being married. That can be arranged marriages of some sort, but everything else is basically going to be some version of 'dating'; it's not just from the last century.

The battle of the sexes is always more about the people having the conversation than it is about the subject matter. You can be glib and say this applies to literally everything, and it might, but it applies to few things more than this topic.

What I mean by this is something like ‘in almost every case, a given person’s sexual politics can be largely inferred from their sexual history’. This isn’t strictly true for actual politics (say the broader ‘culture war’), even if there are clear trends. But it is strictly true, in my experience without exception, for sexual politics. You can challenge me, and declare me wrong if I stumble, but I think that means my calibration isn’t perfect, not that the principle is flawed.

If you present a kind of person - say a woman who married her high school sweetheart who had two kids with him, found out he cheated and was having a kid with a mistress in her late twenties, and is now a single mom in her early thirties who got tattoos, has a dim view of men, and has a public instagram account, you can probably infer her sexual politics. If you present a man who didn’t get laid a lot in high school or early college, but found some men’s forum in his mid twenties, got more attractive, started lifting, and then had a ‘hoe phase’ in his early thirties before setting down with an Asian girlfriend and later wife, you can probably infer his sexual politics. If you present the second daughter of a conservative south asian family who divorced her arranged-marriage husband (they had no children) in her mid twenties and then married a wealthier white guy at 32, you can probably infer her sexual politics.

Another example: the sexual politics of a man who got laid a lot in high school are different - universally - to the sexual politics of a man who didn’t (the same is not true for women, where the exact timing of a hoe phase has a lesser impact). This is true even if ‘body count’, hotness, success etc are identical. This is far more granular than “promiscuity is good/bad”, it’s deeper than that, it’s about the worldview.

I have a hard time imagining that the worldview of all these men would be vastly different.
I'm sure they all understand the concept of a 'nagging wife' for example.
Even the dirtiest of communists seem to have part of their interest focused on the sexual side of the revolution. I would be really surprised if there was a single white male seriously into progressive activism that was not a sex pest.

The first thing you might be wondering is "why is this not in the above section?". For most people, obviously men and women are different. There are biological differences based on hormones and genes. But I think what is different is a subtle and key distincter that makes this much less of a forceful offense, and more of a subtle one.

I will use this quote of yours as I think that "not all men/women" defense discounts it. To give an olive branch, men and women have the same ontological value as humans. I would even go as far as to say that from my view they should all have the same virtues: both men and women should be for instance patient, kind, diligent etc.

However I think this really discounts the huge differences on average between men and women, which really make the difference. I like how I think Andrew Wilson put it: while men and women should aspire to the same virtues, there are different consequences and these virtues have different hierarchies. If for instance if an alien changed all women who would stopped to be chaste tomorrow and fucked around, we would end up with bunchload of unwanted pregnancies with everything that follows. If the same goes with men (and they would not become violent), then we would probably end up with more tissues spend jerking off and some sluts having exceptional revenue that day. The same goes for instance if all men suddenly got lazy and nobody would show up at work: the society would stop working, stores would not get supplied, electricity would fail and so on. If all women stayed at home the situation would be bad, but not as much.

There are real differences in primary duties between men and women - and again not ALL men and ALL women, but on average there is meaningful difference and if it is ignored, it can have far reaching consequences and saying otherwise is standard Lewontin's Fallacy

There are studies showing that women are more interested in things and men are more interesting in people. Men are more effective in physical strenght and violence than women. Men are more suitable to adverse situation ranging from stress (being less anxious) to physical stuff (e.g. being able to be a roofer in Arizona summer, where women would literally die from heat stroke). Women are more interested in socialism and flattening the hierarchies, men are more comfortable with competition and following orders. The quintessential male organization is the army, the quintessential female organization is the sewing circle/quilting bee. And you see it in real life from voting patterns, different mating strategies and everything else.

I think it is not healthy to view the relationship between men and women as adversarial by necessity, but in modern world it was forced to be. Women compete with men on all levels from individual relationships via individualism to corporate sphere to politics. Men and women are not interchangeable, they have different duties and they steer institutions such as marriage or motherhood, organizations such as Army or corporations and even whole societies toward different goals. Helen Andrews has great speech about that here

I think it is not healthy to view the relationship between men and women as adversarial by necessity, but in modern world it was forced to be

I have the opposite conclusion: I think the modern world allows men and women to cooperate and be more equal than before. If all woman became sluts today, we would not necessarily have many unwanted pregnancies, thanks to birth control. In fighting and general life, strength matters less than preparation and intelligence, which may soon matter less due to AI. We can work less, and physical jobs are doable by women even without robotics, just power tools.

This is exactly the opposite of my conclusion. Women being "equal" means men and women compete everywhere ranging from fights who stays at home with kids to competition with women for your job position to politics and societal arrangements. Equal rights eventually means erasure of duties and related social norms.

For instance if it is a new arrangement that women have "right to be sluts", this flattens all social expectations, no slutshaming etc. Moreover this also wildly rearranges societal expectations - women no longer have duty to be chaste, which means more fights at home if husband expects such a behavior as it is oppressive and goes against "rights". Just one more thing to argue and fight inside relationship.

Or take another change - equal pay for men and women. If men and women have equal pay, this then means that in increasing number of cases women will outearn men. This should then come with corresponding change in norm of women as primary breadwinners and their duty to take care of their husbands. But at the same time women also have right to be hypergamous and expect men to outearn them. These rights and expectations are going against each other, which means clash and strife.

If men and women can be whatever they want to be, then there is nothing wrong with somebody being incel jerking off at home. He has his first amendment right to watch porn, it is no longer expected that men should marry or take care of family as it is their right not to chose so - so there is nothing wrong with somebody living in small apartment and playing videogames. In fact if this is their right, it means it is your duty to defend this lifestyle from any infractions or shaming. Every right and norm has counterpart in duty. If everybody has right to free healthcare, it means it is somebody's duty to finance the whole system. To then turn and be horrified by incels choosing their lifestyle you defended or bitch about healthcare taxes you clamored for is illogical. You are adopting traditional norms and duties while at the same time saying that abolishing these norms and duties is fantastic progress toward equality. It is crazy position.

My mindset is basically: women are emotional, horny, and stupid...but so are men; and in other ways, we're reasonable, smart, and wonderful (i.e. mesmerizing). Women are (statistically) flawed in ways that men aren't, but men are flawed in other ways; neither sex is better by any objective metric, even in stoicism and empathy, there are sub-qualities where women and men have different advantages. And don't forget that really not all women adhere to any "feminine" personality trait (or men "masculine"): ~10% of either sex are gay, I doubt you can find any other mental trait with a lower deviation, and some people have so many deviations they may be better understood as a man's brain in a woman's body or vice versa.

Case in point for how similar woman and men are: from their writing, art, etc. you may guess right well over 50%, but it's impossible to reliably infer someone's sex. Multiple famous novelists and mangakas have been women who wrote under men's names, and anecdotally, I've heard multiple women surprised that their favorite fanfiction's author is male.

No, all women are women, and all men are men. Take a look at this chart: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9/tables/2

I'm confident that nearly all the men on this forum know almost every word on the left, and almost none on the right. Exceptions to this trend do not exist. There is not a single biological male or female on this green earth who will be reversed on the chart. In terms of writing this means insanely simple tells that definitively determine the gender of the writer for many written works.

For me personally I know the entire left half, and only 2 from the right.

I get all the left side and about a third of the right. For someone who gets more of them, am I right in thinking that the vast majority of the words on the right (not "doula" or "pessary") are technical terms about textiles?

Textiles/sewing/clothing, yes.

And of course all the words on the left are scientific and technical terms as well - I would say "shemale" is the closest to a non-technical word on either side.

The words "freesia" and "verbena" are the common names of flowering plants. I wouldn't say 'yakuza' (a member of a particular Japanese crime organization, or collectively the name for the organization) is a technical term either. I'm not sure "doula" qualifies either.

Datapoint of one, but I don't know every word on the left. One of them I googled and arrived at the conclusion that I need some khan academy to understand, not just a definition.

I knew all the words on the left and most of the words on the right, though I couldn't actually describe in detail the differences between "tulle" and "chambray" without looking them up.

Perhaps most men and women are simply not well-read?

Which fits the trend, you still knew the left much better. Of course well read people will know more in absolute terms and less well read will know less.

They must have gotten guys who work in STEM because there’s no way 58% of men know what a checksum is. Same with many of the electronics terms, 64% know what a gauss is? I had to look it up, it’s a non-SI unit for magnetic flux density, and I am extremely skeptical that the majority of men have even heard of that.

Same with boson, 76% of men are familiar enough with particle physics? Less than 50% of men have even had a single physics class in high school! I’d be surprised if 76% knew what a proton was.

Science-fiction uses it a lot: anyone who knows about 40k knows about Necron gauss weaponry, and that's a lot of men.

There's also a Gauss rifle in Fallout, and a Gauss cannon in Doom.

They must have gotten guys who work in STEM because there’s no way 58% of men know what a checksum is. Same with many of the electronics terms, 64% know what a gauss is? I had to look it up, it’s a non-SI unit for magnetic flux density, and I am extremely skeptical that the majority of men have even heard of that.

Same with boson, 76% of men are familiar enough with particle physics? Less than 50% of men have even had a single physics class in high school! I’d be surprised if 76% knew what a proton was.

Most men have heard of the Higgs boson, AKA the God particle. They may have no idea what it is (I certainly don't), but they know it has something to do with subatomic particles and the Large Hadron Collider.

Gauss is probably recognized as the last name of Carl Friedrich Gauss rather than the unit.

I am familiar with the unit (as of my PhD days it was still the main practical unit among engineers and experimental physicists because the Tesla is so large) but I also read "gauss" as a proper name.

The study explains that the numbers in this table are z-values on a normal distribution, not percentages.

Because the distribution of percentages known was very right-skewed and did not differentiate much between well-known words, it was useful to apply a probit transformation to the percentages. The probit function translates percentages known to z values on the basis of the cumulative normal distribution. That is, a word known by 2.5% of the participants would have a word prevalence of –1.96; a word known by 97.5% of the participants would have a prevalence of +1.96. Because a word known by 0% of participants would return a prevalence score of –∞ and a percentage known of 100% would return a prevalence score of +∞, the range was reduced to percentages known from 0.5% (prevalence = –2.576) to 99.5% (prevalence = +2.576).2

2The specific formula we used in Microsoft Excel was =NORM.INV(0.005+Pknown*0.99;0;1).

A simpler version of this formula is =NORM.S.INV(0.005+Pknown*0.99). The inverse is =(NORM.S.DIST(prevalence,TRUE)-0.005)/0.99. So, for "gauss", prevalences of +0.64 for men vs. +0.31 for women actually mean percentages of 74 percent for men vs. 62 percent for women.

That makes sense. I’ve seen the table reproduced as a graph with percentages, I guess nobody (including me sadly) bothers to read the actual study.

From a quick look, although there’s not a direct easy conversion AFAIK, 0.15 prevalence is about 56% familiarity, 0.5 is about 70%, and 0.8 is 80%, so it’s not the massive gap originally presented.

But I think all the study did was check if the participants knew it was a word or not by having them pick out the real ones from a list of gibberish?

there’s not a direct easy conversion AFAIK

I gave one in an edit.

But I think all the study did was check whether the participants knew it was a word or not by having them pick out the real ones from a list of gibberish.

More or less.

For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33 nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus. At the end of the test, participants received information about their performance, in the form of a vocabulary score based on the percentage of correctly identified words minus the percentage of nonwords identified as words. For instance, a participant who responded “yes” to 55 of the 67 words and to 2 of the 33 nonwords received feedback that they knew 55/67 – 2/33 = 76% of the English vocabulary. Participants could do the test multiple times and always got a different sample of words and nonwords.

But they largely replicated the results by administering three ordinary multiple-choice vocabulary tests, with r = 0.69 vs. the original test.

There is not a single biological male or female on this green earth who will be reversed on the chart.

I've met some absolutely flaming biological males and went to high school with a butch Lesbian who's now a Formula 1 mechanic. I feel like you're exaggerating a bit.

Yes I know a butch mechanic too and I'll still say her interests are surprisingly female coded.

Anyways motorsports isn't even that male coded: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2024/03/11/heres-why-formula-1-racing-is-growing-in-popularity-with-women/

F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali said 40% of global F1 fans were women, up 8% from 2017.

This is bourne out by the word statistics, where none of the left column words have anything to do with automobiles or racing

That chart shows 15% of women and 13% of men know the least common opposite sex's word, and I bet of that minority, a sizeable number know the other words.

Yes a minority will know some of the words. But the probability stacks up as words are added. Many women will know one word from the left. Few or none will know all.

As @aldomilyar points out, the stereotypically homosexual will provide a source of "reversed" people. In addition to the butch tech-loving lesbians, a lot of the female words are about clothing or fabric, and there's a lot of gay male fashion designers. They'll probably know the flowers too.

Heterosexual female motorcycle enthusiasts might also provide some "reversed" people.

butch tech-loving lesbians

Do these elusive creatures actually exist?

there's a lot of gay male fashion designers

The vast majority of gay men are into men stuff, they just also happen to like anal with other men.

I'm not sure about fashion designers in particular but I admit they may know more words from the right side. I would still expect they will know many words from the left as well.

I've run into a decent number of techie (cis) lesbians, and then there's also the trans male contingent that gives similar twists to the bioessentialist perspective. The probabilistic argument still holds up -- you're talking well under a tenth of a percent -- but they do have existence proofs. That said, there's maybe one I know who'd flip this list, since they tend to either also be fabric nerds or be solely software-focused. Pretty much anyone with a EE background deep enough to know thermistor is going to be a renfest nut, and the exception I do have specifically rejected fabric and flowers stuff because her parents were really jerks about it rather than straightforward lack of interest.

Some of the words wouldn't be relevant even to a typical gay fashion designer. I doubt even the femmiest gay guy would consider a chignon, and they don't want to think about a pessary or doula, nearly by definition. On the other hand, taffeta, ruche, sateen, tulle, chambray, those are all pretty mainstream fabric terms, and many of which I'd expect them to have experience both talking about and using if they're even remotely into hobbyist sewing. Maybe jacquard, chenille, boucle, and damask if they do cosplay, upholstery, or embroidery, though they're weirder and I only know from trawling Michael's.

Bandaeu and kohl they might actually wear, if into crossdress; the real big question is whether it'd be something they'd call that rather than a tube top or makeup. Hell, espadrille isn't even a crossdress thing for guys, it's just a slipon.

I know all of them and so does my wife. :)

Case in point for how similar woman and men are: from their writing, art, etc. you may guess right well over 50%, but it's impossible to reliably infer someone's sex. Multiple famous novelists and mangakas have been women who wrote under men's names, and anecdotally, I've heard multiple women surprised that their favorite fanfiction's author is male.

Eh, I feel like it's more 80-90% reliable. Men and women consistently focus on different little details. I can only think of one example where I was genuinely unsure, though admittedly I can't know if I've ever been totally fooled.

I can usually tell but it's not 80-90% reliable (and I'd consider my literary analytic abilities to be well above average). There are times when I read a book with an ambiguously-gendered pen name (in itself usually a tell) and think "This was absolutely written by a woman." I've commented before that JK Rowling, while a good writer, has womenwritingmen issues. But I doubt you'd actually score 80-90% on a real blind test of writing samples.

Samples, maybe not. Over the course of a whole book? I feel pretty confident. Might ping HereandGone and ask if she can recommend a few mystery novels to test the theory.

What are the signs?

Besides obvious cues, the biggest tell is simply that men tend to depict both men and women like stereotypical men (e.g. stoic and rational) or women like children, i.e. struggle to imagine thinking like a women, and focus on masculine interests like logical systems while ignoring feminine interests like dress...while women do the opposite. I think that women's writing tends to sound more passive and/or casual, men's more direct and/or profound, and men tend to draw more geometric or skeuomorphic...but I don't know if that's accurate or my shallow intuition.

The female main character who wakes up and checks herself out in the mirror while admiring her breasts and curves is an absolute classic sign of male author. Or is that one too obvious?

It is, but /r/menwritingwomen material is almost always rather dated.

In my years of reading, the best way I can break it down is that male writing is more mechanistic, whereas female writing tends to be more intimate.

I’ve always struggled trying to find the best way to phrase it, and that’s what I keep coming back to.

I think the biggest tell is how they focus on people, on the relations between them. Men and women have different ways of assessing the men and women around them, different ways of relating to the same and opposite sex.

the biggest tell is simply that men tend to depict both men and women like stereotypical men (e.g. stoic and rational) or women like children

This is another huge one, especially in the field of pseudonym-cloaked online writing. In theory, I know literally nothing about author CoffeeBacon666, but in practice their female main character is just an autistic dude in a dress with some childish affections.

I could see myself being more confused in a genre I was less familiar with. It would be interesting to take on a challenge like "Read these three mystery writers. All have male names, but some of them are actually female writers. Can you figure it out?"

War of the sexes seems dumb. War is a game where everyone loses, but one side just loses less than the other.

I've written smut for women before. Mostly just one woman at a time. I got good at it in highschool before I could get live smut. Can't imagine women would get very good at it unless they are lesbian or bi. Practice, feedback, and a desire to improve your craft matter most.

I just wanted to elevate some of the rhetoric around women and dating around here. Felt like it devolved too much.

I just wanted to elevate some of the rhetoric around women and dating around here

Now that we got all the nuance out of the way in the thread all there is to do is wait for the usual suspects to show up.

War of the sexes seems dumb. War is a game where everyone loses, but one side just loses less than the other.

"The problem with having a war of the sexes is that there's too much fraternizing with the enemy!"

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