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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25056 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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Occasionally we are told that there is an epidemic of "male loneliness" or "male sexlessness" - an increasing number of young men are going long stretches of time with few or no sexual partners. But why is this a problem? Why should anyone care except for the sexless males themselves?

Evolutionarily, men have always been the disposable gender - the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female. In fact, depending on which estimate you go with, the average male is still significantly more likely to reproduce in a first world Western country today than he would have been historically. So why is there such concern over this particular dip in fertility?

You might say that a high number of sexless males is more likely to lead to violence and social instability - but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale. It's never been harder to imagine actual widespread social unrest occurring in the modern West, given how thoroughly people have been anesthetized with material abundance and cheap entertainment. (This question has been raised a few times recently, about the possibility of the culture war "going hot" over the Trump verdict or the border crisis or whatever - I am of the opinion that no, it won't "go hot", and such a development is essentially unthinkable at this point). Plus, certain MENA societies provide a case study in how you can have a resilient social order where the majority of women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless - these may not be pleasant places to live, but the society is capable of reproducing itself all the same.

What if the incel problem is downstream from the problem of marriage and therefore relationships being unattractive arrangements for both men and women, but especially men? This just came to me, but I used to be a loner guy. Pretty much the entirety of my 20's was spent alone. Tragic from a certain perspective, but I'm not crying over it. Now that I've had girlfriends I'm struggling with the idea of actually staying with one long term. Not because I'm emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise incompatible with the women available to me, but I just don't see the point. I take on all this risk and responsibility... for what? They take on a dependent role and have children (probably unattractive for them) for what? The answer can't just be sex. I feel like everything that once made marriage an attractive or necessary arrangement for both parties has been totally eroded and now we're just running on the fumes of the fuel that once made marriage desirable.

The implicit point of this analysis isn't that men have become especially unattractive and this is what's fueling the loneliness epidemic, but that the clear obsolescence of marriage has taken away any motivation for men to become attractive to women and to actually try.

Women probably feel the same thing and aren't trying to be "marriageable" in the way they once might have, but their role as the selector makes the problems that result from this societal issue seem less serious, though obviously they are feeling the effects as well. I think most women want to be married with kid(s) eventually, but invisibly, imperceptibly, their opportunity for accomplishing this passes them by, and they either have to settle for a man they otherwise wouldn't have if they knew what the deal actually was in their youth, or they go it alone.

You should have kids. It’s incredibly, unbelievably rewarding. Unless you’re literally on track to be the next Lincoln, having kids will be by far the most meaningful and impactful thing you do. And kids need a stable family life, so you should get married first.

I'm begging the people who push this line (which is true on its face) to actually run some calculations and estimate for the class how many actually marriageable women are available in the pool.

How many are single, heterosexual, haven't had kids already, are not grossly overweight, are not riddled with mental disorders, don't have a huge bodycount or any Onlyfans, and are actually interested in having and raising kids in a committed, monogamous relationship.

Otherwise you're basically telling guys to go bobbing for apples in a tub full of acid.

Have you done it? Anecdotally in my locality (SF) basically every late-20s/early-30s woman I know fits the bill. I have a bunch of female friends like this actively searching.

I've run numbers in the aggregate. I'm not standing by them as anything other than a starting point:

About 40% are obese. We've already thinned things out (heh) significantly right there. Maybe Ozempic will save the day.

19% are single moms in the U.S. and Canada. Although I imagine that changes drastically based on race, because I wouldn't have believed that number on first glance.

Around 5-7% are LGBT... although that's much higher for Gen Z women.

Somewhere around 25-27% have had mental illness diagnoses (not counting the severity). Might be 30%+ for the 18-35 year olds that we're talking about)

Around 50%(!) have had 5 or more sex partners. 5 is an arbitrary cutoff, and I CATEGORICALLY DO NOT BELIEVE THE NUMBERS on this type of survey, but again, not an encouraging sign. Difficult to find hard data on how many have been strippers, or prostitutes, or sugar babies, or had Onlyfans pages.

If you want more reliable data take a look at STD rates by gender. Or don't. Its not a fun read. (This one IS hugely disparate based on race, to be fair).

EDIT: to add on, women have more student debt on average, and are less likely to pay it back. So now these women are adding financial burdens to any man who takes them.

And finally, drumroll please, somewhere around 40% of young women are left/democrat leaning. That's before you examine unmarried women specifically. Something close to 70% of single women are probably on the left, politically. Go ahead young man, take a swim in that pond, I'm sure it'll be fine. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” but barely any that are safe to eat.

So we're likely looking at a scarily small % of single women who are relatively chaste, mentally stable, straight, and politically 'moderate', AND also not grossly overweight. And this is what any guy trying to intentionally date and find a relationship is encountering: slim pickings.

And that's before we get into a guy trying to find a match in looks or intelligence.

And as I said in a different comment, women just aren't bringing much to the table to counter the risks, when divorce is still prevalent and doesn't favor the males.

I haven't done the analysis to figure out how these various stats interact (i.e. obviously there will be crossover, so you can't just treat all of these like independent factors), but my gut feeling is it won't help.

And keep in mind, almost by definition the most marriageable ones will get picked up early and removed from the pool and stay out of the pool (people capable of maintaining stable relationships tend to stay in stable relationships. Surprise!). So selection effects would suggest that you're far more likely to encounter the dregs when you're actively searching.

And what makes it particularly bleak is running the numbers on the number of single males in the U.S., and consider how they're ALL chasing the same pool of women, almost regardless of the guy's age. A 50 year old can still have a fling with a 25 year old.

I would guess that what is actually GEOGRAPHICALLY AVAILABLE to a given man will vary too. SF may be a particularly unique circumstance compared to anywhere else. But the type of male you're competing against will also probably be top 1% too.

So yeah, MY read on the situation inevitably leads to the blackpill.

I want people to get married and have kids, but I feel like I can't, in good faith, tell guys to just bite the bullet and marry someone as quickly as possible when there's a veritable minefield out there.

Some of these are legit (like fertility) but if you’re giving up on having kids because your potential wife slept with 6 guys before you or is liberal, it’s an incredible self-own and you’re shutting yourself out of the most joyous thing you will ever experience in life over really tiny details. Obviously nobody is forcing you to compromise but I really hope you and others reading this don’t sacrifice your happiness on the alter of weird twitter dating discourse.

or is liberal

The problem is that "is liberal" tends to be an effective proxy for "is a gynosupremacist".

That's intensely corrosive to relationships for what should be obvious reasons, since someone whose axiom is "always take for I am better, never give for you are lesser" simply can't function in an environment of give and take (i.e. a healthy relationship).

And the reasoning is the same as the [steelman for the] virginity argument- "if she had any brains or working emotional regulation, she wouldn't have been given to man-hating in the first place", and being someone who could be vulnerable to social pressure/irrational hatred like that is a liability (corresponding copypasta: "if she's still a feminist, you aren't the one"). Will she fall back on blaming you just for being a man if and when things go bad? Will she take it out on your sons, resulting anywhere from simple quiet quitting to "I'm divorcing you because you won't gender-affirm the new daughter I would have rather had"?

I say this as someone who thinks "a lack of virginity means she's sex-obsessed with all men everywhere" is the spear counterpart of the above, and just as serious a problem, for the same reasons- as this is a clear symptom that the man has problems with his brain or emotional regulation, gives away a bit of underlying androsupremacy, and might take it out on you or his daughters if the relationship hits a rough spot (corresponding copypasta: "raising daughters is the ultimate cuck").

Partners just aren't bringing much to the table to counter the risks

Every new video game or porno-tech (though I repeat myself) produced simply makes the definition of "much to the table" that much stricter. And I think this is relatively equal across genders- the amount of inherent boorishness/laziness in the average man, or inherent entitlement/screaming harpy in the average woman, that can sustain a relationship... is far lower than it was 100 years ago. Personality types that don't measure up are now much less likely to make it out of the gene pool (and that's even before getting to "is he stable?/is she attractive?") and will also be inherently more loudly resentful of this fact.

The problem is that "is liberal" tends to be an effective proxy for "is a gynosupremacist".

Almost no women IRL are like this. I’ve been on hundreds of dates in big liberal cities and I don’t think I ever met someone who meets this description. It’s a type of woman that exists basically only online and perhaps in some weird pockets you’ll never encounter in person anyway.

As for the virginity thing, I dunno, sleep with a virgin to get it out of your system. It’s just not important.

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but I really hope you and others reading this don’t sacrifice your happiness on the alter of weird twitter dating discourse.

Please don't minimize like this. I didn't report the comment because I believe in addressing things like this head on instead of running to the Mods.

This isn't "weird Twitter dating discourse" this is, as the kids say, "lived experience."

I spent part of my 20s trying to find Mrs. Tollbooth in order to settle down. I kept an "open mind" the way mainstream culture told me to and didn't care about past promiscuity, political incompatibility, their status as a child of divorce and/or poor relationship with father.

Each one of these relationships failed catastrophically for what I recognize now as very significant character and personality failures. I'll admit that I probably didn't do enough to highlight and try to correct bad behavior (again, I was trying to be accepting) and, in at least one case, sort of gave up but kept having sex because sex is fun (I view this now as personal weakness. I wonder what your average sex positive person would say).

So correlation is not causation, right? That these women had "questionable" backgrounds doesn't mean that those background caused these bad situations, right? Bullshit. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. These women had failed to demonstrate a high-trust and durable relationship with any man in their life up to that point (one was even openly, frequently, and hostile-y critical of her very mild mannered and milquetoast brother). Why in the hell would I take all of the available data and throw it out because "don't believe what you read on Twitter"

I should've been fishing in other streams. I realize that now and that's what I do now. I've also cleaned my own act up over the course of several years. My fear is that what @2rafa said in another comment somewhere in this thread is true - I missed the boat on good pair-bonding in my 20s and now will have to "settle" for a woman who did the same in her 20s, but likely has the same view as I do now. Is that really settling and will I quietly resent her for life? Probably not, that's stupid. The fear remains.

But @faceh isn't being some sort of Twitter edgelord when he crunches them numbers and comes up with "welp, blackpill might be on the menu." He's reflecting the reality of thousands of younger unmarried men. And that reality is now manifesting in meaningful ways

Yep. I fell for a few girls who had classic red flags (grew up without father. Claimed to be molested when younger. And/or were on various psych meds, for instance) and I BENT OVER BACKWARDS to be accommodating.

My efforts were not recognized or appreciated or reciprocated, and ultimately the relationships failed in EXACTLY the way you would expect given the stereotypes. The lady blows it up with some irrational, out-of-pocket behavior which completely ignores the actual history of the relationship. Total waste of time and effort to achieve a predictable result.

Eventually you get sick of ignoring your gut and taking chances on the hope that you found a diamond in the rough.

As far as I know, the ex who dumped me prior to our wedding hasn't found another long term partner in the 3 years since.

Suggests it wasn't a me problem.

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They're all just risk factors that should be considered.

You want to make the case that guys should marry and have kids, show them the odds they're facing.

How many are single, heterosexual, haven't had kids already, are not grossly overweight, are not riddled with mental disorders, don't have a huge bodycount or any Onlyfans, and are actually interested in having and raising kids in a committed, monogamous relationship.

If you’re middle class, live in the downtown core (rather than fat suburbs) of a major coastal city and are under 30 and dating under 30 year old women then…yeah, there are a pretty large number of these women, tens or hundreds of thousands of them depending on where you are. Certainly enough not to ‘give up’.

If you're living in a city the number of male suitors is going to be large as well.

So it seems likely that the males are going to be in a state of hypercompetition until they get lucky enough to pull an eligible woman. And many, many won't get so lucky.

And the harder the males compete, the less worthwhile the actual reward is, which will lead some to "drop out."

The stats on males without relationships seem to bear this out.

Why is the number of eligible men higher than the number of eligible women? 5’6 Salvadoran construction workers and 6’ software engineers and guys in the hood with records aren’t competing for the same women.

Multiple reasons. At least partially because of stuff like this:

https://nypost.com/2024/06/14/sports/bill-belichick-72-is-dating-24-year-old-former-cheerleader/

A 70 year old man can date a 24 year old.

https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a45069426/who-is-leonardo-dicaprio-girlfriend-vittoria-ceretti/

A 50 year old can date a 25 year old.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/05/us/billy-joel-marries-girlfriend-alexis-roderick/index.html

A 66 year old can marry a 33 year old and pop out two kids with her.

Literally any heterosexual male aged 20-80 can try to compete for the same pool of desireable 18-30 year old females.

And social norms aren't pressuring against this. No, this isn't limited to celebrities, those are just the ones that get attention.

Every single 20-something woman taken off the market by an older man is one less available for the young men. Which by definition will decrease their chances of finding one.

Stats bear out that women are significantly more likely to be dating or married to a "much" older man than a man is a much older woman.

And young men can see these headlines and realize what it means for them.

Then of course there's my point that women are using corporations as a substitute for husbands

So men have to compete with megacorps, too.

I've recently (in the last year, I think) started to get a sinking feeling that there's been pretty significant shift in the payoff matrix for marriage or even long-term relationships. A combination of men needing to work harder than ever to actually attract a decent mate, and conversely women having to do less and less to be considered 'marriage material'.

In a sense, EVERY woman in the dating scene is just a milder version of Natasha Aponte where they can make all the interested men jump through hoops to compete for her attention while she sits back and judges their performance. And isn't even obligated to pick one at the end. Far as I can tell that lady is still single.

So it becomes pretty reasonable for a guy to look at all the effort and money he'd have to spend to locate a mate and outcompete the other males in the population for her attention, compare that to what he's getting if wins (that is, a companion he can hopefully have regular sex with but who won't cook, clean, may not even give him kids, and will be generally insufferable to deal with half the time) and decide he should just focus on grinding out more wealth for himself and try again later when his relative status improves.

The girlfriends that I've had (including the one I actually proposed to, and then got dumped by prior to the wedding), in retrospect, brought virtually NOTHING to the table that I couldn't have gotten with a male roommate. They weren't good cooks, generally didn't contribute much to household upkeep (despite contributing plenty to the mess), spent copious amounts of time on insta/tiktok/netflix, and had the emotional regulation ability of a teenager at best. The girls I've dated in recent years are not much better, where the one thing they could actually sell themselves with (willingness to bear and raise kids!) seems to be the last thing on their mind.

So getting a GF means you can have sex, yes. But we've all heard the stories of bedrooms going dead after you've tied the knot.

Yeah, if you find a decent one it will contribute a lot to financial stability, that's a strong benefit. But if she ever divorces you it will be the most financially crippling event that could happen short of a chronic gambling addiction.

So on balance a male roommate could still win out.

I'm half considering making that a qualifying question I ask of women I date. "What do you have to offer that I couldn't get from some random guy I met through Craiglist."

I think most women want to be married with kid(s) eventually, but invisibly, imperceptibly, their opportunity for accomplishing this passes them by, and they either have to settle for a man they otherwise wouldn't have if they knew what the deal actually was in their youth, or they go it alone.

Ties into my point that corporate jobs are a substitute for a husband for a woman in her 20's. And there are very few warnings being given to women that "hey, if you put off family formation until your late twenties or even thirties, you are making it SUBSANTIALLY harder on yourself to ever achieve it."

So the current zeitgeist is leading to an outcome where women 'unknowingly' burn their most important years in ways that aren't conducive to their long term happiness.

AND YET, people are still getting married and holding on to (seemingly) happy marriages, kids and all.

I'm half considering making that a qualifying question I ask of women I date. "What do you have to offer that I couldn't get from some random guy I met through Craiglist."

Another point for random guy: In the event of a home invader, having a male roommate instead of a girlfriend/wife means the fight will be 2-on-1 instead of 1v1.

That could be a good “Man vs. Bear”-type question for Twitter and TikTok seethe. “For the men out there with wives or live-in girlfriends, who would you rather live with? Your wife/girlfriend but no more sex or blowjobs, or a random guy you can pick from Craigslist?”

Random guy could himself be a threat. Better a female roommate that can be bullied into at least doing her chores, than dumbfuck larry who spit shines his plate before nuking another hot pocket.

For the most part though, the problem is that women on dating apps have an extremely limited window of Compatibility before they are removed. Good women shack up fast and are taken off the market, or get spammed by shitty dudes and shut down the app, or go on a series of unfulfilling situatkonships and shut down the app. Those who remain are women who like drama, or are undateable for any other reason.

It is quite commonly seen on this board and others that the most viable population for mildly asocial professional westerners is asian women, since they tend to despise asian men and are not fat enough or crazy enough to be disqualifying candidates for dateability. There is the pretty severe risk that an asian woman on dating apps TURNS INTO her white sisters and falls into shrewdom, but thats her fate to bear. Optimal strategy for women should be to date up and secure the bag asap, not fight in the thunderdome to be Chad Thundercocks leavings.

Sure, but Asian women also tend to receive As and Bs unusually frequently, which mean that parts of their bodies those letters suggest are a given size are larger and smaller than the average man wants, at the same time.

Plenty of perverts raised on anime love Delicious Flat Chest. Between fat and booby/butty versus slim and flat, slim and flat usually wins. That is also of course influenced by scarcity, but thats a different dynamic to examine.

The confounding factor is that most of those DFC-loving perverts are probably also ped—ah, sorry, lolicons.

Go on anime-styled erotic art websites and you’ll find heaps of drawings of girls with massively oversized chests (and somewhat less universally, legs and posteriors). Of course, the dichotomy you proposed was “flat and thin versus round and fat”; if that’s the case, then flat would probably win simply because fat is so repulsive. But for reasonable values of the thickness coefficient, I wager that curviness wins out.

This assessment is largely based on my own lived experience (although does looking at 2D porn really count as living?), but I remember one guy (who roleplays as an Orientalist slave trader—weird shtick) who did a more thorough analysis of popular tags on these sites and came to a similar conclusion.

Waist-Hip Ratio is a better overall guide than cup size or bodyweight. A flat chested girl will have no problems if she's skinny, a slightly softer girl will have no problems if she's well endowed. It's the flat fat girls that need to worry. Everything else is matters of taste.

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Yeah.

There's not nearly enough pressure on women on the apps to just HURRY UP AND PICK SOMEONE or go look elsewhere. The ones who stick around, even if they're not crazy, are basically grazing like herd animals, wandering from one patch of grass to another and eschewing any real decision.

Your complaints can also apply to guys, mind. If a guy has been on the apps for a long time, gone on dates, and is still swiping, there's gotta be something about him that is keeping him from successfully entering a relationship.

But yeah, seems like getting 'lucky' on the apps is just that. Luck. You have to manage to catch a lady who is inexperienced and naively entering the arena, hasn't been picked up by a Chad, hasn't been scared off by the waves of creeps, and hasn't gotten mild PTSD from a series of bad outcomes.

And most guys are lowkey aware of this, so they're all on the lookout for the fresh faces to jump on ASAP before they're spoiled. Which ultimately worsens the "overwhelming wave of creeps" issue.

Hell of a collective action problem to solve. Not that the appmakers want anyone to solve it.

When my galpals whine about not finding men to stick with them, I ask them to consider women. Apparently this is autistic to verbalize, because for all their claims that sexuality is a spectrum most insist on liking cock, preferably attached to a 6/6/6 who can 'banter'.

This of course happens because my friends are older women who are comfortable explicating their preferences to Wrongthink William, and when younger these women gaslit themselves on what they actually wanted. Having wasted years of their lives hating themselves for fucking Chad and then displacing their self hate onto Chad, who then rightfully concludes these women aren't serious, the rapidly diminishing physical value these women command has turned the deluge into a shower. At least in the deluge there was the chance of finding a gem in the flow, but in this state they find their pickings increasingly unsatisfying.

The funniest thing is that for the women that do say 'sure lets see what the carpetmuncher crowd is like', its STILL full of dudes! Shitloads of creeps just say they are women or nonbinary and put their full 100% shitty male profile picture and details there. One girl claims she had her account banned for transphobic abuse when she matched with one of these fakers to berate him for abusing the system. I mock them all for the chickens coming home to roost for them, but I still feel for them and wish they can find happiness. Alas the cat-per-woman average is reaching 2 for these girls, and I think thats tipping point but I dont' know why I think that.

AND YET, people are still getting married and holding on to (seemingly) happy marriages, kids and all.

Much fewer people are doing this if a certain graph can be believed.

I believe the graph, but there's still those managing to do achieve something like the traditional life trajectory.

My younger brother got married last year, and is expecting a kid in about a month. He doesn't own a home yet but he has got everything else going for him.

Marriage is very important to Mormons and Gays. That is an anti-signal to normies. Sorry but Internet Atheism and the fight for gay marriage has poisoned the concept for at least a generation.

It matters because married men work harder and follow society’s rules. And that matters a lot; the vast majority of the productive labor to sustain our prosperity is gendered male. When they do less of it, it’s bad for everyone.

follow society's rules

Or to put it more starkly but still perfectly accurately: You are free not to care about these men. And they are free not to care that you would prefer that they didn't engage in mass shootings, serial killings, and rapings against the people you care about.

You might say that a high number of sexless males is more likely to lead to violence and social instability - but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale.

@Primaprimaprima, do you feel comfortable expressing this argument when there's a lone wolf mass shooting (that is, not gang-related), which are almost exclusively committed by maladjusted and love-challenged men? Not asking as a gotcha, just genuinely curious. Are they just the acceptable and not particularly appreciable collateral damage of male disposability to you and not worth the general outpouring of rage and emotion that generally accompanies them? Have you expressed this opinion to any "normies", and how did they respond?

Or to put it more starkly but still perfectly accurately: You are free not to care about these men. And they are free not to care that you would prefer that they didn't engage in mass shootings, serial killings, and rapings against the people you care about.

This is the kind of LARPing I was talking about.

"These men" by and large are not going to do shit. The vast majority of lovelorn men will do nothing but masturbate and seethe; they are not some sort of existential threat whose wrath anyone needs to fear. As for the tiny number who do go on a killing spree, I find it very unlikely that society could have done anything to help them - they'd probably have been the sort of person who goes feral even in a healthier society.

That said, we should care about people who need help, though I'd classify them as similar to drug addicts; they need to want help and recognize the degree to which their own choices have put them in this situation.

"These men" by and large are not going to do shit.

By and large, probably yes. But some of them provably do (and I dispute that they would have done it anyway in a healthier society). And when they do, it's often treated by most as something that should be prevented even in the singular case.

It seems like this site is different from average people in this regard though and doesn't see it as particularly relevant if the occasional Sandy Hook is part of the price of the issue. So I guess I won't be seeing too many condolences on this site the next time something similar happens, or at least that's what I'll expect if motivated reasoning isn't afoot.

By and large, probably yes. But some of them provably do (and I dispute that they would have done it anyway in a healthier society). And when they do, it's often treated by most as something that should be prevented even in the singular case.

Some men provably go on killing sprees for lots of reasons. We clearly cannot stop every unbalanced person unhappy with life who decides to go out violently.

But I was not talking about the occasional loner who snaps, I was talking about the premise that lonely men in Western society pose a threat to social order because there are so many of them they will turn into a disrupting force. I don't think there are that many of them, I think very few of them will ever actually "do" anything, and I stand by my claim that those who do, were probably mentally unbalanced in the first place (and not just because they couldn't get laid).

Some men provably go on killing sprees for lots of reasons. We clearly cannot stop every unbalanced person unhappy with life who decides to go out violently.

This is incredibly simplistic, reductive logic, sloppy thinking that would not even remotely pass in regards to any other issue.

"Some cars provably crash for lots of reasons. We clearly cannot stop every vehicular incident that ends violently."

"Some kids provably drown in bodies of water for lots of reasons."

"Some buildings provably collapse."

I'm sure you get the point. No, you probably can't realistically entirely eliminate men who have a grudge against society and are unattached enough to any of its benefits (which probably does involve some degree of mental imbalance, as history shows it is probably the normative human response to be placated enough by bread and circuses regardless of anything else) to choose violence. But obviously you can ameliorate the issue with changes to society, same as any other.

were probably mentally unbalanced in the first place

This again is just sloppy logic. Let's take Adam Lanza. Now let's put him in whatever his version of a dream world would be, the perfect society that absolutely caters to him (other than that shooting children is still illegal and life-ruining, if he'd actually still want to do that). You think he still shoots up Sandy Hook in that world? I doubt it. You don't think that if he lived in a world that was 10% closer to his dream world, his probability of committing the shooting wouldn't be lowered by at least 1% or so? So obviously there's a gradient here.

Of course there's a clear counterargument to this that someone might make, at least in regards to preventing his conduct: "I think Adam Lanza is nuts/evil/etc. and don't want to live in his dream world or any world that's even 1% closer to it." But I doubt this is true, what with the old saying about stopped clocks and all.

Unless you completely agree with the state of modern gender relations, or want them to be even more like the OnlyFans world they've become, where the traditional marriages that built modern prosperity are becoming increasingly less common and more antiquated (particularly among youths) than old grandfather clocks that a mouse might be running up in a nursery rhyme, then you inevitably almost certainly agree with guys like Lanza, Elliot Rodger, etc. to some degree on some things.

I don't think there are that many of them

Are you aware of the 2023 Pew Research survey that found 63% of young men aged 18-29 to be single?

I am normally somebody who advocates for careful skepticism of Reddit-style "Source sweaty?" link-mining, but the fact that even a single survey from a relatively reputable organization was able to derive this result is objectively insane and I believe likely automatically renders false your assertion that there aren't that many lonely men these days.

Now in fact I unfortunately must agree with you on one thing here. I think the demoralization is too complete and the panopticon is so strong that we're unfortunately unlikely to see an uprising of dissatisfied men. The best case scenario for them is probably a mass exodus to AI-powered waifubots, VR, etc. (which is already happening, though not much yet as the technology is still primitive), a boycott that may eventually leave biological women in general in an actually far worse position than if they had just accepted the trad revolt (but far more gradually).

With that being said, when you have an issue that affects almost 2/3rds of young men of prime fighting age and at the peak of their virility, I don't think you can say anything for sure. If they decided they were sick of the issue and going to band together to fix it by any means necessary as soon as possible, I doubt anybody could stop them for long. Unfortunately though I also think the system is well aware of this and going to work very hard to make sure they don't get to that "if" (as it already is with the onslaught of feminist subversion and other various divide and conquer tactics). I think it will probably succeed.

I just don't think you can make any absolute statements about something that negatively impacts so many people. Complete societal-wide revolutions have been started before by far smaller cohorts (with many of the contributors to these also being relatively listless in their prior society, since after all if they had already been living such great, successful, and dynamic lives of fulfilling their ambitions and fully satisfying their hierarchy of needs they'd have had little desire to change much). To completely dismiss the capacity for violence and change of so many people with shared incentives is what I would call arrogant, cavalier, reckless, and just plain bad civilizational reasoning.

This is incredibly simplistic, reductive logic, sloppy thinking that would not even remotely pass in regards to any other issue.

Using lots of adjectives does not add authority to what was essentially an empty assertion on your part. You are asserting that incel killing sprees are either a thing, or something we should be worried about. My assertion is that they are rare, isolated phenomena and that sexless men are of no greater risk factor in this respect than any other social malady, in terms of turning a few unstable people into killers. Your car analogy is more like "Sometimes car crashes happen because someone was transporting ducks in their car and the ducks got loose and caused the driver to lose control of the car; therefore, ducks are a threat to traffic safety."

But obviously you can ameliorate the issue with changes to society, same as any other.

I've already said we should should try to ameliorate the issue, because I genuinely do feel sorry for sexless men living lonely, miserable lives, and not because I am afraid of them becoming mass murderers. My point is that what you are posting is incel LARP. And also that you seem to put 100% of the blame on "society" for not providing pussy to every man who wants it.

I believe likely automatically renders false your assertion that there aren't that many lonely men these days.

I did not assert that there aren't many lonely men these days. I asserted that they are not a threat, or really, something we should be concerned about threatening society in a major way.

Read more carefully.

To completely dismiss the capacity for violence and change of so many people with shared incentives is what I would call arrogant, cavalier, reckless, and just plain bad civilizational reasoning.

The men with a capacity for violence and change are mostly not in the category of "can't get laid."

And also that you seem to put 100% of the blame on "society" for not providing pussy to every man who wants it.

Yeah, kind of. There have been societies in the past where men without wives were a rounding error (and often were true lunatics, though with even many true lunatics still having wives too), so it's not impossible. If a future society had significantly less availability of information technology, I would also put the blame on that society for not being capable of providing something that is ubiquitous nowadays (unless they were capable of it and not providing it was some deliberate and well-informed philosophical choice about how they wanted people to live).

I've already said we should should try to ameliorate the issue

Sure, but you also seem to be paradoxically reluctant to grant that this might also reduce to any degree the propensity to violence of people who are already affected by it. And I don't see why.

I did not assert that there aren't many lonely men these days.

???

In literally your last post on the subject in response to me you wrote:

I was talking about the premise that lonely men in Western society pose a threat to social order because there are so many of them they will turn into a disrupting force. I don't think there are that many of them

So again: ???

Read more carefully.

Yes, perhaps you should read your own posts before making them.

I asserted that they are not a threat, or really, something we should be concerned about threatening society in a major way.

Alright. If 63% of men between 18-29 not being a possible threat at all is what you want to hang your civizational and historical reasoning credibility on, then so be it. I simply happen to disagree.

The men with a capacity for violence and change are mostly not in the category of "can't get laid."

I think pretty much any man has a capacity for violence and change. You don't have to be appealing to women to operate a gun, bomb, etc. You don't have to be appealing to women to have a high IQ (and often the opposite is true). You don't have to be appealing to women to have strength in the numbers (as the 63%) number proves. I mean, as the classic OKCupid survey shows, most men aren't particularly appealing to women. But if they still didn't have a capacity for violence and change, history would look vastly different.

Would you consider that you're within the realm of claiming that the only men with the capacity for violence and change are those who are already considered desirable by society (and thus again have very little reason to want to change it)? Would you consider why history makes this obviously wrong?

More comments

"These men" by and large are not going to do shit. The vast majority of lovelorn men will do nothing but masturbate and seethe; they are not some sort of existential threat whose wrath anyone needs to fear.

Cigarette smoking, by and large, does not do shit. The vast majority of smokers will not develop lung cancer; cigarettes are not some sort of existential threat whose danger anyone needs to fear.

When you are consistently creating the sort of circumstances that lead vulnerable/damaged men to snap, go berserk and then go on killing sprees, "Most of them just go masturbate instead" does not even reach the level of being wrong. Yes, the majority of these men will just waste away living lives of quiet desperation you are free to not care about, but as that population grows the minority who do in fact snap and go crazy will grow as well.

Cigarette smoking, by and large, does not do shit. The vast majority of smokers will not develop lung cancer; cigarettes are not some sort of existential threat whose danger anyone needs to fear.

what are the stats on this? Im' curious...

EDIT: looked it up, and wow yeah it's a 7.7% chance if you smoke 1-5 cigarettes a day. That's WAY lower than I'd imagined, and maybe the stats there are even cooked since anti cigarette is now the culturally accepted stance.

This ignores increased risk of heart attack and stroke. There's a reason it's the first question insurance companies ask.

Though it is undoubtedly exaggerated, and there is a puritan hatred for any nicotine product as a result.

Cigarette smoking, by and large, does not do shit. The vast majority of smokers will not develop lung cancer; cigarettes are not some sort of existential threat whose danger anyone needs to fear.

I have yet to see any causal link between whatever it is that society is supposedly doing to prevent sad men from getting laid, and spree shootings. If an incel goes on a rampage and says society made him do it, should we believe him?

I have yet to see any causal link between whatever it is that society is supposedly doing to prevent sad men from getting laid, and spree shootings.

And I don't know what that causal link is. My theory is that society is no longer properly socialising young men in healthy ways, and while some men can handle this just fine, some cannot. For a slim minority, this leads to them acting out in incredibly nasty ways.

To use a metaphor, if I fill a house with flammable rags soaked in gasoline, there's no direct causal link between that and the fire (it was the lit match thrown in the window)... but there's very clearly a relationship between the creation of those conditions and a massive conflagration, even if it wasn't the direct cause.

As for the tiny number who do go on a killing spree, I find it very unlikely that society could have done anything to help them - they'd probably have been the sort of person who goes feral even in a healthier society.

They run amok because they think they've got nothing left to lose, so all deterrents are void. Ensure that people have something worth living for and they won't run amok.

Citations: WP, some guy on the Internet, and my memories of the time I ran amok as a teenager (thankfully with a body count of 0). And yes, it was at the tail-end of a depressive episode.

While I am not @Primaprimaprima, my perspective on lone wolf shootings is that most of them are done by a specific sort of maladjusted man that isn't really that hard to notice and that the vast majority of these could be prevented pretty easily by returning to a much broader regime of involuntary commitment for dangerous lunatics. The kids at Sandy Hook died because our society values the freedom of lunatics more than the safety of innocents. The problem with the approach to Adam Lanza isn't that he was treated with too much disposability, but that he wasn't treated as more disposable.

Though Adam Lanza had received mental health treatment, apparently (going based off of Wikipedia here) he'd stopped any contact with mental health providers by 2006 to never return, and his most dramatic documented mental health issue before anyway was clean freak-esque OCD. It doesn't seem like he was on the radar of law enforcement at all before the shooting either (and wouldn't have even had a gun to his name if they ran the records, as they were all owned by his mom).

So what makes you think Sandy Hook had anything to do with society openly valuing the "freedom of 'dangerous lunatics'"? It doesn't seem like Lanza was known to anybody before the event as a "dangerous lunatic", not even his mom (who certainly must have known he was an eccentric recluse, but given that he killed her too presumably she would have taken better measures to protect herself from him had she thought he was actually dangerous).

If you were to cast a net on "dangerous lunatics" wide enough to include people like pre-Sandy Hook Lanza, not only would everyone on this site almost certainly end up in it, while you might solve perhaps the problem of lone wolf shootings, you would have the much bigger problem of an open "incel" insurgency to deal with. After all, if you're going to jail them anyway for potential mass shootings that most posters in this subthread admit that most of them statistically-speaking won't even commit...

Here's the rundown:

When he was 13, Lanza was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome by a psychiatrist, Paul Fox.[155] When he was 14, his parents took him to Yale University's Child Study Center, where he was also diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He frequently washed his hands and changed his socks 20 times a day, to the point where his mother did three loads of laundry a day.[166] He also sometimes went through a box of tissues in a day because he could not touch a doorknob with his bare hand.[167]

Lanza was treated by Robert King, who recommended extensive support be put in place, and King's colleague Kathleen Koenig at the Yale Child Study Center prescribed the antidepressant Celexa.[168] Lanza took the medication for three days. His mother Nancy reported: "On the third morning he complained of dizziness. By that afternoon he was disoriented, his speech was disjointed, he couldn't even figure out how to open his cereal box. He was sweating profusely ... it was actually dripping off his hands. He said he couldn't think ... He was practically vegetative."[155] He never took the medication again.[168] A report from the Office of the Child Advocate found that "Yale's recommendations for extensive special education supports, ongoing expert consultation, and rigorous therapeutic supports embedded into (Lanza's) daily life went largely unheeded."[163]

In a 2013 interview, Peter Lanza (Adam's father) said he suspected his son might have also had undiagnosed schizophrenia in addition to his other conditions. Lanza said that family members might have missed signs of the onset of schizophrenia and psychotic behavior during his son's adolescence because they mistakenly attributed his odd behavior and increasing isolation to Asperger syndrome.[155][162][169][170][171]

I don't buy the claim that this is such an ordinary history that the dragnet would catch Motte shitposters. I suppose it is true that his utterly amoral parents protected their precious psychotic baby as he devolved from merely being an isolated lunatic into a murderous lunatic and that there might not have been much anyone could have done about it after they elected to do so. In any case, there is simply nothing anyone could have done to make this guy less of an unloveable incel.

Sounds like a great way to make sure no one ever voluntarily visits a psychiatrist ever again.

IIRC there are a few polities in the US that will revoke (or are at least empowered to revoke; I believe Washington is among these) your self-defense rights, and seize that property, if you do this and answer the psychiatrist's questions honestly incorrectly.

Safety culture is inherently not capable of dealing with "unsafe tendencies" in a constructive or well-reasoned manner because the only thing it can respond with is violence.

New Jersey's even better -- if you've ever seen a mental health professional at any time since birth, you have to tell the state their name and hospital affiliation to even apply to be able to buy a gun. Don't know it? No gun for you.

It's especially odd to suggest this given that recently society doesn't even have the capacity to keep incarcerated the people who are provably guilty of actual histories of real violence. Plenty of "mini-Lanzas" (that is, post-shooting) have been released on to the streets (mostly if they're black).

The original /r/cringe thread on Elliot Rodger is legendary for a reason.

There are much lonelier societies with more sexless men and they have close to zero lone wolf mass shootings. We just make the tools of mass shootings very easily accessible.

Have you expressed this opinion to any "normies", and how did they respond?

I guarantee you that if you threaten normies with visions of dark brooding virgins rising up they will (1) laugh, and (2) support further repression of said virgins. If you want a rule that says you can't get a gun unless you bring your girlfriend to say you aren't a threat (not a bad idea IMO), stories like this one are how you get it.

If you want a rule that says you can't get a gun unless you bring your girlfriend to say you aren't a threat (not a bad idea IMO), stories like this one are how you get it.

If you think that sounds implausible it's the law in some countries right now. I believe at least Canada's gun licensing regime- one of the more liberal ones, globally- requires an interview with an intimate partner, although it's aimed at domestic violence prevention. I would be surprised if it was the only such example.

There are much lonelier societies with more sexless men and they have close to zero lone wolf mass shootings. We just make the tools of mass shootings very easily accessible.

That's true. It's good that America has the 2A so its men who have been failed by society have a more productive and direct way (at least compared to suicide) to address their grievances that is capable of somewhat effectively targeting society (though of course as pointed out far too few still take advantage of this opportunity or especially target people higher up on the totem pole who are truly more responsible for their issues).

I guarantee you that if you threaten normies with visions of dark brooding virgins rising up they will (1) laugh, and (2) support further repression of said virgins.

And then they will still cry like fools at the next Sandy Hook and demand to know how anybody could do such a thing. They're not exactly imposing given their constant buffoonish contradictions and contextual flip-flopping.

If you want a rule that says you can't get a gun unless you bring your girlfriend to say you aren't a threat

Escorts would love the business this results in.

The fraction of total utility lost to mass shootings and the like is very small indeed. Anyone not caring about lonely men should also be fine not caring if one in every 100k of them commits a mass shooting.

I think the problem is more that having a lack of buy-in into society from a significant fraction of the population is a risk factor for all sorts of things. After all, these men can still vote, for one thing.

Yes, I agree in general with you (particularly that the subtle effects of men lacking investment in society are likely to be what corrodes it far more than the dramatic eruptions of frustration). But it's worth pointing out that while yours is the general opinion expressed in this subthread, it's a minority opinion overall in society. Whether they're just virtue signaling or not, a significant percentage, if not the majority, of people who express a lack of concern or disdain for lonely men also express severe apparent anguish at even singular instances of mass shootings and indicate that they would support quite significant societal changes to stop them from ever happening.

I don't think rambling on about mass shootings or serial killings is the big issue.

I think slacker men is the big issue. Men do the vast majority of productive labor that generates and sustains our society's prosperity- that prosperity which keeps us from living in primitive savagery- and efforts to get women to do it have failed. Marriage incentivizes men to actually go do that labor instead of playing videogames and masturbating all day.

In a primitive society, you can motivate people by the threat of starvation instead, but ours is far too prosperous for starvation or even extreme boredom to be a credible threat. Getting men to do the unpleasant work that needs doing- which women mostly won't do- to run a complex society when they can fuck off to watch netflix is an important problem to solve, and 'your woman and kids depend on you' is the best way to solve it.

That’s just one aspect of it. Whenever this subject comes up here, a bunch of posters are always eager to point out that A) young, aggressive, unattached men are the sole threat to any social order but B) demographic implosion means that this group is relatively much smaller than in earlier times. Which is basically true. But the reality is that social stability doesn’t just stem from the absence of destabilizing factors and an aging population. It’s not only that men in general need to be productive for society to prosper, it’s that they need to be invested in society’s future to the extent that they’re willing to take up arms to defend it, as members of the army, the police, a militia, a vigilante group, a posse etc. In a demographically imploding society, it’s true that there are relatively few people threating the existing order, but there’ll also be few people willing to uphold it, so the demographic effects cancel each other out. And anti-social, unattached men, by definition, will not be invested in upholding the existing social structure.

Columbine was a tragic love story between two men. It didn't have anything to do with being love challenged.

Mass shootings (non-gang related), serial killers, and stranger rape all of have one other thing in common: they're extraordinarily rare. Most incels just descend into listless stagnation; they're not going to be agents that fundamentally change society.

If you're going to go full кто кого and decide that since you can forcibly suppress a group enough, you don't have to care about their problems, why start with sexless men rather than homeless addicts, criminals, "the poor", etc?

Sexless men fall into the Oppressor side of the Oppressed/Oppressor dichotomy for reasons I cannot fathom. Criminals, depending upon their ethnicity or upbringing, usually receive some form sympathy along the lines of it not being their fault or that society caused them to behave as they do.

I mean it isn't their fault, if you were them down to their genome and environment then you would be a criminal too.

“There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford”

Some people get the doubt of a difficult upbringing, others get told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

you know about the bootstrap thing, right?

Sexless men fall into the Oppressor side of the Oppressed/Oppressor dichotomy for reasons I cannot fathom.

Well, not with mistake theory, you can't.

Beyond the obvious reason, dealing with the problems sexless men cause means having to give men-at-large concessions to motivate them to deal with that problem (that women aren't magically entitled to male labor is merely a specific example of what "oppression" means in conflict theory). Thus, even though they might not be oppressing women directly, their second-order effects cause women to be oppressed- because if they fail to motivate men-at-large to defend them then they'll quickly find themselves paying the sexless men with sex: either way, the paying, the obligation to, is the oppression.

Criminals, depending upon their ethnicity or upbringing, usually receive some form sympathy along the lines of it not being their fault

I think this is called "choosing the bear".

Oh no, I am fully aware that conflict theory is real and this is all motivated by an subconcious or actively concious belief that Men Bad, I just want these people to explain their logic.

ITYM Sexless men fall into the Oppressor (bad) side of the dichotomy.

If you were making a statement about the woke framework, where oppression is commonly used, then I think you meant to say that sexless men (like all men without redeeming features like being part of a minority) are considered oppressors.

I think the reason for that is that woke narratives are generally very simple monochrome narratives. If women are the good guys, then men have to be the bad guys.

Of course, just like the near east conflict is more complex than "evil Israelis are oppressing the Palestinians", the relationship between men and women in a society is also more complex than just one side oppressing the other side. It is more likely an inadequate equilibrium far away from the Pareto frontier.

Those latter groups can easily be ignored and shuffled off to other physical areas for other people to deal with, on a day to day basis. Sexless men seem to sprout up everywhere and are encountered everywhere on the Internet, so they're harder to avoid and need a more forceful hand.

ETA: tongue in cheek

It is hard for me to take seriously the claim that incels are more in need of a "forceful hand" than homeless addicts.

Maybe for you, homeless people occupying physical spaces are easier to avoid/ignore than sexless men on the Internet, but that is not my experience.

It was tongue in cheek (not obviously enough so, apparently).

Is any action necessary to suppress them? I didn't read the OP as saying "let's do x, y, and z to stamp out complaints of incels" but "by revealed preferences they are content to stew in porn and video games so why stress about them?"

I don't agree with OP because I am not content to just write off huge chunks of the population which could be leading fulfilling lives and useful to other people, but your objection seems like a non sequitur.

It's debatable whether the "sex recession" is even real. Recent data doesn't show the same kind of numbers that made people on the internet freak out in 2018. If it is real, it doesn't appear to be a problem of men in particular, since women report similar, and sometimes higher rates of no-sex. The idea that an increasingly small minority of men are exercising some kind of sexual monopoly appears to have little to no basis in reality.

men have always been the disposable gender

This is an old redpill bromide but not really true. In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

[In Japan] Farmers would often kill their second or third sons. Daughters were usually spared, as they could be married off, sold off as servants or prostitutes, or sent off to become geishas.

Is there any real counter evidence to the argument that infanticide both historically and today is mostly, in most societies, of female children? That is the way it is in modernity from rural South Africa to one child policy China.

In the US today: depending on what you consider infanticide, when IVF is used sex-selectively, it's usually to select for a girl. And when children are being adopted, adoptive parents have a strong preference for girls.

For infanticide itself, according to the CDC, boys are more likely to be victims of it than girls, both in absolute terms and proportionately (8 boys per 100k person years vs 6.2 girls per 100k person years): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6939a1.htm#T1_down

I couldn't find concrete statistics on sex-selective abortion in the USA, but I'd expect it to follow the same trend.

Post-birth infanticide in the USA is extremely rare and shouldn't be used as evidence of anything. Sex selective abortion is harder to track, but isn't it mostly confined to specific subcultures/ethnic groups that may well have different values?

I don't think male infants being more likely to be victims of infanticide is a strong argument about gender bias one way or another. It is a strong argument against the idea that today, in most societies, female children are more likely to be a victim of it than male children: the contemporary US is a society that exists today that has some relevance.

And, yes, there are strong ethnic trends contributing to it.

I said "almost"

In every society with widespread infanticide (most of them), the gender ratios of surviving infants almost always skew towards boys.

Indeed, and we might add that in historic times of famine food is often reserved for (male) warriors, but almost never for (non elite) women, and women often miscarry or cannot conceive during famines so this has appreciable effects on communal strength. Women are just as disposable as men, it merely doesn’t make sense for them to be warriors given basic biological differences. That doesn’t really make women ‘advantaged’ in any significant way.

Hm. Does it make sense to say that society may advantage either men or women depending in part on economic conditions? In that case, it might still be the case that women are currently advantaged - and unless we expect starvation/subsistence conditions to reoccur in the west, may be sustainably advantaged.

but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale

I don't think this is generally accepted---certainly not to the point of "plainly". There's a very prevalent narrative that the rise of the alt right in Europe/US is exactly the widespread social instability you would see because of this---for example see here:

"One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them?" Krah asks and continues with advice: "Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft. Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots. That's the way to find a girlfriend!"

Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident.

All smart and sensible.

And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft.

Eh, there's a lot you can get done by being nice and soft if you're good at social manipulation. I'd say from experience it's easier to leverage nice+soft into getting what you want than disagreeable+hard.

Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots.

And now you've completely veered off into the deep end.

Well, this is Krah from the far right AfD we are talking about.

"Come to the far right, we have pussy" sounds factually incorrect, mostly. If you think girls are finding you icky, wait how icky they find you if they know you vote Nazi.

I mean, the steel-man of that argument would be "we are in a situation in which too many men compete over too few woman interested in a relationship. The historically successful solution to that dilemma has been large scale conventional war which decimated the population of men."

Of course, most people don't really fancy to bleed to their death in some trench, so this would be a hard sell.

Far right women in Europe are shacked up or male-coded lesbians, not singles eager to repopulate the master race. Even conservative women find most far right people distasteful, if only for legitimate concerns about stupidity permeating the wide umbrella of rightists. Having said that, finding a 'far right' young woman can be incredibly fun. Theres something tantalisingly subversive about a young blonde woman quietly admitting that she is looking for any group that is willing to advocate for a nation to prioritize its own people. I get that from mothers, but every time these young women pop up in my orbit I try to get my guys to get to know them. Unfortunately map-painting CK2 autists don't pass the sniff test of conversational competence, so my efforts are continually frustrated. These guys will eventually find some asian woman to shack up with, but I dont know how to help the girls.

Unless the girls are complete recluses they’ll just end up with the guy who they’d have shacked up with anyway (depending on looks, class, social circle and personality) and then either keep their politics to themselves or slowly drift towards their man’s politics in time.

Normie women are capable of dating men and not have either of their lives consumed entirely by osmotically dictated political preferences? How can you be aware of this and be on this forum at the same time, interloper!

Theres something tantalisingly subversive about a young blonde woman quietly admitting that she is looking for any group that is willing to advocate for a nation to prioritize its own people.

It’s sad that this is tantalisingly subversive rather than the default. Life is hollow without a Riikka-maxxing qt3.14 girlfriend/wife.

I think a lot of people are confused why the sex recession could be concerning to socialcons, so I thought I'd chime in and give my take.

First of all, in an "only Nixon could go to China" sense, I'm a strong opponent of casual sex. I think it's bad. And I've thought it's bad since I first formed opinions about sex, and continue to believe it. I think it's damaging to the individual and to society, and I think it cheapens something that is of great significance.

So my problem with the sex recession is not that I think promiscuity is great and I lament its decline, it's that the problem with the sex recession isn't actually about sex at all -- it's an underlying intimate relationship recession and a loneliness crisis.

What's happening isn't that a bunch of people are getting into intimate dating relationships and keeping it in their pants until marriage, or at least until their relationship is solid and long-term oriented. What's happening is straight people aren't talking to the opposite sex at all. And, if they are, they find no interest in dating any of them, because they have unrealistic expectations, or they don't understand the appeal of a relationship, or they are so neurotic that they're unable to form a stable intimate connection with another person.

That a whole bunch of young people are so atomized and neurotic that they're unable to form intimate relationships is actually more damaging, in my view, than casual sex is per se. So I'm concerned about the sex recession in much the same way as a socialist might have been concerned about the Great Depression.

"Ah, but!" you say, "the Great Depression was all about the banks and the capitalists losing their money in the stock market crash!"

"Well, that was what started it," the socialist replies, "but the real problem was what happened to the workers, who became unemployed and unemployable, who were forced to stand in breadlines for food and travel the country in search of work."

The Great Depression was bad for the capitalists, just as the sex recession is bad for people who want casual sex. But it is also very, very bad for people who want intimate relationships in general, even socialcons who want to settle down with a nice girl and have a family. Because, as it turns out, many of the skills and capacities necessary for people to have casual sex are also necessary for people to have long-term intimate relationships. And if the social environment -- as sex-positive and gung-ho about casual sex as it is -- cannot get people to have sex, well, it probably can't get them to settle down, either.

So the sex recession serves as a sign of the times, a statistical revelation of a deeper problem. There's a reason the news reports on the stock market, and it's not just because many Americans have investments -- it's because what happens on the market ends up affecting the economy as a whole. And so it is with sex.

I hold that a big part of the ultimate problem is a lack of strong, conservative institutions, including marriage, but of course I believe that.

However, just as a socialist would insist that the ultimate causes of the Great Depression were the flaws of capitalism and the lack of worker control over the means of production, I would insist the ultimate causes of the sex recession are the flaws of the sexual revolution and the lack of willingness to sacrifice in order to make relationships work. While, of course, lamenting the loneliness and the emptiness and the suffering that the sex recession engenders.

And just as the socialist would say that the Depression necessitated a revolution, I too say that the sex recession necessitates a serious reevaluation of the "sex system" we've established. This is a system which insists on the greatness of sex while utterly dismantling the insitutions that helped most people safely and meaningfully have it. And I suppose, like the reddit-tier socialists insisting we live in "late-stage capitalism" while expecting the revolution any day now, I hope and pray we are in "late-stage sexual libertinism" where the contradictions and the failures of the casual sex system become apparent to the masses.

All of this comes as people's ability to form platonic friendships is damaged as well. It's a totally generalized loneliness crisis. And it's a massive problem for our society: I think it threatens to tear the social fabric apart. My suspicion is that this will happen less as a bang (pun not intended, but appreciated) and more as a slow, methodical, sorrowful loss of social support and increased low-level suffering. I think this has already been happening for a while now, with the results evident in real life and online.

I hold that many of the problems of wokeness -- the obsessiveness about identity markers, the dogpiling on opponents, the extremely online bickering, all of that -- form but another cluster of symptoms of the same problem: a neurotic, atomized, empty, soulless, lonely society. People are desperate for something to give them an identity and a purpose, because their family and their society and their friends and their (at times non-existent) partners have utterly failed in the basic social function of giving them that.

And it should be explicitly noted that the cause of the loneliness epidemic is in large part the internet: the destruction of in-person interaction, and a turn to interractions oriented in ways other than centered on people, whether that be consuming content, or interacting with individuals about a topic as we are right now.

I personally think the causality goes the other way on that — Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone in 2000, based on a 1995 essay, and the forces of atomization were already incredibly strong by that point. In some ways, the internet has actually mollified some of the trends against human connection, even as its algorithmization of connection has made the quality much worse. I think people resort to the internet because of the atomization that has already occurred.

Before the internet, people were still disconnected and lonely, they were just disconnected and lonely watching TV or reading books instead of binging YouTube and reading tweets. If anything, I think the great gender disconnection that would lead to our present was well in place by the 90s. I Love Raymond was not exactly a positive depiction of marriage.

Yeah, I've seen people in this general sphere argue that early helicopter parenting and Stranger-Danger paranoia killed a lot of outdoors socialization, combined with the isolation of suburbia and the decline of latchkey kids. The Internet and video games, as much as people might malign them when the topic of the modern Battle-of-the-Sexes comes up, at least provide some sort of alternative to "literally nothing."

FWIW, for my personal life I have concluded that relationships are mostly not worth the effort.

When I was 18, I did not worry about finding a girlfriend at all, just assumed that it would be something which would happen on its own eventually. When I was 25, I noticed I was wrong about that, became depressed and so on. From 30 to 40 I had a relationship which felt like net negative at least in the last years, in retrospect. About a year on, my feeling about relationships is "been there, done that".

I mean, both getting laid a lot and being in a good relationship would be net positive in an abstract way. Having a helicopter pilot license would also be a nice thing to have, I guess. But just like I don't have any big dream of becoming a pilot, I also don't have a big dream of becoming a sexual successful man or starting a family. Getting to either of these three goals would take perhaps a few years of work, with the helicopter thing being way more deterministic.

I mean, if I got stuck in the 18th century, I might conclude that cleaning up my act enough to attract a partner would be the best way towards happiness. But today, I have the whole internet at my fingertips. Video games, netflix, porn, whatever. Yes, all of that is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but I would argue that everything a human does is irrelevant in the great scheme of things.

Assuming the trend is real, we should care on an abstract level because we'd prefer to maximize human happiness and fulfillment and it's sad to see so many people being lonely.

On a social level, there probably is a disadvantage to having a large number of men feeling useless and lonely, which probably leads to them not being very productive.

Should we actually worry about violence and social unrest? Probably not - I think the notion of sexually frustrated males turning into an army and causing widespread civil disorder is mostly an incel vengeance fantasy. (I have largely the same opinion of every scenario that is supposedly going to "go hot" and cause American Civil War II.)

But it would be more productive to ask "What can we do to help these guys?" than "Why should we care about lonely guys jerking it to hentai in their basements while they imagine they're Rorschach?" For the same reason that any trend of widespread dissatisfaction would be better addressed with some grace and compassion than saying "Fuck those losers."

I don't really like the MENA comparison, because we have lots of historical examples that were, by objective measures, awful places to live for 95% of the population but were still "capable of reproducing themselves."

which probably leads to them not being very productive.

Given mass immigration and increasing automation, how much of a concern is this, really?

What happens once the immigrants can't fuck either?

What happens once the immigrants can't fuck either?

They go back to their home country with the wealth they've accumulated working in the US, which being far more than they could have earned there, greatly improves their marriage prospects?

I have noticed recently that the conversation from progressives has shifted to prevented boys and young men from falling down the loser rabbit hole, particularly given the rise of Andrew Tate and things like Tiktok. This is equally amusing/depressing to me given that it was progressive policy (lockdowns) that brought us to this point.

I think if you'll take a closer look, the means they propose will do the opposite of "prevent[ing] boys and young men from falling down the loser rabbit hole".

I've thought about this occasionally. I'm a member of the "haves" in this scenario, and as more men opt out of the sexual market or become women, in theory that would be great for my prospective harem.

The problem is that I'm monogamously married and am able to raise children with sufficient male attention. The "Alphas" taking advantage of the evolving sexual market (and sometimes breeding) right now are anti-social, absent fathers, creating more candidates for the underclass that will eventually victimize my children. Maybe directly, maybe through voting.

I'd need the social ability to have a harem and rely on a group of beta males to produce enough wealth to support the family (and give me enough bandwidth to effectively father). We're a bit far away from that.

I'll support your position as soon as the society adopts the same indifferent view of problems and lesser discomforts that women face.

Wasn't that already the case? Incel as a popular phrase was coined in the 90s by some lesbian, do you remember hearing any panic or concern about it in the 90s or 00s before it became an issue for some men?

But why is this a problem? Why should anyone care except for the sexless males themselves?

Kinda proves too much. Almost everyone has some aspect of their life they're dissatisfied with, and would be possible to improve their contentment with life or enjoyment of life if they could coordinate with OTHER people enough to address that area. Or at least coordinate enough to mitigate whatever particular behavior was leading to to the negative outcome. Why should anyone care about grinding unhappiness in anyone but themselves? Why should anyone look around and see if there are potential ways to move towards a better space on the payoff matrix with a little coordination?

We could go the route of extreme atomisation where every person is solely responsible for their own hedonic state but that seems likely to result in everyone sabotaging themselves and others in ways they can't identify without having a bare minimum amount of empathy or at least realizing "hey, this thing that is making me unhappy is also making these other people unhappy, is it possible we could do something about it?

But a society where nobody puts ANY stake in their fellow citizen's wellbeing is (probably) going to be far worse off than one where people are at least willing to communicate their dissatisfaction and others are willing to hear and consider their complaints.

Some problems are mostly intractable, serious mental illness and hardcore drug addiction are often treatment resistant. So the solutions will involve, putting it bluntly, working around the sufferers and not with them so much, to get them in safe housing with consistent supervision where they are less dangerous to others and themselves, and they aren't spitting off externalities just by their existence.

But I do think that the 'problem' of socially inept, sexless, loveless, despairing males can be wrangled with and improved with the cooperation of said males. If only people would give a fuck.

I'm in a position where I'm not sexless and generally don't have trouble interacting with women, but have had an absolute bear of a time finding a woman both worthy of and willing to reciprocate true commitment, so I do count myself among the ranks of the unhappily single. And the more I grasp the severity and nature of the problem, the more I realize that those poor unfortunate souls who haven't made it past first base (if that) are stuck in a loop that is approximately equal parts their own ineptitude but also the forces of social consensus have them in a spiral where each day that passes without finding love makes them appear less worthy of it, and renders their crusade to find a partner ever more hopeless, which saps their motivation to even try to escape.

And, on the flip side, the alpha males who are aware of their advantages in the sexual marketplace are often spitting off externalities of their own, leaving behind broken hearts and 'ruined' women who will end up lonely and unhappy. Because those men, as you say, DO NOT really care about others' wellbeing and thus act in a way that ignores any second order effects they may be causing on other people. I won't go so far as to say they're 'defecting' from social norms, because those social norms were eroded before they arrived, but they are not doing anything to improve the norms.

Over the years, I have watched with intense frustration as many generally intelligent, put-together, 'eligible' women who could have formed a loving family with the right guy get entangled with those sociopathic type of men that are extremely good at getting what they want out of the opposite sex and giving very little in return, and thus these ladies end up with a kid, with STDs, with regrettable tattoos, and/or possibly a warped idea of what relationships should look like. Or at best sucks up a few years of her life where she has the best odds of finding a long-term partner and 'wasting' them on a selfish fling.

And I feel some measure of 'responsibility' for failing to step in and avert these inevitable outcomes. Not a LOT of responsibility, mind, but I feel like I do have some stake in the outcome, realizing how every female ruined by an 'alpha' now shrinks the pool that is available to the good guys who actually 'deserve' the affection.

So basically, I see many, many hapless males who genuinely crave affection, companionship, and yes, sex, and are literally 'unable' to acquire it under current social circumstances (and worse have no available resources to learn how to GIT GUD and maybe have a shot), and I see many hapless females who genuinely crave affection, companionship, and yes, sex who fall for the wrong type of guy and are unable to secure his long-term support after he plays with them (and worse the trauma or regret they experience makes it harder for them to form secure attachments in the future) and they're all OBVIOUSLY unhappy with their decisions and the way their lives have played out.

And I think, SURELY, if only we could get these two groups to interact under the right conditions, we could achieve MUTUAL GAIN FROM TRADE or something. If only someone(s) would put in the work to organize such an exchange.

And "if not me, then whom?"

That is perhaps the question worth asking. Who will take the hard steps necessary to make the collective marginally better off if they are only worried about their own internal state?

Access to sex is a major incentive for being economically productive for men. If the distribution of sex becomes more unequal, the marginal utility from additional work or career growth will decrease for men for those under the xth percentile (imagine the derivative of the Lorenz curve; depending on the starting and ending Gini indices, that break even point is around the 65th percentile). Those men will put less effort into moving up the curve through dedicated everyday effort and self-improvement and instead focus on consumption of other goods (video games, porn) and wild unproductive bets that would move them far up the curve in a single fortuitous event (gambling, speculative crypto, GME).

Which means a poorer, less dynamic society. Which is definitely a society that can survive, but I'd prefer a different one.

It may affect more people than you think. In many cases, it affects men who later go on to have active sex lives, but this delay means they don't make the most of their youths.

the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female

Is this true specifically because of the age-old practice of "killing all the men and keeping all the women," though? My understanding is that that is at least one of the explanations for the genetic footprint we currently have today. Possibly the "80% of women reproduced but only 40% of men" says more about war than about love.

It is problematic because sex is important to a healthy organism. You should care only insofar as you care about the health of others in different ways (obesity, autism rates, alcoholism, whatever).

Evolutionarily, men have always been the disposable gender

Evolutionarily men would also capture foreign war brides. I’m not sure where evolution factors in unless we are considering rallying up Afghani and Ukrainian women as eligible war brides.

the average male was historically much less likely to produce any offspring than the average female

Do you mean prehistory? In civilizational history, I would be suspicious of this once you account for war, venereal disease from prostitutes, priesthood

the average male is still significantly more likely to reproduce in a first world Western country today than he would have been historically

Not sure if this is true once war and veneral disease is accounted for

why is there such concern over this particular dip in fertility?

If the domestic population of Western nations do not have children they will be replaced by foreigners which, evolutionarily and historically, is a fate worse than individual death. Didn’t like, 20% of Russian men die to prevent German rule on their soil?

certain MENA societies provide a case study in how you can have a resilient social order where the majority of women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless

I think this is incorrect. MENA societies are historically a case study in fractiousness. They have calmed down in recent decades because polygamy is on the decline. In addition to polygamy on the decline, MENA has been sending their rebellious men to Iraq / Afghanistan / Libya etc where they fight to the death in some hellish geopolitical colosseum battle. However they also get war brides and that’s pretty cool.

Plus, certain MENA societies provide a case study in how you can have a resilient social order where the majority of women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless - these may not be pleasant places to live, but the society is capable of reproducing itself all the same.

Can you point to the specific examples of the MENA societies you are referring to? What you are saying sounds like a gross exaggeration for contemporary MENA societies. Even in Saudi Arabia, polygamy is somewhat rare and marriage rate is high relatively, although the first website cites a misleading stat. The more relevant one is:

Within the age category where women traditionally got married in Muslim majority countries, 25-34, the rate of unmarried females reached 43 percent while for men it was almost half that at 23 per cent.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200810-66-of-young-saudis-are-single/, https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/165994

So funnily enough the site claiming 66% young saudis including 15 years to 34 years old to are single also claims that from 25-34 year old men only 23% are unmarried.

Islamic societies are mostly monogamous societies. I am not aware of any example of a society were most women disappear into the harems of rich men and the majority of men are left sexless.

It is a transparently bad idea that is both bad for the people involved and not sustainable. MENA societies with all the things one could criticize them aren't that bad. This is more of a fantasy dystopia.

The question also is what percent of men are choosing to not have sex or staying single vs. not out of choice. In the US, a more powerful legal system generally incentivizes singleness for men, as these institutions tend to work against men and favor women. I think this is how 'the right' works against its own interests of promoting fertility. The 'law and order' and 'rule of law' the right values so highly at the same time lessens the power of average men or tips it in favor or women. Outside of the US, these systems tend to be weaker, relatively speaking, compared to men, hence higher fertility rates. In the US, courts, agents, and police have tons of power, whereas military, politicians, and citizens have less. Ex-US, military, politicians, and businessmen have more power but police and courts are weaker and easily bribed or otherwise evaded.

Why should anyone care except for the [unhappy, unmotivated] males themselves?

Because when the enemy comes the women need the men to defend them.

And if the enemy has more to offer the men than the domestic women, this happens, and the end result is that one way or another the women's power will be diminished (either because they need to suck it up and accept the domestic man, or will be forced to do so at the point of the foreign man's guns).

Thus the balance women in that society have to strike now is one between making it as unpleasant/oppressive/offensive to male dignity possible without the enemy of their society being able to offer them a better deal if only they don't go to war no matter how many white feathers the women force upon them.

It is on these grounds that "incel" is recognized by women to be a legitimate threat to their power- because there's a possibility (however slim in the West, of course) that should incels organize they'll be forced to renegotiate with the men of their society and have to give up some of their social power for protection from incels, just as they had to in times gone by (though granted, women being subordinate to men was still kind of the room temperature in the West when the West still actually fought wars).

Society already does not care about low value men. The only reason it pays any attention at to incels et al is out of a misguided fear that they pose or will pose meaningful physical harm to ordinary members of society. Given the continuined re-occurrence of things like the Bear-Man-Woods conversation and its complete disregard of statistics and reality, this trend will continue. I suppose the alternative is worse, in that loser men just get stepped on/around/over in the same way that homeless people do.

Pertaining to the discussion down-thread on the subject of young men and women disliking each other:

The New York Times just published the latest iteration in what feels like a semiannual analysis of dating after 60. The article itself contains the usual "no-duh" realities (old people come with baggage, the machinery doesn't function like it used to) and far-reaching copes (it'll be the best sex of your life, less drama involved), but of particular interest this time around is the unusual tenor of the comment section.

I always enjoy reading these articles and their comments despite (or rather, because of) having a ways to go until becoming a member of the relevant age bracket. The typical reader reaction usually involves stories of finding love late in life, rediscovering the joy of intimacy, meeting new and interesting people to treasure their remaining time with, etc. But man, whether it's a generational shift or a sudden change in attitudes, the elders are much more unhappy this time around. Most of the top comments describe a vehement dislike and/or disgust of the opposite sex, all in a single direction: these women simply hate dudes. Here are some representative excerpts:

"...after a lifetime of having sex with men who have no clue about women's bodies and how to please them, old men waving their bottles of little blue pills and complaining about their 'needs' are not appealing. I'd rather go out for lunch and take in the latest exhibit at a museum with my female friends. They are far more interesting."

"Men need to feel intellectually superior to women and I got sick of playing dumb a long time ago."

"The LAST thing I want is to have someone else to take care of. I enjoy solitude. There is a huge difference between being alone and being lonely."

"75% of domestic violence is committed against women. A third of female murders in 2021 were by their intimate partner. No, not all men. But statistics matter. And they show that women have a lot more to lose in opening their hearts and homes to a man."

"I'm in my 50s and this is already true. The men are fine, but my women friends? They are traveling, learning, reading, exploring. If there was a pill I could take to become a lesbian I'd swallow it so fast...."

"I am appalled by the first photograph in the article which shows a man’s hand around the woman’s neck, even though his thumb is on her cheek. I think it was a thoughtless choice and I am willing to bet that many abused women relived trauma when seeing it."

"Statistically, men are far more likely to leave their wives when the woman gets a cancer diagnosis."

This is the rhetoric that younger generations are hearing from their parents and grandparents. Lifetimes spent with and for another person, only to openly resent those decades of effort late in life. With the hysteria of "sexual assault" at the other end of the spectrum, both independent sexuality and committed intimate relationships are massively disincentivized (or at least, that's how it looks to someone just beginning to figure out the structure of their life). The only guarantee of a lifetime of happiness, it seems, is to stay free of interpersonal bitterness, free of legal and social humiliation, free of sacrificing your own interests for someone who hates you; to live an entire life alone.

How do you convince a 22-year-old of either sex that their perception is mistaken, that there is value in seeking committed relationships with another person?

"Men need to feel intellectually superior to women and I got sick of playing dumb a long time ago."

A bit off topic, but I've heard this sentiment from a number of women, yet I've never seen it in real life. I strongly prefer smart women, and no male friend or relative has ever told me (or acted like) they prefer dumb women. Where do women get this idea? It must be rooted in real experiences to some extent, but it's completely alien to me.

My candidate hypotheses:

  1. Most men like to discuss niche topics of particular interest to them, and women interpret this as a need to feel intellectually superior.

  2. Most men dislike argumentative or combative women, and such women interpret this as men disliking their intellect rather than their attitude.

  3. Most men would choose a hot, dumb woman over a smart, ugly woman, and women interpret this as men needing to feel intellectually superior.

Where do women get this idea?

Woman here, and I started out not believing that "men need to feel intellectually superior to women" but absolutely agree with it now. The experiences that tilted me that way:

  • As a woman, I have had many conversations with men where I curiously asked them many questions about their intellectual areas of expertise. I'm a pretty knowledgeable person and in many of those cases also had credentialed expertise to bring to the table, comparable to what the man was bringing. Following their own monologues about intellectual topics, not one of those men, literally nobody, ever asked me a curious question that indicated their parallel interest in eliciting information from me. Indeed, no non-related man has ever asked me a curious information-eliciting question about anything in my whole life.

  • In those intellectual conversations where I did chime in with information or ideas of my own unasked, male conversation partners would consistently nod dismissively, then redirect the conversation back to some topic where they could educate me.

  • As somebody who loves to learn about stuff in conversations, I try really hard to make sure I'm facilitating a real exchange of high-quality information where I know my stuff and the other party is genuinely interested. I have encountered so many men bloviating on and on, with obvious pleasure, about topics where they actually knew very little, to visibly indifferent conversation partners, that it's hard not to conclude that this is actually a dominance behavior intended to make them feel high-status by capturing someone's polite attention, rather than a genuine enjoyment of intellectual contact. Men seem to do this substantially more with female conversation partners.

  • I have had several disturbing conversations where the principle "most men dislike argumentative women" played out as the man getting visibly angry and breaking off the conversation as soon as I indicated my interest in offering (polite, calm, well-evidenced) counterarguments to whatever they were contending. I have known maybe 3 men who could handle a sustained good-natured debate with me, a very polite lady, without getting angry and insecure and needing to stop, and I loved those dudes so much and desperately miss the ones no longer in my life. Overall, if in an intellectual debate space like this one somebody can unapologetically assert that he dislikes women when they argue with him, I'd say that's pretty suggestive that many men are uncomfortable facing the possibility of being intellectually bested by a girl.

Overall, if in an intellectual debate space like this one somebody can unapologetically assert that he dislikes women when they argue with him, I'd say that's pretty suggestive that many men are uncomfortable facing the possibility of being intellectually bested by a girl.

One of the best allegorical moments of my life:

I was managing a Rock Climbing gym at the time, most of the part time workers were local teenagers. We had just gotten a MoonBoard for the gym and set it up, two of the kids Romeo and Juliet stayed after closing up with me to play with our new toy, both seniors in high school while I was a college grad at the time. Romeo was a pretty good hobby climber who had gotten into it with some buddies a year or so ago, Juliet had parents who climbed back in college before becoming bankers and had been climbing since she was 8, competing in youth level since she was 14.

Now the thing about rock climbing is, and why I recommend it to parents so much, is that it is possibly one of the more gender equal real sporting events. All the very best Pros are men, there are grades that no woman has ever climbed, but anywhere below the pro level it is mixed. You are more likely to run into men who are really good climbers in your gym than you are to run into women, but there will be women in the top grades too, and until you are climbing the top grades you will run into women who stomp you. Romeo was a good climber, but Juliet was much better. And worse, while Romeo and I hacked our way up routes with lots of swinging and cutting feet and grunting, Juliet would glide gracefully up the same climb. What she lacked in reach and upper body strength, she more than made up for in balance, flexibility, and coordination. Her technique was perfect. She danced up the wall, while I yanked myself up.

Romeo was a sweet kid generally, well behaved, responsible, a nerdy Fillipino with great SATs who later went to USC, we called each other "Grandpa" and "Grandson." Liberal politics, very respectful of the girls on staff generally (this was a regular problem we dealt with regarding other male staff). He liked climbing a lot, took to it in that classic nerdy-kid late bloomer way that I took to CrossFit and later climbing, it gave him a venue to be athletic despite not being on the football or basketball teams at his high school, it helped his self esteem as he got better.

As Juliet beat him, you could see his self esteem imploding, and he started acting out in ways I normally didn't see. He started making increasingly offensive jokes in a way that was out of character for him, he was almost bouncing around with nervous energy after each time he failed a climb and Juliet flashed it, cracking dick jokes or sex jokes at every half-opportunity. It got progressively worse as the problems went on. When he started in on Jew jokes ("Bet climbing a fence would have helped you get out of Auscwitz" or something like that) I had to ask him to help me with something in the storage room and tell him to knock it off, then told them I had to turn off the lights and I was headed home.

There's a saying I've seen in the Manosphere that women are human beings and men are human doings. Women are valuable in their own right, or at least as objects of sexual and romantic desire. Men are valuable only in the things they do. Disregarding debating its truth value, this is a deep insight into the insecurity of the male psyche, how we perceive the world. Every man hangs his self esteem on something he does. Romeo hung it in part on rock climbing. He didn't have some big crush on Juliet, as I recall, but she was a girl his age who would have been appropriate for him to hook up with, and being a healthy teenage boy he had probably thought about it. She had value inherently as a cute girl, his own value came from the things he did. Then, it turns out she is also better at the things he did, his sense of his own value imploded.

So:

I have had several disturbing conversations where the principle "most men dislike argumentative women" played out as the man getting visibly angry and breaking off the conversation as soon as I indicated my interest in offering (polite, calm, well-evidenced) counterarguments to whatever they were contending...Overall, if in an intellectual debate space like this one somebody can unapologetically assert that he dislikes women when they argue with him, I'd say that's pretty suggestive that many men are uncomfortable facing the possibility of being intellectually bested by a girl.

Makes a lot of sense to me. You've taken away their Doing while keeping your Being, it throws off the order of the universe for them, they have no place anymore.

I'll note the irony that I wrote multiple paragraphs to explain a woman's own experiences to her.

Your story makes me vividly imagine cutting her safety equipment and hearing the snapping sound as she breaks her neck.

I'm not a good man.

  • -22

Does it bring you comfort to be the opposite and equal of the black women who murderously hate those who have committed the crime of being better than them?

I have never felt comfort in four years and four months.

A shame. But then it would cost you nothing to at least keep such thoughts private. Candidness is appreciated, but this is particularly unconventional candidness because it demonstrates a lack of any virtue to your position (at least the guys who itch to run over protesters in the street are operating from some understanding of law, justice and the right to drive on the road their taxes paid for). Because of your comment, my (and others' perhaps) opinion of those who share your viewpoint on women will be diminished, and the preference for the dominance of the woke will be marginally raised as opposed to the preference for the dominance of, yes, those known as incels. Better my sister, girlfriend or daughter be canceled than murdered.

I'm well aware you're not the type who cares about moralizing or even pragmatic advice.

I would swear that you're female because I try to remember those few who mention that incredibly important in my eyes fact in this forum, but your latest comments in this thread suggest otherwise. I don't know what to think, but either way, the catharsis of me expressing how much I'm hostile towards the female half overshadows any infinitesimal effects it might have on the course of the future.

More comments

Why is it a shame? We can't exist in harmony and never could, don't you like that my existence is miserable? I have no power to exact revenge on the sex which I consider a major part of my misery, while you hold all the cards.

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I'm not a good man.

Well, this certainly isn't a good comment. Banned for a day.

Can you tell me which rule I broke, and whether the decision to ban me came before or after identifying that rule?

Unkind, unnecessarily antagonistic, not writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion, egregiously obnoxious, and multiple user reports.

I banned you for breaking the rules, so yeah, the decision to ban you came after identifying the rules you were breaking. But the case was, as you can see, wildly overdetermined. Coming back to open a rules lawyering session (as your aim appears to be here) is not going to benefit this account's longevity, though.

You misunderstand me if you think I'm interested in rules lawyering. What I'm curious about is how committed you all are to the rules-based order. So far, between me and the Jew-posters, you seem to be committed to banishing assholes more than having legible principles.

More comments

How old are you?

Physically, middle-aged. But in my mentality towards the opposite sex I fully identify with the male character.

I like this comment because of the avalanche of "multiple things can be true at once" it evidences;

  1. Romeo was an otherwise good kid who didn't know how to handle his emotions in one specific context and - were this an office instead of a rock climbing gym - was certainly risking being fired with, perhaps, a lot of downstream career damage.

  2. @FiveHourMarathon demonstrated excellent leadership and tact in the storeroom-lights-out rouse ... but may have technically run a foul of HR policy in my imagined office-centric parallel universe

  3. Men being "human doings" is absolutely how many males self-conceive yet revealing that to women frequently elicits some sort of variation on "oh, get over it! Learn to love yourself." (Side note: this is where a lot of modern psychology utterly fails to help men. Build That Shed)

  4. Male performance related failure absolutely should be met with a constructive "hey, I lost, but I can get better / I can take pride in my level of effort etc." yet will also have a some amount of "HOLY SHIT I AM A FUCKING WASTE OF SPACE" as part of that process.

  1. I don't think you can really separate those two things. Romeo was 17 or 18 at the time, at least four years and a lot of maturing out from any white collar corporate work. It would be a very different act for a 22 or 23 year old college grad than it was for a teenager; and different again to see from 35 year old. Maturing is a real thing that happens!

  2. That's a reason I chose to avoid building a career in the white collar corporate world. Though I wouldn't say it was leadership, just being a few years older and recognizing my feelings from a few years ago in my grandson, and knowing he needed to cool off.

  3. Absolutely. The problem is that showing vulnerability as a man never helps bring you up, only brings you down. This is helpful when people perceive you as too high up for them, when they already like you and especially when they're a little intimidated by you, vulnerability brings you back into level with them and they like you better than ever. But when you're already below them, it just drags you down further.

  4. My view of healthy male self esteem mostly resembles what Rao calls "Losers" in the Gervais Theory of Management or whatever it was. That we label the same philosophy of life as "healthy" or "losers" probably says a lot about at least one of us. Healthy male self esteem comes from having a variety of Doings in one's life, a variety of accomplishments in one's history, which one can fall back on. I have been mogged by a hot tattooed 100lb female at the crag flashing my project; it doesn't lead me to implode or lash out because I have confidence that other things I've done, professionally or personally. I know I have a beautiful wife, got into elite schools, deadlifted a good weight, so when any one of those things goes wrong I think of the others. When you have nothing to fall back on, every injury kills you.

deadlifted a good weight

10,000% The only thing that actually matters in life.

The one thing you can really know. The iron never lies to you.

It infuriates me that many men are too fucking stupid to ask others questions. It's a pattern I see too often myself and hear about secondhand all the time.

When it comes to "debating" women, I have a tough time. The smartest and most well informed women I know will still retreat into parroting propaganda and then - when challenged too hard on it - devolve into naked emotional appeals or literally crying.

Men do this too, to be sure, but I have a tougher time keeping a discussion detached and level headed. Over the years this means I'm just not inclined to engage at all, I'd rather nod and smile.

If a woman literally cries, her male opponent loses the debate. If a man literally cries, he loses the debate. That's a pretty major driver of things.

Physical performance of aggression works exactly the same for men as tears do for women, though. A man of 30+ years raises his voice in that sudden deep "dad intensity" mode, makes a sudden threatening physical move in an argument, then walks off, and people will conclude he's really passionate about this topic and he, on the whole, wins the day. A woman raises her voice and clenches her fists, people will titter to themselves about that shrill bitch who is literally crazy, and she's presumed to have lost.

I guess it's possible the male mode doesn't work as well on the internet, given its reliance on nonverbal intimidation rather than words, but it's absolutely a thing and I've seen it work for men on many occasions.

I guess aggressively calling people cuck faggots works on 4chan? You can even literally draw your opponent as the cowed virgin and yourself as a physically imposing chad.

Physical performance of aggression works exactly the same for men as tears do for women, though.

No, it really doesn't. A guy can try something aggressive against another man, but if his opponent isn't intimidated he loses. If he walks off, the impression those remaining get is "what an asshole!". If he tries it against a woman he loses regardless.

A man of 30+ years raises his voice in that sudden deep "dad intensity" mode, makes a sudden threatening physical move in an argument, then walks off

I would immediately dismiss both the opinion and the character of a man, especially one over 30, who acted like this. I would avoid conversation with them in the future, and if possible, even being in their presence at all.

A man of 30+ years raises his voice in that sudden deep "dad intensity" mode, makes a sudden threatening physical move in an argument, then walks off, and people will conclude he's really passionate about this topic and he, on the whole, wins the day.

This seems to me more fantastical than Lord of the Rings. In my experience, a man who did that would be deemed a pathetic insecure loser who continued his losing ways by losing this particular argument. The only times when physical performance of aggression could be said to "win the day" would be when that physical aggression literally results in some literal victory, such as punching out the bad guy or something. And greater age would be exacerbating, because a man who's 30+ is expected to be more mature than one that's <29 and thus more capable of maintaining composure or arguing his case using reason instead of force.

This is a pretty good allegory for life in general.

The smartest and most well informed women I know will still retreat into parroting propaganda and then - when challenged too hard on it - devolve into naked emotional appeals or literally crying.

A second relevant Hanania has hit the thread: “Women's Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas.”

Coming late to the party, but I think your misinterpreting a few things here:

The situations where people complain about being "argumentative" or "combative" are in my experience not intellectual contests, but practical social disagreements. A stereotypical argumentative woman would e.g. have an argument over whether the toilet is so dirty it needs to be cleaned already, and think "He just doesnt see Im right because hes too dumb.".

The bloviating thing definitely happens. People dont care that they actually know very little; they like to make sense of things, and they like to do it in groups. Ideally, the way this works is a kind of shared narrative building: people do add to each others accounts, and they do correct each other, but these produce an overall picture that everyone is, in the end, happier with than how it started. I emphasise this happiness, because it is so different from the idea of rigorous debate we have here. Its not purely about preconceived notions and flattery - people may also be happy to belief certain kinds of arguments, or to have different authoritative lines agree, or be persuaded about what would be convenient for them. But still, if the the people involved have too different of an approach, it doesnt usually go well, and they will blame the other for this. This, I think, is why they get angry at your "polite, calm, well-evidenced counterarguments" - they thought they were consulting in the tribe, and you swoop in to tell them theyre actually at war, right now, come at me.

And yes, they are happy to keep talking at you even if you dont participate very much. This means that they think you are, or want you to be, "in a group" - be it a romantic doublet or otherwise. Its also fine to participate, so long as youre on topic and "fit in with the group" as per above. If you feel the problems of the above happen mostly with men, it might be because you are just more in tune with women.

Actual intellectual contests, in my experience, most commonly look like this: Disagreement over some bit of trivia comes up, noone can really convince the other, optionally a bet of 10 bucks, followed by googling it. There are other forms it takes, and cases that focus more on reasons and not just being right, but this example shows the typical social feelings people have in the context of intentional intellectual contests. If they react differently then you think they would in that example, theres propably something else going on. Correcting someone political opinions is approximately never an intellectual contest.

Indeed, no non-related man has ever asked me a curious information-eliciting question about anything in my whole life.

This one Im confused by. I think I do this and see others do it. My father, who is most definitely not a feminist, does it. Maybe this is some kind of different definition.

This one Im confused by. I think I do this and see others do it. My father, who is most definitely not a feminist, does it.

Wish I could meet your father, he sounds like a cool guy.

Indeed he is, though I wouldnt have considered that part remarkable.

Overall, if in an intellectual debate space like this one somebody can unapologetically assert that he dislikes women when they argue with him, I'd say that's pretty suggestive that many men are uncomfortable facing the possibility of being intellectually bested by a girl.

Or rather that the experience of arguing with women is, among men, a universally recognized miserable time and bad idea.

Have you ever dated, seriously, a woman who you felt was objectively smarter than you were? Like, one who would have scored a noticeable margin better than you on the SATs/IQ test or who had an objectively more cognitively demanding and higher prestige job?

This is normally cope, most of the women who say that are 100iq types working no-skill service industry jobs not HYS trained lawyers or C suite executives.

But to pretend the whole idea doesn't have a basis in real relationship dynamics is coming in a little hot.

Have you ever dated, seriously, a woman who you felt was objectively smarter than you were? Like, one who would have scored a noticeable margin better than you on the SATs/IQ test or who had an objectively more cognitively demanding and higher prestige job?

Yes, my first girlfriend, who I met in my final year of highschool, was a lawyer who scored in the 99.75th percentile on standardised testing. I wasn't bothered by her being smarter than me at all. The main problem was her addiction to having arguments and IRL trolling more than anything else.

Wait, am I reading this wrong or were you a senior in high school while she was a fully barred lawyer implying that she was at least 23 or 24?

My fuckin' man out here.

She became fully barred when we were dating, but she had already graduated with her degree and was working in the field when we met (on 4chan).

On the one hand, to paraphrase Larry David talking about Asia Argento, they should name the high school after you.

On the other, this is so profoundly unusual that it didn't tell us much about much.

This place should be renamed to The FirmWeird.

You met a woman on 4chan? I’m curious as to how y’all navigated the tits or gtfo phase of the relationship.

I assume the meeting happened first and the lawyering happened later?

interestingly, there appears to be no age limit for the bar exam. So there could be a doogie howser situation where a teenager becomes a lawyer.

...but I assume he just meant that she became a lawyer later.

I scored in the top fraction of 1% on the SATs, so I don't think I've ever met a woman who "scored a noticeable margin better" than me, but I have dated several women I consider my intellectual equals, and I am currently married to one of them (a successful lawyer who went to one of the best law schools in the US). I have broken up with women who I felt weren't able to keep up with me intellectually because I found them boring.

But you raise an interesting alternative hypothesis, which is that maybe women are the ones selecting "intellectually superior" men to date, and that's why they perceive all the men they date as "needing to feel intellectually superior," because they actually are.

But you raise an interesting alternative hypothesis, which is that maybe women are the ones selecting "intellectually superior" men to date, and that's why they perceive all the men they date as "needing to feel intellectually superior," because they actually are.

This seems to be another version of a fairly common trope about the dating market, which is that most women tend to date men that most other women tend to date, and those men tend to have qualities that most women find attractive, which are qualities that also either tend to be or correlate with qualities that they say out loud that men shouldn't take on. The "men don't want to get married" cliche largely seems to stem from this, from my view; where I look, there's no shortage of single men who are eager to settle down and get married, but there's a dearth of women who would even give them a chance on a date. On the other hand, the men that are getting dates from women tend to be men who, whether intrinsically or due to the female attention they've gotten, are pushed towards deciding that playing the field would be more beneficial to their lives than settling down.

It's even simpler than that (and applies to both men and women). Dating preferences are heavily correlated. If you find a single person who matches all the desirable dating preferences, they likely have other factors that make them unsuitable for a long-term relationship; otherwise, they'd have landed and stayed in one. The old saw "all the good ones are taken" is true.

This is why widows/widowers tend to be really good potential partners, despite the baggage of their partner's death. They became single through no choice of their own, but still have all the traits that make them a good partner.

I scored in the top fraction of 1% on the SATs, so I don't think I've ever met a woman who "scored a noticeable margin better" than me, but I have dated several women I consider my intellectual equals...

@ArjinFerman

What I was getting at is more this, that for the average Mottizen there barely exists a dating pool of women smarter than him. Seriously, I feel like I'm about average in horsepower around here, and I've only met maybe a dozen women who obviously verbally intellectually outclassed me. So we're not ever likely to experience that kind of dynamic.

But there exist plenty of women who are substantially smarter than most men, and I've rarely seen that kind of relationship work well. My law school was located very close to another, less prestigious school. The boys who dated "down the hill" were mostly pretty happy with the results. The girls who dated townie guys mostly had these awful dysfunctions around it, where he didn't like to be made to feel inferior, and so would make fun of her for being an egghead and belittle her, and it would go downhill from there. The standard heterosexual dynamic is for the man to be in charge, that falls apart immediately if she is obviously much smarter. Women rarely find being smarter than their man sexy, men perceive this and lash out belittling her achievements, so on and so forth.

That said, I'll repeat that for the people saying this, it is generally cope. I'd expect the average woman to claim to be on the shelf because of her intelligence to lack above average intelligence, in the same way that I expect the average teenager who whines that his classmates don't understand him because he's smarter than they are to actually not be all that extraordinary. Non-measurable things used as self-justification are generally cope. I'm not that interested unless you have receipts for it.

But to pretend the whole idea doesn't have a basis in real relationship dynamics is coming in a little hot.

I mean, it takes two to tango. I'm guilty of never dating one, but the few I met gave off the impression they'd call in an airstrike if I even thought of approaching them this way. Maybe it's just me though.

Have you ever dated, seriously, a woman who you felt was objectively smarter than you were?

I once dated a woman meeting that description. I thought she was smarter than me even in spite of the fact that she was into astrology. Like really into it.

Now that I think of it, I also went on two dates with a doctor who I thought was more intelligent than me.

I dated my linear algebra tutor in college. She was a Czech math major who very clearly thought my courses were cute play-acting from sociologists pretending to do math.

Didn't cause any problems, maybe because I didn't take my major very seriously either. And unlike a lot of women she had the breadth of interests for us to find things we had in common at the same level (cello and violin, swimming)

I never learned much linear algebra though.

4. Women screen for dominant men. This can be both be out of attraction or be mechanical, as women generally don’t approach and are passive followers in the early stages of courtship. Dominant men are more likely to talk over others and give off the pretense that they’re intellectually superior, including over women they’re dating or in a relationship with. Especially in the early stages of courtship, a man often has to lead and dictate the conversation because the woman puts in so little effort and initiative, and old habits can die hard.

5. Good ol’ hypergamy: For a date to go well and for subsequent dates to occur, or the first date to have occurred in the first place, perhaps a man does need to be intellectually superior to the woman or she won’t be sufficiently impressed. He needs enough material to lead and carry the conversation(s), and this can mean reaching for niche topics.

6. Some apex fallacy: Many women subconsciously don’t perceive non-dominant men as men. Non-dominant men are something more amorphous like “guys,” or not thought about at all like the Don Draper meme. See also the infamous OKCupid graphs: How men rate women vs. vice versa.

7. Speaking of Draper, Rule 1 and Rule 2, as always. A man’s supposed mansplaining and pretense of intellectual superiority is only a problem if a woman is not—or is no longer—sufficiently attracted to him.

8. Perhaps the average man is indeed intellectually superior to the average woman. It could be due to a modest gap in average cognitive ability. The average man may also have a wider and deeper knowledge base across a variety of topics than the average woman (e.g. in the physical sciences), which would only be exacerbated at the tails. If a random man or a random woman is to be selected to try to win a game of trivia with my life on the line, I’m definitely going man, especially if the pool is restricted to the college educated. If being funnier (intentionally, that is) is a form of intellectual superiority, that could be another point toward men.

I was accused of “mansplaining” by a young woman multiple times for talking to her the same way I talk to my male friend in his late 40s. Women just do not like being “explained” things the way men do. They HATE the implication that they don’t know something. They view it as condescending, while men are less cynical, and often seem to enjoy hearing how things work from others, or sharing knowledge in explanatory ways.

With women, it’s always about feelings. Making sure everyone in the conversation is “heard.” Lots of prefacing about how “maybe” it’s this way, or “I feel like” it’s that way. The corrosive, brain-melting end result of female socialization is that you can never just have a good argument without someone crying.

Things to consider:

Is the thing you're "mansplaining" something the woman in question might conceivably be interested in?

Have you shown a similar interest in hearing about things she's interested in and knows about?

Suppose you learn a lot about Roman military stuff, and she learns a lot about astrology, so you each have a lot of knowledge about an antiquated system. Are you as interested in what she has to say about birth signs as you hope she will be about your thing? If not, why not?

People can conceivably be interested in anything. I don’t bore women with discussions about anime and sports, if that’s what you’re getting at.

No, it's not. I meant the specific person you were talking to. Are they, specifically interested?

I do not pay attention to women unless I’m required to for work. My girlfriend also prefers that I not have female friends, which works fine given my preferences.

It's unsurprising that your young female colleague might be more sensitive to being talked down to than your middle aged male friend. Because you're not friends, for one thing.

I don’t know what the point of this question is, but no, I don’t pretend to be interested in things if I’m not actually interested in them.

Then it's hardly surprising that it would be more enjoyable for someone to learn about a topic from the internet than from you. I'm currently getting the impression that if I really needed the information you were giving, I would choose another source if possible, despite not generally being a "mansplaining" critic.

Didn’t ask; don’t care.

  • -18

Then don't engage.

In the short time since you spun up this alt, you've posted nothing but crappy comments and antagonism. That plus deleting a lot of your comments makes it pretty clear you aren't here to contribute anything but turds in the punch bowl.

Banned for three days. Decide whether you actually have anything to say.

The issue here is that astrology is worthless nonsense. So that would be kind of a bad jumping off point. Roman history actually happened and may have some relevance.

People believing in astrology also actually happened.

You can say that about anything. Now we should coddle any fantasy?

Speaking of myself, I don't think I mind a girl being smart and/or having an interesting hobby, but I don't need her to be interesting to like her, so I won't probe her interests out as much aside from maintaining small talk. Conversely, I do want her to like me if the talk is to go anywhere, and it appears that most of the time I have to be interesting for that.

That's how attraction and courtship works from my oerspective, if I isolate it from the sexless part of companionship. I value what she looks like, I value how much she values me, and I value how easy it is to talk to her, inasmuch as talking to her is a necessary part of courtship. I think that ease (orthogonal to intelligence) is the difference between "gee, she's so silly" and "jesus she's dumb", as they say.

Women just do not like being “explained” things the way men do.

Sure they do, women love knowing they're with a competent guy that they can rely on in a moment of crisis. Now, it's also true that we're under approximately 1001 reptillian psyops designed to hack our pair-bonding mechanisms, and make sure we see each other as enemies and never come together, which is how you get ideas like "mansplaining", but it's something that can be overcome.

Must be similar to the height thing. I've heard women complain about how guys can't handle that they are taller than them. I've heard many women complain about men being too short. I've never heard a man complain about women being too tall.

I've also never met a man who was upset about a woman not cleaning the house enough, with the exception of a couple Niles Crane-type obsessives who married the same. Literally the vast majority of straight men I know would rather their wives spent less time cleaning. If pressure from husbands could affect women's cleaning, it'd make them clean less.

It goes with the narrative of all the uncompensated work women do. I get the impression much of this work is not at the behest of men. I like that the house is clean but I don't need it to be as clean as it is. Clutter doesn't bother me, it can completely dysregulate my wife. I like a tasty complicated dinner, but I could go without it. I don't need plants that need to be watered, I don't need decorations that need to be dusted, I don't need a rug with tassels that prevents us from having a robot vacuum, I don't need flower beds that require more work than just grass.

I don't need plants that need to be watered, I don't need decorations that need to be dusted, I don't need a rug with tassels that prevents us from having a robot vacuum, I don't need flower beds that require more work than just grass.

Indeed. A lot of supposed uncompensated labor, emotional or other, women perform is just filling in ditches that they themselves or other women dug up.

Like office birthdays: Left to their own devices, a group of men will cheerfully go without their birthdays being celebrated and a Special Day carved out where it’s all about them. They may even find such unearned and unsolicited attention awkward and annoying. Men are less accustomed to being celebrated for merely existing, rather than for having achieved something.

Plus, female-coded tasks like dishwashing or vacuuming are herculean but demeaning self-sacrificial Acts of Valor when a woman performs them; male-coded tasks like mowing the lawn or fixing the car are glorified hobbies or doing the bare minimum when a man performs them. If anything, men should be grateful for the opportunity to be useful for a change.

Last night had a relationship conversation with my wife. The gist is she is "more motivated than me". The tasks she has hanging over hear head contributing to her anxiety:

Finish the front yard (the flower beds I mentioned)

Paint the cabinets

Organize filing cabinet

Organize the pantry

Organize the Desk

Paint internal walls

Get her tickets and lodging for my work trip that she insists she go on

Always have home made bread, pies, and pizza doughs on hand.

Yeah, she's finding stuff to do to make herself anxious/justify anxiety. Always baking pies and repainting things is anxiety-refocusing behavior, not the cause of the anxiety.

It is fascinating to me that this is enough of a commonly believed trope that an entire Netflix movie (and a sequel) was made whose entire premise is based on how tough it is to be a tall girl (who also happens to be conventionally attractive, though perhaps not Hollywood standards) in high school. I tried checking it out out of morbid curiosity once, and I can definitely not recommend it at all.

Its just shitty women transposing their responsibility for being a bad date to their partner. 'Men can't handle a strong woman, its their fault their toxic masculinity is intimidated by me.'. No ma'am, its the fact that you use the phrase 'toxic masculinity' unironically and then jut your jaw out in anticipation of a fight. Tall girls and short girls both have problems with shitty dates, its just that the tall girl has more socially accepted ammunition to externalize blame.

Why is your criteria that men must explicitly state this preference? There's been infinite debates on "mansplaining" but I believe there is a kernel of truth to it and it's revealed through behavior. I think the gendered aspect is overrated though and what you're really dealing with are blowhards that are socialized around other blowhard men, and I find them unpleasant as a man to a similar degree and would hate being married to one. Importantly though, these types have no self-awareness and are unable to articulate their true preferences.

There's been infinite debates on "mansplaining" but I believe there is a kernel of truth to it and it's revealed through behavior.

My own experience is very strongly that this has nothing to do with gender at all. In fact, nobody, nobody, is more prone to condescendingly explaining things to people who already understand them (and frequently just finished making that unmistakably clear) than the kind of feminists who talk about "mansplaining"!

I think it has to do with gender in the sense that gender is one of the primary ingredients of social groups, even in the hyperliberal paradise of today. For instance you probably wouldn't expect that behavior of male feminists. (edit: unless they're mansplaining to TERFs I suppose). But in the context of this article, with older generations, I think the male version of this is far more common since it was given a lot of room to fester years ago compared to today with men.

I said "no male friend or relative has ever told me (or acted like) they prefer dumb women," i.e. neither their stated nor revealed preferences seem to indicate an aversion to smart women. In my experience there's no trend of men seeking out dumber women.

what you're really dealing with are blowhards that are socialized around other blowhard men

I don't see what this has to do with intelligence. I know smart men who I'd call "blowhards" and I know dumb men who I'd call "blowhards." And I've never observed a trend of such men preferring dumber women.

Apologies, I missed your parenthetical completely. So how I see it is that with blowhards, it's less on the surface about intelligence but it's related. Regardless of their IQ, blowhards say dumb stuff because by their nature they are bullshitting all the time. If you know something they don't, then voicing that will intimidate them, and they will only accept that behaviour from people they see belonging to a certain kind of social category of mostly belligerent men that they feel comfortable sparring with, and that excludes many women and plenty of other men as well. Exchanging ideas for them is a deeply vulnerable status game, and they try to play to win, even while undermining themselves with all the bullshitting.

But with this strategy it's not just about preferring dumb women. It's actually just as effective to put down and shut down intelligent men or women who try to challenge them. Women who experience think "he just wants a dumb woman." But what he really wants is typical narcissistic desires of adoration and winning and so he cruelly shuts down challengers as a kind of crude tool to get what he wants.

I think this "prefer dumb women" idea could be refined to be a bit clearer to describe what it's pointing to but I think it's how it feels on the surface when you are dealing with these kinds of people. You know something they don't, you tell them, they confidently explain to you why your wrong even though you know they are BSing. Among certain groups of men, I think this behavior is depressingly common.

Yes, I think you're 100% right. My complaint in dating for a long time was that I wasn't meeting women who were smart or passionate, and so many of them felt like blank slates without anything interesting to say.

I also think men just love talking with a lot of rhetorical force; I'm not the most confident guy in the world and even I can sound like a blowhard when I'm discussing something I feel passionate about.

But the important thing to note is I'm never actually cocky about it, I just feel passionately.

I've probably 'mansplained' a lot to my girlfriend, but she's never complained about it. In fact, she seems to enjoy it. We went out to dinner a few weeks ago and I was rambling on about the upcoming British elections, and she kept asking me questions ("Wait, who are the Tories?" "How is the Prime Minister elected?"), and when I apologized for rambling, instead of complaining, she just said, "No, I'm learning something here, I enjoy listening to you talk." And when I wondered aloud how the partisan split is so different -- with Labour soaking up both white working-class voters and more American-style social liberals -- she had some of her own thoughts and we had a good conversation about partisan splits in the US. When it's a topic she knows something about, like Biology, I'm always interested in hearing her thoughts and we go at it from the other direction sometimes too.

I don't know how this would go with a woman who wasn't so interested in discussing ideas, or was more insecure about her own intellect. This whole point of view is so alien to me as well.

I wonder if there's much difference in preferences between younger and older couples, related to wanting to have children together vs it being too late for that. With kids, it would probably be good if one of us were a bit more present and patient, rather than always going on about culture war stuff all the time. My parents are both very thoughty, they met over Dostoyevsky philosophy classes, and get along great -- but there isn't anyone to keep things in order, and their house is absurdly terrible.

I've probably 'mansplained' a lot to my girlfriend, but she's never complained about it. In fact, she seems to enjoy it. We went out to dinner a few weeks ago and I was rambling on about the upcoming British elections, and she kept asking me questions ("Wait, who are the Tories?" "How is the Prime Minister elected?"), and when I apologized for rambling, instead of complaining, she just said, "No, I'm learning something here, I enjoy listening to you talk."

The argument seems to be that many women have been trained to act interested even when actually bored or if they already know more about it, in order to make their men feel better. I don't know how often that's true, I would guess occasionally but not all that often.

Hm, I could definitely see how that could be the case. If that’s really going on, though, it sounds like the women in question would be the ones who need to change their behavior — unless the men are truly terrible people (which I doubt in most cases) I bet they’d appreciate either the more active interest of their partners with their own knowledge or a polite but clear indication that they’d like to change the subject. Like most things in relationships, communication is the solution.

My gf has definitely gotten bored of a discussion before, but I can usually tell. It’s also happened that she’s talked about something she’s passionate about and I got bored — I know a lot less about biology than she knows about politics and history, so there’s a greater disconnect. But honestly, I’m just excited that she’s excited and I love knowing she cares about what she’s doing.

So many of the relationship complaints I hear from people of both sexes just seem so petty to me. I respect that a lot of people have serious problems in relationships and I want everyone to be respected and appreciated by their partners. But so much just feels like a dark force just wants men and women to hate each other.

Yeah, I'm not necessarily saying that some women getting terrible relationship advice is the fault of the men in their lives. Like that article a few weeks back about college girls egging each other on to have sex right away with every guy they were a bit interested in, and then feeling upset about the results. It sounded like the girls in question had gotten a lot of really dumb advice from the women and female media in their lives.

Personally, I like it when my husband uses an interest to suggest an experience we can share, like he'll research some ruins and plan a day trip to go look at them and play tour guide. I don't like it when he tries to info dump about weapon usage in Ukraine or something, but that's at least half negative emotional valance of it being about ways to kill people.

Yeah, it probably was better to have a norm not to complain about one's romantic partner just because you got in a spat and are feeling angry about it. Healthy couples mostly seem not to do that. We seem to have lost some outlets, living so far from our families, -- I've called my in-laws to complain once or twice when feeling really outraged, and it was way more effective than complaining in the comments section of the NYT or something.

I don’t think it’s really coping about being ‘ugly’, looks aren’t negatively correlated with intelligence (and are likely somewhat positively correlated with it given obesity and class etc). 2 is more true. I’ve heard beautiful women complain about men not liking them because they’re “smart”, and some even were very smart! It’s more of a cope around personality, especially because many type A people have great difficulty realizing they have a repulsive or standoffish personality. A relatively attractive young(ish) woman has no issues getting male attention, so if she gets dumped it can either be because of ill treatment (of her) or her own personality, and the latter is much harder to stomach.

Men have their own equivalents. “Women just don’t like [immutable feature about me]” is an easier cope than admitting you’re boring or have a bad personality.

I don’t think it’s really coping about being ‘ugly’, looks aren’t negatively correlated with intelligence (and are likely somewhat positively correlated with it given obesity and class etc).

The one doesn't imply the other. Even if most smart women are hotter, on average, there will still be some who aren't. There are ugly smart women, they will be likely to use this as cope. In the same way an ugly dumb woman would claim men don't care about "good hearts" or whatever.

Some mentally lacking men are very insecure about intelligence. This is not a women centric issue but might be perceived as such by women.

A certain kind of woman does teach her daughters to come off as a bit ditzy as a form of flirting, and there are probably men who expect that. There’s also some intelligent women who can never turn off schoolteacher mode, and this is very annoying to… well everyone who isn’t five, but relevantly to men.

Not exactly the same, but I personally know one guy who said he was worried about the fact that his then girlfriend would soon be making more money than him.

The comment in question:

I'm a woman. Recently joined the chess club at my senior center chess club as the only female. (one guy smugly announced that all the women who join quit because they "can't hang onto their queens"). At first everyone I played was all smiley, sort of flirting and trying to give me "tips" about developing the pieces and so on. But then they found out that I play like a boss and could crush almost all of them quite handily (I'm on a ridiculous win streak). Now none of these men want to play against me, and all their smiles have disappeared. Story of my 145 IQ life. Men need to feel intellectually superior to women and I got sick of playing dumb a long time ago.

Indeed, I would probably not want to play chess with her, it sounds fairly unpleasant, along the lines of #2.

It is good if young people figure out how to spot lies, especially spotting the cases where people are lying to themselves.

Older women in the dating game have a clear reason for being bitter. Nature really screws them over. Their physical looks / attractiveness to men peaks in their late teens or early 20's. They age out of safely having kids in their early 40's. There goes two of the main reasons for dating/marriage: (sexual) fun and raising kids. I feel bad for them.

The comments section reflects lots of copium being thrown out. I see sexual frustration (which to me seems like a problem with partner selection). I see abrasive personalities (men don't need to feel smarter, but talking down to them like a kid becomes tiring for them to listen to). I see people buried in the culture war losing grounding with reality (most violence is committed by young testosterone fueled men. It nearly ceases to be a real concern later in life.)

I don't think this will heavily impact younger generations. I doubt younger generations are even willing to listen to older generations. They'll figure out sex and love on their own. Or they won't figure it out because of other more important trends.

Sex and committed relationships are something that I think people realize has value because of peer effects. I remember highschool: some girl in the class was the first normalish girl to have sex in a relationship, and then many other girls in school took it as their cue that it was ok to start having sex, and many boys took it as their cue that it was ok to start asking for sex. There was also a wave of breakups because of college separation.

Nature really screws them over.

As opposed to what?

As opposed to men, whose desirability to the opposite sex tends to increase between their early twenties and early forties, and who are able to conceive a child for a far longer proportion of their lifespan.

True, but that doesn't mean men have it better overall.

Of course not, but on the narrow metrics of "desirability over time" and "fertility over time" I think it's fair to say men have it better than women and thus "women get shafted by nature" is a reasonable characterisation.

Perhaps if you're comparing the derivative, but it seems that the actual value matters more than the direction. If Elon Musk loses a million dollars, he's still better off than me if I got a 2 million dollar windfall.

Time is really, really a much better friend to men than to women. Experience, money, confidence. All things that come with time. And most features that make men attractive don't degrade as quickly as the features that make women attractive.

Experience, money, confidence. All things that come with time.

Not necessarily, to be sure.

Exactly. People should always have the infamous "bear vs man in a forest" question on their minds when reading anything women declare in public. There is great deal of GSR - gossiping, shaming and rallying as tools of relational warfare in any such situation. This is no different, just bunch of old hags trying to use the old tricks of how all women are wonderful and how all men are such pigs, possibly with some juicy story to make themselves look interesting. These diatribes are almost without factual value outside of some meta level anthropological evidence of this behavior.

I know it’s sort of pointless to expect even relatively grounded arguments to be found in such a comment section, but still, I can’t help but virtually don my fedora as a garbage human dudebro and notice some gems like:

• The implication that you as a woman are completely safe from domestic violence in a lesbian relationship (as far as I know, the opposite is in fact true on average, not to mention the higher levels of emotional blackmail, drama and manipulation that lesbian relationships entail on average)

• The assumption that forming a relationship with a man of your age automatically entails you having to take care of him (it doesn’t even occur on the radar that it may also happen the other way around?)

• The idea that 75% of domestic violence is committed against women (this sounds rather fishy; maybe it’s true in the case of childless cohabiting partners, or households where a single mother and her children cohabit with a new man – a scenario which, as far as I know, carries the highest average risk to women of domestic abuse, and coincidentally also is a situation these women voluntarily enter; I mean, I’m sure it’s not standard practice on the part of sneaky, manipulative, shitty men to invite single mothers and their children to live under his roof)

• The unstated assumption that women on average do know men’s bodies and how to please them, but not the other way around (questionable at best)

• The assumption that single older men would never in a million years visit museums, travel, read, hang out with their bros and have hobbies in general (I mean…really??)

Back when MGTOW online forums were not yet nuked and purged, I used to check them out after reading shrill complaints about them on the normie internet, and while some of the content did appear unhinged and extreme, I don’t remember ever coming across such utter bullshit like this.

as far as I know, the opposite is in fact true on average

I've heard incredibly conflicting takes on this. I once heard that lesbian relationships reported the highest rates of domestic violence compared to gay or straight relationships. But then I heard someone else say that this statistic had been widely misrepresented: it was that lesbians were most likely to report having experienced domestic violence, without disambiguating the sex of the aggressor i.e. many lesbians reported having been victims of domestic violence at the hands of a male aggressor. If it's really the former situation, do you have any stats?

How does a lesbian get into a situation where she's domestically abused by a man? Is that even common? I'm pretty sure lesbian couples don't usually invite any men to live under the same roof with them. Or?

  1. If she was abused by a male relative, flatmate or housemate.
  2. If she was in a relationship with a man who abused her during a period of her life in which she identified as straight or bi, but now identifies as a lesbian.
  3. If she's a "lesbian" who only dates men.

#3 is difficult to take seriously, to be honest. #1 are scenarios that (hopefully) are specifically not ones taking place in the context of a romantic cohabiting relationship, which the original article is about.

#3 is difficult to take seriously, to be honest.

Agreed, calling yourself a lesbian when you date men as well as women (maybe only date men) is stupid. Nonetheless, if the lesbian demographic includes many women who've been in (or currently are in) romantic relationships with men, that could potentially bias survey results in such a way to give a misleading impression of how common women-on-women domestic abuse is. The person conducting the survey might well assume that a person who identifies as a lesbian and claims to have experienced domestic abuse at the hands of a romantic partner has been victimised by a woman - indeed, this is a completely reasonable assumption given the standard definitions of the words "lesbian" and "woman". But just because that assumption is reasonable, doesn't mean there aren't people using those words in a nonstandard way which will bias the results. (Blood donor clinics and other medical practitioners already do this to route around the men who will give very different answers to the questions "are you gay?" and "have you had anal sex with a man in the past year?")

What you'd ideally want to do is design surveys in such a way that the results can't possibly be misinterpreted, like:

Q: In the past five years, have you been in one or more romantic relationships with:

  1. Male people only
  2. Female people only
  3. Male and female people
  4. No one

Q: In the past five years, have you experienced domestic abuse by

  1. At least one male partner?
  2. At least one female partner?
  3. At least one male and at least one female partner?
  4. No one

Of course, inevitably you would get people failing to report domestic abuse because the perpetrator was non-binary, or inflated numbers for female perpetrators of domestic violence because some respondents were victimised by trans women and interpreted male/female to mean "gender" rather than "sex". It's turtles all the way down.

The unstated assumption that women on average do know men’s bodies and how to please them, but not the other way around (questionable at best)

And/or the unstated assumption that women are passive and hypoagentic and men are active, hyperagentic, and have the burden of performance. Thus, a man is responsible for her getting off and himself getting off (not too early and not too late, though, or she might get the ick).

The assumption that single older men would never in a million years visit museums, travel, read, hang out with their bros and have hobbies in general (I mean…really??)

Could just be projection and a preemptive strike out of insecurities over their own hobbies (current or when they were younger), or lackthereof. Women have tons of interesting hobbies, and if they don’t it’s only because they spend all their time getting mansplained to and taking care of all the stupid men in their lives.

Could also be that, once again, men have the burden of performance, that they’re expected to be interesting and that includes having interesting hobbies. Although, at the same time, within a relationship, male hobbies are a selfish waste of time, because that’s time he’s not spending on entertaining her, taking her on cUtE trips/dates, making her feel like the beautiful queen she is, or grinding harder to improve her lifestyle.

insecurities over their own hobbies (current or when they were younger)

Who drew that comic, it's hilarious

I can’t help but virtually don my fedora as a garbage human dudebro

Not the hero we wanted.

But the hero we needed.

Is this what people are hearing at home? Because I could imagine it as an artifact of, well, the NYT comments.

As for the last question—get him or her to go outside. Log off. Dating is fun and so is the rest. Who will they trust? Twitter, or their lying endocrine system?

As for the last question—get him or her to go outside. Log off. Dating is fun and so is the rest. Who will they trust? Twitter, or their lying endocrine system?

Both. Hormones wear off, pop-psychology / red-pill psy-ops about why your significant other is an abusive narcissist / gold-digging hypergamist do not. We do have our natural instincts on our side, but there's a whole bunch of stuff working against us as well.

It is true that people can get radicalized and ‘trapped’ in the internet if very online. But yeah, once in the real world and very regularly interacting with the opposite sex socially, biology is going to take over.

very regularly interacting with the opposite sex socially

But this doesn't normally happen in the modern world, and I'd argue it was never the norm ever anywhere.

That just gets you over the first hump, you still have to make people want to stay together long-term. I don't even think it's a question of being very online, the culture is full of weird ideas that encourage people to hit reset and try their luck again, over working out their issues with the person they're with.

I'm not saying it's hopeless. Like I said there are things working to our advantage, but I think it's a terrible idea to let these ideas float around the culture uncontested.

Twitter delenda est.

Dating is fun

Meh.

Women hate men. Always have, always will. Male animals in the wild chase female animals down and mount them against their will. Or the females are so unreceptive that estrus is required before they’ll let a male anywhere near them. Humans are only slightly more sophisticated, and if it weren’t for legal systems and social structures that incentivize women to become mothers, with the benefits of early retirement and zero economic obligations at the cost of having to bear children, marriage would be nonexistent.

Now, as an increasing number of women would rather be dog moms dating 2-3 men at a time, searching for increasingly high-earning and sexually desirable partners, being an average guy in 2024 is…hard. Or can be, if you aren’t blessed with a pretty face or a huge cock. And God help any man who wants to point out that the status quo is kind of fucked, lest he be accused of being a losing participant in said status quo (or, God forbid, an incel).

Women hate men. Always have, always will.

When possible, write about specific groups rather than general ones. Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how inflammatory your claims are. Don't attempt to build consensus.

The sociology of sex is interesting and worth discussing, but like everything else we talk about here, the relevant conflicts need to be discussed--not waged.

You’re objectively wrong that I’m waging anything - it matters not one iota to me what women like.

But engaging the people that moderate this exiled and largely deteriorated Reddit thread is beyond pointless, so enjoy feeling like you policed the discussion effectively and to everyone’s benefit, I guess.

Remember that article on Overcoming Bias a dozen years ago? How women froth at the thought of their husbands enrolling in cryonics? A small, but nonzero chance of the husband not dying is worth a negative amount in their eyes.

This is the rhetoric that younger generations are hearing from their parents and grandparents.

Is it? I question whether or not the NYT commentariat has a enough similarity to the general population to draw a useful conclusion. You're talking about people who a) subscribe to the NYT b) read articles on seniors dating c) feel moved to comment on said article.

Anecdotally, I've never heard anything like this from my older relatives, and I'm going to guess that in general older people in stable long term relationships have better things to do than defend their choices in the NYT comments section.

The only guarantee of a lifetime of happiness, it seems... to live an entire life alone.

This is, at best, reducing the risk of experiencing emotional injury.

Anecdotally, I've never heard anything like this from my older relatives,

Seconded. Of the people over 60 whose personal lives I know anything about (e.g. my parents, their friends, my friends' parents) the majority seem to be in happy relationships.

At the same time, internet comment sections have been around for a while, and if more old people than before are complaining about their love lives then that probably signifies at least something has changed. Maybe relationships between older people are actually getting worse, or old women feel more empowered to complain about men, or something else.

Maybe older people are just much more online than they used to be.

In my experience, the truly difficult task is convincing 22-year-old women that it’s a bad idea to put off marriage and kids until their 30s. They don’t need to be convinced that relationships are good and fun; they know that already. What they need to realize is that A) dating is much tougher after 30, and B) women’s fertility drops off significantly after that point. I’ve had this conversation with several young ladies, and all I’ve ever gotten in response is disagreement. Ah, well, maybe they’ll be singing a different tune in ten years.

ETA: Thinking about it, in 10–15 years, they might start sounding like the ladies in the NYT comments section.

In my experience, the truly difficult task is convincing 22-year-old women that it’s a bad idea to put off marriage and kids until their 30s.

Well, yeah, because up until then everyone they trust has been trying to convince them that it's a GOOD idea to do so.

And the ones who do Notice the fleetingness of female beauty and fertility are written off as bitter pedophilic incel naysayers who want to prevent women from having the fun they deserve.

You might be interested in this Pew study of American dating from 2020. Subsequent statistics taken from the second page about single Americans.

One result that jumps out is single women over age 40 are not very interested in dating (71-29 against dating). In the 18-39 age range the interest is pretty comparable across sex. 67% of single men and 61% of single women are interested in dating. Who is single is also very stratified by age. 51% of men aged 18-29 are single while only 32% of women in the same age range are. Meanwhile 49% of women age 65+ are single while only 21% of men in the same age range are. There's an interesting asymmetry where men are more likely to be single when younger while women are more likely to be single when older. Likely a reflection of men's preference for younger partners. It also seems to indicate that if young men were willing to address the other side of this asymmetry (by dating older women) those women are largely not interested in dating them!

How do you convince a 22-year-old of either sex that their perception is mistaken, that there is value in seeking committed relationships with another person?

At least according to Pew 22 year olds of either sex seem pretty interested in forming committed relationships. More generally there's a kind of tension here. We often want young people to learn from the wisdom of their elders but it's often not clear which things from their elders are useful wisdom.

One result that jumps out is single women over age 40 are not very interested in dating (71-29 against dating). In the 18-39 age range the interest is pretty comparable across sex. 67% of single men and 61% of single women are interested in dating.

I suspect this, like the bitter comments of venerable ladies above, is rationalized hopelessness. "It's impossible to get what I want, so I don't want it." In young men this manifests as MGTOW.

Meanwhile 49% of women age 65+ are single while only 21% of men in the same age range are.

The Pew study counts widows and widowers who haven't found a new partner as single, which completely explains this statistic. Women outlive men. Unmarried men die even earlier than married ones, but women outlive them all.

How do you convince a 22-year-old of either sex that their perception is mistaken, that there is value in seeking committed relationships with another person?

You don't, their family life is going to embed their feeling on that deeper than you could convince out of them. Unfortunately, if they didn't have parents, grandparents, and other very close family and friends to model how to behave in one while they were developing, they're not going to be successful in one even if convinced of the value.

Beyond that though, I don't know that there's much value in worrying about that article or what its implications are. People that are dating after 60 mostly have something wrong with them. I don't mean that as a moral judgement, just a fact about baggage and dysfunction. That goes double for solitary people writing misanthropic replies in the NYT comments. Those people aren't having an impact on young people who had good relationship behavior modeled for them, and they can't really make things worse for those who didn't.

People that are dating after 60 mostly have something wrong with them. I don't mean that as a moral judgement, just a fact about baggage and dysfunction.

I suspect they most often are widows or widowers, which reduces the dysfunction quite a lot (though can add some baggage). The widow(er)s I know who have dated have ended up in successful second marriages precisely because of the same traits that made their first one last until death.

It looks like more of the hopeful comments come more from widowers, and the angry ones from divorced or never married women.

In all fairness, if I look around at elderly heterosexual couples I know personally, it genuinely does seem like a much worse bargain for the women:

-Everyone loses some ability to process social cues as well as they get older, but in 95% of those cis/het older couples the women seem to hold onto social function for much longer than the men, resulting in a classic dynamic where the woman manages and humors the guy 24/7 like an autistic child while he narcissistically monologues, complains, rants and repeats himself and never asks a single question about her. My assumption is that women are so strongly socially (and possibly biologically) conditioned to pay attention to how everyone's doing in the conversation that everyday social skills hold out for longer.

-Many women enjoy the greater physical strength of a male partner, and on both a practical and a visceral monkey level this can be a constant low-key benefit of cis/het relationships for women. Older men are often frail and can't really offer that anymore.

-Related, because traditional household roles apportion mostly the strength-based tasks to men, the older women I know seem to do a lot more work around the house, and a ton more active work in general. Virtually every male retiree I know takes long afternoon naps and falls asleep in front of the TV in the early evening. I have literally never met a female retiree who does this.

-Some cursed dynamic with testosterone, poor emotional self-awareness and dementia-linked anxiety seems to result in many old men getting unpleasantly rage-y as they age. "Grumpy old men"/"old man shakes fist at cloud" are both memes for a reason, and that doesn't look fun to live around. Old women complain too, but I have met a vanishingly small number who fly off the handle and shout loudly on the regular, the way their husbands do.

These are women who've chosen to be in heterosexual relationships, so clearly they find this preferable to being all alone. I expect I will too, at that age. But I wouldn't say it looks like a perfectly fair exchange of value.

What social class do these couples belong to? Long afternoon naps and constantly falling asleep in front of the TV (or at least, constantly watching TV) are traits I would associate with lower and lower-middle class suburbanites and urbanites. Most of the older men I know are (semi-) retired farmers, small shop owners, professors, or blue- and white-collar workers who saved enough to be solidly middle class. These old men still help with the farm, cut firewood, paint the siding, clean the gutters, mow the yard, garden, hang out with their friends, golf, do a bit of carpentry or mechanical work, and so forth. Even in their old age, they’re typically still quite a bit stronger than their wives, which enables them to continue doing the more moderately physically-demanding tasks for longer.

Also, while old men may be more likely to go into a rage and fly off the handle, don’t discount the ability of old women to be petty, vindictive, sarcastic, rude, and catty, and to make the lives of everyone around them a living hell. I’m not sure either gender’s social failures are really much better than the other’s.

As a final thought, I can’t help but notice that elderly spouses seem to frequently follow each other into the grave within a relatively short time span. Even if one spouse survives for a long time, he (or more usually, she) is usually forced to move into a home shortly after the death of the other, which to my mind indicates that there was probably some mutually-beneficial division of labor going on beforehand, even if it wasn’t completely equitable.

This is the rhetoric that younger generations are hearing from their parents and grandparents.

X

I think this is the rhetoric of women who feel compelled to comment on news articles about seniors dating. So to start with, they’re probably not terribly lucky in love. Divorced, maybe. But if you’re dating you’re probably not married and if you’re over sixty and not married probably something didn’t work out(I’m excluding widows here because I think a lot of them don’t look for #2).

So this is what jaded people are saying.

My guess is we're not actually talking about 65-year-old women, but a bunch of 30-40 year old women pretending to be older than that because they've already 'retired' from dating because of how jaded they are. The only comment fragment you've provided from the comments section that lists an age says she's in her 50s.

And no one hates happily-married 65-year-old women more than unhappily single 45-year-old women.

This is the rhetoric that younger generations are hearing from their parents and grandparents.

It's more likely that the NYT commentariat is very highly selected, and more so for this piece.

I have sometimes encountered an attitude in single women over 60 that their mothers trained them to look after the house very neatly as a point of pride, and that they clash with younger women who consider it a personal preference that conveys no status. They would probably also clash with older men who were either raised with the expectation that the woman should keep the house, or men who are comfortable with a messier space. There seem to be several comments about cooking and laundry especially, and someone who just visits her romantic interest, but they keep separate homes. As far as I can tell, this represents both a gender difference (men are a bit less likely to be temperamentally orderly, and much less likely to have been trained in homemaking by their parents), and a generational one.

Coping and thus seething are universal human realities. It gets much harder to date as a woman over 60 for relatively obvious reasons (the men start dying off faster, date their age or younger while for women the reverse is true etc) so those who can’t get, cope. It’s not really all that different to claiming the women who don’t want to date you are sluts or bitches anyway.


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