site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

23
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I found a post on /r/Destiny which I found insightful enough I want to post it in full here: Credit to /u/hello_marmalade

On the Sexualization of Women in Contrast to Men

A sentiment I've heard about women before is that they aren't valued for things other than sex. I think this is correct, but the sentiment lacks context.

I think something that gets missed, is that men will pretend to be interested in women for reasons other than sex, in order to get sex - however if sex wasn't an option, they wouldn't be interested in those women at all.

I think the implication is that these women would be noticed for their other qualities - but in reality, without the draw of sex, most people will be ignored. That's the reality for men, which I think gets lost in translation in conversations about sexual attention.

I think this is why you get situations where men will be very dismissive of women when they complain about this, or where the attitude in response comes from. From a man's perspective, these women seem full of themselves. The thinking going something like "Why the fuck would anybody be interested in you? You're just another random chick." Now that comes off as misogynist but I think the sentiment comes from the experiential reality of most men being essentially being invisible. This doesn't get verbalized, because I think it's something that happens so early to both genders that it just becomes part of a person's qualia. Like, just knowing that the sky is blue. You can see it, it's right there. You could argue for hours with someone before realizing that the sky is green for them, because you wouldn't even think to consider that they thought it was a different color in the first place.

Now, some complications with this. There are more issues with the constant sexualization of women. One is that it fucks up your ability to trust people. How can you know when someone is genuinely interested in you, or is faking it? Two, there will absolutely be people that will ignore your other qualities in favor of sex. Three, people will correctly, but nonetheless unfairly evaluate you with the awareness that other people may have given you credit for things unjustly in order to try and have sex with you, which will simultaneously do damage to your self esteem.

I think this leads to attitudes in women that make complete sense even if they're kinda shitty. Basically, if you're always going to be evaluated in regards to sex, then fuck it, get the best evaluation you can possibly get. Think of the F&F panel with Sneako. The first question they get asked is "How much to fuck you?" Well shit, if that's where we're starting, does saying "As much as someone is willing to give me," make a woman a gold digger? If all you're gonna be evaluated on is being a hole, then fuck it, might as well get the highest value. This then gets weaponized as those women being entitled, or shallow, but if you were never going to evaluate them on anything else, why should it matter?

However, by the same token, it leads to a situation where men will feel taken advantage of. I can say for myself at least (and I think a decent number of other men) that being horny can feel like you're being 'tricked' by your own body. Hell, there's even a term for the clarity after you cum: 賢者タイム "Sage Mode", or more commonly known as "Post Nut Clarity". The phenomenon seems to be so universal that it has equivalents in multiple languages that are disparate. I think this is where the sort of misogynistic hate and bitterness can come out of some men. There's a power that you feel a woman can unilaterally hold over you in a way you can't hold them, which can lead you to doing foolish things. As such, any woman using her sexuality for personal gain feels like "cheating".

Additionally, I don't think most women really understand just how invisible you can feel being a man - on almost every level. Personally, I think this affects us in a really deep, underlying way. I think every woman understands that they intrinsically have value. They have limited control over that value, and that value can overshadow everything else about you as a person - but you have intrinsic value nonetheless. On the flip-side, as a man, you are essentially worthless until proven otherwise. Nobody cares. You intrinsically are valueless at best, and a drain at worst. I think this also forms a root of resentment in men towards women who seem to fundamentally not understand this. The line of thinking being "Who the fuck are you? Why do you think you should be valued for anything other than being a woman unless you've earned it? Why do you think you've earned it the same way as any man has?" For some women, this is true. There are women who don't recognize that they've been given credit for things that nobody would care about if they were male. However, at the same time, this creates a situation where any woman who has earned her value is looked at with suspicion. Her successes cannot stand on their own.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head. Just things that I see come up fairly often, but I don't feel like I hear these things mentioned very much. I think a big problem is that the people who end up seeing these things end up being too invested in their own side to achieve any kind of synthesis of these ideas.

Interested to hear other people's thoughts on this. There's probably some other shit I've missed, since this is mostly off the cuff, so I may add to this with edits later as I remember/think of other shit.

This comment is not insightful for those who are familiar with the "Red Pill" views (or any non blank-slatist view) on gender relations. Of which it is a rehashing of, albeit the non-blank-slatist arguments on gender relations usually leaves out the view of either gender depending on who is doing the arguing (Mano-sphere vs FDS, etc).

Therefore, given that most users in this forum are not blank slatists, it's likely that none of this is new for most users here. It might be for Destinys audience who tend to be far less aware/more skeptical of "HBD".

I suppose I should take the above conclusion of mine as a sign that I might be spending far too much time plugged in CW adjacent forums to have that "knowledge". Little of which translates to actionable advice.


Tangent:

Does anyone disagree with the notion that most CW related knowledge is particularly useless for wordly matters? Such that it doesn't help come up with ways to live better, do things better or even give off the impression of being particularly "well read"?

I think something that gets missed, is that men will pretend to be interested in women for reasons other than sex, in order to get sex - however if sex wasn't an option, they wouldn't be interested in those women at all.

I think this is a very weird conjecture. What does it even mean to be interested in a woman?

If a man is looking for a romantic partner, then duh. A platonic relationship is strictly inferior to a complete one. But while sex is necessary for most men looking for a relationship, it's not sufficient. Women claiming most men are looking for a sex bot that cooks and cleans are ignoring the whole OF/Twitch industry of women selling simulated companionship.

Anything other than a romantic relationship? Friendship, business? While women have to rely on their appearance to make a good first impression much more than men, sexual availability doesn't matter. The vast majority of men don't try to have sex with every woman they know, even though there's a daemon in their head that automatically sorts every woman they know into "yes", "not drunk enough" and "can't get drunk enough" piles. If anything, it's easier to form stable non-romantic relationships with the latter two groups.

The vast majority of men don't try to have sex with every woman they know

It's not about the women you know, it's about the women you choose to get to know.

Yes, you're right, I don't try to have sex with every woman I know, but that's because most women (and, indeed, people) I know come as unfortunate by-products of going to school, then work. I got to know them due to being forcibly flung together by circumstance, not because I thought they were an improvement over keeping my own company.

The set of people I would proactively choose to get to know is mostly coterminous with the set of busty women 18-35.

What about men? Would you proactively choose to get to know none of them?

I have yet to meet a male friend in my entire life whose company I enjoy more than my own solitude, so yes.

But I feel this is more a measure of the wonderful richness of my inner life than is is of the spiritual poverty of my neighbours, so I'm not complaining.

I have lots of male friends, I just wish I didn't, they're a tremendous drain on my reading time.

In this case I doubt you're a good example of the median man. While men are more schizoid on average than women, they are less schizoid than that.

I've seen a (possibly) female profile on a horny subreddit, and in her profile there's a vent post about how she feels worthless because everyone only values her for sex. My sister in Christ, how am I supposed to value you for anything else when all you present (on this profile, at least) are cybersex offers!? At least suggest something, anything else to talk about! Sorry, "being a human person I don't know" is not interesting enough. There are 8 billion people offering that.

I mean, there's a fair point that whatever else she puts in there, some guy will feign interest in it to try to get laid.

Or she'll catch attention of an abjectly creepy guy who IS interested in [thing] but, like, to an obsessive level.

I don't think there's a good solution for being openly female on a site that allows private messaging.

I think this misses a key factor to explain where the actual intersex resentment can come from.

Accepting for now the premise that men are functionally invisible for most of their lives, they DO have a key advantage over women in this particular game: their value INCREASES with time as they age... if they play their cards right.

A woman's value as a sex object, in contrast, has a ticking timer on it, and whether it's at age 30, 35, or 40, there will be a point past which she can never get the same level of attention for her looks that she used to.

And most of these women will be slathered in male attention starting at puberty, so they WILL notice this change.

Thus, we get a real issue where women get "taught" early on that they can use their looks and sexuality to get male attention and turn this into, well, whatever she wants, including sex.

Meanwhile, young men are simultaneously at their horniest and yet least capable of exercising good judgment in this age range... and some huge portion of them end up sexually unsuccessful WHILE they watch women exploit sex appeal for fun and profit. Often with older, established men.

So the lesson THEY'RE learning is that they're not good enough to stand out from the crowd and women are living life on easy mode as long as they're even moderately attractive.

Then a guy who finds himself alone in his mid-twenties either falls into despair or buckles down and presses his one advantage: time. Time to build wealth, acquire skills, get fit, and learn how to exploit said factors to the greatest extent.

And then soon the script flips. The dude who put in the effort and didn't blackpill himself is suddenly able to more easily land the hot young chicks who ignored him back then, meanwhile the women his age are losing the ability to effortlessly draw in male attention and have fallen back on... well hopefully they have developed some other valuable skill or trait.

So men get to feel the resentment early but (MAY) still find mating success later in life whereas women are likely to develop an expectation as to how easy life will be early on that will later be thwarted by age, and THEN they resent men their age for ignoring them and the men from her past for never settling down and leaving her to this fate of loneliness.

So men and women who are similarly aged probably end up looking and talking past each other as each side has a different set of experiences at each stage in life.

Young women ignore young mens' plight because they have no reason to care, and older men ignore older womens' plight because... they have little reason to care.

And this apparent lack of care or compassion when the other side needs it most would certainly explain resentment on both sides.


I have intentionally excluded the men and women who find a partner and settle down earlier in life since almost by definition they aren't contributing much to this problem, although the resentment that builds between some married couples is likely similar in nature.

And then soon the script flips. The dude is suddenly able to more easily land the hot young chicks who ignored him back then,

Except 90+% of the time this part never happens. The average middle aged man isn't pulling hot young chicks, not even close. He might be able to pull other 40-year divorcees and single moms who used to be hot young chicks 20 years ago but that's not exactly the same thing

Sure.

But the prevalence of age gap relationships where the female is younger and the male is older vs. the practical non-existence of older-female, younger-male relationships makes my point for me.

Sugar daddy and sugar baby relationships, likewise, are FAR more common than the gender-swapped equivalent.

Leo Dicaprio is the ur-example here.

Older men can target and acquire younger women. Younger men either aren't targeting or can't acquire older women.

I pointed out 2 fates for the lonely mid-twenties guy. One is despair.

If a guy isn't in a relationship by then and doesn't try to maximize his sex appeal, then NO SHIT he won't be picking up hot younger ladies as he gets older, unless he takes some really financially irresponsible steps.

But the prevalence of age gap relationships where the female is younger and the male is older vs. the practical non-existence of older-female, younger-male relationships makes my point for me.

I don't think they do.

I don't actually have any numbers so I guess we're just playing Battling Narratives here, but my expectation is that maybe 0.1% of fourty year old men are banging college girls, while maybe 0.01% of fourty year old women are banging college guys*, so even if we say you're right and the proportions are out of wack, by a whole order of magnitude, it's still a rounding error even in the larger case and therefore hardly something to draw conclusions about the general anomie of men/women.

*(In fact while I was typing this the thought struck me that this is probably low, more because college guys are horny all the time than because milfs are attractive. So I am tempted to reject even your premise that 40 year old men get more 20 year old girls than 40 year old women get 20 year old guys. 20 year old guys don't need sugaring lol)

I don't actually have any numbers

I DO! Feel free to tear apart the methodology if you can.

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/age-gap-dating

From the polls:

Men are more likely to have dated someone 10+ years younger than them compared to women (25% vs. 14%). Meanwhile, women are more likely to have dated someone 10+ years older than them compared to men (28% vs. 21%).

This surely implies that women are having less success finding younger men as they age, meanwhile younger women are finding older men fairly often, and older men are finding younger women at a similar rate (28% younger women have dated 10+ years older, 25% older men have dated 10+ years younger)

And when it comes to actual marriages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity_in_sexual_relationships#Statistics

Approximately 8% of married couples feature a male who is 10+ years older than the female. For the reverse: 1.7%. A 4x disparity.

Plug that into Bayes' theorem and smoke it, it has some interesting implications as to how so many men end up in a position to marry younger women, which is to say, men who are unsuccessful at finding a mate early in life but successful at finding a mate later... and succeed at finding a younger one.

Not counting prostitution what percentage of 40+ year old men do you reckon can regularly pull "hot young chicks"? I would put it at a few percent. It's a small minority for sure. Of course Leonardo DiCaprio can do it, he's a rich and famous actor. His experience says nothing at all about what most men will experience.

I went to college, I know who the hot girls were sleeping with and for the most part it definitely wasn't significantly older men, it was mostly other college students.

Not counting prostitution what percentage of 40+ year old men do you reckon can regularly pull "hot young chicks"? I would put it at a few percent.

I'm talking more about guys in the 30-40 range, but if we limit it to single men I wouldn't say you're obviously wrong but it might be time to update some priors.

Lets pull some stats to get an inkling of an idea of how this dynamic works in practice.

Here's data from U.S., Heterosexual, MARRIED couples, as a percentage of all married couples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity_in_sexual_relationships#Statistics

For marriages where the male is 10+ years older than the female, its' already at just shy of 8%. Include 6-9 year splits and it starts pushing 20%.

This already implies that many guys find themselves single in their late 20's/early 30s, and are able to find and secure a woman in her early-mid twenties. And that's just as a percentage of marriages, it doesn't reflect how many dates a guy goes on to get there.

(I will grant that many or even most of such age gap marriages are probably found in religious communities).

So recent data on age gap dating is also available:

(note this poll was commissioned by 'Cougar Life' but is otherwise done with proper procedures)

https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/age-gap-dating

Men are more likely to have dated someone 10+ years younger than them compared to women (25% vs. 14%). Meanwhile, women are more likely to have dated someone 10+ years older than them compared to men (28% vs. 21%).

1/4 of men right there saying they've dated someone 10 years or more younger. I'd guess this fraction shoots up if we drop men married men out of the equation.

Here's a tantalizing headline:

https://archive.ph/dHvWf

For Online Daters, Women Peak at 18 While Men Peak at 50, Study Finds. Oy.

Here's the study in question:

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.aap9815 (PDF warning)

This one probably gets the closest to our exact query, since the sample is drawn from online dating sites, which ideally captures the population of single males we're discussing.

Once we have our desirability scores, we can use them to identify characteristics of desirable users by comparing scores against various user attributes.

As shown in Fig. 2, for instance, average desirability varies with age for both men and women, although it varies more strongly for women, and the effects run in opposite directions: Older women are less desirable, while older men are more so (18, 19). For women, this pattern holds over the full range of ages on the site: The average woman’s desirability drops from the time she is 18 until she is 60. For men, desirability peaks around 50 and then declines.

From the data in the study, this appears to mean that men at age 50 (conditional on them being on a dating site) are most able to get matches, conversations, and dates with their preferred demographics, regardless of the age range they are targeting.

And as the data in the study already pointed out that women are most desirable at 18, not a huge leap to guess who a 50 year old guy is targeting.


So I dunno bud, 25% of men claim to have dated someone 10 years their junior, and 8% of married men tied the knot with one. Even FIFTY year old guys are able to succeed on dating sites despite targeting younger women.

If this isn't an indication that a guy going into his 30's or even 40's single can get dates with younger women, if he cares enough to work at it, I don't know what else you can do to confirm or refute it. Other than maybe find one of your male friends who remained single in his 30's and has decent looks and a stable job and ask him to talk about his dating life with you.

I feel like there's a bit of a motte and Bailey going on here. The bailey is something like "don't worry if you didn't get laid in college, in a decade once you're established you'll be able to go back and sleep with hot young girls just like the ones who always rejected you" while the motte is "men age a little bit better than women and you can date a wider age range as you get older so the pool opens up so dating might get a bit easier especially if you're financially successful and stay in shape" the motte is true but the bailey is pure cope

if you're financially successful and stay in shape" the motte is true but the bailey is pure cope

This situation may indeed be so bad that there are guys leaving college a virgin who have ~0% chance of losing it without paying going forward.

But I think the Bailey as described is mostly a POSSIBLE strategy for a guy who has managed to increase his odds of dating success later in life, based on factors he now knows to be true. His SMV can be increased, and with it his odds of finding a partner, if he doesn't give in to despair. If he does give up, then yeah, he falls out of contention and has nothing left but cope.

But his odds of success are limited by the fact that ALL eligible guys are chasing those younger women, so every older single guy is competing with every other older single guy is competing with all the younger single guys for the same pool of women, and there's no way for even half of these guys to 'win.'

Which contributes to the whole "women are slathered in male attention from puberty onward" part.

That said, it is theoretically possible for most older guys to sleep with a whole passel of younger women over time, assuming they never give commitment to any particular one and that woman moves on to a new (older) partner quickly.

So if a bunch of men go with the strategy of banging as many women as possible and 'spinning plates' so he always has fresh ones in rotation, this resolves the above hyper-competition issue to some degree.

But that whole "sleeping with them and never giving commitment" thing is the likely explanation for women growing resentful towards men as the woman gets older.

I think all of this is happening at once to various degrees, which is creating a really unhealthy situation for everyone stuck in the dating rat race. Relatively few people are getting what they 'actually' want (committed relationships with a compatible partner) and many are even having difficulty getting what they're willing to settle for (regular sex and companionship, even without compatibility or commitment).

It all strikes me as suboptimal, but I don't control any of these factors, I just observe.

I think that this is oversimplified. Being attractive as a woman takes a lot of willpower (not eating a lot in the modern world), work (applying make-up is not easy) and money (clothes, make-up, perfume, hairdressing etc. are not cheap).

And there are innate things as a man that can make people more pliable to you. For example, I am fairly tall, broad-shouldered, I have naturally very good skin, a prominent jaw, and all my hair in my 30s. These make life easier for me as a man, but I didn't have to work for them.

I guess you're trying to be generous, but it feels like you're taking it too far. I think you really overdo it -- not being obese shouldn't get people big points. Most women don't need to wear much make-up, if any, to still look okay. I don't think applying basic make-up is particularly hard, but perhaps I'm missing the complexity. Hair back in a pony-tail, halfway healthy, and you will be attractive to most men.

Most late teen girls basically can eat crap food and still not get fat (at least according to the older people I talk to now who talk about how they used to be able to eat anything).

(I think women do have a hard time finding someone who values them for more than just their sexual attractiveness, I don't want to downplay that at all, I just want to say in terms of easily getting attention, young women are generally "playing on easy mode" (much as I hate that phrase).)

not being obese shouldn't get people big points.

Why not?

As for late teen girls, women are only late teenagers for a few years. And the same is true for men: I could eat all sorts of stuff when I was a teenager with minimal consequences.

Why not?

They can get some points, but not big points, because most of the world manages it (especially, as you note, when you're under 30, and even slightly active). I also don't give big points out for brushing your teeth, combing your hair, or cleaning your ass after shitting. I don't think I'm setting that high a bar, although I recognize obesity does seem to be getting ever-harder to fight. (I also have some sympathy for people who's parents screwed them on the eating habits and metabolism front).

I'm confused. Are these points for attractiveness or moral merit?

Both, but they are separate.

Being obese is a pretty big hit (for most people, but there are always exception) to attractiveness. But the original point was how hard young women have it to be attractive, because they have to spend time and money on fashion, and doing make-up is hard, and not being fat is really hard. I was disagreeing with all of those, especially the last one, which is what caused this comment chain.

money (clothes, make-up, perfume, hairdressing etc. are not cheap).

Except 90% of the choices women make in this arena are negative for sexual attraction of men. Thereby blowing the whole theory out of the water. Imagine men wearing orange overalls and telling every woman they meet they are an alcoholic and you have an approximation of women's fashion over the last 2 decades.

Except 90% of the choices women make in this arena are negative for sexual attraction of men.

Just in the interest of avoiding typical-minding, I ask my fellow whore-makeup-appreciation-chads to rise up!

Bad make-up is better than no make-up because I interpret any make-up at all (just as the feminists' nightmares alledge) as a signal that "I am trying to make myself more pleasing to the male gaze", which in turn implies a receptiveness to male advances, which IN TURN is more alluring in terms of attainability bias than the 'natural beauty' it replaces would be.

And yes, yes, I know that we are lectured relentlessly that "That's not what wearing make-up signals you misogynist", but whether my perception of it's implications is accurate or not is beside the point.

Yeah, this is how I feel as well. It is for the male gaze regardless of the official narrative. Not just a receptiveness to male advances, but a tacit acknowledgement that men and women are different and that women should try to be at least somewhat attractive to men. So it signals that she's not entirely lost in the feminist frame.

Yes, it's even harder than I suggested: a woman needs money, skill, AND taste to increase her attractiveness this way.

I do think that much of makeup and fashion that is actively unattractive to men is a signalling activity for women, though; so it might not be that 90% are so bad at it that they fail utterly.

Interesting. Or they may be trading off attracting men with impressing women.

Yes, fashion is intra-female signaling. That there are no straight men in the industry is proof enough of that.

I think stuff like expensive handbags are the most clear example of this. It used to be that men would buy women handbags, and being a woman that can get expensive gifts from men signals that you are a desirable person (even if people may secretly envy you) and less dispensable as a person in the group. (Or it might simply be flexing, I don’t know? Someone can probably flesh this out better.) Now that women earn money comparable to men, they buy their own handbags, even though the true signal (of “I’m so attractive I can get people to get impractically expensive things for me”) is dead, and the recognition of handbags as status symbols is pretty much vestigial at this point.

At least I don’t think I’ve met a man who gushed over a woman’s LV handbag and wanted to bang her afterwards because of it?

Is this really true? I'd 'personally' say all existing makeup and 99% of fashion is bad, makes people unattractive, and specifically in the equivalent senses of the highest aesthetics and the functions / signaling meaning of attractiveness. And, certainly many women apply makeup and fashion in an unattractive way. That isn't a mainstream approach though.

But many men can fall for equally social-signally-fashionable things like expensive cars, shoes, various sports things, video game skins, etc. Maybe some of them find that makeup or fashion stuff attractive for the same reason the women do?

Also, a lot of makeup really does work at covering up obvious or more subtle but still important flaws. Often people do notice the bad parts of makeup, but well-done makeup is just being hot. Also, more people I know than not say makeup makes women more, not less, attractive.

Let's simplify it further: a non-obese woman only needs like ONE aesthetically pleasing physical feature to attract male attention.

If she has a pretty face, she's golden. Or nice breasts, or a shapely butt, or a toned stomach, or long, smooth legs. Hell, I would bet my life that having pretty feet is sufficient all by itself these days.

Men, in contrast, need several favorable physical features in conjunction with more intangibles (sense of humor, high social status, wealth) to get the same level of attention.

If true then the "genetic lotto" is easier for women to win than men. Indeed, arguably men only need to lose on ONE dimension: height, and their prospects are forever hampered.

You practically admit as much in your comment. If you were visibly balding at your age, how much would your other features really matter?

Yes, the situation is not symmetric. I'm just saying that it's not simple, either. As you suggest, thinking of it as a lottery with a variety of prizes is a good analogy.

For example, a woman's options are hampered by a big nose, flat chest, saggy breasts etc., but the initial option set is probably better than most men's, e.g. she may not be able to make money as a streamer or model, but she can still attract a larger variety of partners than most men, mutatis mutandis.

Incidentally, I have a friend who started visibly balding at 17. He recently married a hot, sweet, smart chick. He also has the personality that a lot of Nice Guys have, or at least think they have - kind, helpful, not very assertive. He has slightly above average intelligence and a moderately good job. On the other hand, she was his first girlfriend, at about age 27. This exemplifies how the situation for men is certainly not ideal, but it's not necessarily awful.

Yes, the situation is not symmetric.

And once we admit this, it shouldn't surprise us to see things follow a power-law distribution rather than a normal one.

The 'average' guy doesn't have an 'average' chance of finding a mate. Rather, the top 10% of guys have it extremely easy, then the ease of dating/marrying drops off sharply from there.

The average woman, on the other hand, can easily get the attention from the average guy, but is more likely going to target someone in that top 10%.

Yes I'm fudging the statistics but this particular distribution of attractiveness and ease of finding a mate is maybe the most well-documented anthropological/sociological phenomena ever.

I say anthropological because throughout almost every culture on earth and history, there's been a class/caste of male who gets to have a harem of women whilst the rest of the male population is in a state of hypercompetition for what remains.

So to simply state that the average guy, who doesn't have the collection of physical features that make him stand out from the crowd, has it much harder than the average woman, as long as she has one feature that she can display to find attention, is to REALLY undersell the reality of the situation.

Average guys get laid and married on the regular, mind. By definition most guys will fall in this category so the law of large numbers means that SOME of them will still get mates even if it is just luck/chance. This is NOT the same as saying that most average guys will get laid and married.

And now let us add in the point that a man's attractiveness tends to scale up as he ages if he puts in the effort, and the situation looks even bleaker for younger men of average physical attractiveness.

A decade after it stops being the only thing you ever think about you might finally get a girl. You know, if you are a nice guy, which I guess is an incel without self awareness. But at least he knew with bold, soul-destroying clarity that nobody was only talking to him to get him in the sack.

I agree that thinking all the time about getting a girl is not a good strategy, at least for a sustainable relationship.

What destroys many young men's souls is rating themselves based on people's attraction to them. Rating yourself on any basis is unwise, but rating yourself based on other people's approval is even more unwise, because it's a way of voluntarily making your happiness contingent on the mental states of another person - something that neither you nor they can do much to control.

I think my friend is luckier than most women, at least as far as happiness goes. The real joy of relationships and sex comes from activity: from actively pursuing something meaningful. That's how happiness works in general. It's not getting what you want that gives you most of the happiness, it's doing things that you think have a good enough chance (relative to the value of what you are pursuing) of achieving your goal. Our neurochemical reward system is designed to push us towards achievements, not to make us happy and satisfied. So my friend, who had to work hard to learn how to talk to girls, be emotionally stable, and be interesting, experienced more happiness than some naturally hot chick.

Similarly, a woman who exercises hard, learns how to cook healthily, learns how to look beautiful using make-up, and how to be someone that guys enjoy staying with, will probably have more happiness than a woman who just naturally looks beautiful. As Jonathan Haidt puts it, "happiness comes from in between" - the joy of life comes when you realise that you are doing things that help you to get what is important to you.

I would only add to Haidt that those goals must be thought of as "wants" rather than "needs". Pursuing women because you think you need one (for happiness, status, or just because) is a great way to be unhappy. Pursuing women because you want one (or more) is a great way to be happy. I'm pretty sure that that's the key difference between my friend and incels: for him, a good relationship was something he wanted and worked hard to achieve; for most incels I know, they think they need a woman for "...reasons...".

There are more issues with the constant sexualization of women. One is that it fucks up your ability to trust people. How can you know when someone is genuinely interested in you, or is faking it?

If sex exists, at all, then this will be a problem for women (and rich/attractive men, and in business, and many other places). It has nothing to do with some idea of 'sexualization'. E.g. - does the hijab desexualize women?

Two, there will absolutely be people that will ignore your other qualities in favor of sex

How is this even a problem? If you're emmy noether, people won't ignore your genius in favor of sex. If they're ignoring said qualities - it's usually because they would anyway.

Additionally, I don't think most women really understand just how invisible you can feel being a man - on almost every level. Personally, I think this affects us in a really deep, underlying way

This is a common sentiment - but, what? I'm male, have friends, do a variety of things at work and outside of work, am never invisible, nobody I interact with IRL is really invisible in any sense. Yeah, I'd be invisible if I was unskilled, uninteresting, unfunny, etc - but that's good, and an interaction or conversation without any of the former would be empty and worthless anyway.

I can say for myself at least (and I think a decent number of other men) that being horny can feel like you're being 'tricked' by your own body

I mean, if sex was worthless, you would be tricked, but it's just a selectively advantageous, mostly fair evaluation of the usefulness of having children.

There's a power that you feel a woman can unilaterally hold over you in a way you can't hold them, which can lead you to doing foolish things

Women also often do ""irrational"" (making a sex/sexual desire-related mistake isn't any more or less irrational than making a normal "intellectual" mistake) things over men, and also very strongly desire men in certain contexts, so there isn't really a stark difference here

I think every woman understands that they intrinsically have value.

Well, every man also just-as-intrinsically has value, in the sense of labor. Almost any man, or woman, can get a job and be paid. There's value! And society and the state respects this in all sorts of ways. Or just being buds with other men of equivalent value / status / whatever. There's also welfare! There are multiple senses of 'value', indeed a sense for every possible activity, desire, and these aren't directly comparable. Just saying 'men have value, women don't' is, at best, an imprecise metaphor, and at worst just wrong. Also, people treat women better because of a combination of the biological role of women and universalism - if we go back to Rome, is it really fair to say that "women intrinsically have value, whereas if you're a man nobody cares", given the severe difference in legal status between the two?

the flip-side, as a man, you are essentially worthless until proven otherwise. Nobody cares

Yeah, but almost all men can prove otherwise in plenty of contexts, so this doesn't really matter.

Well, then let's ask it outright:

How do we (as a society) socialize women to pursue nonsexual value? How do we create opportunities for this to occur?

Personally I think it has to look like absolutely bringing a hammer down on workplace relations, while also pursuing sex-blinded hiring/promotion policies. But that only addresses (if at all) the workplace situation, it does nothing for early socialization, social groups, etc. I have no idea how you'd do it for non-workplace groups.

Personally I think it has to look like absolutely bringing a hammer down on workplace relations, while also pursuing sex-blinded hiring/promotion policies.

We did that, and it had absolutely the opposite effect, so you might want to re-examine your reasoning.

I'm not sure if the current approaches result in better outcomes? My proposed approach is only half the puzzle; it can remove hindrances but can't solve lack of availability or interest.

What in God's name is a Sneako?

Some streamer/YouTuber famous for doing highly cut street interviews, and in this particular area having extremely cynical (and some would say immature) views on sex relations.

Some streamer who is vaguely red pill don't worry about it too much