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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   36634 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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It's not about social skills. It's about the fact that women are only attracted to a small minority of men. Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.

Completely normal guys who shower and hold jobs and have friends and are non-obese or autistic get lectured by feminists that doing the bare minimum doesn't entitle them to a girlfriend while a small number of men plow their way through entire harems. And not even good men, but terrible human beings like Henry and Dean Moriarity, because not only are women only attracted to a small minority of men, but the minority of men they are attracted to are cocky assholes with options.

We increasingly live in a world where the average guy's best chance of getting married is to wife-up a 30+ single mother after she falls off the bottom of Chad's booty call list. And if you are an average man in your teens and twenties, you don't even get that, you get a "fuck you" and told to wait your turn.

If you wanted to fix this with advanced technology, and you did not want to resort to wire-heading or something morally equivalent like creating non-conscious sycophantic cat girls, digital or otherwise... well, you could create conscious male-complements that required some effort and level of social skills to successfully court but who were not impossible to please the way that human women are, what Eliezer calls verthandi... or you could modify human women to actually be satisfiable by regular men, perhaps with human men being modified in some other way in return... or, you know, we could just go back to what worked for the last 5000 years and force women to get married while they are still young to hard-working, law-abiding men, who would then be allowed to take their marital rights whenever they wanted (hey, you don't even need the advanced technology for that one!)

But if you don't want to wirehead, and you don't want to create sycophantic cat girls who will fuck and cuddle you at the drop of a hat, and you don't want to create bespoke Belldandys who will act like the love interest of a shonen romcom and get together with the nerdy loser after a few years of character growth and sexual tension, and you don't want to edit existing human women to make them something that could ever be satisfied with not being the exclusive wife of Chad, and you are not willing to bite the bullet and force young women to get married and perform their damn marital duties...

...then the problem is over-constrained and has no solution.

Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.

Seems like this is a claim that should come with some evidence. Depending on what you mean by "free to make their own sexual choices," women have more or less been able to choose and reject suitors for centuries in the West. And even in ancient times, they usually had some say in who they got married off to. Where they didn't, they were literally property, and if you are advocating that we'd be better off in a world where fathers simply sell their daughters and females are livestock, well... You need to read less Dread Jim. In very few societies have women ever been sexual and breeding chattel in the way he keeps advocating.

He did. It’s the old OKCupid data showing that, while male rate the average woman as averagely attractive, women rate the average man as extremely unattractive. And indeed any man below the 5th percentile or so.

Of course, it would be nice to have replications but there never will be, because if true this strongly indicates that any society where women are free to choose their mates or to remain single will be one where huge numbers of both sexes die alone. The latter choice was not possible in historic societies and is the main reason for our current predicament IMO. That is why I advocate for progressive and extremely high rates of taxation for single men and women approaching 30.

From the link:

Men don’t just find women more attractive; men’s ratings closely follow a bell curve, with 6% of women getting the minimum rating and 6% getting the maximum rating.

Women don’t just find men less attractive; the median and mode rating is 2 out of 7. Even more strikingly, the second most-common rating is 1 out of 7 — and near-zero men in the sample received 7 out of 7. (Over the years, by the way, I’ve repeatedly said “exactly zero,” but if you look close at the original post archived by Gwern, that’s not quite true).

The OkCupid results are far from unique. But the graphs are stark enough to inspire mutual anger. Common angry male reactions include: “Women have absurdly unrealistic standards” as well as “Women are just cruel.” Common angry female responses include: “It’s not our fault that most men suck” and “Why should I settle?”

But the only thing less constructive than anger is mutual anger. The data reveal an ugly truth that we all need to face. While there are several ways to capture this ugly truth, my favorite is just: The typical man disgusts the typical woman. You can expand this to: The median man moderately disgusts the typical woman, and the bottom quarter of men strongly disgust the typical woman.

[Various musings on how men and women can treat each other with empathy]

Update: Stefan Schubert points out that the OKCupid estimates of the male-female gap are unusually extreme. Emil Kirkegaard agrees after thoroughly reviewing a wide range of measures. True enough, but we should trust the OKCupid data more. The big advantage of the dating website rankings is that they greatly reduce Social Desirability Bias by getting both men and women in a “What do you REALLY think?” frame of mind.

That is why I advocate for progressive and extremely high rates of taxation for single men and women approaching 30.

You're still doing it. If men are single because women would prefer not to settle for anyone but Chad, taxing single men is punishing the victim.

You’re implying there’s no marginal men who who would marry before 30 facing huge tax penalties but don’t when they aren’t facing those penalties? That seems unlikely. Many men are in long relationships around that age that would likely see faster marriage and children. Others would feel more pressure to find a spouse. So would women since the same would apply to them, and bigamy remains illegal in much of the West. So, yeah, I’m pretty sure it would make a big difference.

I am sympathetic to the idea of a bachelor tax, but it seems like it would either end up being a cruel punishment on the unattractive. And if you add some sort of loophole, it is bound to get exploited (see: professional rejecters)

There couldn’t be professional rejecters – you’d get 3 rejects and then you’re out, you pay the bachelor-spinster tax. If you do not reject, and are therefore rejected by those who drop out, you keep getting official dates with counterparts. Imagine the creatures who would find each other in the deepest depths of hell, 20-30 one-sided rejections below ground.

Anyway the real problem is not lack of cohabitation/marriage but childnessness. And that power lies entirely in women’s hands, legally. Just give some of it back to men: no abortion or contraceptives unless the husband/boyfriend gives his consent. His DNA, his choice, it takes two to tango, whatever cliché you prefer. Then you put the spinster tax on childless couples.

Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.

Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.

I am always amazed at the things people will propose just to avoid rolling back 60 years of feminism.

Can’t turn back abortifacients.

And it’s one thing to want more children, another to force others to have children they don’t want to have.

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