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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   28975 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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I came across an interesting X post by a right wing Christian religious man on the topic of young people and dating and would like to share:

Jack Reacher Won't Ask Girls to Dance

I’ve had a front-row seat to the social breakdown hitting our young people. You can see it in a lot of places, but one of the clearest examples came from a mom in our church who’s helped run a homeschool prom for several years. She told me something recently that I’ve been stewing on.

When she first got involved, it was normal for boys to ask girls to dance—especially during the “snowball” dances, where the DJ tells you to rotate partners every thirty seconds. That’s the whole point: go find someone new, talk, move, risk a little awkwardness.

But this year? The boys wouldn’t do it. They stood around, clumped up with friends, goofed off, and refused to initiate. Some danced with each other, ironically of course. Meanwhile, the girls were standing around the edge of the dance floor—waiting. Eventually, they gave up and started dragging each other onto the floor. Some even went over and tried to coax the guys to come out. It didn’t work. There were 2 girls for every guy.

The DJ repeatedly re-explained the rules and purpose. Didn’t matter. Nothing changed. He was baffled by it. It didn't use to be like this.

The next day, one of this mom’s younger daughters said something that sums it all up: “I’m graduating, and I’ve never danced with a guy.” Contrast that with her older sister, who just seven or eight years ago came home from prom having danced with seven or eight different young men in one evening.

Something’s shifted. It’s not just social anxiety or awkwardness. It’s paralysis. It’s absence. And yeah—it’s unsettling.

The same trend was the focus of a recent video from Charisma on Command, titled “This Shift in Masculinity Is Scary.” It uses the Reacher series on Amazon Prime as a cultural case study. Reacher is a walking male power fantasy: big, competent, calm under pressure, lethal in a fight. And yet, in the modern adaptation, he is oddly passive with women. He never initiates anything romantic. In fact, the women have to all but throw themselves at him just to get a kiss.

This isn’t how Reacher was written in the books. And it’s not how male leads used to behave. Go back and watch The Girl Next Door or Casino Royale. Whatever flaws those movies had, the men at least wanted something—and they acted on it. Desire was visible. Rejection was a possibility. And risk was part of the reward.

That’s what’s missing now: initiative. Reacher has been reimagined into a man who wins without wanting. He gets the girl without having to pursue her. There’s no risk, no rejection, no emotional vulnerability. He’s strong in every arena except the one that requires personal agency.

And the problem is—it’s not just fiction. The video rightly points out that more and more young men are living like this in real life. They aren’t avoiding women because they’re ascetic or holy. They’re avoiding women because they’re afraid. Afraid of rejection. Afraid of misreading a situation. Afraid of being embarrassed, canceled, or misunderstood. So instead, they scroll. They lift. They build. They wait. They distract themselves endlessly, preparing for a moment they never plan to seize.

I thought this was overstated, but I digress.

It’s not that they don’t want anything. It’s that they’ve lost touch with how to act on what they want. They’ve been taught to suppress desire instead of disciplining it. They’ve learned that passivity feels safer than pursuit.

I used to think this was mainly a problem in my own circles. I’ve harped plenty on the socially stunted sons of Reformed households—the boys who can quote Theologians from memory but can’t make eye contact. But let’s be honest: this isn’t a Reformed problem. It’s a cultural one. We’re just producing our own brand of it.

A lot of young men today have rightly rejected the old “just be yourself” lie and embraced the call to “improve yourself.” That’s a good shift. You see more of them focusing on fitness, career goals, and personal discipline. But that growth often stalls out when it comes to relationships—especially with women. They’ve learned how to level up, but not how to move toward someone.

They’re told to develop themselves but warned off pursuit. So they become hesitant, uncertain, stuck. What’s needed now is the courage to carry that same sense of purpose into the social realm—to risk, initiate, and act with clarity and resolve, even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

So maybe we need to say this to our sons directly: If you like her, ask. If you want something, step up. If you get rejected, survive it. But don’t stand on the edge of the dance floor waiting for someone else to make the first move.

P.S. This is merely one angle of the dilemma. I know there are issues with the girls as well. Next time.

The replies to the post range from supportive and understanding to hostile. One that caught my eye said:

I genuinely mean no malice when I type this: this showed up on the time line, I got three paragraphs in, and thought "I bet this is a Based Pastor or something." A few seconds later I figured, girldad. I'm right on both counts.

You write effeminately. You don't seem to have any fellow feeling for young men as young men. Until you reckon with that, you and your dj are going to remain confused.

A 'girldad' has either all girls or a mix of boys and girls, and holds the girls to a standard that elevates them while holding the boys to a standard that denigrates them. It's why Con Inc. tells boys not to go to college and work in factories, and girls to work in STEM.

I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear. The real question should be why that anxiety and fear exist in the first place. And to what extent the responsibility to overcome it rests on young men rather than someone else.

A lot of young men today have rightly rejected the old “just be yourself” lie and embraced the call to “improve yourself.” That’s a good shift. You see more of them focusing on fitness, career goals, and personal discipline. But that growth often stalls out when it comes to relationships—especially with women. They’ve learned how to level up, but not how to move toward someone.

The problem here seems to be one of active vs passive virtues. One becomes strong in the weightroom through developing active virtues: discipline, endurance of pain, consistency, intelligence and research. One avoids being a creep or a fornicator or a player, on the other hand, through passive virtues: not doing anything bad, resisting temptation, not saying the wrong thing.

The problem being that the passive virtues are maximized by never doing anything. One can never rape if one never has sex. One can never say the wrong thing if one never talks. One can never hurt anyone if one never moves.

I recall reading somewhere that one should compare one's aspirations against a corpse, and if the corpse would be good at what you're aspiring for, you should reject those aspirations and find new ones, because your aspirations are anti-life. This is the problem here: the evangelical teenage boy has been taught chastity is a virtue, but chastity is a virtue best practiced by the dead, and the Good Christian Boy who never causes trouble with girls is often revealed to be homosexual or to lack healthy desire altogether. We're only just now grappling with how to deal with this question.

One avoids being a creep or a fornicator or a player, on the other hand, through passive virtues: not doing anything bad, resisting temptation, not saying the wrong thing.

The problem being that the passive virtues are maximized by never doing anything. One can never rape if one never has sex. One can never say the wrong thing if one never talks. One can never hurt anyone if one never moves.

I recall reading somewhere that one should compare one's aspirations against a corpse, and if the corpse would be good at what you're aspiring for, you should reject those aspirations and find new ones, because your aspirations are anti-life. This is the problem here: the evangelical teenage boy has been taught chastity is a virtue, but chastity is a virtue best practiced by the dead, and the Good Christian Boy who never causes trouble with girls is often revealed to be homosexual or to lack healthy desire altogether.

I’m reminded of a saying from Sir William Marshal as he was on his deathbed.

The context is that William has had an extremely successful career beating other knights in tournament, and at the time the earned reward for that was taking the loser’s equipment. The church argued that this was an unlawful taking and William had to make amends for it for the good of his soul.

The Marshal replied: ‘Bear with me a moment, Henry. The clerics are too hard on us! They shave us too close! I’ve captured five hundred knights and kept their arms, their destriers and all their gear. If that means the kingdom of God is barred to me then that’s that – I can’t give them back! I can do no more for God, I’d say, than yield myself to Him repentant of all my misdeeds, of all the wrongs I’ve done. Unless the clergy mean to see me damned they should stop their harrying! Either their claims are false or no man can have salvation!’”

We live in an age when the priests have accrued too much power, no one has the capacity yet to tell them to get wrecked, and it will keep leading to passivity until the fever breaks.

IDK if my experience is relevant, but ...

As part of junior orientation at the math-and-science high school I attended, there was a dance. Having avoided all school dances up to that point, I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and also there were two girls I hadn't spoken to who went out of their way to find me beforehand to be first in line, so w/e. I had no experience or education on anything dance-related other than one squaredancing class in 4th grade PE, so the girls did the leading.

Going from "I bearly know your name" to hands on swaying hips for minutes at a time was kinda traumatizing and I spent the rest of the event curled into a ball on a bench trying to sleep.

This was 2004. This school also had a weird gimmicky rent-a-senior day, and all I remember about that was that someone used this to force an outspoken Republican student to stand in the cafeteria with a pro-Democrat sign at one point, and when I was in earshot, he reacted to one of the people wisecracking at him with "Yeah; we should just give everyone money," in a bitter voice. And I thought, "lol silly hyperbolic republican, acting like democrats want to give-everyone money." The slope seems way less slippery at the top.

If @hydroacetylene is to be believed, these are homeschooled christian conservative kids, or at least something close to it. I'm not sure how wise it is to project their problems from modern liberal dysfunctions, as much as I may dislike them.

If I compare what he's describing to my own upbringing - german conservative catholic mainline christian, not exactly the same but somewhat related - it's unclear how this can even happen. At 14-15 everyone, and I mean everyone, even the atheists and heretics protestants would start dancing school here. They would teach a pre-defined list of dancing styles popular in the entire region (primarily disco fox, secondarily wiener & regular waltzer, as well as the basic steps for some completely different styles such as latin). If you didn't, people would laugh about you. It's pathetic to not go, and even if you wouldn't formally be excluded from much, you'd be de-facto excluded from a large number of social gatherings. And at the ones you can go, partner dancing would still be present and you'd be very much negatively noticed.

This culminates in a big ball at 16, similar to a prom. At that point for us, everyone would already have a fixed primary dancing partner which we would bring to the ball, would be familiar with dancing with other girls, and would be capable of dancing to almost any music that is played. Your partner would be extremely pissed about you in particular if you then just wouldn't dance with her. You'd be eager to show off proficiency in some of the lesser-known styles, or just generally. Even shy & socially awkward guys like me didn't struggle particularly with the expected basics. At most, you'd only dance with your primary partner instead of asking out other girls, which is slightly looked down upon but generally accepted.

The only way how something like what he is describing could happen would be a complete breakdown of the supporting infrastructure. So it's hard for me to blame the guys here. One of the advantages of conservative societies is that you can do this: You can blatantly push people into certain behaviour on little more than "this is how we do things, and you'll make an ass of yourself if you don't". But you need to actually do it. Evidently, the parents and other guardians didn't. Imo this is a general problem with some neo-conservative groups, that they basically try to cargo cult traditions without understanding which parts make them work. Especially the parts that require effort, or require enough pressure to seem mean.

On the topic of dancing, I think a portion of the problem is that this guy’s church comes from an American Protestant religious conservative background, and that grouping of people has, at best, an ambivalent relationship with dancing.

The kids aren’t going to feel comfortable dancing if they aren’t taught, as you point out, and then courting rituals have to be emphasized and valued, rather than somewhat grudgingly put up with.

at best, an ambivalent relationship with dancing

And at worst, it's full-blown hysterical about "grinding", "Leave Room for Jesus", etc.

The hysteria is, in my experience, the more typical route.

That sounds like an average 6th grade dance, from what I remember. Up until a certain age, kids think romance is gross and embarrassing. Then in about high school it flips, and having a gf becomes cool. As an incel, I distinctly remember completely missing this change, not realizing that people were going on unironic dates. Even then, it's nowhere near as direct as boys asking girls to dance. That would be trying too hard, which isn't cool. The actual courtship happens behind the scenes, without adults watching.

If these are high school kids, then it's a little weirder, but since they're being homeschooled maybe the process is delayed.

My experience was probably atypical, because I went to a boys' school. It had a parallel institution, a girls' school, and the idea was that they would occasionally crossover for social events. The girls' school was both much older and much larger, so it had a significantly larger student base.

I remember at social events and dances, what usually happened was that the boys were maybe 20-25% of the room, and they would all bunker up defensively in a corner, unsure of the female strangers who made up the rest of the room, and likewise the girls would eye all the boys nervously. There was a large gap between them and neither side crossed it.

This was before smartphones so I don't think you can blame it on that. This is all millennials. It's just that when your social scene is extremely segregated by gender, you're naturally going to cluster with your friends whom you trust, and nobody wants to draw attention to himself or herself by being the first one to try to cross the gulf.

(There was, for what it's worth, zero mention of homosexuality on either side - neither ironic nor serious. I attribute this mostly to them being conservative religious private schools. I don't think I fully understood the concept of homosexuality until after I had graduated. In many ways I wish for that innocence back.)

I distinctly remember seeing the "ironic homosexuality to avoid asking a girl to dance" strat at our first high school dance, because it wasn't exactly common behavior to ape the gays.

It was mostly just anxiety I think. People grew out of it before the next year.

I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear. The real question should be why that anxiety and fear exist in the first place. And to what extent the responsibility to overcome it rests on young men rather than someone else.

While its been a while since I was in high school, I do recall quite vividly that the anxiety to asking out a girl was very strong even back then. Overcoming this and asking girls to prom/homecoming/etc has always been a thing many boys struggle with. What has changed isn't that situation, it is the girls. Frankly, the options out there seem middling. The stats are in. The girls are fat now. The ones that aren't are getting 10000 swipes on Tinder, yes even the high school girls. They lie to the app and purloin booze from some 21 year old "loser" instead of going to prom at all. Its not just the stats, I believe my lying eyes. I used to live next to a high school. The hotness recession is real. I had little to no lecherousness that needed suppressing.

By the way, the guys are fat and ugly too. They know this, thats additional points for their anxiety about being rejected being justified.

How to fix? Take PE seriously. Make BMI and 5k times into strict graduation requirements for women, and pullups and 400M times for men. And then stick to them. The law is a teacher after all. Currently it teaches bad things. We should have it teach good things.

The obvious hypotheses are valid, but boring. Yes, men are worried about being cancelled. Yes, online alternatives (dating apps) disincentivize in-person courtship. Yes, if women have better outcomes than men, they don't need men. Yes, by forcing men to be same as women, men aren't doing the things men were supposed to anymore.

I want to go in another direction : 'Revenge of the Nerds '

Culture reflects the traits of economically ascendent groups. So far, the 21st century belongs to introverted tech-nerds. Therefore, the next generation has traits of introverted nerds.

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

Vivek is correct, about his youth at least. 90s Cincinnati was a place that valorized the Jock. Aspirational Americans looked to become a partner at McKinsey, BigLaw litigator or to own a Auto showroom. IE. to be a charismatic man in a suit.

But Vivek appears to have missed the last 30 years. Right after his youth came Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The nerd became cool. Over the late-90s/early-2000s, the nerd was an ascendent underdog. But, NY Finance clearly stood atop the American caste system. Then 2008 happened. The financial crisis destroyed finance's chokehold on the American psyche and nerds swooped in with the 1-2 punch of the Social network & Iron Man. It was done. Nerds won. The first generation that's grown up under nerd-supremacy is reaching high school, and families can now see the fallout.

Woke culture, dating apps, asexual movie leads can be traced back to tech & nerds running the show. Influencer-media allows basement dwellers to become role models overnight. Like it or not, that's nerd culture.

I don't dislike nerds. I like them and am one of them.

But I dislike 2 aspects of nerd culture.

  • Anxiety
    • Nerds are anxious. And nerd culture is built to work around these anxieties.
  • Repression
    • Nerds are horny and embarrassed about it. On sexuality, nerds are dishonest. Their dishonesty leads to a weird disconnect between their behaviors behind the scenes and media they endorse.
    • Nerds want to wield power and are embarrassed about it. On the surface, they endorse universality and equal treatment. Power corrupts, and now they too want to wield their newfound power. Once again, disconnect between stated ideologies and the irresistible temptations of power.

This worst aspects of nerd culture aren't more or less degenerate than what came before. But Nerd culture (and as a result our culture in general) has failure modes that are a result of this unique tendency towards anxiety and repression.

Personally, I'll take a jockish and fertile culture over a nerdy and barren one any day.

I think this analysis is interesting but fundamentally off the mark. "Jocks" and "nerds" aren't real, except in a descriptive sense. They're polyphyletic groups. There are jock and nerd behaviors, by which we assign the labels, but no jock or nerd etiology. There are multiple causes that might cause a person to externally present as either, and no cause common to either party. It may or may not be correct to say that kids nowadays want to be more like nerds, but trying to attribute deep social changes to that is fundamentally futile. Even if it's true, these kids don't want to be more anxious, or more socially awkward, or pastier-- they just want the positive attributes associated with nerdity... intelligence, education, high-paying jobs. But they aren't copying the monomaniacal focus on studying that creates the "true" nerds and their social problems.

Now, I think you're onto something about the impact of 2008-- but you're missing the root cause. It wasn't the GFC, it was facebook, youtube, and the iphone. Modern kids don't idolize tech founders, they idolize influencers! (Streamers, youtubers, social media stars, etc.) Think about the dynamics of that. From their own perspective, an influencer is just a person-- they're constantly concerned with social approval, and constantly afraid of failing. But from the perspective of an impressionable media-consumer, every influencer is constantly succeeding, because failing or quitting just means means they're seamlessly replaced with another aspirational influencer selling the same vision of success. So the narrative they're fed is: all the most successful people in the world are hyper-vigilant about social consequences and also glued at all times to the drama-and-suffering machines we all have in our pockets.

But Vivek appears to have missed the last 30 years. Right after his youth came Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. The nerd became cool. Over the late-90s/early-2000s, the nerd was an ascendent underdog

Thats because what Vivek is actually complaining about is the absence of sufficient credentialism (in his eyes, I imagine many Americans think there's already too much).

He wants some South Korean/Indian model where people are told what to grind and then rewarded for meeting the goal with the right certificate.

The actual computer nerd hero origin story is about breaking the path, one way or another. You're cooler for dropping out of Stanford or some such school that an immigrant child would kill to get a degree from to do something amazing.

The Social Network has a scene laying this out. Zuck doesn't need the class. He's that good. That's the dream. Not getting a nice shiny A.

As for Woke Culture being the fault of nerds...debatable. I recall when nerds were the irreverent types. If anything, that was the line of attack: nerds were low SMV types who were inordinately pleased with themselves and resentful at women for not agreeing.

I remember when feminists were hunting nerds for wearing the wrong shirt or having the wrong opinion.

I'll cop to the dishonesty with which nerds approach their own sexuality. But , even here, we're downstream of a generation's worth of negative messaging about what nerdy men actually like. The overly-online "Step on me mommy" stuff is viscerally disgusting but it is safe/"unproblematic" after constant objectification discourse around unapologetic nerd thirsting for their sex symbols. In the real world it doesn't matter as much. But people don't want to be continually whined at or browbeaten online.

Why wouldn't it just be that what happened to everything else happened to nerd spaces too, especially since a lot of successful nerds were within the academy or tech companies in liberal states and nerds can be quite secular and progressive?

As for Woke Culture being the fault of nerds...debatable. I recall when nerds were the irreverent types. If anything, that was the line of attack: nerds were low SMV types who were inordinately pleased with themselves and resentful at women for not agreeing.

There's a strand of woke culture which comes from women in tech -- "Geek Feminism" is probably the term to search for. Some of these women were various sorts of hangers-on (looking at you, Shanley Kane) but some were actual female nerds who despised male nerds for whatever reason (probably mostly the same reasons non-nerd women do). I believe a lot of earlier woke male nerds got woke trying to impress or appease that group.

some were actual female nerds who despised male nerds for whatever reason (probably mostly the same reasons non-nerd women do)

Were they? There are some male nerds who are even despised by other male nerds, but it's almost a tautology that the "Star Trek posters in the workplace are Not Inclusive and Not Okay" sorts of woke blather were coming from non-nerds; actual female nerds were more likely to be Star Trek fanfic (or actual Star Trek novel, for that matter) writers. There are many male nerds who are basically perceived as romantically undesirable by most female nerds, as in the old "the odds are good but the goods are odd" joke in so many gender-lopsided environments, but there's a big difference between being unloved and being despised (although I'm sure that difference feels academic to the chronically unloved).

Consider the crime of Landing On a Comet While Wearing The Wrong Nerdy Shirt: there's a reason why it took a fashion writer out of her depth to call the guy out, despite both his boss and the creator of the shirt being women.

Were they? There are some male nerds who are even despised by other male nerds, but it's almost a tautology that the "Star Trek posters in the workplace are Not Inclusive and Not Okay" sorts of woke blather were coming from non-nerds;

Yes, much of that was coming from non nerds. (in fact, you can name the person -- Dr. Sapna Cheryan -- who gave academic backing for that particular one). But there was some which was not; there are female nerds who are not particularly enamored with some of the trappings of nerd culture (male nerds too, but no one cares), and they were happy to use the weapons provided by the non-nerds.

There are many male nerds who are basically perceived as romantically undesirable by most female nerds, as in the old "the odds are good but the goods are odd" joke in so many gender-lopsided environments, but there's a big difference between being unloved and being despised (although I'm sure that difference feels academic to the chronically unloved).

It's not just "unloved", it is "despised". One reason given for this is that the women would be romantically approached by male nerds they found undesirable, and this was wholly unacceptable and makes male nerds despicable. However, as with most things in the area of male-female relations, that reason probably should be taken with a grain of salt.

nerds

jocks

Everyone needs to go watch a Studio Ghibli movie right now. We should aspire to be well rounded people who aren’t specialized weirdos. People in other countries understand this. Why do Americans want to flatten their identities into one weird thing? Someone thinks they’re a nerd so now they’re absolved of the responsibility of being attractive or the expectation that they can hold a conversation. Someone else believes they’re a jock so now they don’t have to suffer the irritation of being corrected by pedantic relatives or be expected to work at a computer all day. It’s so exhausting and reductive. Why aren’t we supporting everyone to be a well rounded person who is as capable as anyone else at all the various parts of life we’re going to have to deal with? It’s really sad to see people waste away their potential in identities pushed onto them by family and schoolmates at an early age.

The pastor is blinded by his preconceptions. These boys aren't crippled by anxiety, they've simply developed class consciousness.

The common logic of the old world was this: "Women will never make the first move, therefore men have to." This is the one-sided logic of the bourgeoisie factory owner who says to his workers, "You need me more than I need you," and deludes himself into believing it. When your negotiating partner refuses to come to the table because they think they hold all cards, the only recourse is direct action.

The boys aren't stunted, they're on strike. Your move, girls.

It can be both.

"Both" in practice puts all the burden on the boys.

I mean, boys are both stunted (obviously) and also on strike.

They're not really on strike, though. In a strike, the workers are hurting themselves in the short term for benefits in the longer term. And they're coordinating it. The boys here have left the job because the working conditions are terrible and the paychecks aren't coming.

From "More Ominous than a Strike" by Dalrock:

Dr. Helen has a thoughtful post up asking if the title of her book [Men on Strike] is an accurate description of men’s response to the changes in the law and culture. While the title of her book is extremely effective in opening the discussion (which is what it needs to do), it isn’t an accurate description of problem we face in the West. A strike can be negotiated with; offer them a bit more and they’ll get back to work. Better yet, offer a few of them a side deal and break the cohesion. True strikes require moral or legal force to avoid this sort of peeling off. The problem for the modern West is far worse. What we are seeing isn’t men throwing a collective temper tantrum, noble or otherwise. What we are seeing is men responding to incentives. Even worse, inertia has delayed the response to incentives, which means much more adjustment is likely on the way.

There was an old joke in the Soviet Union to the effect of:

We pretend to work. They pretend to pay us.

The problem for the Soviets was this wasn’t a movement. They knew how to handle a movement, and Siberia had plenty of room above ground and below. The Soviets were masters at coercion through fear, but the problem wasn’t a rebellion, it was that they had reached the limits of incentive through fear. In the short and even medium term fear is a very effective motivator. But over time if overused it loses some of its power, especially when it comes to the kind of productivity which requires creativity and risk taking. Standing out is risky; you don’t want to be the worst worker on the line in a fear based system, but you also have reason to fear being the best worker on the line. This doesn’t happen so much by conscious choice, but due to the influence of the incentive structure on the culture over time. Conscious choices can be bargained with, and threats of punishment are still effective. The culture itself is far harder to negotiate with. No one is refusing anything. So the Soviets had no choice but to assign quotas, and severely punish those who failed to meet them. But while the quota/coercion system keeps production running, it works against human nature. If you become the best producer you end up being assigned a larger share of the quota burden; from each according to his abilities. Over time the logic of this works its way into the culture, as everyone gets just a little more inclined to go with the flow and not do more than required. The problem is while momentum causes the response to be slow, it also means it is very difficult to deal with once you have enough of it to recognize.

The problem we presently face in the West is similar. While we have a small number of men who have decided to slack off as a form of protest, the far more insidious risk to our economy is the across the board weakening of the incentive that a marriage based social structure creates for men to produce at their full potential. We’ve moved from a mostly reward based incentive structure to a model the Soviets would have been proud of.

You can see this at the micro level with a man whose wife goes Jenny Erikson on him. The courts understand that throwing a man out of the home and taking away his children naturally reduces the man’s normal incentive to work to support his family. How could it not? It isn’t that most men in this situation will stand by and watch their children starve, but they won’t be motivated to produce quite as much. You can confiscate a percentage of his income in the form of child support, but he no longer has the incentive to fight his way quite so high up our progressive tax structure. This is why the courts have to assign the man an income quota he has to meet, Soviet style. Imputation of income isn’t incidental to the child support family model; it is essential to the function of the model. Note that this doesn’t mean the courts have to formally calculate an income quota for each man who ends up in the new child support family structure; in most cases the man has already assigned himself a quota based on past production. All the family courts need to do in most cases is make sure he doesn’t fall below this quota.

I like this reply since it has a little edge to it, but I am left wondering, to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex? Does that do them any good? To me a lot of the replies about fear of getting 'cancelled' just seem like an overblown and hyperbolic expression of that anxiety and fear.

I think it's about cost-benefit ratios. Suppose you're an adventurer going out to slay a monster. Maybe you'll go for a band of goblins for 40 gold pieces, or a dragon for 1000 gold pieces, a knighthood and universal fame. You wouldn't go out to slay a dragon for 40 gold pieces not because you're cowardly but because the risks and dangers aren't worth the reward.

Young men are notorious for being the bravest and most fearless. Young men do the fighting and dying in war and crime, they found startups and create new things for good or ill. So long as the incentives match up, young men are perfectly prepared to take risks.

I think the incentives don't match up for the bulk of young men to go out wooing girls like they used to. The status of being a boyfriend is fairly low, there are semi-common complaints about going out on a date being like a job interview (in other words a humiliation ritual/interrogation). There are significant financial costs maintaining relationships. There are cultural expectations that the man mustn't do anything wrong like sleeping with a drunk girl while drunk or approaching in the wrong ways and these are strong expectations, a huge amount of power is going into 'don't be a creep/sex pest'. There's a huge political divide between the sexes these days, it's semi-commonly expected for the man to lie about his true beliefs.

Moving on to marriage, again the status of the husband is not very high. He is not really the man of the house unless there's a burglar or something. Marriage is not 'till death do us part'. There is not really much he can do about nagging or a dead bedroom except an expensive divorce. As far as the legal system is concerned, he is clearly the second parent when it comes to raising (incredibly expensive if done the high-status way) children. Possibly the third parent, behind the state education system. And there's all kinds of media that presents the husband as a loser/fool while the wife is strong and wise.

My point isn't so much the classic 'porn cheaper' discourse so much as it's a matter of status and respect manipulation. Of course it's easier and safer to stay at home and not go out to war. But the status of warriors used to be kept very high, people would sing songs about the glory and valour of these proud defenders of the fatherland. And once he reached the front, there was cameraderie and morale, a mission to achieve that kept him fighting even through death and disease. Militaries are underrated as social institutions, they did an amazing job getting people to do things one would naively imagine to be impossible.

It's not just "Why looks-max, develop game, get fit at the gym, develop hobbies that bring one into contact with women without actively seeming lecherous, learn to interpret these complex semi-passive signals, woo a woman, take her out on appropriate dates and wield good sexual skills... when I have Biggus Tittus from anime, custom-tailored to appeal to me for free?"

The key thing is status here. Many would do all those costly things to end up in a high-status position. Look at South Korea, they exam-max super hard to get into Samsung and the opportunity to work even harder competing with the other elite rat-race enthusiasts. Then there are the gigachads who sleep with hundreds of women, that's a high status position in our culture. Of the looksmaxxing high-effort young men, I expect that's more their goal than the socially desirable 'loyal productive monogamous husband'. They're not going to do all that for a low-status position. Incels aren't satisfied with Biggus Tittus the anime girl or even a prostitute, they want status and respect.

Obviously there are many exceptions and many people who are perfectly happy in relationships. However, I think more effort needs to go into nerfing the dragon (making relations between the sexes less tense) and/or buffing the reward (making married men higher status, not just in cheap words of conservative speeches but real privileges).

"Don't be such a pussy, go kill that dragon on minimum wage" isn't going to cut it.

Asking a girl to dance shouldn't be anything like slaying a dragon, and if the social scene is managed appropriately, it's higher risk to stand there doing nothing while the girls are making eye contact from a few feet away, and then gossiping about how lame he was for not taking the hint. Clearly, it was poorly set up. Perhaps they should revert to the more conservative circle dances.

You realize these are teenaged boys? Approaching a girl in a way that gestures at the romantic is very intimidating the first few times you do it. Given the social stratum they’ve almost certainly not done this regularly before.

Being scared to ask a girl to dance is indeed something they should get over, but it’s very normal and understandable in context.

On the one hand I agree totally that asking a girl to dance shouldn't be anything like slaying a dragon... but they're still not doing it according to Michael Foster.

On the other hand, I think this is precisely the wrong idea. Young men go through their consent training in school and/or have the message sink in culturally, don't be creepy or whatever... Then they're to be gossiped about if they don't approach - 'don't be such a pussy loser, man up and ask her to dance'? There's already lots of that. I imagine that this room was full of immense awkward tension. Didn't work.

The logical conclusion from this mixed messaging is just not to attend dances.

Yep, as they say: Out of sight, out of mind. Just don't attend one of these dances and nobody will even think about you enough to gossip. Instead the right way of doing things is to hold a meeting with both the boys and girls present some days beforehand telling them of expected etiquette and warning the girls in full view of the boys that it is expected that any boy might approach them during the dance and to not attend if they don't feel comfortable with that happening (rejecting a dance with a boy is fine, but each girl must at least be open to being approached by anyone). That way all the boys will know at the very start of the dance that any girl present will be open to a request to dance and won't be so scared of breaking norms.

Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love. Actual, passionate love, which can only be satisfied by entering a relationship with that specific woman. It's not a desire for the social status a relationship brings, and it's certainly not sheer undirected lust. The Internet didn't invent masturbation, and if that wasn't enough, brothels and prostitution were commonplace in the old world.

I myself have never asked a girl out because I generically wanted-to-have-a-girlfriend for nebulous status reasons, or because I idly wanted to have sex with her. That always seemed stupid to me, like forcing yourself to eat when you're not hungry. I asked girls out if and when I had crushes on them, because having a crush made me really want to spend time with her, and that in itself was a big enough reward to get over the rejection anxiety. Is that really so rare? Have people stopped falling in love? I'm not asking for sweeping fairy-tale romances, but even a flimsy, fickle crush would do. You just need a push of confidence at the crucial moment. Lust or social ambition alone can't get you there, unless you're exactly the kind of lecherous, materialistic creep which any sane girl would turn down as a serious romantic prospect!

('Course, in pre-modern times, another powerful factor you leave out was literally just money. If "figure out why boys don't fall in love anymore" is too hard a piece of social engineering, there's always that.)

It wasn't supposed to be a thorough analysis (who can thoroughly investigate such a huge topic?), though I guess that this line was a little pathetic as a qualifier when I spend the rest of my words saying the opposite: "Obviously there are many exceptions and many people who are perfectly happy in relationships."

Love is powerful but its strength is finite and its effectiveness context-dependent, that's what I'm trying to get at. There are going to be easier and harder environments to fall in love and have that work out. People are still capable of falling in love but we live in a society that redirects or suppresses much of that energy. Consider the simps moderating Pokimane's twitch chat for free or sending their money to onlyfans girls who provide a (often outsourced to low-paid Pakistani men) simulacrum of a relationship with a woman. On the female side there are those who fall into a Stockholm syndrome like infatuation with their rapist/abuser. That's a kind of love but it's not quite what we're talking about, it's not achieving what it's supposed to be and it's pretty pathetic. Circumstances matter.

"Don't people love their country, why aren't they joining the army?"

Some people of course love their country and will fight and die for it regardless. But money and glory help get others over the line and keeps them in the trenches. Being assured that you won't be prosecuted for war crimes helps. Adventure helps. Watching people die writhing from FPV drones hurts... Siegfried Sassoon poems hurt... Chaotic military bureaucracy hurts... Seeing other people boo veterans, support the enemy and flout the draft hurts...

And people come to love their country less and less if the latter is more prevalent.

Consider the simps moderating Pokimane's twitch chat for free or sending their money to onlyfans girls who provide a (often outsourced to low-paid Pakistani men) simulacrum of a relationship with a woman. On the female side there are those who fall into a Stockholm syndrome like infatuation with their rapist/abuser.

These all seem like social diseases of the disaffected twenty-something. I don't think it explains what is preventing high-schoolers from getting crushes on their classmates. (Of course, the pastor from the OP was talking about homeschooled teens.)

Fair dos on your opening disclaimer, but besides being very cursory, it's also addressing a somewhat different points. Many people nowadays wind up in loving relationships that started as casual dating not motivated by anybody having an organic crush on anybody else. That's fine, but not the same thing as relationships starting because one party falls for the other, and therefore gets sufficient motivation to ask their crush out from the prospect of dating that person alone. (And of course there's no guarantee that a relationship which $starts* this way will be a long-lasting, happy relationship!)

Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love.

Sure! But love is very rarely 'at first sight' and even more rarely 'at first sight' in a way that is totally requited. You have to have a base of initial attraction, interest, and liking for love to blossom. Seeing romance as something that just falls out of the sky and immediately demands passion from both sides is actually a big part of the problem -- it usually doesn't!

I'm as big an advocate for romantic love as can possibly be conceived, but I'm also a realist. Young people aren't falling in love not because they're "lecherous, materialistic creeps," but because they learn to silence the impulse based on frequent rejection or messaging that, as you do, tells them that "the worst thing she can say" isn't "no thanks," but "you're a creep!" As it turns out, people are responsive to operant conditioning and social messaging.

If I understand him correctly, @RandomRanger is talking about people not even getting to the stage where love can develop. That's the problem.

I never said anything about it being requited or demanding passion from both sides! What I'm talking about is one person (typically, the boy) developing an infatuation, and being motivated thereby to ask out the other one (typically, the girl). Hopefully, in the course of dating, the askee comes to reciprocate. Hopefully, if she doesn't, it's because the two of them don't really click in a romantic context, and this causes the initial crush to fade. Perhaps using the L-word confused things; I'm not speaking about the full bells and whistles, necessarily. Just about its precursor. A crush. An infatuation. Whatever you want to call it.

Of course, falling-in-love with/developing-a-crush-on someone necessitates already knowing them and hanging out with them frequently for non-dating-related reasons. Luckily, we have a social institution for locking largeish numbers of boys and girls together in a room for months on end until they are forced to get to know each other; it is called "school". By the end of any given year of middle school or high school I'd spoken to most of my opposite-sex classmates a few times, worked on class projects with several, and befriended a few platonically. Even without direct interactions, I'd seen enough of literally all of them to have a working sense of their vibe and personality. That's quite enough to develop a romantic infatuation that goes beyond the carnal (as it did yearly for me) and might motivate you to eventually ask one of these girls out on a date (as it did a few times).

That brings up part of the oddity of the story about the homeschool prom. Do the teens not know each other? Are they strangers?

I don't remember ever dancing as a homeschooled teen. There was an evangelical youth group event where we were playing games like musical winks, where the girls were in a circle, and then the boys were around them in a larger circle, and when the music stopped we had to make eye contact and wink. Something like that. I didn't like it at all, but maybe they had a point. Several of the youth group members did in fact get married to each other.

As far as the homeschool prom goes, before making any galaxy brained pronouncements about the sexes, one might want to enquire: have they taught the kids to dance? Did they teach them dances that are compatible with the songs they are playing? Do the boys know how to play the role of lead in a partner dance?

One prom I witnessed as chaperone, many of the kids had learned folklorico as kids, and maybe line dancing or something, but the DJ was mostly playing R&B. So they mostly didn't dance, or very badly, or by themselves, until some Mexican folk came on every great once in a while, and then they danced.

Once, I went to a Baptist ball for college students. They had three practice sessions before hand, where they taught the dances and organized the pairings if necessary, since everyone was expected to learn and dance every dance. It was polkas and waltzes and such. They were very explicit that the men were expected to dance at least half the time. Most people danced.

Another dance I went to was Greek Orthodox, with an emphasis on the Greek. They were circle dances, and the priest's wife taught them for a couple of weeks before hand at coffee hour. Everyone danced.

There was a quirky Alaskan group I knew that all sang and played music, and liked to dance things like the Virginia Reel. It was very clear that no one was making any kind of long lasting commitment by asking for a dance, and that the lame thing was to stand around while a girl looked around hopefully. Another Alaskan group I knew decided to play rap music at their school dances, but actually taught the kids fan dances to accompany a drum circle. They did not dance at the school dances -- it's really very difficult to dance to rap without looking a fool, and requires a high skill level.

In general, most people will dance the two or three folk dances they know and are comfortable with, and will not dance the ones they don't know, or especially lead when they don't know what they're doing.

The DJ is largely to blame in playing music intended for couples dancing when the kids were clearly not comfortable with that.

It probably is related to the larger social scene, where it's unclear how someone should go about asking for a date -- that the social script has become largely illegible.

Do the boys know how to play the role of lead in a partner dance?

This is not necessary. Learning how to lead properly takes 4+ years if you put effort into your dancing (by this I mean frequent lessons etc.). For people just starting out it's better for both the leader and followers to be responsible for their own steps, otherwise it just feels (and even worse, looks) awkward.

have they taught the kids to dance? Did they teach them dances that are compatible with the songs they are playing? Do the boys know how to play the role of lead in a partner dance?

I can certainly say from experience that this applied to me (and still does, though I'm married so I am past the point where dancing matters for forming romantic connections). I have no idea how to dance beyond "sway back and forth and step side to side a bit" during slow, intimate songs. As a result, I am well aware that if I try to dance (outside that context) I'm going to just flail around and look like a fool. So I don't dance.

The only time I can remember really enjoying dancing as a young man was when I went to a salsa night in college. Nobody was expected to know how to dance salsa, nor even bring a partner, so they split people up into couples and taught us all how to dance. And honestly? It was a blast! But at every other dance I went to, I had no idea what I was doing and had a miserable time.

I wanted to highlight a reply to this that I thought was insightful.

Every species has mating rituals. If those mating rituals cannot be performed, they will not breed.

That's why we say of some animals that they "won't breed in captivity". It isn't because they have abstract philosophical ideas about freedom and want to take a stand. It's because the zoo environment has some restriction that disrupts their mating rituals.

In humans, these rituals are partially instinctive, but also must be adapted to culture, so parts of them must be learned.

If these parts are not taught, because they're not understood, or because speaking of them openly is politically off-limits, the next generation will have trouble mating.

If you put a group of unattached young boys and girls, in a room with music, and they don't dance with each other, that disruption, that failure to teach, has clearly happened.

But most people don't understand what was disrupted, or how it's supposed to work... and that's why they can't teach it.

They think that young men are supposed to just have the courage to approach girls. That this is a failure of character.

Wrong.

That's not how the human mating ritual works at all.

If that was how human mating worked, young men would not be afraid to approach women. They wouldn't just be "brave enough" to do it. It wouldn't be scary at all, because the men who were scared by it would have less descendants.

If you're a keen observer of old books and movies, you already know what the basic human mating ritual really is.

But if you aren't, it can be logicked out from what boys and girls are afraid of.

Girls are afraid of embarrassment from being too forward.

Boys are afraid of embarrassment from being rejected.

So, it's pretty clear that girls aren't supposed to be overt, and boys aren't supposed to cold approach. Which tells us everything we need to know.

Correct human mating rituals are covertly initiated by the female.

She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way.

He then perceives the hint, and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he does not, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited.

That's how it actually works.

But for this to work, young men need to know how to pick up a hint. And young girls need to know how to drop one.

And before they can learn how to do it, they have to learn that this is what they need to do.

If you don't understand this, then you try to shame young men into cold approaching, then girls complain about being cold approached, because they instinctively don't like it, and it takes a lot of charisma to overcome that.

Don't bother me at the gym, don't bother me at the coffee shop, don't stop me on the street out in public, etc, etc, etc.

But when men ask them, when should we approach you, then, they immediately bluescreen and start giving nonsense answers, because the real answer is they only want to be approached by men they like, and even they realize that this is impossible without telepathy.

Because they've never been taught how to send a signal that says "I want you to come talk to me" with no telepathy required. They don't even know that's what they are supposed to do.

And with zero instruction or examples, young men would be equally inept at spotting the hints she doesn't know how to drop.

Idealistic political notions about how people "should" be hurt everyone, because they prevent us from dealing with them as they are.

Great reply. This is why the “groomer” discourse* is so wild to me. Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children. I imagine that much of tribal and traditional child rearing involves educating children and adolescents into how courting/mating/reproduction operate, and it is at the exact moment that straight parents fail to teach this to their children that they choose to project their failures onto nearby drag queens or trans people. If you don’t do it yourself they’re going to pick it up off the street. Are the parents not possibly creating sexual minorities (which are to some degree sexual dysfunction in my opinion) in their children through the lack of education surrounding courtship ritual?

If you are disturbed to imagine parents providing sexual or courting education (which is a response I might expect from this post) I don’t really disagree with you but it also reinforces my point. I don’t really know how to create an environment more conducive to courtship today but the clinical answer of high school sex ed isn’t very sexy and doesn’t seem to be working.

*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children. I imagine that much of tribal and traditional child rearing involves educating children and adolescents into how courting/mating/reproduction operate

That's because social norms are moving too fast and parental dating advice is as cringe as their job-seeking advice.

The part of traditional child rearing that might still work is children hanging out without parental or pedagogical supervision in mixed-age groups. Since being forced to hang out with older siblings, spending the summer at your grandparents' farm and being friends with your neighbors are the things of the past, we need to come up with more ways to force children to observe the courtship habits of those slightly older than them.

My proposal is mandatory student-led school clubs with equally mandatory 33% sex quotas. This won't help homeschooled kids much, but at least those going to public schools will have to interact (in person!) with students of different sex both older and younger than them.

Modern parents precisely are NOT grooming their children.

Time after time I see otherwise-competent Boomer parents utterly fail to delegate effectively or otherwise inspire the want to risk/reward in their children. They think giving their teenagers literal societal puberty blockers is the height of parenting- or more charitably, failing to administer the appropriate antidote to puberty blockers society forces down their throats (and then those of a traditionalist bent freak out when progressives take that to its logical conclusion).

I have yet to encounter a case where this has worked well; when it occurs, it occurs by accident.

I don’t really know how to create an environment more conducive to courtship today but the clinical answer of high school sex ed isn’t very sexy and doesn’t seem to be working.

Just make young men more attractive to women (again). This will require the old and women to pay some socioeconomic or sociopolitical taxes, or as is just as often the case, for a war to break out.

Are the parents not possibly creating sexual minorities (which are to some degree sexual dysfunction in my opinion) in their children through the lack of education surrounding courtship ritual?

Yes, they're taking tops/potential active partners and turning them into bottoms/passive partners (I call this transgenderism, because statistically men are meant to top and women are meant to bottom, but most people do not share that definition). This is why Boys [must] Beware- because they try it, actually get some fucking validation for the first time in their lives, and stay there without progressing back to the top/active role (or they get turbo-AIDS and die).

This functions independently of actual orientation, but most people don't actually understand that distinction because they're too focused on "peepee in but", much like how most people don't understand that consent for tops and consent for bottoms functions differently.

straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

Oh, that's just traditionalist men failing [intentionally or otherwise] to understand how female sexuality works. If they knew how it worked, they could combat its excesses (in the gay case, where older men take younger men-who-would-be-tops off the market, and in the trans case, where women with a castration/sissification fetish encourage younger men-who-would-be-tops to castrate themselves, or lie to them that people will still want them after the modifications), but they are unwilling or unable- so they're reduced to that characteristic impotent screaming.

*Groomer discourse referring to straight people calling trans and/or homosexuals “groomers”

What's your take on people using the term "groomer" to refer to a person in a position of authority who uses that position to secretly involve themselves in a child's sexuality?

A huge portion of the debate very clearly centers on authority figures lying to parents to hide information from them about what's going on with their kids. Surely you are aware of the many, many documented cases where this has been the center of the controversy? How can you frame teachers and administrators "teaching" kids about aberant sexuality, explicitly urging the kids to hide this information from their parents, and then lying to the parents when they ask what's going on, as a matter of policy, as parents "failing to teach" their kids?

Correct human mating rituals are covertly initiated by the female. She signals interest or, at the very least, availability. But she does so in a plausibly deniable way. He then perceives the hint, and decides if he wants to pick it up. If he does not, she avoids embarrassment because she can pretend there was no hint. If he does, he can approach with confidence because he has been invited. That's how it actually works. But for this to work, young men need to know how to pick up a hint. And young girls need to know how to drop one.

This was probably the most important lesson I gained from the PUA community (replace 'aerial combat' with pick up and fighter pilots with 'PUA'). Not just the words of it, but the experience of it in repetition to truly grok it.

Learning what Indicators of Interest looked like was critical. In generations past there was all sorts of weird things girls could do to show interest, like dropping a handkerchief, but luckily most can be done with nothing at all and are just as relevant today.

Eye contact was pretty much rule zero for getting a warm opener when approaching a woman. There were a lot of other minor behaviours to notice, like a girl standing in proximity or brushing past you, but at the end of the day, eye contact was always the go-to. What was funny is that I think some girls would instinctively look at you in a particular war and be genuinely surprised when you approached them, but would still be warm. And that 'particular way' is difficult to explain, but I think many people know it when they see it. Some girls knew exactly what they were doing ("took you long enough") and others really believed 'it just happened'.

There's something twisted about the whole 'We want you to know how to approach women. No not like that. You aren't meant to learn, you're just meant to know.' thing.

You aren't meant to just know, though, is the thing. You're meant to just not know. You're meant to be eugenically filtered out.

Luckily finding a cheat code by learning and not getting caught doing so is a perfectly acceptable strategy towards mating success.

It's not an acceptable strategy, which is why the whole PUA thing is so despised.

Hence the "not getting caught" clause.

Glad you posted this one. I wanted to discuss it as well in conjunction with a different post written by Foster, but the OP was lengthy enough as is.

This reply is very PUA or maybe more classically 'RedPill' adjacent. Which I found surprising considering the crowd one might expect to find following a pastor. But reading more of Pastor Fosters work, it looks to fit right in.

There seems to be an odd synergy of old /r/TheRedPill type dating advice woven into the otherwise traditionalist presenting pastor. As seen here.

The post goes over things like abundance mentality, 'sarging' to get over rejection, not being needy, friendzoning women and getting them talking, he even goes into text game... And every piece of advice there is underlined with verses from the Bible.

Whilst modern problems sometimes require modern solutions, this endeavor is certainly not coming from Biblical or 'traditional' channels, as far as I know. Foster seems to stumble into this fact when replying to a negative comment:

With your PS statement in mind, I'll say this:

Improving yourself has shown that 1) women bring very little, if anything, good to the table, 2) women do not improve, as they are raised to believe they're perfect from a very young age, and 3) the risk is not worth the reward

Foster replies:

This is really a loser mindset that rejects basic statements in Scripture.

What follows is a deluge of comments from negative posters dancing around the fact that the modern American Christian woman and the dating market as a whole are not exactly in line with Biblical norms.

On one hand I am sympathetic to Fosters position. There seem to be a lot of negative posters who, I suspect, might not be very representative of the people Foster is trying to reach. Anonymous X accounts can be anyone. On the other hand, this is an indirect participation in a long debate regarding the gender wars. As such, one would hope that people like Foster would have a more holistic approach to the issue at hand. That issue being that we are not just dealing with people who want to engage with the opposite sex but don't know how. But people who seemingly do not want to engage with the opposite sex or view it adversarially. Throwing the Bible at them might not be a solution with a very wide audience.

To underline that point I'd remind those who missed it that RedPill and PUA dating advice was looked upon with great scorn back in the day. The assertions against it being that it was explicitly and implicitly misogynistic. And to an extent I would have to agree. Though maybe for the wrong reasons:

The pastor is warning the young male sheep of his flock that the potential love of their life might simply reject them and their potential lifelong union because he, in his infatuation, posts cringe texts...

There is some disconnect here between the Bible and RedPill/PUA philosophy, at some level. Even if I'm not quite smart enough to articulate it.

This reply is very PUA or maybe more classically 'RedPill' adjacent. Which I found surprising considering the crowd one might expect to find following a pastor. But reading more of Pastor Fosters work, it looks to fit right in.

Devon Eriksen is an indie sci-fi author. He's a polyamorous libertarian with multiple wives. He's "redpill adjacent" in the same sense that folks like Eric S. Raymond are - anti-woke and evpsych aficionados (when it fits their priors) but not really part of the manosphere.

Ironically, Eriksen came to my attention through TracingWoodgrains, who positively reviewed his book. (I thought it was good enough that I'll read the sequel, though it's got some rough edges.) Eriksen also hides his power level a bit, probably because he wants to sell books.

This isn't the first time I've seen a somewhat improbable coalition of vaguely right-aligned people online, conservative Christians rubbing shoulders with libertarian atheist SF authors, united mostly by their hatred of woke. Often these affiliations fracture on their fault lines - KulakRevolt probably lost a fair bit of his audience once he started going hard on "Christianity is a pussy simp Jew religion," and the only time Eriksen gets pushback from his mostly rightie followers is when he reminds them he's a polyamorous atheist. (He probably gets a bit of a pass on the first because his situationship seems to be closer to "harem" than "polycule").

Does he lean in hard on the poly-am thing?

Every time I run into one of his tweets or a tweet from his marketing wife, it distinctly sounds like a harem. Is there reason to think there is another guy in the mix?

Not really, he just mentions his wives regularly. Afaik he's the only penis in the mix.

This certainly describes a social technology that used to exist and has in large part corroded away, but I'm unconvinced by the claim that it's instinctive enough to resist attempts to replace it with some other social technology (or indeed literal technology, eg dating apps). Being afraid of embarrassment might be a spontaneous response, but I don't think it is written into the Y chromosome that being rejected is inherently embarrassing, and I especially don't think it's written into the X chromosome that being romantically or even sexually forward is inherently embarrassing. Sexual taboos are social. Women who were raised to have none, or in whom they didn't 'take', need feel no such embarrassment.

I think "homeschool prom" says it all right there. First of all, as much as homeschool parents like to protest that, no, their kids don't have any problem socializing because we make sure they have plenty of friends, etc., how many of these kids were ever in a situation with a member of the opposite sex who wasn't a family friend? I've known a lot of homeschool guys in my life and none of them were exactly players in the dating world until they figured it out with the help of friends who weren't homeschooled.

More importantly, though, I don't think this guy knows what a prom is. Prom is an event where it's expected you come with a date. It would be socially awkward for a member of either sex to show up without one, if only because 95% of the people there are going to dance with their dates all night. It's a formal event, not a dance club. What he's describing is a middle school dance, and it sounds like most of these kids are acting like one would at a middle school dance.

Prom: A musical festival held during the summer at the Royal Albert Hall. Can recommend.

This guy is a homeschooling confessional Protestant aka a fundamentalist in the original sense of the word. The attendees probably weren’t allowed to take a date and probably aren’t allowed to dance with the same person all night.

Yeah, calling this ‘prom’ might be dumb, but that’s because it doesn’t fit the cultural context to have prom.

I see this as part of a larger problem of our system basically beating initiative out of the population. It shows up in dating because that’s pretty obvious, but teachers report that kids don’t really try to figure out how to solve problems on their own, and often end up “stuck” until an authority be it teacher or parent does the problem for them. They also tend to seek out adult help with any social problems that tend to crop up. If some kid is mean to them, they don’t try to solve that issue between the kids, they go straight to an adult.

Partially, I think it’s a lack of time away from adults and with other kids, especially when the adult doesn’t know exactly what’s going on. Most kids have their lives arranged for them — they play sports after school, they have activities. They have playdates. And of course, the cellphone means that someone always knows where they are and can call them if they deviated from where mom expected them to be. How do you learn to take risks and initiative when you live an arranged life? When you have never been in a situation where you do something awkward and discover later that it’s recoverable?

The other thing is that school and parents tend to be overly worried about the kid making a mistake that will follow him around. Maybe he tries to figure out that homework problem and gets it wrong and loses his spot on the honor roll. Maybe he makes a mistake with a girl and gets accused of sexually harassing her. Maybe he does something stupid when he’s out with friends and ends up in trouble or does drugs or drinks underaged. Any of those can stick around for a while. Parents know this and kids pick up on it. So between th3 both of them, it’s better to just not try those things.

Ok, I actually live in a fundy bubble that, from a quick glance at this guy’s timeline, is more similar to what this guy experiences than a typical motteizean. I have a few words. Probably less than 100% generalizes to his situation but more than 80% do.

First off, #metoo is not occurring to these young men as a negative outcome. Probably some of them haven’t even heard of it(homeschooled conservative Christian youth aren’t really allowed to have Twitter), but for the ones who know about it they think it’s something that happens in liberal secular world, not ‘here’. They may be worried that people will laugh at them for getting rejected, maybe that a young lady’s father will be mad at them for taking excessive interest, but ‘get cancelled’ is not an outcome that they would spitball. This probably does not make them brave.

Secondly, teenagers are not allowed to have relationships with each other. This is taken seriously, and there is much more effort put into this than into getting young people married when the time comes for that. The results for local marriage rates are predictable; the shift in social roles, especially in young men, does not happen as a result of wish casting by a third party. Obviously the young women have some share of the blame here but it is fair to discuss the two things separately.

Thirdly, this is a culture where men lead. That means that relationships are initiated by the young men. I notice from his timeline that he is also skeptical of ‘courting’. For those who don’t know, this is a partially-aborted conservative Christian attempt at replacing dating with something like an arranged marriage but lacking the parts that make arranged marriages work. The idea spreads through fundy homeschooling networks independent of denominational lines, and it tends to vary from place to place, but the gist is that a young man develops an interest in a girl(who is, to be clear, in her twenties and still living at home- in these kinds of circles a girl isn’t a woman until she’s married and pregnant- and women don’t live independently either) without talking to her very much and then asks her father for permission to court her, which he gives or declines following whatever process. The ‘courtship’ is measured in weeks or low single digit months, is chaperoned, and doesn’t feature many displays of affection. This should be distinguished from ‘courting/courtship’ which is just what classical moral theology uses as a catch-all term for things leading up to marriage- dating in our culture but it could include talking to a matchmaker in cultures which use those, background checks on a potential spouse in India, etc. Given that he lives in a bubble where the former kind of courting(if you’d like to see it in practice, I believe there’s some episodes of 19 Kids and Counting(never watched but been told they do this) showing it) is widespread enough that he feels the need to counter signal it, and it also doesn’t work very well because it’s missing some steps at the beginning, he is addressing a very different set of problems from those of broader society. I think, if I had to guess, that he’d actually put more blame on church elders and heads of household than on young people themselves.

Finally, conservative Christians mostly believe two things, rightly or wrongly- that their communities’ survival depends on continued high(and in many cases higher than currently) fertility rates(there is functionally no group of church attending Christians with below replacement fertility in the USA btw. Everything we know about actual fundamentalists is that they have fertility rates varying from 2.5-4 depending on the sect, individual church, etc) and that their within marriage fertility rates cannot be increased by much at all. YMMV on both, of course, but neither of them are totally unreasonable beliefs and when they’re your assumption, the need to raise marriage rates is a pressing issue. This guy wants to do it by giving young people more leash(I know it doesn’t sound like that, but he can’t just say it out loud. He has to dress it up in ways his audience will accept). There are people- I’m guessing people he’s arguing against in person- who have different ideas about how to do this, but his audience is not who you think it is.

Secondly, teenagers are not allowed to have relationships with each other. This is taken seriously, and there is much more effort put into this than into getting young people married when the time comes for that. The results for local marriage rates are predictable; the shift in social roles, especially in young men, does not happen as a result of wish casting by a third party. Obviously the young women have some share of the blame here but it is fair to discuss the two things separately.

How do you try and combat this for your own kids, if you homeschool?

They’re nowhere near that old yet.

Ok, then, interpret @TheDag's comment as a future tense question: How will you try and combat this for your own kids, if you homeschool?

Hah, ty. I second this response.

The plan is to a) pay attention to families whose children marry in a timely manner and copy them and b) emphasize hitting maturity/developmental milestones(jobs, driving, making their own schedule, etc) while the boys are still at home.

If that sounds vague- sure, maybe it is. But I don’t have a son out of diapers. A detailed and specific plan will probably do more harm than good.

Yeah, heaven only knows what things are going to look like in 10 - 20 years. No point in getting locked into a flowchart.

I was homeschooled and dated and married basically entirely "within" the broader conservative religious universe – which wasn't necessarily 100% homeschoolers but had a lot of overlap, and I personally was homeschooled. I met my wife, who had a similar background, at a college with a statement of faith and we married shortly after we graduated. I have zero regrets about any of the above and plan to raise my children relatively similarly.

To the extent that I've had a better outcome than the stereotypical homeschooler (which might not be the case – in my experience homeschoolers often turn out fairly well) it might be in part because my parents were always very confident in their children and our ability to succeed outside of the house and "in the real world," whether that was in romance or on the job or in areas of basic life competency. My parents never really expressed anxiety about our ability to work, or find a wife, and never seemed fearful about our future, or overprotective. They were never hectoring about the "basic life script" but there was an implicit assumption that we would follow it, not because they insisted on it but because we were capable of it.

One concrete thing I would say is that my wife and I both took a few community college classes in high school and found that very good for starting the transition out of the home. I think it's worth considering even if your kids are in public or private schools – it's a good introduction to the college format.

My experience doesn't support this. When I go out, I see many young men in their early 20s doing really well with women. There are young couples everywhere. I don't see any difference between zoomer men's confidence with women and my generation of men's confidence with women. This is anecdotal, sure. But it makes me wonder how many of the articles and posts about this supposed problem are based in reality.

The zoomers doing badly are by and large the ones you don’t see.

But also this guy’s bubble is not representative of the general population. Homeschooled high school boys being a bit too shy with girls for their own good in a context where it’s normal to need parental permission before a first date(skim his profile, he’s talking about that) is utterly predictable.

Is it so much crippling fear and social anxiety as much as it is not socially acceptable? It isn't anxiety that prevents people from eating pasta with their hands in a restaurant as much as it is simply not how it is done and people would think you had an episode if you did. Most people wouldn't even consider the option of enjoying a carbonara with their hands a restaurant because that is not how it is done.

Social etiquette has been changed to the point where hitting on women isn't socially acceptable. So people don't do it. Just like people don't wear bathrobes at work or listen to music without headphones in an airport.

Very likely these men aren't standing there trembling with fear, they are simply not even considering the option of wandering way outside the realm of the socially acceptable. They are sticking with convention and the standards of behaviour their society set.

Online dating is popular because it is the socially acceptable way of interacting with the opposite sex. Mutually matching on an app is the HR approved way of initializing an interaction with both parties consenting by swiping right on each other.

New podcast idea - you take interesting people out to fancy restaurants to discuss controversial topics and eat carbonara with your hands. Call it The politesse functor.

How is that a functor?

It isn't one lol, it's just his name - that's also why I used politesse instead of something more normal like etiquette or behaviour - it's a set up, if you have a passing familiarity with the words in the title (which is true of most educated people) it sounds very smart and classy, but if you actually know how to use those terms they don't actually make sense together like that. And then you discover that the fancy thing you are about to watch is actually two people cramming fistfuls of eggy pasta into their faces.

You think it is socially unacceptable for middle/high school boys to ask girls to dance at a school dance?

The boys know it’s ok. Sure, if they’re particularly young they might worry a little about their peers razzing them for taking an interest in the opposite sex but it kinda sounds like these guys are too old for that. It’s just social anxiety in the youths.

It is socially acceptable to ask girls to dance at a school dance, but boys don’t want to dance. They want to fuck (or get married if you’re feeling charitable). The discourse is unproductive because they have abstracted away the thing that everyone knows young boys want.

It is socially acceptable to ask girls to dance at a school dance, but boys don’t want to dance. They want to fuck (or get married if you’re feeling charitable).

That's an oversimplification. Teenage boys also have feelings for girls, and want to express them and have those feelings reciprocated. They aren't just walking erections. That means that yes, boys do enjoy dancing with girls on occasion even if it doesn't lead to sex.

Yeah, but those boys have both shit ends of the stick; the left thinks that they're rapists-in-waiting who need to be castrated or gaslighted into turning gay, while the right thinks that if they have any positive feelings for women aside from maybe lust then they're as good as gay already and need to be beaten. (Ignoring the normie/boomer faction of the right that's just a reskin of the left.)

Your description does not match any portion of the right I've ever interacted with. Would you care to provide some evidence along with your inflammatory statements?

Go flop around on Twitter or /pol/ for a short time.

So basically you heard it from a guy?

More comments

They have been told it's unacceptable everywhere else, why would a school dance be any different? Look where you are, posting in an offshoot of an offshoot of a culture war blog made notable in part by this very issue that boys are still experiencing. How many of us are ultimately here because a young man asked a woman out in a elevator because he thought the worst she can do is say no.

Weird far leftists being mentally ill at each other has no bearing on what these kids think.

"Weird far leftists being mentally ill at each other" have had a major impact on mainstream culture, and if we're hearing about these kids, it is unlikely they are actually as isolated from that as their community would prefer.

I think I've said this before, but I agree with the "girl-dad" criticism. And I reject this notion that empathizing with young men just translates to validating their anxiety and fear. One thing that is almost inescapable watching almost any medium of modern culture is that women act like cunts, while the men tiptoe around them begging forgiveness. I mean, just for instance, compare the Dune novels and David Lynch's adaptation, where the love between Paul and Chani is a fated historic romance. In the newer adaptation I don't think Chani so much as smiles at Paul once, and they supposedly love each other? "Romance" according to modern media is a woman treating a man like garbage, something that got stuck to her shoe that she can't seem to get rid of, and the man gets to feel thankful she settled for you. Being an absolute cunt to someone you ostensibly love is viewed as some political project to reject being a "Stepford Wife".

Unsurprisingly, young boys raised in this environment aren't sold on their role as eternal abuse victim in this new model of "romance". And I sincerely doubt you can get them "step up" into the role by brow beating them, or educating them about their proper gender role being the initiator. They see all around them that even if they "win" they still lose.

You want better men, you need to raise better women.

David Lynch's adaptation, where the love between Paul and Chani is a fated historic romance. In the newer adaptation

You're sure this isn't just Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young vs. Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya?

I've an easy time seeing the fated romantic erotic relationship in the Lynch movie.

I can't see Harvey Weinstein casting Zendaya, current year seems to be purposefully trying to be unattractive. I don't want either of them taking off their still suits.

I grew up in the 90's and 00's. I always had the sense that women did not enjoy sex and barely tolerated men. This somehow came up in a drunk conversation with my mother at some point and she was a bit horrified. "No I never told you that! Women like sex! Your dad and I..." I cut her off at that point, didn't need to hear more. But it feels pretty clear to me that I picked up this idea from media sources. And yet I can't point to a single particular example.

I can't imagine how things have gotten even worse since that time.

I do feel that putting the onus on parents to either raise better men or women is misplaced. I'd first turn to Hollywood or other culture makers and say "stop making such shitty culture". I have memories and can point to specific times when my parents took the right approach with me. My dad telling me that he was never willing to have sex with a woman he didn't want to have a kid with (he seemed to want kids though, so I don't know how much of a restriction that was), and him making jokes about not sticking your dick in crazy. My mother being concerned for my emotional well being after silly breakups in middle school, and her insisting on us watching a discovery channel show that was basically sex ed. Them telling their kids that they wanted grand babies, just not while we were in highschool or college. I remember them showing signs of affection towards each other, and forgiveness after they fought with one another.

TV shows and movies still managed to do a number on me, and on those around me. After all I can't count on how other kids are raised but I can usually count on them having a similar cultural soup they grew up in.

From a practical perspective applying the social responsibility to cultural producers also seems easier. It feels like they've weaseled out of that responsibility somehow. I'm happy to reward shows like Bluey that have good parental figures. But they seem like rare glowing exceptions instead of the rule.

Should we expect all parents to explain to their teen kids how Chani's love in Dune seems slightly off, or should we lean on Dennis with criticisms of the film that his interpretation of love sucks. Of course we can do both, but the latter seems fat more effective for the level of effort involved and reward expected.

From a practical perspective applying the social responsibility to cultural producers also seems easier. It feels like they've weaseled out of that responsibility somehow

Quite the opposite. All we hear about is how cultural producers have vast control over the general society and how they should use those powers for good instead of abdicating their responsibility.

The rise of endlessly and self-consciously didactic work is a product of moralism not its absence.

This guys is a homeschooling fundamentalist using this as window dressing to talk about the problems he perceives with courtship norms in his subculture. These kids have fairly limited media diets and aren’t really looking to Hollywood for guidance.

But we should also bear in mind that he is not addressing the general public here.

Not sure if the media has much to do with it. Boy meets girl narratives in the 90s/00s, same as now, are one of the most popular types of narrative in media, including obviously among women as well as men, and rationally speaking, that would be weird if women did not like sex and just liked all the other things about erotic relationships. Naturally, it can be hard to be rational about such things when one is young and has not yet had direct first-person experience that women like sex. But that doesn't necessarily make it the media's fault.

Maybe one issue for a lot of guys is just that sex is biologically asymmetrical. One penetrates, the other is penetrated. For a straight man, even a virgin, it is easy to understand that he would enjoy penetrating a woman, but it can be hard to understand why anyone would enjoy being penetrated. Hence the confusion.

Johnny Bravo has done a number on the psyche of a huge subset of men and kids from the 90s-00s.

Ha! Yeah thinking back on that cartoon, it must have been written by the nerdy stereotype that hated those kinds of guys. Johnny Bravo types in reality were pulling all the babes.

Well the joke with Johnny Bravo is that for most of his life he was a scrawny unattractive nerd, and though he finally hit his growth spurt and got big and handsome he still internally struggles with a lack of confidence and doesn’t really know how to behave around women. Which actually has a lot of relevance to the self-improver type OP talks about in his post.

I mean, just for instance, compare the Dune novels and David Lynch's adaptation, where the love between Paul and Chani is a fated historic romance. In the newer adaptation I don't think Chani so much as smiles at Paul once, and they supposedly love each other?

Huh? She smiles throughout the entire main romance scene.

I don't think that Zendaya is a particularly good actor and the romance subplot wasn't handled all that well, but come on.

to what extent does empathizing with young men just translate to validating their crippling anxiety and fear over interacting with the opposite sex?

I think there's a politically-aligned difference here in what "validate" really means. Neutrally, it just implies "yes, there is [well-founded?] anxiety and fear." The way it's used in left-leaning (and even in just describing left-leaning) spaces, it comes with an implication that this is justified and insurmountable. I think there's a right-leaning take on this that can go the other way, though: "Yes, asking girls to dance is scary. Yes, they might turn you down. And Yes, you should do it anyway." There are so many parenting moments that are largely about overcoming fear and inspiring confidence ("Yes, you can walk to school alone"), and this is just another example of how we've come to coddle the median child in ways that are probably detrimental.

But it certainly isn't helping that the way the modal male hero is written has swung from Bond womanizing to platonic, chaste action heroes. Surely there's a happier medium in there somewhere.

I think there's a politically-aligned difference here in what "validate" really means.

In the context of the original post and its respondents, the salient distinction seems to be between old school personal conservatism and more modern social anti-liberalism (I don't really have a punchy term for this phenomenon). The former prescribes manning up. The main problem is boys refusing to step up and take risks. The latter focuses primarily on anti-feminism and identifies girls' attitudes as the primary problem.

The former prescribes manning up. The main problem is boys refusing to step up and take risks. The latter focuses primarily on anti-feminism and identifies girls' attitudes as the primary problem.

I suspect part of the reason that the former is popular in certain circles isn't because there's necessarily a denial of the attitudes of some women, but because the idea is "you don't want to marry that sort of woman anyway."

Which, on the one hand, might be true. On the the other hand, it might be good for there to be more of the sort of woman "you" would "want to marry." On the gripping hand, it's often considered unseemly for men to tell women how to comport themselves, which tends to explain why men often restrict their public advice to other men and boys (or, if they do give women public advice, is along the lines of telling them that they deserve good marriage material in a man, which, while not necessarily bad advice, is at least to some degree indirect advice to men about what sort of men they ought to be).

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