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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   29098 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.

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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