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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   28909 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.

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.

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