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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   29031 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.

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?

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.

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