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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   29084 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 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.

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.

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