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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   29062 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.

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.

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.

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