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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   29066 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.

If @hydroacetylene is to be believed, these are homeschooled christian conservative kids, or at least something close to it. I'm not sure how wise it is to project their problems from modern liberal dysfunctions, as much as I may dislike them.

If I compare what he's describing to my own upbringing - german conservative catholic mainline christian, not exactly the same but somewhat related - it's unclear how this can even happen. At 14-15 everyone, and I mean everyone, even the atheists and heretics protestants would start dancing school here. They would teach a pre-defined list of dancing styles popular in the entire region (primarily disco fox, secondarily wiener & regular waltzer, as well as the basic steps for some completely different styles such as latin). If you didn't, people would laugh about you. It's pathetic to not go, and even if you wouldn't formally be excluded from much, you'd be de-facto excluded from a large number of social gatherings. And at the ones you can go, partner dancing would still be present and you'd be very much negatively noticed.

This culminates in a big ball at 16, similar to a prom. At that point for us, everyone would already have a fixed primary dancing partner which we would bring to the ball, would be familiar with dancing with other girls, and would be capable of dancing to almost any music that is played. Your partner would be extremely pissed about you in particular if you then just wouldn't dance with her. You'd be eager to show off proficiency in some of the lesser-known styles, or just generally. Even shy & socially awkward guys like me didn't struggle particularly with the expected basics. At most, you'd only dance with your primary partner instead of asking out other girls, which is slightly looked down upon but generally accepted.

The only way how something like what he is describing could happen would be a complete breakdown of the supporting infrastructure. So it's hard for me to blame the guys here. One of the advantages of conservative societies is that you can do this: You can blatantly push people into certain behaviour on little more than "this is how we do things, and you'll make an ass of yourself if you don't". But you need to actually do it. Evidently, the parents and other guardians didn't. Imo this is a general problem with some neo-conservative groups, that they basically try to cargo cult traditions without understanding which parts make them work. Especially the parts that require effort, or require enough pressure to seem mean.

On the topic of dancing, I think a portion of the problem is that this guy’s church comes from an American Protestant religious conservative background, and that grouping of people has, at best, an ambivalent relationship with dancing.

The kids aren’t going to feel comfortable dancing if they aren’t taught, as you point out, and then courting rituals have to be emphasized and valued, rather than somewhat grudgingly put up with.

at best, an ambivalent relationship with dancing

And at worst, it's full-blown hysterical about "grinding", "Leave Room for Jesus", etc.

The hysteria is, in my experience, the more typical route.

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