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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
3163 thread views
Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Might have been a better fit for the WW thread but here goes.
I am bamboozled by this interaction with a girl. Help me make sense of this.
Context:
My mom is a photographer so she photographs people sometimes. I drive her to places if I am free and got nothing better to do.
So she wanted to hang out with one of her friends and photograph her daughter a bit as well.
I am a 24 year old guy. The daughter was 21 years old.
The weird part:
She literally wouldn't talk at all. Or even make eye contact. Like I would ask her a random normie question, she would answer it and then go silent again, often texting on her phone.
No I wasn't being weird. Since I had to kill time, I just wanted to talk to her and pass time. No I wasn't bothering her, the photography was done quickly and both us were captive there with our moms.
No I am not especially retarded. I literally talked as "normally" as any normal person ever normaled. No my breath didn't stink. No I am not horrendously ugly; In a generous day, I might even argue that I am more attractive than her.
This is the first time I had any interaction like this where the other person just refuses to talk to this extent. Like I can understand not talking if you are trapped there with someone for 5-20 minutes. Not if you are trapped somewhere with someone for hours on end!!
I wasn't being pushy, just tried to make conversation every 15-20 minutes. Every single time if I didn't follow up with a question she would just stop replying.
Is it just genZ being genZ or is this just how some people are? Or my fault? Or no ones fault?
I wouldn't over-analyze the whole status thing. Seems to me the most likely explanation is that she's just an antisocial weirdo. It's probably a lot more common than we'd like to believe for a random 21-year old today who hasn't already chosen to go somewhere for the specific purpose of being social with strangers to seem weirdly anti-social for no particular reason. I've known plenty of people, both men and women, in both categories - some will talk basically anyone's ear off on any occasion and others who are virtually impossible to pry a complete sentence out of even when they're at an event where people are expected to be social.
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She's a 21 year old girl. If she's even remotely attractive, she's got 1,000 simps and and at least 20 Chads on her phone in her pocket, any of whom she can likely summon IRL quickly (except maybe the peak Chads, but even they'll come around eventually most likely) if that is her preference (as opposed to simply narcissistically basking in the endless dopamine cascade).
If you can't compete on quantity (impossible as one person) or quality (and due to feminine hypergamy in an environment of behavioral freedom for them, you'll have to be within a reasonable distance of the attractiveness of the most attractive guy who would be willing to pump and dump her for a night, not just more attractive to any degree, to be considered competitive in that realm by her), and if she is not in any way rightfully subjugated to your natural authority as a masculine entity over her as was historically enforced by men due to (among other things) the true nature of unregulated feminine behavior as you've experienced, then why would you expect her to give you the time of day ever?
What's in it for her? Nothing's forcing her, and no gain is on offer. Where's the incentive structure favorable to your mutual socialization? It doesn't exist. The only way to create it would be for you to become vastly elevated in sexual status (enriching yourself), which may or may not be possible for you, or for the natural edifice of absolute male authority and feminine reverence and submission to be reinstated (enriching all of your fellow men and all of humanity as well).
This assumes that the entire interaction is sexual in nature. He didn't say he's hitting on her, he was just trying to talk to her.
Now maybe she is attractive enough, used to being hit on, and stuck up enough that she just naturally assumes any attempt to talk to her by a male is a prelude to sexual overtures, and given her behavior that seems reasonably likely. But it's definitely not obvious or universal enough to just assume it is definitely the one definitive answer. People usually don't need explicit rewards incentivizing them to play nice in a conversation unless they are unusually antisocial.
Every interaction between the sexes is inherently sexual as in involving sexual dynamics. (Keep in mind that almost all credible evolutionary theories behind the development of every complex, non-erotic trait we have, from intelligence to comedy, tend to involve a significant portion of if not mostly boiling down to mating advantage. There is nothing in the behavior of an evolution-derived creature that is wholly untouched by reproductive fitness concerns.)
If you mean "sexual" as in "of an erotic character", I never assumed that it was explicitly at all. (The simps in her life certainly aren't having only explicitly erotic interactions with her, quite likely the opposite/none.) Without any insult implied, frankly the men bold enough to immediately make an interaction with an unfamiliar female explicitly erotic (even just by lightly hitting on her) don't tend to ask for socialization advice on themotte.org.
The younger generation seems to blatantly contradict this to me. They may be "antisocial", but the degree to which they are is no longer unusual.
I'm genuinely curious about the ages of individuals (particularly girls) most people replying to this acting like her behavior is bizarre and uncommon tend to interact with nowadays. In my experience "phone zombie" syndrome, especially among younger people, is quite common, quite normal, and rarely even considered poor etiquette by them (if they even care, which in my experience many don't, and if they do they usually just justify it with some reference to "anxiety" or something similar).
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You're putting on a pretty high pedestal a girl who's stuck sitting around for hours on her phone.
Humanize her a bit and it's probably less likely she's made a rational calculation with ho logic to ignore the LVM than it is that she's neurotic and antisocial.
I'm not putting her on a high pedestal at all. (But I will say that if you've ever known/dated/been related to any hot girls recently you would realize how foolish it is to discount a girl's sexual status for "sitting around for hours on her phone"; they all do that nowadays. Let us hope that no playful AI ever gives a first world woman the choice between genociding men and losing access to Instagram Reels/TikTok because I assure you in that case we are gone fellas.)
The infinitely high simp (and to be clear those simps aren't necessarily loyal; most of them probably have more interchangeable girls on their phones than the reverse) factor and the possibility of being served in multiple Chad digitally-solicited all-you-can-fuck-buffets are both purely artificial phenomena that do not in any way reflect her value (and the exact numbers are just fun hyperbole) even if she is the hottest girl on the planet. (And since her attractiveness wasn't mentioned thus far we can't really run the probabilities anyway.) They are the product of modern dysfunctional sex dynamics held aloft only by the weakness of contemporary men. Were they to reverse course in reasonable unison with resolve, she could do absolutely nothing to stop them. Her pedestal, if she is on any, is made of toothpicks and playing cards and scarcely above the ground.
Oh and at no point did I say she made any sort of a "rational calculation with ho logic". Responding to incentives requires neither calculation nor logic as basically all of human behavior and society proves. If anything, seeing her behavior as a mere product of incentives is humanizing her.
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I don't agree at all with the explanation that "you're the help, and women don't talk with the help". That's nonsense, I have known plenty of women who will happily make small talk with someone they hire to work on stuff for them. My best guess is that this is either (as you guessed) zoomers gonna zoomer, or this girl is very shy/introverted and was uncomfortable talking to you for that reason.
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She has her own life. Maybe something important to her was going on but you have no idea about.
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You showed up driving your mom around. That classifies you as "The Help" and self respecting women don't fraternize with "The Help".
At first, I was inclined to agree with you, but other comments have changed my view. If fez's mom was hired as a photographer, then yes, fez would be "The Help". For those who don't see what this means, imagine hiring a dude to retile your bathroom that brings his son along to unload the truck and now that the dad is busy tiling the son wants to hang out with your daughter. No way, Jose, go help your dad or go sit in the truck.
This is a different situation. The moms are friends, it's a social visit. It seems like social obliviousness runs in both families, though (FM for fez's mom, GM for the girl's mom):
FM should've mentioned she was bringing fez with her
GM should've replanned the whole hanging out thing to include fez
GM should've also included her daughter in the hanging out so fez wouldn't feel weird drinking tea with two older ladies
Instead, what the girl expected was this:
FM comes, hangs out with my mom, I can do what I want
then I do a photo session to make my mom happy and FM leaves
and got this:
FM comes with her son, hangs out with my mom while this dude is left moping about
I haven't been taught to be a gracious host, so I will try to pretend he doesn't exist until he leaves
Just to clarify, Everyone knew in advance what was going to happen. Both of them knew that I would show up.
Imo, GM did her part. I spent more time talking to GM than G. Lol.
About 3/4 of the way through I knew G was a gone case, and I might as well just shift my attention to something else, GM was very talkative though.
So yeah G was really really not interested.
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Fair enough.
Cynical as I am, I am more likely to accept this reasoning as a cause. However the counter is that "The Help" and "The Useful" are not two distinct sets, And one would assume that "The Useful" are of neutral status at worst.
I actually ran this idea by some of my normie (but not stupid) friends, and they find it somewhat dubious because "The Help" is such a common role occupied by so many different people in so many contexts that it would be "crazy" for it to hold that much negative status connotations.
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Would you have felt bamboozled if instead of a 21 year old girl, you were stuck with a 21 year old guy with whom you shared no discernable interest?
I don't think isolated interactions, barring ones that are extraordinary which I don't think this counts, are informative of what's going on with an entire generation or observation of how some people are. If you notice this same thing recurring, then it would be time for introspection and/or analysis of society.
And Occam's Razor would suggest it was very simple, that between talking to you and texting on your phone, she preferred the latter. I don't think that says much about other of you. Maybe odd of her if you're actually Harry Styles, but otherwise perfectly normal and unremarkable.
Lastly, I'd note that she probably wouldn't think it's very high status of you to be your mother's chauffeur. I think it's great that you're willing to help her, but she could very reasonably conclude that if your life is awesome, you'd be busy with your own priorities. And even if you were doing a favor for your mom by driving her, you might be busy with your own life working/socializing remotely via your phone, instead of "Since I had to kill time, I just wanted to talk to her and pass time."
With a guy, I would have much more readily chalked it up to poor/ a lack of social skills and moved on.
With a girl there is the element of poor social skills or {I am very unattractive}. Which is the bamboozling (hard to accept) part.
Yeah this is definitely not "high status" behaviour. But its one of those things that need to be done.
As for your theory on her assuming I am even lower status because not only am I wasting my time being "a helper", I am not even making use of down time while doing that. I wouldn't discount that at all, after all signalling is king.
Let's just say, if that were the case, then fuck me for managing my "awesome life" by working overtime, completing things in advance, barely having much free time of my own.
But nevertheless, I probably shouldn't lose sleep over it. No one said signalling should be rational.
This is the most ego preserving possibility, but the whole reason I posted was so that I could know if it could have not been this.
And clearly there are many potential cynical (!= not true) takes.
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Since plenty of people find themselves in this situation with even their own friends who are choosing to hang out with them, I'd go with this. No big explanation necessary.
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