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I can agree on the broad strokes here, but the marriage + baby boom that happened in the 50s is a pretty evident counterexample. The Industrial Revolution was mostly played-out by that point and there were plenty of creature comforts and trappings of modernity, yet the marriage rate ticked up by quite a bit. Any story on birthrates or gender relations that is just a broad trend of the modern world sucking, and which doesn't take into account the booms that happened in the 50s is woefully incomplete IMO.
My take is a bit different from yours. It's that second-wave feminism in the late 60s and 70s let women earn their own keep, which meant marriage became far less of a necessity for basic survival. This made women choose men more for "love" than provisioning, which made us regress to our biological roots. Women all naturally want a high-value man and so they broadly chased after the same small percentage of guys (in other words, women's standards went up). These lucky few men got their pick of the lot and could treat women like barely-sentient fleshlights. The dating market effectively got worse for everyone except the lucky few guys, and now women broadly hate men since their opinions are formed on the small % that have the least incentive to commit. This led to a collapse in marriage rates, which ended up collapsing birth rates as well.
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
Baby boom was in a sense a last gasp. Huge wealth changes the equation. But it was the specific experiences of the baby boom that sparked feminism; when second-wave feminists deride the life of the housewife, they are and can only be specifically talking about the baby boom housewife. Daughters saw what life was like for their mothers, and they wanted out. You can’t declare feminism as a premise; feminism was, like any social movement, a reaction to prevailing conditions. Those conditions were, first, the Victorian era and second, the baby boom.
The advice is distilled from my own life and my successful friends and coworkers, who are by and large married and with or currently having children. It’s not advice on how to get laid, or how to attract women initially (I have opinions but consider it besides the point), but how to convert a relationship into a companionable and loving marriage with children, which is what I consider valuable. Take it or leave it, I guess.
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This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
If this is true you have a golden business opportunity starting a matchmaking business for overworked SF nerds with more money than sense. But my experience talking to people who do this kind of thing is that even those kinds of women have become unreasonably picky.
They found a solution
I naively would have thought some significant minority of them would go for all the transwomen we work with. As best I can tell no one does. It must be more than zero, but so low I somehow don't notice. I certainly notice all the asian wifes and half-asian kids.
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I don't think SF nerds are thrilled about:
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This seems directly contradicted by the various attempts at measuring the frequency of baseline human relationships. My understanding is number of friendships, number of relationships, number of sexual partners, number of marriages, number of young people who've never had sex, age of first sexual relationship and so on are all trending in the same direction, and the trend is not a subtle one. If significantly more people are actually spending their lives alone than previously, it doesn't seem possible to me that this part of your argument stands.
The odds are good but the goods are odd part, though, seems perfectly accurate.
Why would the existence of undatable people in every era imply that their frequency must remain constant over time? That's true if datability is entirely genetic or if it's strictly relative (e.g. datability = being in the top 70% [or whatever]). But if animal courtship rituals involve complex, learned social behavior, then you could easily have cultural and environmental shifts that would reduce the number of people with the social ability to do courting effectively, regardless of their motivation or desire.
For instance, it strikes me that in every era, when you see intelligent young people who grew up like Extremely Online young men today (that is: indulged but also isolated, mostly sedentary life between school and home, 0-2 siblings under the care of a pampering mom or nanny, pressured to study hard with no economic constraints well through their early 20s, socializing largely virtually or in adult-controlled spaces, allowed to pursue status by developing obsessive, frivolous solitary or same-sex hobbies) - the introverted ones also commonly end up unpartnered or childless and a little eccentric. That's the H.P. Lovecraft story and it seems like practically the median trajectory for Gilded Age scions especially, but you can find instances all through history and across cultures.
So as more people are raised like this, you'd expect the ranks of the undatable to grow over time, assuming that some level of charisma or social confidence are necessary to inciting female desire in the absence of countervailing factors. It's just the "zoo animals can't mate in captivity" or the "my dog doesn't get along with other dogs" problem.
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This is only a feature of the mid to late dating app era, this was not the norm until dating apps because these unusually attractive men just could not be in enough places to create the pickiness.
There was a lot of hatred of men already appearing before dating apps really took off.
It isn't a feature of the current era, either, but an excuse guys who can't get dates use to justify why it isn't their fault. Dating apps are easy mode compared to how it used to be. Yeah, you may have a better chance of getting that cute girl to talk to you if you ask her in the real world rather than like her profile on a dating app, but in the real world chances are you aren't going to cross paths. In the real world there isn't a seemingly bottomless well of single women advertising their availability. In the real world you might get a prospect once every couple months maybe she'll go out with you if you ask. I doubt there are many people who had a ton of game pre-app and are now getting nothing but crickets.
I don't see how this makes any other point than that the apps spoiled you as much as the women.
Single women absolutely were advertising their availability. There not being a "bottomless well" effect is exactly what made it better than today.
Do you think the complaints are about the top 1% with a ton of game?
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..were you even alive back then? People went drinking and to clubs and hit on girls there. Most everyone was paired up. I recall reading fucking complaints about how 'everyone is dating someone' in mid sized towns in Germany, by some clueless feminist.
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I would say it's true. It's just that "trustworthy" is a bigger concept to unpack than it looks like. Being trustworthy is not like dateless guys thinking they're a catch because they're a "feminist ally" or because they think that it's all so easy not to be an asshole and that if they had a girlfriend/wife they wouldn't be abusive to her and wouldn't cheat on her, etc...
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested. It's easy to think you'd never ever cheat, if you've never had the opportunity to, if you've never been on the receiving end of an attractive woman signaling she'd be up for no-strings-attached sex.
Being trustworthy means being reliable and having your shit together, and making women at ease in your presence.
Women date and, to a lesser extent, marry and reproduce with lots of untrustworthy men. That doesn't mean that the men they don't date are trustworthy, but it does suggest that trustworthiness isn't the primary blocker. And if you're a man who can't get a date and wants one, it's better to focus on changing other aspects of yourself than some fuzzy concept of trustworthiness. Those other aspects being those that fall into the broad category of attractiveness, almost tautologically.
What kind of woman does that? Would you consider her in your league? In the college league?
Besides, this was advice for reproducing, not dating. Dating advice is a different kettle of fish.
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This seems like it's veering towards a No True Scottsman sort of thing. As in "if women don't want to be around you, it's clear they're not at ease in your presence, which is what trustworthiness means, therefore you weren't trustworthy to begin with". We can generally infer "trustworthiness" by how people act in other areas of their life, if they follow the rules and don't cheat, etc. Of course men could behave differently in contexts that involve women, but we'd generally expect a pretty strong correlation. Yet there are plenty of men who are trustworthy in other areas often don't find much success in love.
Here's my own personal take of what it takes to be successful with women:
Being "reliable" isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't say it's an overriding concern most of the time. Perhaps a lack of reliability could be seen as sufficiently negative that a girl who would date a guy wouldn't want to marry him, but I've never seen it be a proactive concern beyond that.
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An appreciable number of women (at minimum) go for guys who observably aren’t reliable and don’t have their shit together.
Yes, but that does not mean the opposite people are not also successful.
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I don't think your observations are at all incompatible with the fairly standard antimodernist narrative. i.e.: that Modernity started hacking away at everything old and sacred without any sense of what was load bearing, and eventually had to hit things that truly were.
The antimodernist narrative is too broad. It typically takes the position that the past was uniformly better than the present, and that it linearly decayed towards the present day. Then antimodernists use this as a cudgel to attack almost anything they don't like about the modern world (HR, woke, college education, etc.)
I'm more of a fan of Arctotherium's take about a really specific aspect of modernity being the root cause, rather than modernity broadly being at fault.
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Well, if you're 'just trustworthy' (and able to provide) I'm confident that you'll be able to have and raise children. Maybe not your own, but...
tee hee =)
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