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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   31348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I'm dragging up the gender, dating, and fertility discourse for one last rodeo.

The below analysis is a possible infohazard for young single males. It contains analysis done by LLMs, but I solemnly swear I drafted this through my own brainpower, using AI only for the analysis I was too lazy to do myself.

I'm following upon a comment I made about a year ago that pulled out some raw numbers on the quality of women in the U.S., and how this might impact the desire of men to actually develop themselves and find one of those women and settle down.

At the time I didn't bother doing the work to produce an actual estimate of how many women would match the basic crtieria, given that these are NOT independent variables. The though occurred to me that AIs are the perfect solution for exactly this type of laziness, and now have the capability to do this task without completely making up numbers.

So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':

  1. Single and looking (of course).

  2. Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.

  3. Not ‘obese.’

  4. Not a mother already.

  5. No ‘acute’ mental illness.

  6. No STI.

  7. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.

  8. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).

  9. Under age 30.

And ask both ChatGPT and Grok to attempt to estimate the actual population of women in the U.S. that pass all these filters, accounting for how highly correlated each of the variables are.

Notable criteria I omitted:

  • Religious affiliation

  • Race

  • Political affiliation

  • Career

  • Drug use

  • Sex work/Onlyfans

I argue that a reasonable man would NOT want to ‘compromise’ on any of the original criteria, whereas the omitted ones are comparatively negotiable, or alternatively, are already captured in one of the original criteria.

Would you accept a woman who was carrying $50k in student loan debt into the relationship? I guess maybe if she was a doctor or lawyer or made enough money to justify it. Much higher than that and it starts to suggest financial recklessness.

5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making. Ditto for being STI positive.

The age one is probably the most ‘unfair,’ but if having kids is a goal then this is pretty close to the ‘reasonable’ cutoff given the ticking fertility clock. Adjust upward if needed, I guess.

Here is the ChatGPT conversation. I used o3 in this case.

Here is Grok, specifically Grok 3.

In each case I used the “Deep Research” mode for the main query. I used identical prompts to start them off, they each seemingly did slightly different interpretations of the prompt. I was not using any fancy, complex prompt engineering to try and force it to think like a statistician or avoid hallucinations.

ChatGPT Gives this conclusion:

Bottom line: We estimate roughly 1 million women age 30 and under, equivalent to approximately 3-4% of that demographic (with a plausible interval of 2% on the low end up to about 5-6% on the high end), meet all eight of the given criteria simultaneously.

Grok comes to quite the similar conclusion:

Based on available data and statistical techniques, it seems likely that approximately 1.1 million biological women in the U.S. meet all the specified criteria, representing about 0.64% of the total female population, estimated at 171 million in 2025. The error range, reflecting data gaps, is ±0.3 million, or 0.8–1.4 million in absolute numbers, and 0.47–0.82% as a percentage.

Then I asked the truly cursed followup question: “how many men in the U.S. might be seeking these eligible women and thus how much competition is there for this population? How many are likely to ‘fail.’"

ChatGPT:

• Low-competition scenario (optimistic) – if male seekers are only approximately 9 m and women at the high end 1.4 m → approx. 6 : 1.

• High-competition scenario (pessimistic) – if male seekers hit approx. 16 m and women only 0.6 m → approx. 27 : 1.

Even under the friendliest assumptions, there are at least five single straight men pursuing every woman who meets all eight hurdles. The modal outcome is closer to ten-plus suitors per eligible woman.

Put bluntly, only about one man in ten who is actively hunting for this ultra-specific ideal partner can succeed; nine-plus will strike out.

Emphasis Mine.

Grok:

• Number of single men seeking women meeting all criteria: Approximately 4.5 million single, straight men aged 18–30 in the U.S. are likely seeking a partner, with an estimated 2.3 million (±0.5 million) specifically seeking women meeting all specified criteria (unmarried, not dating, straight, not a mother, not obese, age 30 or below, no acute mental illness, ≤5 sex partners, no STI, ≤$50,000 student debt). This is about 2.7% of the male population (171 million).

• Competition ratio: With approx. 1.1 million women meeting all criteria (from prior estimate), the ratio is roughly 2.1 men per woman (2.3 million ÷ 1.1 million), indicating moderate competition.

• Failure rate: Approximately 48% of these men (1.1 million out of 2.3 million) will fail to secure a partner meeting all criteria, assuming one-to-one pairing and no external factors (e.g., men seeking multiple partners or women remaining single).

Then the followup, when I tell it to extend the age range:

About 4.9 million single, straight men of all ages are likely seeking women aged 18–30 meeting all criteria, facing a 4.5:1 competition ratio. Roughly 78% (approx. 3.8 million) will fail to secure such a partner, driven by the scarcity of eligible women, age-related preference mismatches, and modern dating dynamics. Competition is high, particularly for older men, with failure rates varying by flexibility in criteria and dating market conditions.

The error bars are pretty large on this one... the 9-out-of-10 number doesn't quite pass the smell test... but I think the point speaks for itself.

I don’t want to say that this is bleak, per se. I mean, 1 million or so women in the U.S. with some decent marriageable bonafides. That’s not a small pool! The problem stems from noticing that said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections, or more if they’re near the absolute peak of physical attractiveness.

Hence my increasing annoyance with the bog standard advice proffered to young males “become worthy and put in some effort and you will find a good woman” as it becomes increasingly divorced from the actual reality on the ground.

It’s not wrong. It is incomplete. Insufficient. If we increase the number of “worthy” men, that’s just intensifying the competition for the desirable women… while ALSO ensuring that more of those ‘worthy’ men will lose and go unfulfilled, DESPITE applying their efforts towards “worthiness.”

You CAN’T tell young men both “be better, improve, you have to DESERVE a good woman before you get one!” and then, when he improves:

“oh, you have to lower your standards, just because you thought you deserved a stable, chaste(ish), physically fit partner doesn’t mean you’re entitled to one, world ain’t fair.”

That dog won’t hunt.

Thems the numbers. I’m not making this up wholesale or whining about advice because I find it uncomfortable. No. The math is directly belying the platitudes. I’m too autistic NOT to notice.

So where am I going with this?

First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong. All of my personal experience, anecdotal observations, research, and my gut fucking instinct all points to this being an accurate model of reality. But I am fallible.

If I’m wrong I want to know!

I’m also not particularly worried about ME in general. I am in a good position to find a good woman, even though I’m sick of all the numerous frustrations and inanities one has to endure to do so. I get annoyed when someone, even in good faith, tries to suggest that my complaints are more mental than real. I can see the numbers, I've been in the trenches for years, this is a true phenomena, the competition is heavy, the prizes are... lacking.

And finally and most importantly, I genuinely feel the only way we keep the Ferris Wheel of organized civilization turning is if average women are willing to marry average men, and stay married, and help raise kids. I’m all for pushing the ‘average’ quality up, as long as actual relationships are forming.

Objectively, that is not happening. And so I’m worried because if society breaks down... well, I live here and I don't like what that implies for me, either.

(Yes, AGI is possibly/probably going to make this all a moot point before it all really collapses)

No offense, but can the mods please just blanket ban any post that builds an argument based on LLM output?

FWIW I'd support that.

But it would be almost impossible to enforce if a user can simply lie and SAY they did the math or thinking themselves.

So you end up with a situation where the only posts banned are the ones where the user is honest.

I would humbly suggest that there be a given day or thread set aside for posts that rely heavily on AI work.

Fair point and good suggestion.

It's all temporary anyways, isn't it? A few more years and the whole internet will just be bots talking to each other.

Its funny, a couple years back I joked about setting up a GPT3 instance trained on my posts and then just retiring from the internet at large.

I wonder how many people have already done that.

"Just trust me, bro" would at least have some meat to talk about in that the user might be expected to back up his opinions-- "just trust this LLM output" is intensely weak.

FWIW OP used the LLM to do his math for him, but still - I don't want to be double-checking a chatbot's napkin arithmetic.

AIs are the perfect solution for exactly this type of laziness, and now have the capability to do this task without completely making up numbers

When I saw that I wondered why a token predictor was being presented as better than just guessing. Our brains are somewhat decent estimating machines. Not sure what value a LLM token predictor is adding to this.

He found a solution less trustworthy than "I made it up" (as reasonable back of the envelope order of magnitude estimates).

I’d support that, for what it’s worth. Let’s go for higher standards than whatever the AI spits out.

I wrote on this about a year ago here, but I was replying to a Friday comment on Sunday and it found few eyes.

I'm reposting it because short of cataclysmic war or calamity, what I describe is exactly what will happen.

What's wrong here is the particular equivocation of politics and war. Politics is not equal with war, politics are meant to avert war, but they are equal in that both are about the transferral of power. If we were to assign a sex polarity to the practices, politics would indeed be the feminine method to the masculine method of war.

Beyond that, I can tell you where this divide ends. We'll pass the core of this turmoil, enough to stabilize us as we move into the approach for the singularity.

Around 2030 we'll see the first examples of convincing human simulacra. These will be proofs of the concept but they won't be largely available until later in the decade. Boston Dynamics maintaining their exact rate of advancement will have robots with convincingly human articulation by the mid-30s, especially with AI improving at helping research.

In the 2040s, simulacra will be able to replace a great deal of labor and production of simulacra will become the national industry of whatever country that perfects them. My bias is Japan: they're most poised with the combination of established acumen, workforce and key socioeconomic factors, namely their inverted population pyramid. Low TFR will be neatly solved by simulacra taking over labor. As so-ordered a nation and people as the Japanese, they will implement the necessary policies to begin the country's move toward quasi-post-scarcity. Those few other similarly ordered nations will likewise swiftly adopt simulacra, and as tens of millions are produced by the year, and only increasing, simulacra will quickly become a reasonable household expenditure. I expect by the end of the '40s they will be ubiquitous in every country where they are legal.

For the price of a mid-range car, households will be able to purchase a lifetime of service from a chef-maid-assistant. So average households will acquire simulacra, further increasing demand, and lonely men will also buy them for all obvious reasons. That motivation for purchase will not end with lonely men. "She's a 10 (she's a hotter-version-of-pick-your-hottest-celebrity), but she's a robot" won't last. One of your friends will get one, and you'll interact with it, and even if you're obstinate about "it," eventually it will be her to your mind, because she talks, she laughs, she appears to think, she in all ways seems the part. You'll only know because you know, that won't be enough. It won't matter how they aren't "real" because they will be real enough. All but indistinguishable for the existential question of soul in the machine, and it won't be long before you're not so sure about that, either.

At ubiquity they will end dating. The bottom third of men who can afford them for a start, to half, to I'd expect a Pareto 80%. The man is accustomed to not having children, it's our evolutionary history, it may bother them, it won't stop them. What women say won't matter, a guy might want what only they can offer, but not at the cost, especially not if they've never had that success, and that already increasing population will represent an even greater percentage of the next generation. To put in such effort to settle for someone less attractive, less responsive, more burdensome, more risky, to settle for something human when he can have something machine-perfect. Work, go home, play games until she has dinner ready, watch a movie, fuck, maybe play more games, go to bed. His friends can and will talk shit, his base urges are satisfied, he won't care enough about what they say. His true needs will go unsatisfied and it will be a lifestyle harmful to his soul, but it will be so much easier.

Some women will have them, not many. I'd rather not invoke inceldom, I find the specific slant to their ideas irrelevant here, but it's true men pursue while women are pursued and that imbalance defines dating. The asymmetric effort of dating as a man versus dating as a woman, again the man pursues, he works, he pays; the woman is pursued, she is worked for, she is cared for. The simulacra will thus be unnatural as a thing women acquire as a relational prosthesis; why would she pay for what, for good reason, she gets free? The simulacra will have no being (or so we'll reassure ourselves), can father no children, can offer no increase, can offer no status. Women will have them as the chef-maid-assistant models, maybe even more sometimes, but they won't replace, not in the way they will replace relationships for men.

Harems will re-emerge, they will be the only option for most women, so they will be easier. Between simulacra and harems, female sociopolitical power will collapse. They will lose too much leverage with too many low-status men, while high-status men will each become a little king with his court of concubines who will certainly have no power.

The 2050s will see human gestation in synthetic environments, so clinic-based artificial wombs. Here I don't think that it will take that long for the breakthroughs in tech, instead it will be the economics and social impacts of simulacra that will give incentive to developing the tech. Again I expect Japan to widely adopt, as their already low TFR falls off a cliff from their herbivore men taking to simulacra. They will have a reduced need for a new generation from so much of their labor being automated but I expect there still to be decades between the ubiquity of simulacra and those simulacra reaching the capacity to automate >90% of all labor. This will also be the first sight of the real benefit to the age of simulacra, the offer of stability in overseeing the drastic reduction in human population.

Starting in the 50s or 60s we'll see government regulation on reproduction. It won't be severe because it won't need to be, so anyone who really wants a big family will be able to have one with minimal structural hindrance. It will be simple incentive-based, I've referred to the policy as the "Half-Right to Reproduction." Systemically its purpose will be to halve the population with each generation, it'll work faster than that. Every person will be bestowed with one half-right they can exercise at age of majority. Would-be parents can combine to a whole-right and exchange it for their child's addition to the government dole, UBI, which will also exist. As AI and simulacra come from almost all labor, the newly jobless will need placation else promiseless young men become bored and at-risk for chaos. AI-managed industry, so all goods, pharmaceuticals, medical care, farming, and also advances in 3D printing, will see the cost of goods plummet while their quality peaks. It will become progressively harder for the government to not adopt major socialist practices as capitalism finally begins to "win" in competing itself out of existence. The population can't keep growing in such a system, at least not until we have FTL and a thousand shipyards in Sol. Assuming FTL is possible, which I don't, but I sure hope it is.

Simulacra will play a critical part in stability in keeping men satisfied. Advancements in entertainment, so another 20-30 years of development in video games, the arrival of UBI and the removal of needing to work to live. The population will need to be distracted until most can die childless but "happy enough." Half-rights help this goal, because people can sell their half-rights or buy other's half-rights, all at government exchanges. The exchanges will always buy half-rights, subject to reversible sterilization. A guy will go to a clinic next door to the exchange, maybe incorporated into the exchange, get whatever implant that stops sperm from working, get the cash to order a simulacra, sail into the sunset. Easy.

I don't expect western nations to swiftly automate labor like Japan. We'll need to acclimatize to the idea, begin the inculcation of no-work-to-live in successive generations so that when they're older, or their kids are older, they'll be prepared for not having jobs. With that and the shrinking population, by the turn of the century Western nations will be ready for post-scarcity life. New generations will still be needed in the interim, artificial gestation is pivotal here for the other paradigmatic social change.

As relationships and childbirth are "solved," as countries most adopting simulacra and bespoke children grown in vats enjoy golden ages while their men break productivity records, why would a country not produce as many sons as possible and as few daughters as necessary? There will be outgroups, so the Amish and the like, potentially a new movement of tech-circa-1999, but they will be small, none meaningful political factions, or where meaningful, supportive of the new power structure. I'd also expect a "reserve" population for practical concerns of catastrophe and ovum stocks, but most women will belong to the elite population. This above all is why we will see minimal and then no opposition to sharp sex-demo disparity with the great decline in the population of the human female: with so few, being a naturally born woman will be a position of immense status, inherently aristocratic. They will necessarily be the best of the best. Those chosen, those expressly wanted few. A new nobility, and it will indeed be so easy.

Women will "benefit" first, eventually men will, as again the purpose will be to shrink the entire population. So each generation will more-than-halve itself until the population is at an "acceptable" – at least stable – level. The sex distribution will once again be at parity, and those naturally born biological males will also be inherently aristocratic, as all civilized humans belong to the new nobility.

And all of this will just work. What I describe will happen because it isn't fighting back, it isn't trying to undo anything, it doesn't require conquest over more than a century of culture, it doesn't require recovery from war or calamity. It will work according to slopes and entropy, it will work in congruence with human nature. It will be the easiest path through, so it will just work.

If it's physically possible we'll break the tyranny of the rocket equation and achieve FTL travel. We'll begin spacefaring regardless and when, in however long, man reaches frontier planets to settle and dominate, they'll return to lifestyles us today find familiar. Those humans will begin the real work, of understanding and healing the light scarring on our gestalt soul from the depravity of human civilization, culminating in what was necessary to pass through the 20th and 21st century – with what was necessary to pass the Great Filter.

It didn't have to be this way, now it has to be this way. Or else we're all fucking dead.

How much are you willing to bet on this timeline?

Work, go home, play games until she has dinner ready, watch a movie, fuck, maybe play more games, go to bed.

Eternal childhood, except ersatz mommy lets you fuck her.

The simulacra will thus be unnatural as a thing women acquire as a relational prosthesis; why would she pay for what, for good reason, she gets free?

If men want the easy girlfriend, why do you think women won't want the easy boyfriend? Always attentive, romantic, spontaneous, does his fair share of the housework and emotional labour, isn't the messy real life guy who requires compromises: "To put in such effort to settle for someone less attractive, less responsive, more burdensome, more risky, to settle for something human when She can have something machine-perfect."

Harems will re-emerge, they will be the only option for most women, so they will be easier. Between simulacra and harems, female sociopolitical power will collapse. They will lose too much leverage with too many low-status men, while high-status men will each become a little king with his court of concubines who will certainly have no power.

Time share in a high status guy versus a whole robo-boyfriend? Some women may take that deal, but if you think "little kings" will reign over powerless concubines, I suggest you watch some Chinese harem drama series. Men can and will be subtly manipulated in such situations.

as countries most adopting simulacra and bespoke children grown in vats enjoy golden ages while their men break productivity records, why would a country not produce as many sons as possible and as few daughters as necessary?

If AI is doing all the work and all the thinking and all the research and all the planning and all the productivity, why does it matter if the human in notional charge has XY or XX chromosomes? We won't need "ah, but men are more adventurous, more risk-taking, make the big breakthroughs in science" when the AI is super-intelligent and doing all the research work. Link this in with

As AI and simulacra come from almost all labor, the newly jobless will need placation else promiseless young men become bored and at-risk for chaos.

And can you not see that governments may prefer a society comprised of the more tractable half of the population. If young men are chaos risks, then tilt the reproductive balance for more daughters, fewer sons. This also means the harem scenario is more viable, since you will now have fewer men automatically making them more desirable (if having a robo-boyfriend or girlfriend is coded as low-status from the adoption by the lowest third of men as envisioned, then having a real human boyfriend is high-status). Or perhaps women will be happy to have a time share in a real human boyfriend so long as the majority of their needs are being met by their robo-boyfriend.

This may in fact break the socio-economic power of men, since the new society can be truly egalitarian: it doesn't matter if the president is a man or a woman, the real power is with the AI. Women can be just as productive as men, particularly if reproduction is done by artificial wombs etc. No more nine months growing a new human and having to take time off for baby raising! Perhaps, in a majority female society, men will now be the decorative, pampered sex whose purpose is to be charming, attractive, cultured, and raise the status of the woman/women they are accompanying.

One outcome is as likely as the other.

Eternal childhood, except ersatz mommy lets you fuck her.

Well said.

If men want the easy girlfriend, why do you think women won't want the easy boyfriend?

Because if women prioritized ease in relationships this thread wouldn't exist.

Time share in a high status guy versus a whole robo-boyfriend? Some women may take that deal, but if you think "little kings" will reign over powerless concubines, I suggest you watch some Chinese harem drama series. Men can and will be subtly manipulated in such situations.

Certainly there will be manipulation and "court drama" but on the country level, look to any Muslim nation that allows harems. It's not that individual women have no power, it's that the group "women" does not comprise a meaningful political bloc. Thus "female sociopolitical power will collapse", not "the wife's sociopolitical power."

If AI is doing all the work and all the thinking and all the research and all the planning and all the productivity, why does it matter if the human in notional charge has XY or XX chromosomes? We won't need "ah, but men are more adventurous, more risk-taking, make the big breakthroughs in science" when the AI is super-intelligent and doing all the research work. Link this in with

This and your point on chaos are very strong observations. It could be that I'm wrong about sex disparity in simulacra interest, and that would significantly change the progression. I could also be wrong about the swiftness of automation and the requirement for human labor. If women are equally interested, all these changes occur so quickly there isn't the span of decades between 2050-2100 where significant amounts of human labor are still required, it would make sense to reduce the male population first. Women are sensible about these things, they'll take quite easily to life in post-scarcity civilization.

But I'm not wrong. The matter of automation isn't one of logistics, it's one of society. We can't flip a switch and become a post-scarcity civilization, we have to prepare for it. We have to draw plans to sunset all those structures based on human labor, and that's all of them. We have to develop the spirit, inculcate to posterity, so they are psychologically prepared for the cessation of the cycle of School -> Career -> Retirement. We have to develop new structures and new politics to accommodate a country where people only work if they want. This means an interim where labor is still required. Some labor automation won't cover for that reason of giving people work, some practical reasons of redundancy, some aesthetic, but wherever there is labor automation can't cover, that is the domain of men.

I'm also not wrong about the sex disparity in use. Clear evidence of biology informing these preferences can be found in the share of US households with children where the mother is the breadwinner and the father is the homemaker: 1% Women don't want to provide, they want to be provided for, deservedly, but this is exactly why simulacra simply cannot offer for women what they can for men. Men aren't attracted to Alexandra Daddario because she's an actress, but we all know why Grace Brassel is with Shane Gillis. It doesn't matter if it's by the time few are working, because attraction isn't really about being provided for either, it's toward the man doing the providing, and how. It's not enough about attentiveness or emotional labor or housework. It's not enough about physical attraction. It is a gestalt thing that a robot cannot achieve with women by fact of its existence. Shall I be more clear? The "relational prostheses" are lesser things, pathetic things, contemptible things women are above, and no enduring attraction may arise from that sort contempt.

In a vacuum, the sex disparity in births could be flipped as you suggest. It makes sense, the inclination to chaos is a powerful argument for reducing the male population. All the way up to when a country that isn't 90% women decides to invade.

It's not that individual women have no power, it's that the group "women" does not comprise a meaningful political bloc. Thus "female sociopolitical power will collapse"

Sociopolitical power in harem situations is wielded by being the mother of the heir. Look at Mohammed bin Salman - son of the third wife, so plainly she manoeuvred her way into getting her son made the heir:

He is the eldest of his mother's six children and the eighth child and seventh son of his father.

And Salman's father was the (reputed) twenty-fifth son of his father. The strongest alliances are those between children of the same mother (though of course this does not rule out intra-clan scheming to replace one likely successor with another, which is another theme in Chinese history when you have harems and multiple sons by multiple wives/concubines):

The Sudairi Seven is the commonly used name for a powerful alliance of seven full brothers within the Saudi royal family. They are also sometimes referred to as the Sudairi clan or the Sudairi faction. They are among the forty-five sons of the country's founder, King Abdulaziz. The King had more sons with their mother, Hussa bint Ahmed Al Sudairi, than he did with any of his other wives.

This has been the tradition: the sultan's mother and the sultan's favourite wife/concubine are the women with power, so it's worth scheming to make sure you're either the favourite of the current sultan, or the mother of his heir (best of all, of course, is to be both). That's one reason why monogamy makes for stronger dynastic lines - if there's only one legitimate wife and bastards by favourites, mistresses, or concubines have little to no hope of being in the line of succession, you cut way down on intra-family slaughter over succession (and the Wars of the Roses show how important reducing conflict over heirs is). If you look at the Al-Saud family, the succession bounces around between potential Heirs Presumptive who get replaced (and often imprisoned) as they rise and fall in favour, which means instability and public concern and unrest. By contrast, everyone knows that William is the heir of Charles, and it's not going to be "Charles decides to name one or another of his nephews, nieces, or grandkids as heir then changes his mind and names another".

What about the elephant in the room - personality?

Many young women are irritating and unpleasant. So are many men for that matter. I think this is a bigger problem than body-count, where the woman can simply lie. Or at best you can just ignore the body count in a way you can't do for personality. In so far as body-count matters, it's really about pair-bonding and personality.

Grok or O3 can't tell you whether women have a bad personality. We can't quantify this right now, though I'd be very eager to see the figures if we could. Anyway, it's age old wisdom that some women are just crazy and you don't stick your dick in crazy, let alone date one. Maths can't quantify personality yet it's a key criteria.

But if there's anything that the mathematics shows, it's that your point is real since we need only observe plummeting birth rates and a growing divide between the sexes. There's clearly a major social problem. Obviously there are exceptions. This is the most 'there are exceptions' kind of thing imaginable, it's individual human behaviour. But statistics can model this and the numbers are indisputable. It's no good saying 'just man up' when quite clearly that's not working as a solution. It can be a solution for an individual but it's not a solution to the problem because there's clearly some reason why everyone isn't already doing it, if it worked.

With the 'climate crisis' nobody says 'just have a cold shower'. That won't have any effect, it's a global industrial system that requires collective action to fix.

The fertility decline is a much bigger and more important issue. It's not going to be resolved by men looksmaxxing or grinding hard at work to self-improve. They do both a lot in South Korea to absolutely no avail. I highly, highly doubt anything non-coercive is going to work. There's a reason nearly all settled states had extremely coercive (by modern standards) treatment of women through most of history. That's a stable, high-fertility equilibrium.

I doubt we can even lower house prices non-coercively if you want to tackle fertility purely economically, without any cultural/social tools. People don't want their wealth taken away from them. It goes against the cherished principle of Universal Boomer Income where their assets must always rise in value.

There's a reason nearly all settled states had extremely coercive (by modern standards) treatment of women through most of history.

Also acceptance of men having mistresses, legalised (in many societies) prostitution, concubines, etc. That's not a stable family dynamic because the coercive control of women also means men wanting to break out of the rigidity of marriage and family life. If you need prostitution because "men have needs" then you need women to break the taboos on sexual promiscuity through choice, circumstance, poverty, etc. (e.g. families selling daughters to brothels in time of bad harvests or economic need). It also incentivises women to have affairs when married.

You can structure a society like that, but men won't like the society that says "women marry early, have lots of kids, don't get an education, and don't interact with men outside of their family" because we see that men break the social rules by seeking out prostitutes, concubines, etc. which, in a society that runs perfectly on "women are chaste and non-sexual and under the control of the man of the house and only have one male sexual partner, their husband, in their entire lives" would not generate exceptions like prostitution, affairs, etc.

"My wife is chaste and doesn't even think of another man ever than me in her entire life, also I have the right to fuck the maidservants in my house whether they're willing or not" is not consistent in its view of female sexuality. It's certainly coercive but it's also incoherent.

It might be intellectually incoherent but it worked.

Obviously the modern context presents different challenges. Child mortality is not sky high anymore.

However, our society has huge coercive resources. Economically, citizens are coerced by powerful bureaucracies to fund all kinds of programs, wars, welfare. Socially, policing works via coercion. They don't just educate people on what to do, people are coerced by police wielding guns.

There's no reason to drop coercion entirely with regards to sexual relations when it's present in all other aspects of life. In fact there are extremely strong coercive systems set up for underage sex and other scenarios. One might very reasonably say that it's bizarre and inconsistent to have such harshness allocated for relatively minor problems while civilization-ending, nation-ending decline is met with a limp-wristed 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas, bring in more immigrants'. Imperial Japan tried coercion, they restricted female employment, banned abortion and taxed bachelors. There was modest fertility growth in an industrializing, urbanizing society albeit complicated by the war. In 1945 the US changed their constitution to give equal rights to women and Japanese fertility plummeted, never to recover.

https://x.com/SyroJaziran/status/1848973547344928887

This kind of coercion may not be the only solution but it is a solution. There could also be incentives-based solutions. Take the entire pension budget and transfer it to fund parents who raise children to certain standards. 10-15% of GDP should get things happening. But you'd have real political problems doing this, any sufficiently powerful incentive resembles coercion, it would require the same voter-proof political consensus that mass immigration enjoys in many Western countries. There'd need to be a huge, forceful redistribution of political power for this to happen, likewise with largescale cloning or any other effective solution.

It might be intellectually incoherent

Nonsense, that is perfectly coherent.

Men, Inc. wants to acquire sex for as little a price as possible (as opposed to Women, Inc., which wants to set the price of sex as high as possible). Everything either one does is downstream from that fundamental fact, which is itself downstream from human biology. (This analysis ignores men that want commitment/women who want sex, but those are statistical outliers and can be safely ignored.)

So we should expect, when men are dominant in society, that we see lots of high-quality sex at affordable prices (so lots of mistresses, sex-pro-quo/workplace sex [historically frustrated by the lack of co-ed workplaces but the prototypical example is the Casting Couch] and secret other families, the 'raise my kids/be exclusive to me while I fuck other women' polyamory, and maximally attractive [as in, 13-16 year old] brides... into marriages that bind them but doesn't protect their interests in any way); when women are dominant in society, we should expect price controls out the ass ('fight for 25', #metoo, 'if she's younger than you it's rape', the 'pay my bills while I fuck other men' polyamory, and marriages that bind men but don't protect their interests in any way).

One might very reasonably say that it's bizarre and inconsistent

Unless Women, Inc. is in control, in which case again, it's perfectly consistent that men be punished [more severely than for most other crimes, including murder] for an act that inherently devalues older women. Young women are competition for old women, you see, so naturally old women would seek to keep them out of the sexual marketplace so they can demand a higher price. It is quite literally just the distaff counterpart to the "state-mandated girlfriend", but that selfishness is tolerated/Women, Inc. can afford that right now, so it continues (contrast men, who are forced to support children born of statutory rape).

There'd need to be a huge, forceful redistribution of political power for this to happen, likewise with largescale cloning or any other effective solution.

Not necessarily; Men, Inc. started ceding power to Women, Inc. in a major way centered around the 1900s. The suffragettes were not a violent movement. What did change was technology that brought the average woman up to the productivity of the average man- the sweatshop is an equalizing force, you see- and why lots of traditionalists get confused about the Sexual Revolution, because it was in a time of economic productivity that didn't solely advance men.

It is worth noting that the Japanese solution you mentioned above addresses both male and female selfishness according to what the balance of power in the society could bear at the time. To deal with Men, Inc. you impose heavy costs on sex (and make sure that having it with more than one woman is unaffordable); to deal with Women, Inc. you suppress their worth outside of sex (and make sure that they don't have a good life outside of a context where they're selling that sex to a man).

Since Japan has come up it might be my chance to introduce the concept of 枕営業or "makura eigyou." This term could be translated strictly as "pillow business" but in reality refers to the necessarily transactional nature of the mizu shoubai or "water trade" aka night life business such as hostess bars, etc.

Relevant to this discussion due to a 2015 case that made the news.. Essentially while long term infidelity is grounds for divorce, just sex with your friendly neighborhood hostess is not. At least not so in a way that would grant the wife a settlement. Why? Because our friendly neighborhood hostess (or whatever) works hard for the money, that's why. Just another part of the nightly grind. Sorry, wives and mothers in Japan, but at least dad was just paying for it and wasn't really in Luv.

Who says Japanese law is impenetrable? Well, I say that, but I suppose sometimes I'm wrong. All puns intended.

What is worse: to have a few fallen women designated as prostitutes to allow young men to blow off steam and gain experience without spoiling the nice girls they will eventually marry, as we did in the past? Or to allow every young woman to become a whore and make a Pikachu face when it turns out that most of them embrace the offer with open legs arms, as we do now?

I know what I pick. Better to live in Omelas than in Sodom and Gomorrah.

This is a false dichotomy.

I don't think a 5 body count is some insane disqualifying factor by 30. That's like 12 (probably more like 14-15 realistically) years on 'the market' for a woman and you can easily get to there with year-long+ committed relationships.

I think your LGBT and mental illness criteria are too strict, as they would exclude many young women who identify as bisexual or mentally ill due to peer pressure/social contagion and not because they belong in those categories as traditionally defined. For most of them it's just a phase they will grow out of, just as being an online edgelord with political opinions it would be unwise to discuss in polite company is for most of the young men here (no offense intended, I count myself among you).

Agree on LGBT, but for mental illness, it might be too lax, actually
We can't easily filter for "a total bitch who will drive you insane if you will have the misfortune to put a ring on her", so the next best thing is diagnosed mental illness. These categories heavily overlap, but the bitch category is almost certainly larger.

Mental illnesses aren't made alike. Someone with depression or anxiety is far less likely to make your life hell than a woman who is BPD or bipolar. A (high functioning) autistic woman? Some are really into that.

Maybe, but on a long enough timeline, and with enough "therapy", a 20 year old woman with "anxiety" becomes a 40 year old woman with BPD and a dissociative disorder. Seen it happen numerous times. From my vantage point the safest thing for a young man is reject any woman enmeshed with therapy culture.

To the contrary we don't diagnose teenagers with personality disorders because all teenagers have personality disorders. BPD manifests early and mellows (not that I would date anyone of any age with it).

Modern society creates anxiety in males and females, its theoretically manageable and curable.

Eh. I'm sympathetic to your point, but I don't buy all the conditions (or even strictly any of your conditions, except for obesity, which if you can provide health insurance for your family is itself fixable) are necessary for a good wife. Many of them are also heavily correlated: condition a woman on simply being college educated and having a professional career, and the majority probably meet your criteria.

A woman could do the exact same thing: list 10 traits that are requirements for a man and calculate how large her dating pool is. And in fact we did this for a single female friend who was bemoaning her dating situation: when we added up all her requirements, there was an expectation of only a couple dozen men in the entirety of California who met them. Is that a sign of how bleak women have it, or more a sign that her requirements were unrealistic?

And, speaking from experience, I'm a 5'3" bisexual guy in what's probably the toughest dating market for men in the USA, and I managed to get happily married, though currently living the degenerate DINK lifestyle. And I've notched up more (opposite-sex) partners than my wife. My personal most-restricting requirement was to find a single woman who made approximately as much as me, which is likely more restrictive than all your requirements put together.

All that said, it's absolutely true that (at least initially) dating is harder for men than for women. I'm not sure that anyone would dispute that, though, and I don't think your model provides good evidence for it. Better would be to come up with some quantitative and more direct measure for how hard dating is (for each percentile of attractiveness) and estimate it to provide a comparison.

Or, if the goal is to actually solve the problem, learn to exhibit masculinity, lift weights, and constantly put yourself out there and cast a wide net.

I do think there's definitely correlation factors that make the actual pool bigger than a surface-level analysis would say, but also it's partially a cultural thing. Back when I was single, I got occasionally ribbed for largely dating Asian girls but in my experience wanting to tick the 'non-obese, has a career/some sort of actual job, nobody else's kids, isn't obviously overly promiscuous' boxes meant that the majority of my leads were Asian girls.

5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).

Protip: on the off chance you end up dating a woman who is a virgin in her 20s, be sure that it isn’t because of SSRIs interfering with her sex drive.

People are biochemically different now than they used to be.

So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':

2 . Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.

I think that a bisexual woman can presumably have a traditional exclusive relationship with a man, just like a man who has a thing for red-haired women can presumably have a traditional exclusive relationship with a brunette woman.

7 . Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.

I would argue that the correct unit to measure student loan debt is "years till payoff". Presumably, in a well-earning profession, you can pay off your student loans in a decade?

8 . 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).

Why? Most of the women who want to start a family will be closer to your threshold of 30 than 18. Why would you care how many guys she fucked when she was 3/5th of her current age? Why not also care how much Sailor Moon she watched when she was 12?

I mean, if during the last year, she has sucked off twenty random guys in some club bathrooms while drunk, then there is some argument to be made that she is likely not ready for the kind of relationship you have in mind. If the same thing was a decade ago and she had sex with two boyfriends since then, that paints a very different picture as far as her suitability is concerned.

Or is this more of an illegible aesthetic preference for sexual purity? Call me a horny guy, but I would rather settle down with someone after both of us had 20 partners than if we had zero partners.

As a guy, it took about zero willpower to stay under your limit, but I can tell you that if I had gotten the median number of sexual advances a woman will get before turning 30 things would look very differently.

Realistically, your limit of five will not select for women with few sexual partners, it will mostly select for women who are willing to lie about how many partners they had.

Notable criteria I omitted:

  • Political affiliation

Realistically, this is a show-stopper. Perhaps it was different three decades ago, but today it is. I would happily stay single for the rest of my life before I would stick my dick into either MAGA or Hamas fans, for example.

  • Drug use

This phrase covers a lot of spectrum. Probably 90% of the population are at least occasional drug users. Of course, there is a vast gulf between "not a teetotaler" and "addicted to crack".

  • Sex work/Onlyfans

If you are selecting for less than six lifetime sex partners, I do not think that you will have a lot of OF models left in your pool. While I am sure that there is the odd virgin on OF, it does not really strike me as a hobby for the purity-focused religious types.

(OT: If I start a line with 2., the preview will turn that into 1. Do we really need the editor to count for us? Relevant quote: He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.)

Yeah 5 as a hard cutoff feels a bit crazy for a 30 year old. If they've been on the market from 15 onwards, which is broadly typical, that's achievable with 5 3-year long-term monogamous relationships.

There's a BIG question as to why none of those 5 relationships stuck it out and became permanent.

(OT: If I start a line with 2., the preview will turn that into 1. Do we really need the editor to count for us? Relevant quote: He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.)

Comments are parsed in Markdown, which is translated to HTML. By writing "2.", you are creating an ordered list, which is an HTML object that always starts counting from the beginning.

You CAN’T tell young men both “be better, improve, you have to DESERVE a good woman before you get one!” and then, when he improves:

“oh, you have to lower your standards, just because you thought you deserved a stable, chaste(ish), physically fit partner doesn’t mean you’re entitled to one, world ain’t fair.”

Do you think that the kind of improvements required to be within the top million young men in America are outside of the average man's control? Because using your definition of a Good Woman, we can easily backwards-prompt-engineer a Good Man, ie a man who is in the top million-or-so. And I think doing so can be illustrative of what people are talking about when they set men on the self-improvement track, right? "Do these things that are in your control and you will be a Good Man worthy of a Good Woman."

Playing with ChatGPT I came up with a set of seven criteria. Sticking only with actions that are more-or-less completely within a man's control, so no height and no race and no penis size. Trying to stay simple, so nothing specific or weird or regional or denominational. Sticking to things that most men can achieve with their own reasonable effort, so nothing luck based like having married parents or having athletic talent.

Here's what I came up with:

Approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all the specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent.

-- Under 40: We should give some age flexibility in here, I think "aim to get married before you are 40" is pretty reasonable advice, and more than ten years age-gap gets iffy in general (<10% of married couple have more than a ten year age gap

-- Single: Obvious, but also note that ChatGPT used data for single showing "not married or cohabiting" which is a little different from the colloquial use but probably works well enough.

-- Earning $65k/yr: Under the median salary for a police officer, achievable for a warehouse forklift operator who picks up some overtime or a backhoe or crane operator; or the median for a high school teacher. A level of income that any man can reasonably reach by their mid-30s without having any special blessings of intellect or skill.

-- No felony convictions: Not a criminal, and also likely captures most violent men.

-- Exercise at least once a week: Better than obesity for men IMHO, maybe just a bitter personal opinion because I am classified as overweight by BMI; but once a week is a pretty easy number to hit, go for a walk, play a beer-ball league of any kind, etc.

-- Attend Religious Services at least once a month: Rhymes with chastity, but more applicable to men, a woman with the values of being chaste is more likely to select for a man who is at least mildly religious. Most women in general will find a man who attends some religious service more attractive for an LTR than a man who doesn't. Very easy to do, as well!

-- No drugs other than Marijuana + Not an alcoholic: I'll spot you weed and ordinary beer consumption. Addicts are obviously worse than non-addicts.

That all seems very reasonable and achievable for your average man before marriage.

Now, are those factors actually the ones that the Good Women and Good Men are selecting on? Probably not, largely speaking, since we didn't include a lot of things they definitely do select on.

But that's a separate question from "Are there enough Good Women for all the Good Men?"

Add 'not addicted to porn and gambling' to your 'drugs' line. This probably weeds out a lot of men. Both of these are common, growing problems.

I'm trying to do as little as possible to get to a similar number of men as OP's good women.

Why? Isn’t your goal to make an equivalent list to see how it matches up?

No, my goal is to assemble a list of "advice compatible" traits that a man can cultivate to put himself in similarly rarified air as a Good Man to match up with one of these Good Women. It's actually pretty easy: there aren't a million single men under 40 out there who make decent money, aren't convicted felons, attend church, work out, and aren't addicts.

We don't need to get into gambling or porn. Just follow those criteria and the Good Woman to Good Man ratio shifts from the GW:M ratios to slightly in favor of Good Men pretty quickly.

Yes, that's the problem; you've decided the result in advance and you're trying to find a way to reach it. That way the onus can properly be left on men and no burden at all placed on women. Which is what we've been doing for the better part of a century at least and has led us here.

I have no interest in lecturing "men" here, advice when given is given to an individual man. And that man can quite surely make good decisions to achieve the goals set out in the post, and be among the top million marriageable men in America.

-- Has not fathered any children with women who were not his wife at the time.

-- Has not had a divorce with a mother of a child of his before that child turned 16.

Has not had a divorce with a mother of a child of his before that child turned 16.

This seems largely redundant if restricting ourselves to men under 40. At that point you might as well say never divorced with kids at all.

Probably good picks, but they don't seem to be selected against as hard as I'd think by women, and have a certain degree of fait accompli to them once they happen. I guess the felony one is also irredeemable but the rest are never lost causes. And anyway I wanted to get there in as few moves as possible.

Hence my increasing annoyance with the bog standard advice proffered to young males “become worthy and put in some effort and you will find a good woman” as it becomes increasingly divorced from the actual reality on the ground.

It’s not wrong. It is incomplete. Insufficient. If we increase the number of “worthy” men, that’s just intensifying the competition for the desirable women… while ALSO ensuring that more of those ‘worthy’ men will lose and go unfulfilled, DESPITE applying their efforts towards “worthiness.”

I'm compelled to link one of the old comments of @MaiqTheTrue on how men supposedly used to develop masculine traits. I mean no discrespect to him at all with this, but I can't help but consider it to be almost comical, though well-intentioned. I guess it's easy when discussing this particular subject to fall for the fallacy of imagining a past that never existed.

Assuming your definitions are accurate for the moment, Have you done the same in reverse? How many men in your pool meet the 9 basic criteria women would put on them?

For example if we assume women also have non obese in their preferences that filters out close to 30% of those men in one fell swoop, just like it did for women.

The pool for 9/9 women is 9/9 men. A man who only meets 2/9 criteria is going to be paired with similar women. The pool of 9/9 women is irrelevant to him and vice versa (in general).

On your modal outcome where 10 men are pursuing every 9/9 woman, well if 9 of them are not 9/9 men then most of your problem goes away. Their reach exceeds their grasp. They really do need to lower their standards to meet their own achievements. If all 10 are 9/9 men then yes you have a problem.

This is a pairwise function, not an independent one. You can't evaluate only one half of it.

You need to build the same estimate for number of single young men who meet the 9 basic criteria women have, then compare those two estimates. Of course for women their criteria may be different. For example if women prefer a man with some experience then their bodycount criteria may be 5-10 not less than 5.

Or to put it another way its irrelevant logically how many men in total are pursuing marriageable women. It matters how many marriageable men are pursuing marriageable women in this context. Non-marriageables have to be filtered out on both sides for the comparison you want to do. They are in their own pool together.

For example if we assume women also have non obese in their preferences that filters out close to 30% of those men in one fell swoop, just like it did for women.

Assuming that is incorrect though. Women don't have the same average revealed preferences regarding obesity / excess body fat in general as men do, and this applies to pretty much every other preference as well.

Indeed which is why I said assumed here, and then later pointed out that their prefences may be entirely different as well.

Still you have to do both sides of the equation if you hope to make proper comparisons.

To be charitable to @faceh 's point, I think it could probably be described as 9-10 men string along 6-7-8 women (otherwise good marriageble women) without pairing with them. 6-7-8 women believe, both because they get some attention from 9-10 men and because society keeps repeating it to them, that they are worth 9-10 men and should not settle for less. 6-7-8 men find themselves unable to find a 6-7-8 woman to pair with, so they end up single or pairing with 4-5 women. 4-5 men face a similar dillemma and at the bottom you find men without even the option of settling for less because there is nothing left.

Sure there are other dynamics, but you have to measure both sides the same in the first placebefore you can the measure the dynamic differences.

First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong.

You don't have to limit yourself to the United States.

I understand your other criteria to various degrees, but I still don't understand why I'm supposed to care so much about the number of past sex partners. It is pretty much irrelevant to me when evaluating a potential long-term romantic partner unless maybe it is so ridiculously high that it indicates some kind of actual severe sex addiction. But that would be a number in the high 100s, probably. Actually, for me it would probably be more important that the woman had had at least one sex partner in the past, rather than that she had not had too many. I'm not sure that I would want to take on the risk of being a wife's first sex partner and thus having her views of me passed through a filter of inexperience.

I mean, 6 is above average for western women, isn’t it, and he admits that he’s being arbitrary with the actual numbers.

‘Not noticeably promiscuous’ seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to ask for in a partner for compatibility-and-expectations reasons- my understanding is that most secular westerners expect to have sex before getting engaged, but how soon varies a lot from person to person- or more precisely filter bubble to filter bubble- and it’s a reasonable proxy for ‘coming from a filter bubble with courtship norms acceptable to mine’. Welcoming of corrections, though.

Yeah hard to set a line for 'not noticeably promiscuous' but 5 sex partners feels a tad low for somebody who's 29.

On the market from 15, could do that with 6 2-year relationships or just say 3 4-year relationships and one extra 'body' in every dating period between whilst feeling things out.

It's actually insane to me to read the parade of guys coming to these comments to express that the criterion for less than six sexual partners is strange or puzzling or not fair. I grew up in a community in which sex before marriage was a scandal, where parents actually cared about it, and where the expectation was to wait until marriage, and I'm younger than most of you!

These attitudes were handed down directly from a Christian moral understanding of sexual ethics so it certainly shouldn't be surprising even if you disagree with it. So the response of "Huh?? So strange!" is baffling to me in a forum where so many are otherwise eager to go to bat for Christianity if purely for the sake of argument.

I must say I myself find strange the new pagan-Western ritual of engaging in a series of pretend-marriages wherein you cohabitate, have sex, and mix finances with multiple partners before you finally vow lifetime partnership to whichever one you happen to be with when you realize the window for children is closing. And then have your first child in your mid-thirties.

These attitudes were handed down directly from a Christian moral understanding of sexual ethics so it certainly shouldn't be surprising even if you disagree with it. So the response of "Huh?? So strange!" is baffling to me in a forum where so many are otherwise eager to go to bat for Christianity if purely for the sake of argument.

Are you sure that the people who "bat for Christianity" are the same people saying it's not a big deal in this thread? I do the opposite of bat for any religion, so what's it to me?

I already know you're the Indian doctor atheist transhumanist novelist. So if I ever generalize in such a way again you can be sure to exclude yourself from the group for the sake of my point.

I agree with you that some people pretend not to understand why other men would want a virgin (or as close to virgin as possible).

That said, the US is no longer governed by traditional Christian mores. You may bemoan that and seek smaller communities where the norms remain, but it shouldn't surprise you that a lot of people nowadays genuinely do find it strange to care so much about body counts.

I must say I myself find strange the new pagan-Western ritual of engaging in a series of pretend-marriages wherein you cohabitate, have sex, and mix finances with multiple partners before you finally vow lifetime partnership to whichever one you happen to be with when you realize the window for children is closing. And then have your first child in your mid-thirties.

FWIW, I actually agree with you that this is fucked up and in my personal life I prefer something much closer to traditional Christian ethics even though I am not Christian.

I do not miss that being the law or de facto law, though.

It's actually insane to me to read the parade of guys coming to these comments to express that the criterion for less than six sexual partners is strange or puzzling or not fair.

And yet, you still didn't actually answer the question, which is "why are we supposed to care so much?"- probably because you're just taking "traditionalist/Christian sexual ethics are correct in all cases" for granted and going from there.

You could even get there from first principles and evopsych as it applies to the majority of people in any given place and time; you could argue that the liberal approach converges on the Christian one from a risk-management point of view so reality bears out that you should live by those rules, or you could come up with something different than those.

Or you could just say you don't like it and that's the way it is (and at least maintain a modicum of intellectual honesty), then extrapolate from there, since for n = 1 that might not be a particularly strong argument.

Sure, speculate about my irrational motivations! Try to turn this into a debate about the object level while attempting to convince the audience that I've already tried and failed to debate the object level myself! Just don't act like you're surprised body count is a consideration among most men.

Again:

These attitudes were handed down directly from a Christian moral understanding of sexual ethics so it certainly shouldn't be surprising even if you disagree with it.

Are you surprised by faceh's inclusion of that criterion? I suspect you aren't really; and I suspect most commenters here aren't, despite the chorus of scoffs about its irrationality. My first comment was expressing shock that there are so many here to claim not to care, because they're the weird ones.

Your native community's sexual ethics do not surprise me, in the sense of me being surprised that they exist. When I say that I don't understand, I mean that, while I abstractly intellectually can mentally model the inner experience of men who are different from me in this way, I do not share their feelings. It is similar to how, I like broccoli and some people hate broccoli. I can mentally model not liking broccoli, but I don't really understand it from the perspective of my own tastes, all I can say is "oh well those people's tastes are different from mine".

Your native community's sexual ethics do not surprise me, in the sense of me being surprised that they exist.

I see your rhetorical sleight of hand. This is not a small or long-forgotten culture that you're hand-waving.

Idk man. Thinking of my wife with another man is acutely distressing, and I'm not anxious to convince myself that it shouldn't be. Maybe that's just a matter of liking broccoli.

Thinking of a lover being with another man in the present or the future distresses me. Thinking of a lover being with another man before I even met her does not affect me in the least bit.

It is pretty much irrelevant to me when evaluating a potential long-term romantic partner unless maybe it is so ridiculously high that it indicates some kind of actual severe sex addiction.

Its associated with divorce risk after a certain point.

Of course YOU don't have to care about it.

But try to tell a single guy "yes you should settle for the girl that has like 6-12 guys she banged previously but don't worry I'm sure YOU'RE the one she sticks with and has NO remaining thoughts or feelings for the previous ones" with a straight face.

Reading your link, you sure you interpred this correctly?

There's a high peak at 2 previous partners, then a dip back down for 3 to 9. Then back up at 10 being maybe 3% higher than 2.

Divorce statistics shouldn't be a necessary condition to explain the male aversion to wifing up a woman with a past. If women's feelings such as the ick are legitimate, so are men's feelings and preferences.

If someone asked me why I don't eat roadkill, I wouldn't pullout graphs and studies about the longitudinal effects of consuming motorway by-product—I'd just shrug and say the thought of eating roadkill is revolting.

I have to say that I found the roadkill metaphor extremely insightful. My belief that female promiscuity is unwise is fundamentally disconnected from my opinion that female promiscuity is unappealing. I don't think less of the moral character of a woman who's been raped - indeed, the crisis might even present her with an opportunity to demonstrate her virtue in some way. But it does give me the male equivalent of the proverbial ick, just as it would if she'd had casual sex voluntarily, or been divorced, or tripped and fallen down the stairs onto a man.

I think that this is also why I feel a profound discomfort when I see other men list things like "five or fewer sex partners" as their standard for a woman. Because they're obviously using the more rational standard of the woman's wisdom - they're judging who's wiser, the woman who's had sex with five men or the woman who's had sex with twenty. But in my gut, this looks to me like, do I want the barrel of wine with five spoonfuls of shit in it or the barrel of wine with twenty spoonfuls of shit in it, and I'm just thinking, uh, no, I don't want any of the shit-wine, thanks, I don't care how exactly the shit got there, I don't care to grade it on a curve, and if that's all the wine I can afford I'd rather just be a teetotaler.

I'm pretty sure you can safely eat roadkill if you manage to find the right roadkill and you cook it right. But I'd still rather just not do that.

I would never tell a man to settle for a girl, though, unless maybe he is desperate to have kids and is reaching the age where even a man has to just take the best out of whatever mother options are available or else go without progeny.

What I would tell him is that if he actually likes the girl, he shouldn't let the number of guys she has banged stop him. And if he just simply has a visceral repulsion to that idea, I'd say fine, then go find some other girl. But I would recommend that he examines his own feelings and tries to figure out whether this is a true repulsion, like just not being into fat people, for example, or whether this is just a temporary insecurity that goes away with more experience.

Instead of recommending to a man that he settle, I'd recommend that he either goes and finds more girls or that he becomes more comfortable with having no girls, since being alone is better than being in a bad relationship.

I wouldn't worry too much, abstractly, about whether her promiscuity made her less likely to stick with me, if she was making me happy in other ways and I didn't see any evidence that she was actually pursuing other guys. Especially given that, since it is extremely easy for an attractive woman to get laid, for a woman to only have had sex with 12 guys strikes me as almost closer to celibacy than to promiscuity. Any attractive woman could easily have sex with 1000 men if she for some reason wanted to.

As for thoughts and feelings for previous lovers, I would find it a bit weird if she didn't have any at all. If by thoughts and feelings you mean that she was still carrying a torch for them, pining over them, etc. then sure, I think that would be weird and I would not be into that at all. But I would find it strange and almost inhuman if she completely put them out of her mind as if they had never existed. I guess you probably mean the carrying a torch version, though.

whether this is a true repulsion, like just not being into fat people, for example, whether this is just a temporary insecurity that goes away with more experience

Gotta disagree, after decades of internet arguments I have lost any ability to tell genuine difference between two. Nearly every "true repulsion" is just a "temporary insecurity" according to someone else. "Not being into fat people"? There is a loud crowd of activists who will try to argue you into that its your social and cultural environment speaking, not ingrained psychological repulsion. Into monogamous relationships? Not difficult to find a polyadvocate who will argue its a temporary insecurity enlightened people learn to deal with it / it disappears. Repulsion to seeing two males being intimate? A different, overlapping crowd will argue that it is a temporary insecurity you need to deal with. Not gay? If you are good-looking man and go to gay bar, someone is likely to try arguing otherwise.

It is not limited to romance and sex either. I say it feels bad when I have less things and status than my peer group: one person will reply that it is a natural response to inequality, other will reply that I am just being jealous for no good reason. Don't like taxes? one person will reply that it is natural response to government taking money, others will argue that you have misguided idea about stealing.

Also, for whatever is worth, my opinion on skinny vs chubby is one of those responses that has changed over time (/anecdata)

I mean, the average woman simply doesn’t desire the same variety of sexual partners that many men do. She desires a strong sexual relationship with a single man, which includes lots of non sexual affection, intimacy, caretaking, etc.

Would you accept a woman who was carrying $50k in student loan debt into the relationship? I guess maybe if she was a doctor or lawyer or made enough money to justify it. Much higher than that and it starts to suggest financial recklessness.

It would depend on how easy it would be to just not pay the loan back.

Many men already look beyond the borders of the US to find a bride. I married in 2005, things were different then, but also the same.

I had to go to the old country to find a wife.

And unfortunately, that will just export the same problem, where foreigners losing out to U.S. men will also struggle romantically.

Yes, certainly.

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

I went to Germany, alot of the native men seemed like maybe they weren't into women and / or were kind of dirty and leftist.

My wife certainly would not fit your criteria and we have been happily together for almost 15 years, married for a substantial portion of that, and have a bunch of kids.

My wife started significantly more liberal than me, but is now radically more conservative than I am, she was vehemently anti-religion, and is now an extremely devout Catholic who prays the rosary multiple times a day, wants endless deep conversations about religious philosophy, and would happily go to church with me every day if we could handle it with the number of kids we have.

I'm going to be blunt: a lot of the men I talk to about dating are just weak losers. Stop being a weak loser. Women want a man who is going to take care of them, and in a sense "tame" them. Look at every single female erotica story and it's some version of "strong willed man tames crazy rebellious woman" (often wrapped in: strong man sees the thing in rebellious woman that nobody else saw and they tame each other, but she still wants him to remain strong and only tamed towards her).

I see a lot of men who whine and complain that they don't want a "project", or a woman that isn't already the perfect match for them. Well...okay, man, but the entire world is made mostly by men who like the idea of a "project" in basically every facet of their entire lives, so maybe your status as single is a feature of evolution.

The only thing I agree with on your criteria is: STDs/sex work. That is a dealbreaker.

My wife started significantly more liberal than me, but is now radically more conservative than I am, she was vehemently anti-religion, and is now an extremely devout Catholic who prays the rosary multiple times a day, wants endless deep conversations about religious philosophy, and would happily go to church with me every day if we could handle it with the number of kids we have.

Much of this problem exists because religious conservatives alienated young women with the abortion issue. At least from my perspective it doesn't look like they've taken any responsibility for that.

This is one reason I'm hesitant on pronatalism. A culture that is excessively pronatal will wind up empowering bad actors among both genders, as they can use it as a "get-out-of-jail-free card." "You prefer to remain single instead of marrying me because of I did X and Y, whadabout the fertility crisis, you wouldn't want to be a genetic dead end would you?"

I would encourage you to take a look at the actual demographics of the prolife movement.

Disproportionately middle-aged and elderly women.

Much of this problem exists because religious conservatives alienated young women with the abortion issue.

If a young woman can be alienated by being told she should not kill her child then that reflects a problem with her own character. No compromise on this is necessary or acceptable.

If a young woman can be alienated by being told she should not kill her child then that reflects a problem with her own character. No compromise on this is necessary or acceptable.

What about the young men struggling to find wives? Do they matter?

If a man is so desperate for female attention that he'll suck up to a child killer or would-be child killer, he demonstrates his own failed moral character as well. He "matters" as any human being matters, but he should feel lucky he isn't being taken before a firing squad.

With this standard, you would need to firing squad a significant portion of society. I believe a majority. Most people support a limited "right" to abortion. You can't easily go against most people that hard.

The resolution of the Slavery issue argues that you can, in fact, go against a lot of people pretty hard.

Yes, the Cambodian genocide and the American Civil War are examples of a significant minority of society getting stamped out. But you can't do that easily. And that was a large majority crushing a relatively small minority.

If you tried to do that to a significant majority (around 70% support for first trimester abortion) maybe it is you that would be taken before a firing squad.

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David Cole wrote:

The late German historian Martin Broszat, another highly respected advocate of the “weak dictator” theory, went so far as to say that Hitler’s rhetoric inadvertently (that’s the key word there) caused the Holocaust. As summarized by Mommsen in a 1987 essay, Broszat’s thesis was that “utterances by Hitler that stood in a primarily propagandistic context were taken by the party radicals at face value. What was meant metaphorically thereby became actual policy.”

Think something similar happened here. Rhetoric that was meant to be taken as overheated hyperbole ("abortion is murder!") became taken literally. Now you have the guy above who thinks 63% of women in his country are child killers or would-be child killers and oozes with contempt for young men who commit the crime of wanting to marry that cute girl four doors down. Pro-lifers should ask themselves whether creating such a person was a good idea in retrospect.

To be clear, you're arguing that the side of the political aisle that voices moral disapproval of the industrialized slaughter of infants thereby demonstrates themselves to be Naziesque?

No. It's an analogy. The pattern can be seen in other contexts. Radical feminists who said "gender is a social construct" inspired the transgender movement when people took literally what was supposed to be hyperbolic propaganda, a movement that would later turn on them.

Rhetoric that was meant to be taken as overheated hyperbole ("abortion is murder!") became taken literally.

For many of us, it was never overheated hyperbole. We meant it, and we still mean it.

I see a lot of men who whine and complain that they don't want a "project", or a woman that isn't already the perfect match for them. Well...okay, man, but the entire world is made mostly by men who like the idea of a "project" in basically every facet of their entire lives, so maybe your status as single is a feature of evolution.

Its true up to a point. Obviously a relationship will be work, and you have to accept that not everything is perfect right away, but one of the Copybook Headings is that persistent changes of character are rare and not especially inducible (where weight is apparently included in character traits).

I see a lot of men who whine and complain that they don't want a "project", or a woman that isn't already the perfect match for them. Well...okay, man, but the entire world is made mostly by men who like the idea of a "project" in basically every facet of their entire lives

Agreed. As a man it's basically your duty to slowly mold your wife/compromise with her until both of you are on the same page.

Right now my parents have started searching for a wife for me in our community. I fully and openly accept that the woman I marry won't be perfect for me when I get her (or vice versa), but like Pygmalion of old I shall chisel and sculpt and over time create Her. That is a man's burden and I willingly take it upon myself.

All I ask is that I be given pristine quarried marble for this task instead of spolia from somebody else's workshop...

A man of any ambition will have projects in his (professional) life already. Multiple projects, and some of those he picks up because he has to, not because it's fun. Of course he wouldn't want his girlfriend to be yet another project. That'd be just a pain in the neck.

What more fundamental and valuable project could a man have than to sculpt his own wife and mother of his children? I agree he'll probably have other things on plate at the time he gets married (god knows I have more than enough) but any intelligent man knows how to prioritize stuff and when he gets close to marriage/finding "the one" will either sideline the less important stuff or just not pick up more low importance projects as he completes his current undertakings to make the time for himself to create his wife with all the care and attention that deserves.

My wife started significantly more liberal than me, but is now radically more conservative than I am

Yes, I didn't include the political affiliation criteria because that's one of the most malleable traits for women.

On the other hand, a full on seventy motherflipping percent of unmarried women vote democrat.

40% of women aged 18-29 identify as VERY LIBERAL or Liberal.

Have you not heard about the recent, RADICAL political polarization among young women?

These women ALSO largely refuse to date conservative/Republican men.

So men don't HAVE to filter these women out, these women are filtering THEMSELVES out. And they go on social media and aggressively police other women on this issue.

Whoops.

(btw this wasn't the case 15 years ago when you got married, so I humbly suggest your advice is based on a qualitatively different scenario)

Its all well and good to say "it worked out for me."

But the situation has gotten drastically worse. Not acknowledging this is a huge oversight.

a lot of the men I talk to about dating are just weak losers. Stop being a weak loser. Women want a man who is going to take care of them, and in a sense "tame" them. Look at every single female erotica story and it's some version of "strong willed man tames crazy rebellious woman" (often wrapped in: strong man sees the thing in rebellious woman that nobody else saw and they tame each other, but she still wants him to remain strong and only tamed towards her).

And here it is.

"Men, be better."

Okay.

But now the best men get to sleep around with their pick of women and never have to commit.

The rest of the men have to compete for a smaller pool of women, because you can't even suggest that maybe we should make the pool of good women larger.

The relationships are not forming at all.

AT WHAT POINT do you start suggesting that we put pressure on women to lower their standards a bit and settle down earlier?

I remember a few years ago that putting 'conservative' on your Hinge Profile was literally a death knell for matches.

The rest of the men have to compete for a smaller pool of women, because you can't even suggest that maybe we should make the pool of good women larger.

This is the final boss of gender relations. Somehow breaking women's cartel like behavior where they race to the bottom, crab buckets anyone who tries to better themselves, and acts like anything a woman does is justified because patriarchy. I have no idea how you change the conversation to get women to introspect, consider how they treat men/what they bring to the table, and be better. Our culture is dominated by a zeitgeist where men who have frankly any standards or boundaries what so ever are demonized, and somehow the most reprehensible acts of faithlessness, betrayal and even violence by women are met with sympathy as a floor, and frequently cheers of empowerment.

You know what's been great for my marriage? Turning off the TV, and going to church. There are a pair of Bill Burr bits I remembered as we made the decisions as a family to start going. One where he's talking about how he really doesn't believe any of that shit anymore, and he just quietly stopped going. And then a later interview where he talks about going to church again, because it's just good to be reminded what a piece of shit you are. And that definitely comes across when I started going. The insipid narcissism that infects the core of your being through virtually all of pop culture is insidious. I remember reading The Narcissism Epidemic almost 20 years ago now, and it's impossible to deny that it's kicked into overdrive since then. Trying to repeat the Penitential Act which I don't have memorized doesn't exactly purge the ambient narcissism our culture imposes on us. But speaking personally there has been a lot less ego driven conflict in my household.

If I had to do it all over again, and I hope I never have to since I love my wife and we've built a great life together and truly grown to complement and support one another, I'd consider trying to find a right minded woman at church. If this proved impractical for whatever reasons, I'd see how open they were to going with me. I have no idea how practical this advice is to a younger generation even further up shits creek than I was trying to navigate what I thought was terminal toxicity in gender relations in the 00's. But where ever you look, it's going to have to be in a subculture that has rejected mainstream American culture at least in part. I don't know, I guess I see a lot of tech bros marrying (I assume) high caste Indian women too.

Why is /r/twoXchromosomes not a banned hate subreddit? The comments there are demented, and also uncomfortably familiar from my IRL encounters with Leftists.

Why is it so impossible to be better? And why don't you simply date lower status women, and then elevate their status?

Why is it so impossible to be better? And why don't you simply date lower status women, and then elevate their status?

Because the odds are much higher that they divorce you and take your wealth and lower YOUR status.

Downside risk is serious, upside benefits are usually small.

McKenzie Bezos and Melinda Gates became billionaires... by divorcing billionaires.

What man would want that particular risk AFTER he went to the trouble of accumulating the wealth in order to be able to get the woman in the first place.

A woman would have to be worth that risk.

The absurdity of the situation is that men are told to accumulate more skills, wealth, and VALUE, for women who are less valuable and more likely to defect from the marriage, and thus to take much of the value the man worked so hard to acquire.

And literally EVERY SINGLE LEGAL CHANGE IN THE PAST 50+ YEARS HAS FAVORED WOMEN'S ABILITY TO DEFECT.

Why is it so impossible to suggest that women should settle earlier?

The stats are showing that:

  1. Women are less healthy than before.
  2. Women have more sex partners than before.
  3. Women have higher incidence of mental illness than before.
  4. Women have more aggressively liberal politics than before.
  5. Women are contributing less to relationships than before.

Conclusion: MEN SHOULD IMPROVE THEMSELVES.

Hilarious.

It ain't working. the women ain't happy, the men are lonely, when do we admit that current advice is insufficient?

McKenzie Bezos and Melinda Gates became billionaires... by divorcing billionaires.

It seems fair to note that both of these divorces were due to infidelity by the man, and also that in the Bezos case her extremely large payout was due to her having functionally been Jeff’s business partner early on- a founding member of Amazon would be worth billions, that’s only fair.

There have been societies where a man committing adultery isn’t grounds for divorce unless he abandons his wife, brings home an STD, etc. Is that what you are advocating for?

McKenzie Bezos and Melinda Gates became billionaires... by divorcing billionaires.

What man would want that particular risk AFTER he went to the trouble of accumulating the wealth in order to be able to get the woman in the first place.

A woman would have to be worth that risk.

Oh for hell's sake. McKenzie Bezos helped Jeff when he was establishing Amazon and she was in the steady job earning the money while he chased his dream. Then the marriage ended because HE, not she, fell for the next door slapper* and blew up his marriage (apparently they are finally getting married because she just threw a huge hen party recently).

I think in that case she's entitled to every penny of the divorce settlement. I'm not familiar with Melinda Gates' case but again that seems to be Bill not being able to keep it in his pants. The men in these examples are the cheating liars, not the women. Pick a different scare story than "oh no, if you wreck your marriage to the woman who raised your kids and was there in the early years before you became rich and famous because you chased a blow-up Barbie doll, you might even have to pay a fair share of alimony! clearly women are all only gold diggers!".

*This is what she considered appropriate to wear to a presidential inauguration. But go ahead, tell me how poor Jeff was taken advantage of by his rapacious wife.

I don’t see why a woman should have any right to a man’s earnings after termination of the marriage. Being a good companion and a good parent is easy. Making money is hard. If one parent stayed at home while the other worked, if there’s a divorce, the idle parent should owe compensation for the time they twiddled their thumbs and watched teletubbies on the other’s dime: they’ve had their fun, it’s their turn to work now.

I smell a stuffy prudishness in your condemnation these men: are you familiar with the modern concept of no-fault divorce? No one gives a shit who fucked who, and even less how the paramour dressed.

Right to spousal support started because, in the ideal world of "women do not work outside the home", once divorced a woman had little to no chance of income of her own. If you threw her out for a newer model, it was considered only fair to save her from ending up on the streets until she got a job or married again.

"The idle parent" shows your lack of comprehension of how a household works.

No one gives a shit who fucked who, and even less how the paramour dressed.

Funny, I thought the entire point of the rant about women was that men very much would give a shit if their wife fucked another man, and if she dressed like a slut. Or if she left her nice hardworking ordinary guy husband for a bad boy who looked cool but was trashy.

McKenzie was not at fault in the divorce, Jeff was: he broke up the marriage not because they had grown apart or because she was a bad wife and mother, but because he went through a midlife crisis and fell for a trashy vamp whose only assets are the plastic tits she constantly flashes.

Right to spousal support started because, in the ideal world of "women do not work outside the home", once divorced a woman had little to no chance of income of her own. If you threw her out for a newer model, it was considered only fair to save her from ending up on the streets until she got a job or married again.

"The idle parent" shows your lack of comprehension of how a household works.

Yeah but the game has changed on both fronts. Incomes are more equitable between genders, and whilst domestic duties are still difficult the average Divorcee isn't an Irish Catholic Mother of 14 that needs to wash and darn the socks by hand. I think there's a potential middleground between the two approaches in which it is possible to acknowledge marriage as a partnership, whilst still feeling that divorce settlements far, far, far beyond the amount it'd take to literally retire and have a comfortable rest of life are a bit outlandish.

Right to spousal support started because, in the ideal world of "women do not work outside the home", once divorced a woman had little to no chance of income of her own.

God forbid any woman would find herself in financial difficulty and would have to earn a living, like any man ever.

"The idle parent" shows your lack of comprehension of how a household works.

Single guys spend maybe 2 hours a week on household chores. When they move in with a woman the weekly dose per household goes to 16 hours, without any kids. Most of the housework done by women is busywork, deadweight loss. They tidy and clean in circles, and if that’s not enough waste, they remodel. They brush the slabs outside, where people walk, and want the roof power-washed, where no one ever goes.

Funny, I thought the entire point of the rant about women was that men very much would give a shit if their wife fucked another man, and if she dressed like a slut. Or if she left her nice hardworking ordinary guy husband for a bad boy who looked cool but was trashy.

We’re not all the same, with the same rants, you know. I accept that adults can fuck who they want, as our legislation says, and I want that rule applied fairly.

You seem to have a great deal of hostility towards another woman, based on her appearance. I’ll put it down as a data point in favour of slut-shaming being mostly intrasexual competition.

In the case of McKenzie Bezos, she was functionally his business partner at the founding of Amazon and it simply hadn't been structured that way because they were married. This seems like a reasonable thing for the courts to decide in the event of divorce.

More to your point, being a good wife and mother is not, actually, easy. It isn't a super g-loaded task but housewives should be recognized for their valuable role and marital property in the event of a divorce seems fair. Neither Gates nor Bezos are poor after their divorces(which, again, were easily avoidable by those men).

She put a few stamps on early orders, that must entitle her to half the future earnings of the man who created and worked all his life as CEO of that company. I think not.

We live in a time where every wife feels like an “equal-value partner” in their husband’s business, and the laws we made agree with them. But they are not.

(which, again, were easily avoidable by those men).

I understand it's always the man's fault and he always has to pay. If he cheats, well he got what he deserved. If she cheats, he failed to nurture a woman's love, he didn't treat her right, and you wouldn't want to slut shame a woman anyway, and besides, she 'contributed' to the marriage, so here's the bill again.

At every level of society, at every age, women get more than they put in. Starting at university, where they have been 56/44 for decades despite working far less, through marriage, divorce, and pensions, where they live longer after having contributed less. And the more we hand over to them, the more oppressed they feel.

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Downside risk is serious, upside benefits are usually small.

You've got this backwards. The upside risk is infinite, and the downside risk isn't. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are still billionaires, btw.

admit that current advice is insufficient?

The current advice is insufficient only in that it is not clear enough to men that they need to stop whining.

Whaaa this untamable wilderness isn't being fair

Whaaa this untamable ocean isn't being fair

Whaaa this vast untable universe isn't being fair

None of the men who have ever done anything of note ever at any point in human history have done so by meeting something that was fair. Your effort and the effort of the women you want to date will not be equal. It will not balance out. If anything, the shortcoming of the advice you have heard is that you would ever expect that.

Man was not owed the wilderness, and men are not owed women.

Men by and large stopped caring about the wilderness, and new (more rewarding) frontiers opened over that time.

men are not owed women

Then men do not owe women anything, including consideration or respect. Hence the efforts to impose that by force paid for by social credit.

do not owe women anything, including consideration or respect

I mean they do owe them consideration and respect qua persons.

The current advice is insufficient only in that it is not clear enough to men that they need to stop whining.

Whaaa this untamable wilderness isn't being fair Whaaa this untamable ocean isn't being fair Whaaa this vast untable universe isn't being fair None of the men who have ever done anything of note ever at any point in human history have done so by meeting something that was fair. Your effort and the effort of the women you want to date will not be equal. It will not balance out. If anything, the shortcoming of the advice you have heard is that you would ever expect that.

Man was not owed the wilderness, and men are not owed women.

Good comment, I agree entirely.

Men conquered the women, conquered the wilderness, and they should go about reconquering the women.

One day, this past 150 year interlude can be looked back on as the sexual post-apocalypse, before men as a whole reconquered and subjugated the world again.

Great post.

Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are still billionaires, btw.

Yep.

You can either be rich enough to just absorb the hit, or so destitute you have nothing to lose.

For guys in the middle (i.e. WHERE MOST GUYS ARE), its just financial devastation.

Man was not owed the wilderness, and men are not owed women.

Women aren't owed men's attention and support, by the same token.

And if men are making the logical decision that the prize they get for supporting and paying attention to women is not appealing, why SHOULDN'T they just ignore them?

What's the point of taming wilderness if you aren't then allowed to build a society in it?

What's the point of taming the ocean if you can't go fishing in it.

Why explore the universe if you are not given the credit for your efforts and risks?

You're basically characterizing women as a ENEMY, or possibly just a natural force that men must overcome.

In other words, as a force against ongoing maintenance of civilization.

Makes little sense to give such a dangerous presence much control of your civilization.

Have you not heard about the recent, RADICAL political polarization among young women?

These women ALSO largely refuse to date conservative/Republican men.

So men don't HAVE to filter these women out, these women are filtering THEMSELVES out. And they go on social media and aggressively police other women on this issue.

No, they say they refuse to date conservative/Republican men. What they actually do is refuse to date conservative/Republican boys.

So are we talking about women or girls here?

The distinction is far less relevant than in the case of man/boy.

5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making.

Very arbitrary. A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.

It's much more likely to reflect the reality of serial monogamy than bad decision making.

Not ‘obese.’

Not unreasonable to include, but remember that obesity is an equal opportunities offender. Most non-overweight men aren't going to want a fat wife, but then most men are fat too.

This is also true, to a lesser extent, with mental illness. Women have more mental illness than men (or at least they say they do) but the numbers for men aren't zero.

In fact, we can really apply this filter to most things you've listed. Men have high levels of obesity, student loan debt, mental illness, existing paternity and STIs. We can't apply it to everything of course. Men want a woman below 30 for obvious biological reasons that don't apply exactly to women, but broadly the way you've framed the question implies an average eligible man and an average ineligible woman. Whereas in reality, most of these things affect the numerator as well as the denominator. Loads of women are fat, but so are an equal number of men, which reduces the competion for the slim women.

A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.

And statistically she'd be more likely to divorce her partner later. You've kind of underscored how simple it would be for a woman, starting at 16, to rack up comically large numbers, and there is almost ZERO external pressure to NOT sleep around.

And it didn't used to be this way, women are just sleeping around more on average. We went from about 64% of women having 0-1 partners by marriage... to 27%. So hey, you've got about 1 in 4 shot if you get married. But your granddad had a 2/3 shot.

Unless you think this is a good thing the best you can argue is that its neutral and can be ignored.

Most non-overweight men aren't going to want a fat wife, but then most men are fat too.

Sure thing.

But men don't have to bear kids.

And men can make up for this issue in a lot of other ways.

I do hope that Ozempic comes to help out with this.

Oh, and guess what, obese women won't settle for an obese man, even though the reverse isn't true.

So the problem is, ONCE AGAIN, that men are told to 'get better' but women aren't pressured to settle for the so-called 'looksmatch.'

Loads of women are fat, but so are an equal number of men, which reduces the competion for the slim women.

Not precisely. This is my point about competition.

Any attractive women are a target for men of virtually all ages.

The sheer amount of choice she'll have, thanks to this competition, makes her less likely to settle.

Add in the effects of hypergamy and this explains almost ALL of the current strife in the dating market: Women get bombarded with attention during their most attractive, fertile years, decline to settle, and as time comes on become less marriageable overall.

  1. Every single major cultural institution, Hollywood, Academia, Tikok/social media, dating apps(!) and every U.S. Corporation is telling them to never settle, never compromise, and they should delay marriage and kids so they can have money/career/travel etc.

  2. Aside from the Catholic Church there are zero large cultural institutions sending the message “you should settle for a man who is decent and forgo other opportunities to bear children."

Not a huge surprise that the former message is internalized.

And statistically she'd be more likely to divorce her partner later

That's not what the link you posted says. A woman who has slept with six men is (statistically) a safer bet than a woman who has slept with two. Although even then the effect is small. The only significant effect is for women who have slept with 0 men, which is pretty clearly a proxy for conservative religiosity. If you want that kind of woman, they're pretty easy to find, they all go to the same place on a Sunday...

Oh, and guess what, obese women won't settle for an obese man, even though the reverse isn't true.

Women on dating sites won't settle, but men apparently will? Aside from a few fetishists, men don't like fat women. This seems more of an effect of the imbalanced ratios on dating sites than actual preferences. Nobody prefers a fat partner, but beggars can't be choosers.

Women get bombarded with attention during their most attractive, fertile years, decline to settle, and as time comes on become less marriageable overall.

And yet according to surveys, both men and women are equally likely to want to marry, and women are more likely to want to marry now (as opposed to some vague time in the future).

And speaking more personally, my experience has been that the most attractive women are most likely to have boyfriends or husbands, because it's much easier for them to attract said boyfriends and husbands. Women don't actually like the modern promiscuous dating market. It's an inadequate equilibrium that benefits womanisers to the detriment of basically everyone else.

There has been a decline in partnering and marriage. The decline in partnering seems to be a consequence of atomisation, digital interaction replacing real-life interaction and perhaps excessive female pickiness due to social media. But crucially, it's not because women are sleeping around, because they're not sleeping around.

But crucially, it's not because women are sleeping around, because they're not sleeping around.

Your link isn't about sleeping around, and even if you want to try and infer that the numbers aren't broken out by gender

The Catholic Church does not advise its female membership to settle for a man who is ‘decent’. Factually the preference of the Catholic Church is for unmarried laywomen to become nuns, but for those who don’t have a vocation the idea of ‘settling’ is not much pushed.

The Catholic Church raises the marriage rate by having a theoretically hard ban on cohabitation, not by reducing standards for men.

Look at the graph in the link you shared that shows divorce rate by number of premarital partners. It shows that the divorce rate for women who had 2 partners exceeds that of women had 6-9!

There is a 10 percentage point difference for the arbitrary cut off of 4-5 and the maximum at 10+ partners. The difference between 4-5 and 6-9 is negligible, maybe 1 PP.

This makes the choice of 4-5 very hard to justify. After all, you should also rule out women who have had precisely 2 partners by the same logic.

Note that you also need to account for the fact that a minority of people divorce multiple times and drive up the average.

I've linked the image in question here.

/images/1748284134725351.webp

This in particular was addressed here for example:

The interesting thing about this study is the way that it shows how the second-greatest risk is marrying a woman with only 2 partners; the researcher's theory is that this might be the result of over-emphasized comparisons; the woman has just enough experience to realize that there is something else out there, but not enough to realize that most of it isn't an improvement.

https://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2016/06/n-matters-lot.html

The images in the post are no longer available as it's from 2016 but it doesn't matter much.

There's food for thought in the comments as well such as:

The odds doubling for the 10+ set likely is due to a woman who has that many partners has some other mental short circuit that causes her to either seek personal validation through sex, daddy issues, follow and unquestioningly accept some nonsensical ideology like slut feminism, is bipolar, or has some other issue not listed here. Where the n=2 may be a relatively normal woman who has a basis of comparison, the n=10+ is a strong indicator of some kind of mental/emotional instability.

///

I wonder if "2 prior partners" is the sexual equivalent of "just 2 beers".

///

Two theories:

1) Those may be fairly conservative religious girls who were brought up being told premarital sex and divorce was bad and held off sex to an extent, but went nuts with the divorce as an adult. But they didn't have enough time to accumulate 4-5 partners like the secular women did.

2) Women with 4-5 partners are less likely to get married AT ALL than those with 2 partners, choosing cohabitation instead. If marriage and cohabitation are considered together, those with 4-5 partners are still higher breakup risks than those with 2.

The images in the post are no longer available as it's from 2016 but it doesn't matter much.

Here you go.

I'm actually wondering how different the statistics are between "had 5 boyfriends for 2 years each, with almost no gaps of singleness" (the well-known "serial monogamy") and "had 5 one-night-stands with no relationships inbetween". Intuitively, it feels like one could argue either way - "she wanted to keep a man but can't" vs. "she had NSA sex".

Very arbitrary. A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.

Yeah, I've been single for a long time, and if it had been "as easy" for me in my moments of peak horniness/loneliness to go out and find someone at least acceptable looking for a one-night-stand that no else has to know about as it seems to be for women, my body count would have effortlessly cracked the double digits. And I'm far from a libido monster.

5 by 26 for a single girl seems like a girl with a good amount of restraint to be honest.

Have you considered that women, by and large, don’t have much desire for casual sex?

Of course, but while it's not as strong as men's, they do still have it. I know because I know some women. I'm married. I have friends with wives and girlfriends.

I would not consider it strange for a single woman to, in her 20s, have a strong urge to fuck, at least once every two years. I'm not judging women by the same standard as men here, because frankly when I was single and in my 20s I had that strong urge weekly.

Combine that with opportunity, and it doesn't look extraordinary to have 5 partners in 10 years.

a girl with a good amount of restraint to be honest.

Yes, that's what it takes to be marriable.

Male behavior doesn’t support body count rhetoric. This isn’t bitterness, I would even have met your own standard before I met my spouse, it’s just fact.

  1. Very high status men marry formerly very promiscuous women all the time. Prince Harry, Ronald Reagan, Jeff Bezos, Edward VIII, Evan Spiegel, even probably Donald Trump (NYC was a crazy place for Eastern European models in the early 1990s). If even men with the highest status and most options do this, clearly the revealed preference isn’t very strong.

  2. Status signalling about not marrying a promiscuous woman is more for other men than women. “For the streets” rhetoric is for the boys, it’s male bonding, often times it’s even post-breakup comforting of the “don’t worry babe, he didn’t DESERVE you. Men suck!” variety, just between men rather than women. The truth is that men love promiscuous women and always have, I suspect because promiscuous women are disproportionately likely to be more ‘masculine’, more outgoing, more likely to have male interests and are more likely both to enjoy male company and enjoy entertaining men.

  3. Other rules explain male courtship behavior better, including assortative mating and related patterns around class, hotness, shared extraversion (which means people who…partied a lot in their twenties usually settle down with people who partied a lot in their twenties).

  4. Public disdain for promiscuous women is mostly redirected class signalling. See copious 4chan memes where the trad chaste woman in the sundress is compared to the nasty tattooed whore with the body jewelry and the (mixed race) baby, no father in sight. Many of the most promiscuous women I know are hot, not tattooed, have no children or OnlyFans and are otherwise indistinguishable from other urban PMC other than being marginally more outgoing than average. I presume there are also low class women (maybe even some single mothers) who were not particularly promiscuous at all and who have tattoos.

  5. In my long experience knowing many women in their twenties of varying levels of promiscuity, I have never encountered one case where a woman was actually ‘punished’ for her promiscuity. Women do share their Ls with the girls, at least a lot of the time. Certainly there are examples where the woman might never know, but I have never found an example of a beautiful woman who couldn’t settle down with a man in her league and social class because she was too promiscuous in modern America or Britain.

  6. Some quick fire anecdotes: my Arab coworker, who told our mutual male coworkers that all British women were whores, just married a bottle blonde Dubai Russian with a dubious past, but it’s OK because she’s converting to Islam. The sluttiest girl in my high school class just married er boyfriend of 5 years, a handsome Ivy rower with family money from the same extended social circle and so undoubtedly knows all about her past.

The woman punished for her promiscuity is a male obsession in a deeply seated and likely unchangeable way. Men are obsessed by ‘fallen women’ because men (gay and straight, which make me think this is even deeper than just sexuality) love sluts (and not just for sex). Men are scared and in love with promiscuous women. They imagine grand punishments for them (many of the greatest novels and plays of all time). In the end, the joke is that there is no real punishment, at least most of the time.

I'm also pretty nonplussed by "body count". There are red flags related to it (HIV and stepkids are obvious; I'd also consider a nonzero count of "times cheated on partner" without an extremely-good explanation to have too high a risk of ending in Extreme Drama) but the count itself is not very relevant.

The high-status people are playing in a different league. On this point, I think Goodguy is on right track. More succinctly put, it's the relative count that matters more than the absolute count. For high-status male, the absolute body-count of prospective partner matters much less. He probably has comparable count himself, and I can imagine part "I realize I am super high status" is enough to offset any instinctual doubts he may have. And no doubt you are correct about class status signaling element, too.

Insecurity being insecurity does not make it less real, though.

Men have no reason to dislike sluts, on the contrary. It’s women. Like OP, women want the sexually promiscuous of their own sex, and I quote, ‘culled’. So that now perhaps, their dream partner, deprived of rival options, will turn to them, on their terms.

The women and their priest (religion, and Christianity in particular, being a woman’s game, with women’s ethics) always rail against the town bike. But most men secretly love the slut, as you recognize. And no wonder, because how can one love someone who gives seldom, and grudgingly? Men’s tragedy is there aren’t enough bikes to go around.

The fallen woman who pays the ultimate price? Yeah it’s common, but it’s part of the silly trope where the writer really wants to tell a mundane story that happened to him, he’s two-third done and fears he has nothing left to say, so to make it seem more important, give it some oomph and end it with a bang, Mr. or Mrs. Smith dies at the end for some ill-explained reason. It’s death out of a machine. And look at that, it's the end, and there's a death, just like in real life, death is the end. They all sit back and wait for the nobel after that flash of genius.

@2rafa @Tree You think that way because you’re both boomers. The reason people used to like the town bicycle is because they would occasionally get a turn to ride the town bicycle. That’s where the term comes from! When the town bicycle gets seized from the public commons and only the mayor and the five richest businessman in town get to ride it anymore, it just becomes yet another symbolic way you’re getting ground into the dirt. You have to open Instagram and see the mayor in his stupid little top-hat doing donuts in the town square on the bicycle that you never get ride going ding-ding-ding on the bell and you grit your teeth in hatred and tab over to BicycleHub dot com to look at even more bicycles that you’ll never, ever get to ride. Forget actually owning a bicycle, they’re much too expensive. You’ll just have to walk.

As I recall 2rafa is a recently married millennial woman.

So like I said, a boomer.

No?

If you’re over thirty, you’re a boomer. The future is now, OLD MAN.

Is that a reference? A joke? I don't get references, because I was raised in a homeschool bubble determined to turn us all into 18th Century boomers.

More comments

FWIW, my experience as a man was more of quiet resignation. When I was dating, I was resigned to marrying someone with a "body count" since well-adjusted women who were at least slightly attractive without one were vanishingly rare. If asked I would've said that I was not interested in marrying someone with many previous sex partners, but that wasn't because I was try to flex in front of the boys, it was really how I felt. I have a pretty "conservative" personality though, I have strong feelings on the "Sanctity/Degradation" moral axis and I have strong "disgust" reaction. So I may be an outlier.

In private conversations with very close friends, I would often see a bit of what you're describing though. They didn't care that much about her past. They just didn't want to be seen as a cuck who married a slut, so as long as her past escapades were never revealed, it was more or less okay.

I imagine Prince Harry's and Edward's decisions were mainly driven by them wanting to simply spite their families whom they resented above all else.

With regard to Reagan I'm assuming you're referring to his 2nd wife? Did she have a reputation as a thot?

And with regard to Melania, are we automatically assuming that she was a thot by virtue of being a fashion model, or is there more to know about her career that I'm not aware of?

Edward's decisions were mainly driven by them wanting to simply spite their families

Does this make sense? I was always under the impression that especially for Edward the spite for their families was mostly downstream of their disapproval of their (prospective) marriage.

With regard to Reagan I'm assuming you're referring to his 2nd wife? Did she have a reputation as a thot?

By 1950s standards yes. Which by today’s standards would make her practically a Catholic saint.

And with regard to Melania, are we automatically assuming that she was a thot by virtue of being a fashion model, or is there more to know about her career that I'm not aware of?

She did pose naked for magazines a couple of times.

No one gave a damn that Schwarzenegger posed nude for gay magazines. Beyond unimportant for a politician, much less a politician's trophy wife.

She did pose naked for magazines a couple of times.

Which is what pretty much all fashion models normally do, I guess?

The joke is that the real punishment is that he has to be with a partner who has loved and will love a man other than himself. Men are extremely jealous, we can cope when we see someone with our partner who is clearly more deserving than we are, but we don’t like it.

You are also making the very female mistake of imagining that men with higher status have higher self esteem than men with lower status. This is probably broadly true for women but is very inaccurate for men. Male self esteem correlates almost entirely on how much sex he’s getting and how gratifying the sex is to his ego. Money doesn’t matter, buying prostitution doesn’t boost the ego, having a partner who respects him does. Having a hot wife he can imagine is actually devoted to him is the best thing he can have in terms of self esteem. I’d be so much happier poor with one moderately attractive partner I feel trust and respect from than being rich with someone I know is sleeping around with other men.

Edit:

men (gay and straight, which make me think this is even deeper than just sexuality) love sluts

No we don’t (as a gay man.) We do like other men who are mature and able to be comfortable with a lot of other men and respectful toward them. Nobody really likes the depraved bottom who is a slut for his own gratification. We don’t respect bottoms who immediately drop to their knees in front of any man. Even when you get head from a man who you do respect you will have your opinion diminished slightly toward him, just as you have your opinion toward yourself slightly diminished if you perform a bottom act with even a man you respect.

I think that men who are insecure (whether or rightly or wrongly) about their own sexual value on the market often fear and resent promiscuous women simply because the promiscuous woman is an extreme version of the already huge difference that these men feel between how easy it is for themselves to get laid and how easy it is for the average woman to get laid. Also, they fear the power differential in a relationship - they perceive that the woman could leave them at any moment and be fucking some other guy an hour later, meanwhile it might take them much longer to find a new sex partner. These fears are somewhat understandable, but become quite pathetic-looking when instead of being honestly acknowledged, they are instead wrapped up in some ideological cover such as religious LARPing, posting pictures of tradwives on social media, or performative misogyny meant to get likes from other men.

There are much healthier ways of dealing with this insecurity. For example: 1) maximizing one's own sexual value and game to the extent possible, 2) realizing that men and women have different kinds of advantages in the sexual marketplace and that it's not really a situation where women hold all the cards, 3) realizing that since women tend to not be as driven by constantly wanting to fuck hot new partners as men are, even a relatively promiscuous woman, if she actually is into you, is not necessarily going to ditch you to go bang some other guy who happened to wander by. And if she does, it's not the end of the world, there are plenty more women out there.

Very high status men don't need to feel any of this kind of insecurity to begin with. If a business mogul or rock star's hot partner leaves him, he can easily find a replacement an hour later, too. Very high status men generally don't spend their time chasing hot women, they spend their time fending off all the hot women who are throwing themselves at them. So these men just have much less psychological motivation to care about a woman's promiscuity than the average man does.

There are much healthier ways of dealing with this insecurity.

I agree strategies you outline are more realistic in this day and age. One individual cannot change the whole society, so it is "healthier" to adapt. It is still legitimate to wish the society was otherwise, because other societal equilibrium has been possible in the past.

a relatively promiscuous woman, if she actually is into you, is not necessarily going to ditch you to go bang some other guy who happened to wander by.

Citation needed

It's very big if, and response to it may vary over time.

I believe it's is psychologically much easier to maintain idyllic romantic notions of sex as this super special thing called "making love" (notion that is conductive to longterm monogamy) if you ever have sexual anything with one person.

Excellent comment, but I think the bigger problem with using numerical criteria and analysis for promiscuity is that people lie to everyone and especially to themselves about the numbers. People can come up with a million reasons why it "doesn't count" in particular cases, how to round down, how to ignore something they know is so.

The upshot of which is that vastly more men think and might even report that they married a chaste woman, than would be judged to have married a chaste woman by an outside omniscient observer.

I've heard that it "doesn't count" because:

-- It was before she found Jesus

-- She was drunk

-- He "pressured her"

-- He told everyone they did it, but actually it was nothing/kissing/hand stuff

-- It was just the one time. Or a weekend.

-- It was anal

-- He said he loved her but he didn't mean it

-- She married him so that he wouldn't get deported to Russia

OP says 5, but 5 can mean a lot of different things depending how you count.

Maybe I'm just thinking about this after my workout today, where I saw the downsides of Crossfit first hand in terms of counting reps.

I knew a girl in high school that self identified as bisexual. She was in a long term relationship with a guy.

Then in college in the dorms there was a very similar woman. Same exact personality and interests. For some reason also felt the need to inform people she meets that she is bisexual. Also in a long term relationship with a man. This is before social media, so it wasn't internet brainrot.

There's some portion of women that are hypothetically bisexual. Or we could frame it negatively and say they are performatively pretending to be "queer" as stolen valor from actual LGB people. Refusing to admit that they are regular straight people; "cishet".

That does not prevent them from pairing up with men. I found those two women annoying. I suppose I'd find a modern "demisexual" "pansexual" woman who got her identity from tumblr similarly annoying. But that shouldn't be a universal filter. Any man who can resist rolling his eyes while she recites her "actually it is a spectrum" speech can live a productive hetero life with her.

As for age: men's age preferences are well known The cowards at okcupid deleted their blog post that chart was taken from. If there is indeed such a desperate shortage of high quality 20-something women willing to date, then date women in their lower to mid 30s. Up to mid 30s they can have kids no problem.

Your okcupid URL links to "nice hat.". I'm having deja vu...

So strange. I click it now and also see nice hat.

It was this when I copied it over, but on reddit rather than twitter.

Direct reddit image links are not persistent?

I'm not sure, but I knew I wasn't imagining it.

Indeed, young women being memetic and adopting bisexuality as a quirk (and a form of stolen valor to earn some more social credit points) has been long-noted—even the "charge they phone, twerk, be bisexual , eat hot chip & lie" meme is basically ancient internet history nowadays.

However, female bisexuality can be difficult to discern from female heterosexuality, as women are basically asexual relative to men, on top of female sexuality being less binary than male sexuality. In addition, a woman legitimately interested equally in men and women will almost certainly have had only relationships with men, given female passivity and lack of courage and initiative when it comes to dating.

It reminds me of a 4chan screenshot I saw, to the tune of:

>women claim to be bisexual, but have only ever dated men, are in a relationship with a man, and will eventually marry a man
>men claim to be straight, but constantly joke about fucking femboys, twinks, and trannies
>why are we like this?

men claim to be straight, but constantly joke about fucking femboys, twinks, and trannies

What really?

On 4chan, not real life.

then date women in their lower to mid 30s.

How does a woman make it to her 30s without landing in a stable, committed relationship?

Especially if she was inundated with options in her 20's.

Doesn't this suggest there's some factor that makes her less suited for such a relationship?

There's some portion of women that are hypothetically bisexual. Or we could frame it negatively and say they are performatively pretending to be "queer" as stolen valor from actual LGB people. Refusing to admit that they are regular straight people; "cishet".

Is your advice to young men here "actively pursue bisexual/queer women and hope this one isn't sincere?"

Add on the correlation between mental illness and LGBT identification.

One large point I've found is that this was NOT a major issue that men had to negotiate even 15, 20 years ago, let alone 50.

So we're still in a world where the sexual marketplace is far more difficult than it was previously, which has ripple effects on actual relationships, and the approach men have to take to them.

Still a bit crazy to me that the advice boils down to "men need to become better AND keep lowering their standards until they find someone who meets them."

Almost nobody out there saying "Women need to lower standards and pick a partner earlier."

Just seems asymetrical.

You say long term relationship but what you mean is marriage. This is 2025, they are not synonymous, and plenty of long term relationships fail to transition to marriage.

How does a woman make it to her 30s without landing in a stable, committed relationship?

Well, it takes two to tango. Even assuming that the woman in question wants a stable, committed relationship, it's pretty easy for her to have a run of bad luck and end up dating one or more men for years each, but every time the guy turns out to be crazy, or there is some other incompatibility issue that is too much to overcome. Sure, sometimes it is more the woman's fault than the man's, but it's possible for even a well-intentioned and mentally stable woman who is seeking marriage and who puts effort into her relationships to just happen to spend years in relationships that turn out to go nowhere.

How many 22 year old men really really want to be married and having kids versus 'these are my prime years, time to have fun before I settle down'?

There are men who want to marry early, but not the majority of them. And there are women who want to marry early, but again I would say not the majority of them. It's 2025, both sexes want fun and freedom before they're too old to enjoy themselves and have to settle down to adulting.

Where is the number 22 coming from? There has never been a society where the usual age of (first) marriage was 22 for men.

IIRC the USA got there, briefly, in the fifties, but men have typically been older than that at marriage- by world historical standards the typical marriage age would be around thirty for men.

Although that reflects two very different marriage patterns - the cisHajnal one where a man in his late twenties marries a woman who is only a few years younger than him by mutual consent, and has also spent several years as a single young adult because she is expected to save her own dowry first, and the more usual one where a man who has accumulated sufficient capital to support a wife buys (either literally or figuratively) a teenage girl from her father.

I'm not saying you should go out of your way looking for hypothetically bisexual women. I'm saying bi shouldn't be an automatic deal breaker. If a woman is living a hetero life, it isn't much relevant that she (performatively?) identifies as bi. She's probably more announcing that she is a good progressive than that she would ever be in a relationship with another woman. I find such people annoying and would not date one. Young single men should evaluate them on a case by case basis. Those two I knew in high school and college had men in their lives who didn't seem to mind.

Doesn't this suggest there's some factor that makes her less suited for such a relationship?

I suppose. But that applies equally for these forever single young men. There's an opposite framing of modern dating issues in which young men are less and less going to college, getting good careers or even stable employment and more playing video games and watching porn. We have a loser young men epidemic.

There's some problem with unrealistic standards on both sides. I don't know how to fix this though. If only we could tell people "You are a 4 out of 10. Here's a list of single people in your area who are also 4s. You think they are too fat, too short, over 30, don't make enough, too many partners, lame hobbies, too woke, chuds, etc? Too bad, this is your level. This or single are your choices."

How does a woman make it to her 30s without landing in a stable, committed relationship?

Quite easily. I'll let you in on an insight most men haven't realized yet.

You know how you often hear women complain "Where are all the good men?" and then totally a catch yet perenially single nerdy guy complain "Uhhh, we're right here, you just ignore us!"

The equivalent women exist. The equivalents to men who have hobbies and friend groups that don't intersect with the people they probably should be matching with. Dating's "dark matter", the women we all imagine probably exist yet no one can find. The problem is that men expect that the equivalent for women is within the same hobbies, that the match for lonely nerdy guys into anime should be lonely nerdy girls into anime. But nerdy girls into anime are rarely lonely. But I found them. I found the elusive missing good women.

The equivalents are nerdy bookish/library girls. There are a lot of women who spend their time in libraries, reading high or low brow stuff. Recently I had to do some work for a client that works in the library space, and I quickly realized that 90% of the employees there were quiet, nerdy (and no, certainly not unattractive) girls. I had to deal with pretty much all of the employees and most of them seemed shy and unaccustomed to dealing with a "normie" guy like me.

Had I made this discovery in my bachelor days, it probably would have completely changed how I approach dating.

I'll throw out an alternative answer- western courtship lengths are too long, and a couple of long term relationships that didn't work out could easily lead there.

I'd also add an alternative mundane answer:

By being unserious about relationships in general. In a society where extended adolescence and delayed adulthood are the norm it's not even out of the ordinary.

I think the "adjustment" for conditional dependence in ChatGPT model is suspect. It says it adjusts for some pairwise correlations, but some are not. For instance, having a long-term relationship and children sounds like one very big correlation with "BMI >30". I not fully trusting the adjustments it made either, and exact student loan cutoff can be debated. ( the ChatGPT presentation was tiresome so I didn't bother reading Grok analysis, as it had similar conclusion.) And accounting for dependencies wouldn't qualitatively change the main discussion point: if you define "marriageable women" population with any criteria, you will find that only a fraciton of "women" qualify, and there are many men competing for these individuals.

More important to bear in mind that if the calculation is correct and there is 4.5 million single, straight men competing for 1.1m single, straight women, then the competition will have important characteristics. Guys who are not forming committed long-term relationships will be overrepresented. Some are lacking in looks or charisma or stable financials or stable mental facuities. Your "average guy" hopefully can consider themselves above such very much less than average guys. The rest, guys who are hotter than your "average guy" and enjoy playing the field? I agree its not optimal for societal stability (and no fun, unless you are the hot dream guy).

Dunno what one can effectively do about it. Is it even possible produce a meme to make chastity and commitment popular again without sounding icky and conservative?

The rest, guys who are hotter than your "average guy" and enjoy playing the field? I agree its not optimal for societal stability (and no fun, unless you are the hot dream guy).

Yes, and I think this is in fact a major factor causing the issue.

A lot of guys out there have realized they can be complete lotharios without consequence, and so will run through as many women as they can (decreasing those womens' marriageability) while having no intent to commit.

But that implies a VERY DIFFERENT solution.

And its not solved by telling men to 'become worthy.'

Is it even possible produce a meme to make chastity and commitment popular again without sounding icky and conservative?

If you ask me, it would have to make that point that finding a good guy solves almost every other problem a woman can have, if only due to creating a much more financially stable situation for all involved.

But more to the point, there has to be some way of enforcing commitment so that both parties don't worry as much about the other defecting.

And the basic marriage contract, paired with 'no-fault' divorce doesn't do it.

So maybe some meme like covenant marriages, rebranded with a catchier title, can shift the equilibrium a bit.

But that implies a VERY DIFFERENT solution.

And its not solved by telling men to 'become worthy.'

I suppose in addition to telling men to 'become worthy' of marriage, the society would have to look askance at men who are worthy, but not settling down. That means the lothario who can and does pull a new chick every month would have to be judged and lose opportunities with people whose opinion he cares about and depends on.

I mean you know most of the mental illness and LGBT identification is fake, right? And some of those STI's are curable, you'd just have to wait for sex(if you're demanding a low body count woman I assume you're willing to wait, right?).

A lot of the STI numbers are HPV and herpes, which aren't curable, followed by chlamydia and trichomoniasis. There's fair reasons for herpes to be an issue, but HPV and trichomoniasis are almost always asymptomatic in men. The clap is the central example of an STI (literally the 'it burns when I pee' disease), but it is curable -- the trouble's usually diagnosing it, especially since only about half of those infected are aware of it -- but in turn I'd expect faceh may be concerned about the upstream causes.

I'm pretty skeptical about the gay or bisexual is fake thesis, but I'm also pretty skeptical that many straight guys would be that opposed to their significant other jorking it to some femslash every so often. Hell, I don't have a great grasp of the average straight guys' minds, but even if it would take some adjustment I'm not convinced that the average straight guy would be unwilling to date a woman who occasionally wanted to take a strapon to another woman, so long as the guy got invited.

That's part of the reason why the filter is for 'acute' mental illness, not just mental illness as a whole. If you can't deal with a partner who goes through mental health episodes every now and again then you probably shouldn't be getting married, that's true.

And its not just about the STIs, but more about the implications for a woman's decisionmaking if she ended up with an STI.

If you want to be frank, though, can you just say "Yes, I think men should be willing to settle for a woman who was diagnosed with 'serious' depression/anxiety/bipolar disorders, and/or who tests positive for Gonorrhoea."

And then we can see how the men looking for a committed partner react to that.

I'm also very willing to discuss men's sexual proclivities, since a huge factor causing many of the observed issues is some percentage of men (10% at a guess) who happily bed many, many women and toy with their emotions and make them 'less marriageable' with no intention of committing.

And its not just about the STIs, but more about the implications for a woman's decisionmaking if she ended up with an STI.

I suppose if you think decisions early in life, especially in a stage where circumstances are overly permissive, are implicative of some immutable qualities that will certainly have an impact later on... But by then you're not just picking "reasonable" marriageability qualities, you're optimizing.

I'll say straight up- I think you should be less picky. Having had gonorrhea is not a good thing, but compromising on it doesn't seem like the end of the world. I also think you should be willing to settle for a woman with depression or anxiety, because that's more likely to be a stress response to single women being forced by society to act outside of their gender roles and it'll go away once married. I'm also not sure why you consider a bisexual woman totally off limits- that shit is fake and women conform themselves to their partners.

We have seriously gone from "it's not a big deal if she's not a virgin, bro" to "it doesn't matter that she had gonorrhea, bro". The debasing of marriage (or hoeflation, as the kids are calling it these days) continues apace.

Fuck this gay earth.

If you want to marry a virgin I’m quite confident there are a number of fundamentalist sects within driving distance of you that accept converts. Most of them will have desperate women at them. If you don’t you don’t, curable VD’s don’t seem any worse than anything else that comes from fornicating- indeed, unlike the emotional baggage, they can be fixed.

Speaking from experience, this is all just a post hoc rationalization and confirmation of your preexisting incel worldview. Just because you were able to put the words in an AI's mouth doesn't make it any more impartial or objective.

Irregardless of AI, the "ratio" calculated by your fermi analysis is highly highly variable on small variations on the input data, especially if these data were collected in different studies or with different methodology. Even if your data comes from the same study, you have to also know that self-reported data is biased based on how different genders respond to questions.

If you want to talk about society and not just yourself, then your entire analysis is is premised on the wrong idea. You're deliberately nignoring all of the people who are happily married or at least in a relationship and only zeroing in on the miserable few who are not. Think about this alternative question: what percentage of women in each age bracket has whored or otherwise destroyed her marriage value? This is a much better look at the societal issue.[insert aislop here if available]

More pressing I think is the increasing number of single people even controlling for socioeconomic factors, as well as the decrease in the number of children per married couple. And besides that, the steadfast trend that educated professional people are more often single and have fewer children than the underclasses. Obese Laquisha is over there having 5 kids to that many dads, has $50k in debt, and probably has an STI too, so maybe your criteria aren't hitting at the root of the correct problem.

Friend, if you're going to write off any woman agéd thirty rounds of the sun as An Hag and Crone and thus not marriageable, you're cutting out a lot of potential spouses given the trends towards late marriage and divorce. Nay nay, I shall only wed with a virgin bride not less than twelve nor more than fourteen years of age, the prime times of a woman's life before she becomes a jade, when I myself am still a sprightly youth of five-and-thirty - the Roman Empire sadly no longer exists to accommodate you.

See 0.15 of this relevant movie.

The figures you quote for competition for mates ("said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections") are in large part because of the limits of male attractedness (not attractiveness but who they are attracted to); whether the man is 18, 28, 48, or 68 he still wants that 18 year old hottie. If thirty to forty year old men are writing off women with "oh my god she's thirty she's got one foot in the grave" then that ratio is not going to improve.

replied to the wrong comment?

Never expected a Foil Arms and Hog link here. A fellow Hibernian?

If you want to talk about society and not just yourself, then your entire analysis is is premised on the wrong idea. You're deliberately nignoring all of the people who are happily married or at least in a relationship and only zeroing in on the miserable few who are not.

This number is going down very fast. There are fewer people in relationships AROUND THE WHOLE PLANET. It's not a 'miserable few' anymore.

That's as objectively true and readily observable as possible.

Was this something you were aware of?

I'm trying to figure out why.

And what can be done about it.

People just want to quibble around definitions and criteria or claim the numbers HAVE to be wrong, without bringing their own numbers.

Gotta be honest, I've thought of every single objection you guys keep bringing up, and when I do the barest amount of research it actually makes the overall picture look WORSE than I thought.

So no, I'm not 'confirming my pre-existing incel worldview.'

My attempts to REBUT it keep making my worldview worse, every time.

And nobody has been able to provide any actual data or reasonable argument to the contrary.

Of course the fact that relationships and childbirth are dropping is true.

But your claim that the reason is because too many women are fat ugly whores who are not worth marrying is a very incel coded conclusion.

a very incel coded conclusion.

You use the word "incel coded" (and "incel worldview" above) as if said modifier implies, or is synonymous with, "incorrect." It's a sneer masquerading as argumentation.

If a conclusion is true, then it is true regardless of how "incel coded" it is.

What does it add to the conversation, except as a verbal "boo light"? I mean, at best it's Bulverism — "You only believe this because…".

It's not a reason why OP is wrong. It's pointing out that OP's incorrect conclusion is shared with a significant number of other people who share in this flawed ideology.

The claim that the reason childbirth is dropping is because too many women are fat ugly whores who are not worth marrying has been thoroughly rebutted in my initial response as well as by nearly every other commenter in this thread, and it's not worth rehashing again.

It's an objective truth that people have gotten fatter, not just women.

It's an subjective one that women's fashions have trended to the blue-haired and side-cutted. Androgynous, maybe. I would say 'less aesthetically feminine'.

Although on average, people are having less sex, the ones who are having it are having a lot more of it.

"I want to start a family with a woman I find attractive and young and who isn't the town bike" isn't the end of the world.

What does incel actually mean? He considers himself likely to be successful with women and is lamenting the plight of his fellows.

Maybe incel isn't the correct word stricly speaking. It's just coded in the sphere of ideologies such as red pill, mgtow, mra, pua, etc.

The fact is that OP claims he could be successful with women, but is still single, has been looking for years, and feels that worthy women are rare.

Maybe incel isn't the correct word stricly speaking. It's just coded in the sphere of ideologies such as red pill, mgtow, mra, pua, etc.

Again, what does that have to do with whether it's true or false, correct or incorrect?

Are you kidding me? You weren’t able to find real numbers, so you asked a system that has a well-known propensity to provide the kind of answers it thinks best match the question. I.e. you got a guesstimate, and you didn’t even bother getting it from a human. Nobody reading your post has gotten any information from it. There is no information there. It’s all just hunches and feelings, all the way down.

I get that you feel there aren’t many good women. Probably there aren’t. But this post makes a claim of objective reality that simply is not substantiated by its contents.

Are you kidding me? You weren’t able to find real numbers

Incorrect, I found the real numbers a year ago. I linked it in my post:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1042/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/221415?context=8#context

I've been considering this issue for a long time.

That's as 'real' as any other statistical conclusions can be.

But this post makes a claim of objective reality that simply is not substantiated by its contents.

Possible its not correct, and I even acknowledge that.

That's why I said:

First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong. All of my personal experience, anecdotal observations, research, and my gut fucking instinct all points to this being an accurate model of reality. But I am fallible.

If I’m wrong I want to know!

So what else you got?

I get that you feel there aren’t many good women

As I told you before. IT IS NOT ME YOU HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT.

You keep making it sound like I'm the only person with this belief.

Worry about all the OTHER guys who feel there aren't many good women.

It sounds like you just find the implications of this, if true, to be too uncomfortable to admit?

But if its true, surely its worth discussion.

These are not independent variables. Just to hammer on the most obvious point, obesity is inversely correlated with wealth, typically measured by race in these statistical reports, and wealth is also inversely correlated with single motherhood. So you’ve got a bunch of fat poor single mothers out there, probably with 5+ partners, sucking up all of those negative attributes. Meanwhile, on the other end, you have relatively thin and sexless women… who have college debt and are very liberal. So which is more important? Impossible to do without the headache of real analysis. Said again, I really don’t like the practice of asking AI as if it’s an oracle. It ain’t.

Finally, the most important question to ask about this data is: have things been getting worse, and why, and for whom? Obesity is obviously getting worse, and is a real scourge, but there’s no effort here to measure things which would have been very important in the recent (<100y) past, like: does she live in my town? Is she the right Christian denomination? Is she white and NOT Irish?

Mating is an incredibly complicated sorting problem, where the constraints are enforced by personal attraction, class standards, and social Brownian motion that brings suitable parties into contact. If I had to swipe through the millions of women in a couple-hour drive from me, my wife (or someone like her, single) would be a bit of a needle in a haystack. And yet I met her at the right time, seemingly without effort. My friends tend to have similar stories.

Put another way. Obesity is high, yet very few of the people in my area are fat. In my personal circle the number goes down even further. At the same time, wealth goes up. So, by those standards, if men want to marry they should leave the areas with bad women.

Personally, I believe there aren’t many good women, but that there are plenty. A helpful factor breaking this down is that there aren’t many good men either. Being intelligent and stable starts moving you one to three standard deviations out of center, and makes a strong position feasible. If you’re in that category, the remaining question is: what unmarriagable characteristics do women and men in your subcategory have and what can be done about them?

In my experience, intelligent and educated men struggle with, basically, giving women what they like. They don’t have much personal, visceral experience with flirting, pushing boundaries gently and challenging women without threatening them. At the same time, they are insensitive and unresponsive to women’s needs, which are typically more subtle (or she drops the point more easily than she feels). Men who have a lot of trouble are typically aggressively against caring about what women like, usually out of spite. This can be fixed with experience and focused learning.

For women, the problem is that they are socialized to disrespect men and to identify any male qualities that they don’t personally gel with as moral failings. They are more aware of what men do and don’t like, but are encouraged to view giving men what they like as a sort of selling out. (At the same time, women actually LIKE positive attention from men, so you get bizarre behavior like women wearing revealing clothing and insisting that it’s “for them.”) This obviously sabotages relationships, but again, you can learn your way back out of it.

Finally, educated men and women both have problems with respecting the privacy of a relationship (although women have more trouble). So when they have problems, instead of dealing with them personally, they broadcast them widely - meaning that other people’s dysfunctions enter the relationship.

All this can be learned away. So, for the high-class young men looking for relationships, they should fix what problems they have in themselves and anticipate and work towards lessening them in women, probably starting with the public-private distinction.

But then again, who am I to say, I’m just another guy who just happens to know a lot of great guys my age (late 20s, early 30s) who found and married great women and are having kids with them. I guess that’s elite privilege? If so, I’ll happily bear that designation; why shouldn’t being better entail getting better things? I know some guys who aren’t doing so well in life who have worse women - is that supposed to surprise me?

5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).

This seems like the first criteria that you'd want to relax.

I don't actually understand why other men care so much about body count. I mean, I can understand it on an intellectual level, but not on a visceral level. Perhaps that's just a side effect of my general pattern of sexual deviancy. I also have no instinctive revulsion towards incest between consenting adults, for example, although many other people swear to me that they most assuredly do.

It has to be visceral/instinctual; there's just no other explanation that makes sense. The people who do feel that are going to try to rationalize it quite a bit harder and, logically, would rather not have to work at sexual attraction because it makes the relationship much more likely to succeed (for obvious reasons). Compare [the emotional impulse behind] 6/6/6 for women. Preference falsification applies to everyone, especially those that suggest vanity.

Conversely, we should expect men who have to fight themselves every time they need to prove they're attracted to their wife to be worse at marriage, which naturally leads to a higher divorce rate. The implication when it's brought up is that it's all on the woman, but obviously that's not true (and considering the market value of sexual access to the female body has fallen through the floor -> sex is expected when dating, women who might not otherwise want to do that really aren't in a great situation).

It makes sense that the revulsion is instinctual; from a biological standpoint women who intentionally seek out sex are malfunctioning since it's very risky for zero benefit. It's only been within the last 70 years that the risk (of pregnancy) dropped to literally zero, so this trait hasn't evolved out of the male population yet, and the selection pressure might actually be in the direction of reinforcement anyway.

no instinctive revulsion

Interestingly, there are a couple of sex things I do feel instinctive revulsion towards (seeing two conventional men interact sexually is one of those; actually, I suspect this is also true for [obligate] gay men, which probably explains some furries... among other things) so I just kind of map that feeling onto this.

Perhaps that's just a side effect of my general pattern of sexual deviancy.

Personally, I would be more concerned about marrying someone who isn't sufficiently deviant/has too much instinctual revulsion about sex to actually be any fun to sleep with... but then again, low body count kind of falls out of that equation anyway for other reasons so maybe that's just a self-serving rationalization too.

makes sense that the revulsion is instinctual; from a biological standpoint women who intentionally seek out sex are malfunctioning since it's very risky for zero benefit.

Evolutionarily speaking there can be lot of benefit to a woman seeking out the best men instead of letting her genes' destiny just entirely depend on male decisions. This does not have to necessarily include seeking out actual sex with many men, but in practice the two will be correlated.

seeing two conventional men interact sexually is one of those; actually, I suspect this is also true for [obligate] gay men

Nah, no way. Otherwise they wouldn't, you know, spend so much time having sex with men, often times in semi-public places (bathhouses, orgies, etc) where they also watch other men interact sexually with each other as well.

I don't actually understand why other men care so much about body count.

It has a noticeable impact on divorce rates once it gets 'too high.'. 0-1 previous partners is, it seems, the 'ideal' there.

(and women generally had fewer bodies at the same age in the past, using this same data)

Also it correlates with the STI criteria.

And it probably correlates with the mental illness criteria.

OBVIOUSLY it correlates with the single motherhood criteria.

So a man MIGHT compromise on this, but more women having more sex partners is still going to reduce the overall size of the pool of good marital partners.

Yes but it's only correlated with those things. It itself isn't really a bad thing. Much like how a college degree is correlated with professional skill, but it's not equivalent to professional skill, which is why it's not unheard of (especially in say, tech) for people to get hired to highly-skilled positions without degrees.

(You also don't need to measure single motherhood by proxy. It can be measured directly. The child has a correlation of 1 with itself, and the absence of children has a correlation of 1 with the absence of children.)

It's the double standard, though, and it's going to choke relationships if it still is applied. Men want to sleep with as many women as they can, but they want their prospective partner to never have slept with anyone, or at least only one guy before him ("0-1 previous partners is, it seems, the 'ideal' there").

Well, seeing as how the ratio of men: women is about 50:50, that ain't doable. Either a few women are sleeping with all the guys, or a few guys are sleeping with all the women (the latter case not making most men happy at all) or we get Sexual Liberation when women are supposed to be approaching sex with the same kind of mindset as men, wanting casual flings and novel sexual experiences, in which case yeah you're going to get more than 1 previous partner. Men will have to dial down their own body count if they want "women who haven't slept with a lot of guys, but who are still willing to have sex with me while we're dating and before we've fallen in love and before marriage". Or go back to the days of "if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it" and no sex before marriage, and I think modern men don't want that kind of limitation either.

'If you won't marry anyone but a virgin, then you'd better leave a few of them around!'

If you leave any virgins around, they are not going to be virgins when you come back; they are going to get popped by some other cad. So you might as well take what you can get. Like unto a communal plate of French fries; such is the tragedy of the commons.

To solve the problem, need to privatize the commons.

Again, I suspect that if you go to the nearest fundamentalist church you will find at least a few women who are virgins well into their twenties. They may have other problems, but if you wanted to join a filter bubble where you could get a virgin bride those exist.

My guess is that you- like most guys complaining about this- do not actually want the fundy tradeoff set. You don't want to be sole breadwinner, to have to give up porn, etc. But that's what the old-school marriage contract that you say you want looked like. Those are the conditions for having a submissive virgin wife.

Man, I think that men who pine for a virgin bride have caught a glimpse of the loveliness in the life you’ve described. I wish someone could explain the rest to them such that they could see the beauty of the whole package. Some secular men would be moved by it; many others would at least respect it. And it would strengthen the spines and zippers of Christian men and women alike.

I’m not the right person to do it. I’m not even sure what form it would take. But it would be a win for truth and beauty, to say nothing of the people involved.

You don't want to be sole breadwinner, to have to give up porn, etc. But that's what the old-school marriage contract that you say you want looked like.

Those arent the parts of the fundy tradeoff I have a problem with. Giving up porn is not a huge deal for most guys if theyre having sex, doing it in advance somewhat but propably not a dealbreaker for people otherwise interested in that kind of life, if they believe in the payoff. Sole breadwinner, propably is an issue but depends on how much you make - and rich people are less likely to be super religious, so thats propably not the driver either.

If you leave any virgins around, they are not going to be virgins when you come back; they are going to get popped by some other cad.

'Tis an old complaint!

Go and catch a falling star

By John Donne

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

Yeah, to unilaterally abstain from the sexual markets while waiting for your hypothetical virgin waifu (lest you get accused of double standards), just means sitting around dick-in-hand while she gets pounded out by other guys.

Might as well enjoy the decline.

And the same goes for women: if you don't put out for the guy, he will dump you. It's a long, long time since I was a teenager, but the advice columns in the girls' magazines were full of "my boyfriend wants to have sex with me but I don't want to have sex but he says he'll leave me if I don't".

Sexual Revolution was not good for everyone.

I find some of the cutoff criteria rather questionable. Is >=5 sexual partners that bad? Wouldn't be a deal breaker to me, but if they broke double digits and weren't unlucky serial monogamists, I'd raise an eyebrow.

A hard cutoff of the age of 30? Nonsense, you can cross that by half a decade before having at least 2 kids becomes an uphill struggle.

Obesity? Not ideal, but we live in the Age of Ozempic. It's a solvable issue, if everything else was fine.

I feel like a more realistic model would use a point or percentile system, weighted by how much the average man cares about things. Has had 8 sexual partners, but is hot and filthy rich? I bet my ass 9/10 men would overlook that.

At any rate, my experience is that assortative matching works pretty well, and whatever someone's "sexual market value" is, they tend to find someone else who is a close fit. This can entail compromises on different axes, maybe you'd accept someone being below average looking if they were smart and kind. Or a hot model snagging a balding and chubby multimillionaire.

I only observe the US dating scene from a great distance, but as others point out, people aren't suffering that badly.

At the end of the day, if you're trying to sell yourself for more than others think you're worth, you'll find yourself with no buyers. And in the marriage market, your value will inevitably decline at some point, age being the most likely reason. Of course, if some 37 year old career woman malds about not finding a 6'3 witty finance guy with a strong family orientation, then she either settles for less, or decides that she won't settle and goes unmarried. This applies both ways.

Your analysis strikes me as catastrophizing, directionally correct but magnitudinally wrong.

Is >=5 sexual partners that bad? Wouldn't be a deal breaker to me, but if they broke double digits and weren't unlucky serial monogamists, I'd raise an eyebrow.

If in ${CurrentYear} due to hoeflation, a woman's Wonderfulness as a potential wife doesn't start losing its shine until she's been railed by enough men to field a full-court 5-on-5 basketball game, things are bleaker than I thought.

I feel like a more realistic model would use a point or percentile system, weighted by how much the average man cares about things. Has had 8 sexual partners, but is hot and filthy rich? I bet my ass 9/10 men would overlook that.

Sure, trade-offs can hypothetically exist. However, men take what they can get, even if they'd prefer a chaste wife. The opportunity cost for 9+/10 men of an 8-body-count hot and filthy rich wife is not an almost-as-hot almost-as-rich chaste wife, but a plain, non-rich wife with ~8ish partners.

If in ${CurrentYear} due to hoeflation, a woman's Wonderfulness as a potential wife doesn't start losing its shine until she's been railed by enough men to field a full-court 5-on-5 basketball game, things are bleaker than I thought.

I grew up in a very different society and culture, even if I ended up Western-adjacent by preference. I don't think 5 partners is a big deal at all, at least for a girl who isn't like 16 years old and making her way through the entire football team. By the cutoff age of 30, that's less than a partner ever 2 years (counting from 18). Even at 25, that's just a string of serial monogamy, each relationship over a year. Of course, in an Indian context that would be a serious concern to most suitors, this is a sexually conservative country.

I also take "fairness" seriously. I have well over 5 sexual partners, and I'm only in my late 20s, and I spent most of the last decade in 3 committed relationships. I find it hard to condemn women for the same behavior I engage in. I don't condemn other men for seeking different things, but they're going to have to pay a very heavy tax on their preferences. If they hold them that strongly? Well, such is their lot.

I still ask if they consider carefully what they're asking for. If someone tells you they have seen individual people for years, and it didn't pan out, that is very different from "hoeing around" in a non-commital manner. Especially when the age of marriage has shot up, such that it's socially expected that high school and college flings don't necessarily end in matrimony.

Sure, trade-offs can hypothetically exist. However, men take what they can get, even if they'd prefer a chaste wife. The opportunity cost for 9+/10 men of an 8-body-count hot and filthy rich wife is not an almost-as-hot almost-as-rich chaste wife, but a plain, non-rich wife with ~8ish partners.

There are a significant number of "almost-as-hot almost-as-rich chaste wives" around in India. Less so in the West. And at least @2rafa, who probably mogs us in the net worth department, doesn't think that's a revealed preference.

Besides, unless they tell you, or you know them for a long time, how would you even know exactly or approximately how many men they slept with? It's the easiest thing in the world to lie about.

Is >=5 sexual partners that bad?

You go much above that and it has a VERY noticeable impact on divorce rates which guys are aware of.

I would admit that many guys would accept it, of course. But that says more about THEM, I think.

But if you were talking to a 23-25 year old women who admits to 6, 7, 8 whatever, what does that imply about her decision-making?

And suffice it to say, even if you exclude that criteria entirely, it doesn't really fix the ratio problem.

I only observe the US dating scene from a great distance, but as others point out, people aren't suffering that badly.

Check in on Gen Z sometime.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-much-of-gen-z-will-be-unmarried-at-40

Your analysis strikes me as catastrophizing, directionally correct but magnitudinally wrong.

Show the countervailing evidence. I beg you.

Relationship formation is in freefall across the fucking planet, I think 'catastrophe' is actually a fair characterization.

Reproducing relevant comment elsewhere:

Look at the graph in the link you shared that shows divorce rate by number of premarital partners. It shows that the divorce rate for women who had 2 partners exceeds that of women had 6-9!

There is a 10 percentage point difference for the arbitrary cut off of 4-5 and the maximum at 10+ partners. The difference between 4-5 and 6-9 is negligible, maybe 1 PP.

This makes the choice of 4-5 very hard to justify. After all, you should also rule out women who have had precisely 2 partners by the same logic.

Note that you also need to account for the fact that a minority of people divorce multiple times and drive up the average.

I've linked the image in question here.

/images/17482841643516097.webp

You also have to read these numbers through the different thresholds for getting married in the first place - the people with shorter previous relationships are propably less likely to get married in the first place, and so its more meaningful when they do - but that doesnt hold in the "intervention" condition of "why dont you consider those as potential wifes".

If men were very efficient in assesing divorce risk and chose to marry accordingly, you would expect this graph to go up in the beginning and then be flat, which is more or less what it does.

he people with shorter previous relationships are propably less likely to get married in the first place

IDK about this. People could be more likely to get married because they don't spend as much time dithering about it.

This graph isnt about getting married in a certain timeframe, its about getting married to a certain partner. There could still be some effect of that... though I notice now that the IFS data doesnt have age, so bodycount isnt necessarily about relationship length, as it would be for someone evaluating the mostly-similarly-aged women he might date. Note also that their table 1 shows the odds of marrying partner #n continually decining (beware the pooled fields).

But if you were talking to a 23-25 year old women who admits to 6, 7, 8 whatever, what does that imply about her decision-making?

Make that a 23-25 year old man, and what does that imply about his decision-making? You can't have it both ways: you can't have "the guys get to sow their wild oats but then there is a crop of fresh virgin brides when they decide to settle down", or else you get "the fresh virgin brides are snagged by the 40-50 year old successful men leaving the 23-25 year old guys to be incels".

Unless we had a sex ratio where there's one man for every two, three or four women, we are not going to get "Joe gets to sleep with a ton of hot chicks while he's young and randy before he settles down to be a family man husband and father aged thirty, but Josie only has one boyfriend since high school who she marries, or if he breaks up with her, she then finds a guy at college and marries him aged twenty-three". The numbers will not work out. Joe, Bob, Bill, Sam, Phil, Ben and Tom can't sleep with ten girls each unless those ten girls all sleep with ten guys each to keep the access equitable. Certainly Joe can sleep with ten girls if he's hot and rich etc. but that means Bob, Sam, etc. don't get to sleep with those girls or only get to sleep with one or two girls instead of the ten they envy Joe for getting.

That's the point I want to get across: both sexes do not get to eat their cake and have it. Joe can't have a stream of girls to have fun with and then settle down with a maiden bride because there aren't enough spare women for each man to have a string of sexual adventures but each girl he sleeps with only sleeps with two or three men over her dating life. Josie can't sleep around like a guy and not face consequences because the good old double standard and when she wants to settle down to be a family woman wife and mother aged thirty, the men in her age range will still be looking for the twenty-three year old maiden bride instead.

I understand you're a woman and you feel this is unfair, but further up faceh posts an article claiming that 80% of women are sleeping with 20% of men.

How much more sex-suppression can there be done among men? Female selection is already enforcing the sex suppression. 80% of men are receiving lower than average amounts of sex!

How much room is left on the female side? Well, 20% of men are running through 80% of the women. It's a small share of men creating the "bodies" problem, while 80% of women are cooperating! Why is it that this smacks of double standards to you?

I don't know if I believe the 80/20 thing, but part of the problem is the divide between what men want from sex (sex), what women want from sex (intimacy) and that there are men who want love and romance and women who want sex and no strings attached.

The plaint is that it's easy for women to have sex, that a single woman can just go out and hook up with a guy whereas a single guy has to jump through all kinds of hoops. Yes. Think about that. Men have such low/no standards that "a standing prick hath no conscience" so if the woman isn't actively repellent, they'll sleep with her. That's where we get the "a woman can have sex just for the asking" part.

Meanwhile, women want (I'm not going to deny it) casual sex too, but a lot of women want "sex AND", where it may be as simple as "sex with the hot/desirable guy" or more complicated with "sex with the guy I'm hoping will commit" or "sex turned into feelings and now I can't leave even though I know this is just a fling for him".

You go much above that and it has a VERY noticeable impact on divorce rates which guys are aware of.

There is a quite a lot to scrutinize here - firstly, the fact that is is an article from the "Institute for Family Studies." The numbers themselves come from the CDC, but even the IFS doesn't quite say what you say it does. There is not a strict correlation between high body count and divorce rate, the biggest jump is not at 5+, and they sort of mention but mostly brush past confounders like "People with few sexual partners are more likely to be religious and thus more likely to be opposed to divorce."

I also question how you conclude that "most guys are aware of" these alleged facts? I think most guys have an intuitive feeling that women with a lot of sexual partners make them feel less secure ("she's going to be comparing me with every other man she's slept with") but not that it automatically makes them less committed to the partner they eventually choose.

There is not a strict correlation between high body count and divorce rate

There is between body count and STD rates.

And single motherhood.

And probably mental health as well.

Unless you're arguing that Body count is a GOOD thing for a partner to have... best you can say is that this is a neutral issue that can probably be ignored.

Unless you're arguing that Body count is a GOOD thing for a partner to have... best you can say is that this is a neutral issue that can probably be ignored.

No, I would put a high body count in the negative column, but most men won't consider it an automatic dealbreaker. If you get to know someone (amazing concept, that) you may find out if they've had a lot of sex because they consider it a fun thing to do while they are young and unattached, or desperately seeking an alpha and delusional about their own market value. Or just sluts who don't value monogamy.

I do not buy the "too many cocks inflicts psychic damage on females!" theory.

What proportion of men are:

  1. Making over 50 000$ in a profession with enough employment prospects and stability that they could possibly support a family. I guess this can vary depending on location, so you could replace it with "makes enough money to not use over 1/3 of his salary to pay for a 2 bedroom living space, be it house, condo or apartment, in a neighborhood where children could safely grow and thrive".
  2. Emotionally stable. Most importantly: not violent.
  3. Not obese / is at least in minimal physical shape to offer some sort of physical protection for his family.
  4. Not going to cheat. Hard to know, but it's important to note that not cheating means jack shit for someone who does not get any and never had the opportunity to.
  5. Responsible financially and don't blow their entire discretionary income on hobbies.
  6. Not somebody's baby daddy already.

Not including but probably should:

  1. Not drug abusers
  2. Not a degenerate gooner (does not subscribe to an only fans; it's only fair to judge the people who enable the sex work as well)
  3. Again, IF HE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY, would not have a body count over 5 partners? (I understand it's less of a dealbreaker for women than for men)
  4. We mentionned hobbies already, but what proportion of men are not deeply invested into women repellent hobbies? That depends per generation, but for some generations it's manga/anime, for others it was video games, now it's probably like being terminally online on racist or "red pill" forums.

I mean, I could probably keep going and match all of your points with equivalents.

Most importantly: not violent.

Why are you assuming this with regard to women's preferences? Also, not violent to anyone, or just not violent to her or specific people?

support a family

physical protection for his family

So it's important to be a patriarchal man except when it isn't?

I mean, I could probably keep going and match all of your points with equivalents.

Do it.

Please.

I beg you.

Run the numbers on it all.

Give me some evidence that counteracts what appears to be a very clear trend.

Also, your criteria probably excludes 95+% of the black male population.

I'll caveat right away that these numbers are coming from Grok (and Grok is pulling from academic sources that are worse than just an LLM); I don't trust them, you shouldn't trust them, yada yada. two links, because I derped on setting up the first (yes, I shouldn't have asked about the felony one first; everything else got obsessed with race.).

  • "Thus, 35-45% of 52-68% yields an estimate of 18-31% of American men aged 19-30 having both an income above $50,000 and stable employment."

  • "To estimate the percentage of American men aged 19-30 who are both emotionally stable and have no history of interpersonal or domestic violence:[...] Assuming independence (a simplification, as mental health issues like PTSD or substance abuse can correlate with IPV perpetration), we multiply the probabilities: 0.80 × 0.70 to 0.85 × 0.75 = 56-64%. If we account for correlation (e.g., mental distress increasing IPV likelihood), the range might be slightly lower, around 50-60%."

  • "Thus, an estimated 16.4 to 18.2 million American men aged 19–30 are not obese [ed: 60%], based on recent data."

  • "Approximately 80–89% of American men aged 19–30 would not cheat in a relationship given the opportunity, based on reported infidelity rates and adjusted for hypothetical temptation." [ed: I told you I don't trust the LLM]

  • "Approximately 40–60% of American men aged 19–30 are fiscally responsible, defined as regularly saving, budgeting, and managing debt without significant financial strain. This range accounts for the variability in financial independence and literacy among young adults."

  • "Approximately 65–75% of American men aged 19–30 have not fathered a child."

  • "Approximately 65–75% of American men aged 19–30 have not had more than five previous real-life sexual partners, based on CDC data, General Social Survey findings, and recent trends in sexual inactivity"

One that pidgeon didn't cover, but I think you are motioning around:

  • "If 10-15% of men aged 19-30 have adult felony convictions and 3-6% have juvenile felony-equivalent records, a rough estimate, assuming minimal overlap (since juvenile records often don’t carry into adult systems), might be 13-20% of American men aged 19-30 with either a felony record or a juvenile record equivalent to a felony."

Add them together, and Grok says:

  • "Approximately 2–5% of American men aged 19–30 meet all the criteria: stable job, income above $50,000/year, no history of interpersonal violence, not obese, would not cheat in a relationship given the opportunity, fiscally responsible, have not fathered a child, and no more than five previous real-life sexual partners."

[caveat: it did so with the formula "0.65 × 0.30 × 0.80 × 0.60 × 0.80 × 0.40 × 0.65 × 0.65 ≈ 0.0092". Don't trust LLMs!]

And this doesn't include stuff like orientation (despite what you'd think from the yaoi fans, there's a lot of distrust of actual bi guys among women) or student debt or willingness-to-have-kids or whether they're already married. It still leaves a gender gap, but given that the 'seekers' approach was comparing two decades of men against one decade of women, that's not really surprising.

I think that's bad in a different sense; having the vast majority of both gender 'not count' suggests that we're measuring the wrong thing.

((And I think this sort of button-pushing is itself dangerous, in the sense that it's letting both of us do harder statistical analysis without the gut-level integration of the knowledge that adding multiple filters after each other breaks apart comparisons.))

I went and fed the initial criteria I listed through Gemma 3, had to correct it for one misunderstanding it made. It gave between 4.3% and 11.2% of the US male population.

I fed it through a Deepseek R1 Distill to see if a reasoning model went about it a different way. The reasoning chain, the way it tried to guesstimate, was wild. Still, it came up with 5-10%, so roughly similar.

Strikethrough: Sorry, just realised I also forgot to tell it this is of SINGLE men, so the numbers are probably significantly lower. I'll prompt again.

And I'm sure I could add criteria. I forgot to ask them for cishet men, I forgot to tell them to exclude men above a certain age.

If you want to put a ceiling on body count for women, it'd be fair to put a floor on it for men; at least 1 partner; virginity is not attractive for men, it's lack of social proof. Maybe if we wanted to be more fair we could put a specific age to them. A floor of 1 partner for men after 20, a ceiling of 5 partners for women before 25.

*SUBSEQUENT EDIT: I reran the numbers with SINGLE men and cishet, and it gave less than 2% of men fulfilling these criteria. Note that I don't trust AI estimates for these since it uses extremely simplistic analysis and can't really account for correlation between criteria appropriately, and tends to mix specifics in ways they shouldn't (compared US-wide salaries to rents in highly inflated high cost of living areas) but I think for both men and women, with my and your criteria, we're probably both in single digit percentages.

If you want to see this as a blackpill, go ahead, but I think both criteria sets probably are too restrictive. Women probably shouldn't be looking only for men who are financially capable of being single income breadwinners, men probably shouldn't be looking at education debt and >5 body count as dealbreakers.

As for the large contingent who fall short of these criteria, they'll end up matching with one another.

Don't you think we could create a similar list of "minimum requirements for a marriageable single male" that would likewise exclude the vast majority of single men? While your criteria vaguely gesture at a general problem that seems true (a lot of women on the market will be excluded by a man with reasonable filters), your crunching the numbers to conclude it's something like 1-in-10 odds of finding an acceptable woman seem similar to Newsweek's infamous 1986 article "Too Late for Prince Charming", publishing a marriage study allegedly concluding that college-educated women over 40 were more likely to be killed in a terrorist attack than to get married. This study was later found to have distorted or misestimated a lot of numbers for the sake of producing a sensational punchline. Many, many more women over 40 than that study would have estimated did in fact wind up married.

I think we could quibble a lot over your criteria. You think most men would be bothered more by a woman with a body count > 5 than a sex worker? Or would find drug use more acceptable than student loan debt?

It's easy to ask ChatGPT to crunch some artificially-generated numbers to produce a blackpill. But sometimes "lived experience" is actually more convincing than dubious statistics, so I'd like to ask if 90% of the single men you know are incapable of finding a decent woman? Because that is not my experience. I know a few guys who seem to struggle, but it's nothing like "90% can't find a woman who isn't an obese single mother with BPD"...

I would hazard a guess that marriageable men are thinner on the ground than marriageable women, even.

Don't you think we could create a similar list of "minimum requirements for a marriageable single male" that would likewise exclude the vast majority of single men?

Yes?

And then what.

You think most men would be bothered more by a woman with a body count > 5 than a sex worker? Or would find drug use more acceptable than student loan debt?

I think a sex worker will ALMOST CERTAINLY have a body count greater than 5, so it'd be redundant to include.

And yeah, I think a guy serious about marriage would start to have second thoughts if he learned his GF had 5, 6, 7, bodies. Thats the point at which it has very noticeable impact on divorce rates. Guys are aware of that.

Of course, other factors could override that.

And for drug use... depends on the drug, doesn't it?

It's easy to ask ChatGPT to crunch some artificially-generated numbers to produce a blackpill.

My dude, I found the numbers myself, a year ago, no LLM involved:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1042/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/221415?context=8#context

The numbers are a 'real' as any other statistical conclusion can be.

so I'd like to ask if 90% of the single men you know are incapable of finding a decent woman?

YES.

Or damn near to it.

I'm surrounded by men who are great catches by all appearances, and THEY LITERALLY ALL HAVE THE PRECISE, EXACT SAME COMPLAINTS ABOUT TRYING TO FIND A PARTNER IN THE CURRENT SEXUAL MARKETPLACE.

EVERY ONE. I've got multiple friends whose women divorced them for seemingly no decent reason in the past 4 years. They are even MORE scarred and they're still scared of the dating scene they've been out of for a while.

I go on reddit's dating advice forum and its the same complaints. Note that one is complaining about the UK. It isn't just limited to America!

The young guys are cooked. Its hard to get even to a second date.. Guys will be single for years and years, despite living in NYC and checking all the boxes.

Its everywhere. These people are not outliers. Yet the advice always assumes they are the problem.

Almost half of Gen Z guys claim they're not even dating anymore.

Relationship formation is cratering across the globe

I talk to anyone, ANYWHERE and they're all saying the exact same thing about it. I DEFY you to find anyone who is having a 'good time' trying to find a partner.

Yes.

IT IS THAT BAD.

Guys who are CURRENTLY single are having a nightmarish time finding a partner.

Note: I have to exclude the guys I was great friends with in college (circa 2010) who are all still married with kids now.

Which just emphasizes how much worse its gotten since, say, 2013.

I think a sex worker will ALMOST CERTAINLY have a body count greater than 5, so it'd be redundant to include.

Depends pretty heavily on how you're defining sex worker, but even the prostitution-with-numbers-filed-off escort services sometimes do have one- or two-off sugar daddy sorta behaviors, and that'd be at least a small red flag to me. I don't get why straight guys care about how many people who've seen a potential partner naked, but if you think it's a significant, there are 'sex workers' who have zero body count but tens or hundreds of thousands of watchers via camera.

I think a sex worker will ALMOST CERTAINLY have a body count greater than 5, so it'd be redundant to include.

But you put it in the "not a dealbreaker" column. I assume you were also including women with OnlyFans who might not actually have had a lot of sex.

And for drug use... depends on the drug, doesn't it?

Sure, but my point is you seem to be eliding a lot of nuance. For some guys, weed will be a dealbreaker, and I would hope any reasonable person would consider meth or heroin a dealbreaker.

I'm surrounded by men who are great catches by all appearances, and THEY LITERALLY ALL HAVE THE PRECISE, EXACT SAME COMPLAINTS ABOUT TRYING TO FIND A PARTNER IN THE CURRENT SEXUAL MARKETPLACE.

EVERY ONE. I've got multiple friends whose women divorced them for seemingly no decent reason in the past 4 years. They are even MORE scarred and they're still scared of the dating scene they've been out of for a while.

Okay, I believe you, but your bubble is evidently very different than mine (and I'm not in some trad red bubble - far from it), and I am unconvinced that yours is more representative.

Guys who are CURRENTLY single are having a nightmarish time finding a partner.

This I believe, but I don't believe it's because women in general are nightmares and mostly unmarriageable. I believe it's because dating norms and Tinderification have made dating a nightmare. That and norms you and I would probably agree are detrimental, like feminist hazard zones and the much-discussed choosiness of 80% of women wanting the top 5% of men (which is also a consequence of Tinderification). That said, I remain skeptical of the blackpill take that always circles around to "Actually, the solution is we should somehow contrive to force women to settle for... me." (Should I settle for a woman I'm not really into? Heavens no!)

I believe it's because dating norms and Tinderification have made dating a nightmare.

What do you think the mechanism for that is?

Hint: your average woman on Tinder is getting easily 50x the attention that the average male is getting

Gender Average Match Rate Male 0.6% Female 10% Overall 1.96%

What would all this excess attention and the APPEARANCE OF CHOICE do to a woman's psyche, and her tendency to settle for a man? Any guesses?

Just throw some thoughts out there.

Do you think that women will become more likely to marry?

"Actually, the solution is we should somehow contrive to force women to settle for... me."

Of course.

But more and more women aren't settling for ANYONE.

Objective fact.

What now?

What do you think the mechanism for that is?

Hint: your average woman on Tinder is getting easily 50x the attention that the average male is getting

Unsurprising. Tinder commodifies sex, and men mostly play a numbers game. (The average woman at a sock hop in the 50s or at your church social probably gets vastly more attention than the average male too.)

Of course.

But more and more women aren't settling for ANYONE.

Objective fact.

What now?

Accept that you have stiff competition, but it's not as hopeless as blackpillers would have you believe. Do not succumb to blackpill solutions like "Women are all hypergamous slutwhores and we should just make them marry mesomeone."

Unsurprising. Tinder commodifies sex, and men mostly play a numbers game. (The average woman at a sock hop in the 50s or at your church social probably gets vastly more attention than the average male too.)

And now she can get attention from almost every guy in a 20 mile radius.

The worst part, as I see it, is that every woman is AWARE they can hop on the apps for a quick confidence boost, casual sex, or even a free meal.

There's zero friction.

So even the ones who aren't actively using the apps are having their behavior modified by their existence.

Accept that you have stiff competition, but it's not as hopeless as blackpillers would have you believe. Do not succumb to blackpill solutions like "Women are all hypergamous slutwhores and we should just make them marry mesomeone."

Doesn't work when on a societal level we're trending towards the hellscape that is South Korean dating.

Even massive government subsidies hasn't helped

So we see that we in the U.S. haven't hit rock bottom yet.

i.e.

IT CAN IN FACT GET WORSE.

I don't have to be a blackpiller to say "Guys maybe we should TRY to change course because I see where this is going."

South Korea's problems are numerous, and the lack of desire of South Korean women to marry and have children is more that they perceive it as being a shit deal for them than that they are all sleeping around. (SK is still a pretty conservative country and most of them aren't.)

Most American women are also not just ordering up dick on Tinder.

When you say "We should change course," do you have any suggestions that aren't basically "Reduce female agency"? Because you seem to blame everything on women while rejecting any suggestion that unsuccessful men are to blame for their own lack of success .

Because you seem to blame everything on women while rejecting any suggestion that unsuccessful men are to blame for their own lack of success .

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'M POINTING OUT A SYSTEMIC ISSUE THAT IS EFFECTING EVERYONE IN EVERY COUNTRY SIMULTANEOUSLY AND YOU THINK I'M PLACING BLAME ON ANY SPECIFIC GENDER, OR GROUP?

This is why the problem is impossible to discuss, everyone automatically assumes you're an incel, or bitter, or hate women, or are just motivated by envy or something OTHER than 'concern for the very trajectory of society.'

The only reason it reads any differently is because every other institution blames men explicitly. I don't have to make that argument, but pushing a different line automatically makes people assume you're blaming women instead. Even trying to make the case lowers your status and thus tends to make people take you less seriously.

There's no benefits to being the one person talking about it like this. Plenty of potential costs.

And so the issue goes undiscussed, let alone solved.

ahem.

No. I'm not blaming women. Women themselves are less happy than they've ever been. I feel bad for them too.

I'm blaming the lack of cultural pressure on women; a society that places zero expectations on women to settle or marry or have kids.

It is unsurprising that women live up to those expectations when Academia, Corporate America, Hollywood, Social Media, and all the dating apps are telling them they don't have to settle, ever.

Whilst continually telling men that they're worthless, from a young age.

Then giving men advice that provably isn't working. Anywhere. Then blaming men for this even though its clear there's something different causing it. "Why are the younger men turning aggressively to the right?" Because that's the only place that DOESN'T blame them.

do you have any suggestions that aren't basically "Reduce female agency"?

Identify the cohort of males who are carousing and stealing women's most fertile years and cull them. Just straight up kill 'em.

If that's too extreme, we can just castrate them. Compromise!

That cuts out a major factor that is both preventing women from settling AND is making them less marriageable. Heavily punish males who exploit young women's emotions and leave them worse off than they found them.

If that's still too extreme, then maybe just ban dating apps altogether.

If THAT is too extreme, just require every dating app to VERY publicly disclose their actual success rates for men and women forming relationships, so people can make an informed decision when using them. There's a reason they don't disclose them normally. They're abysmal.

And then, reduce or remove all economic policies that explicitly favor hiring women so that women are less likely to marry a corporation. There's enough competition amongst biological men without having to compete against Megacorps anyway.

Then reduce or remove most policies designed to allow an unmarried women to live 'comfortably' on the public dime, thus becoming brides of the state.

Basically, remove the economic policies that keep women from enduring any significant difficulties, ever, from childhood on, so that women will actually need a man in their life for more than just happy fun sexy times. This is called "ALIGNING THE INCENTIVES."

But that's about the most politically unpopular idea possible, since poor, single mothers are genuinely the most sympathetic group out there, across the political spectrum.

None of these steps are 'reducing female agency,' in the sense women are still fully able to make whatever choices they want without the law stepping in.

But they're leveling out the system so its not completely and utterly slanted against (average) men's interests, as it has been for like 50 years.

Every single one of those suggestions is tongue in cheek because the whole problem is that NOBODY serious is willing to even suggest any solution that admits that women have every single social and legal advantage possible over the average guy, and thus there might need to be a correction.

There's no political solution unless enough men are willing to do some things that will upset women en masse, or some strongman takes power who just does it. And even then it ain't guaranteed, since this problem exists in dicatorships too.

all I'm asking from YOU is that you politely stand aside and don't raise a fuss if men start taking steps that will address the problem since you're clearly not interested in accepting any responsibility or otherwise intervening to help.

If you suddenly start interfering with attempts to address the problem, you're really not on men's side anyway.

More comments

the lack of desire of South Korean women to marry and have children is more that they perceive it as being a shit deal for them

How many men would take the bargain of "you'll have to get married and have a kid, preferably a son, and pour resources into that kid to succeed by getting into the limited range of jobs deemed socially acceptable; this will mean no childhood for the kid but that's the price to pay. you also have to work. you also have to do all the housework and childrearing, because your husband will be working more than he is at home, will have obligations outside of official work hours, and the rare time he is home, all the domestic labour is on you because that's a woman's duty. also you will have an interfering mother-in-law who will expect you to obey her every command because respect for seniors and preserving family harmony is important."

More comments

IT CAN IN FACT GET WORSE.

I don't have to be a blackpiller to say "Guys maybe we should TRY to change course because I see where this is going."

pawnstars.jpg: Best we can do is to continue increasing the protections and freedoms afforded to women, and reducing the protections and freedoms afforded to men.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Don't you think we could create a similar list of "minimum requirements for a marriageable single male" that would likewise exclude the vast majority of single men?

First thing that came to mind for me too. The situation is symmetrical, there are "unmarriable" women competing for "marriable" men too.

And yet, do you think there's much competition for the 'unmarriable' men?

Is it fair to say that a marriageable woman is going to get a LOT more attention than your average 'marriageable' man?

Any woman is far more likely to receive advances than a man of equivalent "attractiveness". This is a natural consequence of men simply being more likely to approach women than vice versa, across almost all cultures and time frames.

An average woman might get hit upon (unsolicited) as often as a much more attractive man. This is glaringly obvious! The average woman is hit on far more than the obvious man!

A truly rigorous analysis would require careful consideration of what fraction of such propositions are serious or likely to lead to marriage. After all, it's widely accepted that men are more likely to seek or settle for just sex with no future plans in mind, or that women are pickier and less likely to sleep with men they don't want to marry.

None of this is new. This is the human condition, or that of any sexually differentiated species. That's how the game theory plays out.

Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.

Maybe it's because of my particular bubble, but this is the one requirement in your list that seems completely unreasonable. My understanding is that (1) 40% of US citizens in the relevant age bracket get at least a BA, tendency rising; (2) it is very hard to get a well-paying white-collar job without one; (3) US tuition fees now run on the order of magnitude of that figure per year, more for good universities. Together, this is starting to look like six-figure student loan debt is something like the standard path into the US middle-class - asking for a person in their late 30s without it is somewhat similar to asking for someone at age 40 without a mortgage, that is, you are strongly going to bias for either unusually rich or just not a homeowner.

Also, regarding

Single and looking (of course).

Wasn't there a redpill-adjacent term like "monkey-branching"? As in, the idea that women's dating strategy involves remaining formally "attached" to the best option available all the way until a better option comes along (as opposed to breaking up and then spending some unknown amount of time looking while identifying as single). In such a setting, you could have a perfectly liquid dating market in which everyone gets matched up just fine, but your way of counting registers approximately zero "marriageable" women.

While this is a dumb filter, most college grads have much lower amounts of debt.

Maybe it's because of my particular bubble, but this is the one requirement in your list that seems completely unreasonable.

Funny enough, this was the one that was easiest to clear, I think the LLMs said north of 90% fit under this ceiling.

Most women don't have much or any student debt, if you include the ones who didn't attend college.

There are a few with a lot more than $50k, but the overall average for women is around $33k, and I think that's limited to ONLY women that have debt at all.

And its even lower on average for white women. Black women have around $40k average.

Yeah but your algorithm is explicitly excluding high ability, very much marriage material doctors, lawyers, etc. This criteria is badly thought out; you would at minimum have to make it a combination of high debt and a "bad" degree.

You would be much better off doing some function of credit score and age.

Yeah but your algorithm is explicitly excluding high ability, very much marriage material doctors, lawyers, etc.

Hmmmm.

Do you think.

its just possible.

That these 'very much marriage material' women.

Will probably get into a stable relationship at a relatively young age.

And will probably already be married before they get too old or too debt-burdened?

And thus would fall out of the pool very early anyway?

That's what the 'single' criteria is there for, after all.

No, I do not think there are a great deal of high earning women who get married young, and your link is not saying that this occurs - only that it is common for medical professionals to marry other medical professionals. If you think that you should exclude various professionals for having too high a degree of sorting, using debt as a proxy for high level degree is a deranged way to carry this out.

Don't most doctoresses and lawyeresses marry after they've started their careers?

I'd say "cishet" and "no college debt" are the unfair ones. I'm not convinced that women have the same "base" strictness of heterosexuality, so in a society that preaches self-discovery and openness in that aspect many who are not religious will likely decide they're above 0 on the Kinsey scale.

Likewise, in the society that assumes that anyone worth anything is going to have a college degree, the ones who don't try will likely be mostly underclass or rural religious, with very few being the ones who are actually financially wise.

Also, not sure what criteria is "acute" mental illness judged by.

And suppose that we agree on a final set of reasonable criteria - how many men, of those who are looking to marry and restrict the search set in such a way, meet a similar set of reasonable criteria? (I'll let women of themotte decide what that would be).

Overall, it's strange that you put the emphasis on

if average women are willing to marry average men

, when your post is primarily on how the average woman is apparently unmarriable.

I'd say "cishet" and "no college debt"

Now now, I specifically gave them a $50k ceiling. "NO" College debt is a pipe dream, I know it.

This ceiling is safe for like 95% of women, according to the LLMs.

And women are less likely to pay off their debt than men are and so be carrying it years later. So its kind of an important factor, men will have to absorb this 'bride price' when he marries her.

when your post is primarily on how the average woman is apparently unmarriable.

Well, I can add in my point that THE SOLUTION HERE IS TO PUT PRESSURE ON WOMEN to actually choose a guy relatively early, and offer some guidance on choosing one that will stick around. And, presumably, disincentivizing those who delay.

Because You also have to increase the pool of desirable, wiling women for this to play out favorably.

But I felt that would distract from the more neutral data I provided.

Also, not sure what criteria is "acute" mental illness judged by.

In my mind it would be less than a "severe" mental illness that is actually debilitating, but still serious enough that it impacts their daily behavior. You can peek and see how the LLMs chose to interpret it.

In either case, you can look at the raw numbers and see young women are showing INCREASING prevalence of mentall illness. Something around 30% for the under 30s.

Its fair to say things have gotten 'worse.'

And suppose that we agree on a final set of reasonable criteria - how many men, of those who are looking to marry and restrict the search set in such a way, meet a similar set of reasonable criteria? (I'll let women of themotte decide what that would be).

Sure.

But I will go ahead and place my bet that the number of men who meet this has probably been steady for the last couple decades, whereas the ratio of women who are marriagable has been decreasing.

See my point above about the pressure being on the wrong gender.

In either case, you can look at the raw numbers and see young women are showing INCREASING prevalence of mentall illness. Something around 30% for the under 30s.

Jump on the SzaszWagon bro. My paternal grandmother was never diagnosed with a mental illness; she was a complete nutter, who drove my paternal grandfather away, and then completely broke down when he died. My father was raised primarily by my great-grandparents, because my grandmother couldn't take care of him.

Who is diagnosed with a mental illness is first and foremost a measure of who has contact with the mental-health industrial complex, secondarily a measure of what advantages one gets from being diagnosed with a mental illness, and only a tertiary measurement of any underlying mental functioning.

Well, I can add in my point that THE SOLUTION HERE IS TO PUT PRESSURE ON WOMEN to actually choose a guy relatively early, and offer some guidance on choosing one that will stick around. And, presumably, disincentivizing those who delay.

As an old school sexist, I would strongly disagree. Women have much much less agency than men and pressuring them to enact major social changes is essentially pointless; men act, women are and all that.

Yes our society goes about it wrong. But single women are already more marriage minded than men. The 'living together for years' thing is driven by male preferences.

In either case, you can look at the raw numbers and see young women are showing INCREASING prevalence of mentall illness. Something around 30% for the under 30s.

Yeah but this is mostly depression and other stress-responses that our society tries to treat with SSRI's because it's too politically correct to admit that women need to be taken care of by men. If she married a man who loved her it would go away in most cases.

But I will go ahead and place my bet that the number of men who meet this has probably been steady for the last couple decades, whereas the ratio of women who are marriagable has been decreasing.

Ah, but for men you need to include another criteria- plenty of emotionally stable adult men who could support a family simply don't want to. How many marriageable and marriage minded men are there?

Women have much much less agency than men

If you were to give a rationalist-style quantifiable estimate of the agency gap between men and women, what numbers would you give for the SD gap, overlap percentage, and percent of women at or above the male average? I agree with you directionally, but I think that the actual biological difference is closer to the gender IQ gap than the strength gap, and in any case I believe that agency and general virtus is a nearly unalloyed good and should be more prevalent among the fairer sex.

The 'living together for years' thing is driven by male preferences.

That's the one thing that drives me mad when I see women complain about "so we've been living together for ten years and I think it's time he proposed but he says he's not ready for marriage and now he's talking about breaking up".

Of course he's not! He's been getting the benefits of marriage without being married for ten years! And you enabled that! If you're not planning on marrying within a couple of years, or if you're not one of the people who don't ever want to marry because it's just a piece of paper/it's a repressive relic of the patriarchy/our arrangement suits us as it is, then you should ask him to put up or move on. Don't hang on for ten or more years hoping that one day out of the blue he'll decide to move out of his comfort zone and do the romantic proposal, because he won't. Why should he?

This is why the #1 piece of dating advice to young women should be 'don't move in without a ring'.

Yeah. But of course we've had it dinned into us "oh marriage is a big commitment, you need to be sure you're (sexually) compatible, live together first to find out". Maybe that worked out when the end goal was "probably going to marry this person" but now it's "well of course we'll live together, might get married, might not, probably we'll break up and move on to new partners".

I'm not going to say "slippery slope" but social conditions erode over time if not maintained, or if weakening of the boundaries happens. Back when cohabiting was rare, there was still the expectation of marriage as the end point. So living together was expected to end with a ring and kids. Over time as cohabitation became more accepted, marriage moved more and more out of the picture. You can't change something and expect it to remain at that one single change point forever, because it won't.

How many marriageable and marriage minded men are there?

At least twice as many as there are marriageable and marriage-minded women are out there.

That's my bet.

Women have much much less agency than men and pressuring them to enact major social changes is essentially pointless; men act, women are and all that.

Except most cultural institutions and pressure are actively PREVENTING men from 'acting' and punishing them for doing so.

So we're still hitting the same problem.

At least twice as many as there are marriageable and marriage-minded women are out there.

Well yeah, if every guy from twenty to eighty is only willing to marry a woman aged twenty to twenty-nine, there's gonna be a shortage of Jills for every Jack.

I wonder. Your engagement here, and especially about the age thing, does sound bitter. But I think you were the asexual one, no?

It doesn't sound so much bitter as sarcastic. Ah, yes, someone has run the numbers on heavily selected women 20 - 30 vs much less selected men 20 - 40, and found that there are more men. Shocking. Who could have guessed?

It doesn't sound so much bitter as sarcastic.

This one yes. Theres another, which you dont see easily but she would know. I replied to this one because it was the second one I saw. Though I somehow thought that other one was in direct response to someone talking about the difficulties of children over 30.

But I think you were the asexual one, no?

I believe he describes himself as ex-gay (but that he has "never been a sodomite").

Well then men should overcome that.

And your average man is a porn addict, which it's at least as reasonable to be worried about as a woman's body count, so I kinda doubt that there's twice as many as reasonable marriage minded women.

In either case, you can look at the raw numbers and see young women are showing INCREASING prevalence of mentall illness. Something around 30% for the under 30s.

My semi-informed opinion is that this is at least partially confounded by increasing awareness of mental illness as well as easier diagnosis or more relaxed diagnostic criteria. Borderline Personality Disorder was not a recognized condition not very long ago, for example.

I've seen strong evidence that this is the case for autism, and some for ADHD. These people were considered a mild curiosity, and managed normalish lives without classification. I will grant that rates of anxiety and depression have increased significantly in the last few decades.

Edit: Anorexia is a largely culture-bound/ mass psychogenic illness, so a massive increase in incidence can be expected. But even then, most people can deal with a skinny chick with body issues barring the worst cases.

You're not wrong.

And yet.

Mental illness rates among women are drastically higher then men (particularly for YOUNG women).

So if it were merely 'awareness,' why aren't we seeing a surge in men?

So either women are more likely to get incorrect diagnoses.

Or, women have been this way all along.

Or women are actually suffering from more mental illnesses now than before.

We've seen increases in men? Can't say off the bat if it's proportionate to the increase in women over the same period. I'd look that up if I wasn't sore af after the gym.

So either women are more likely to get incorrect diagnoses.

Or, women have been this way all along.

Or women are actually suffering from more mental illnesses now than before

I'm not sure if you're using an XOR there, but my understanding is that it's a bit of all 3. Women are more likely to seek help with their mental health (and have less stigma around it), are more prone to some kinds of mental illness (schizophrenia has always been more common in men), and have an overall increased disease burden in recent decades.

These mental illnesses are mostly stress responses to living outside their gender roles. If these 'anxiety patients' were married to a good man who took care of them instead of worrying about earning a living themselves it would go away.

Also if they had their own kids to worry about instead of foreigners.

Yes, and if they had homes to be arranging instead of trying to arrange society, and if they would spend more time talking to God and less to their therapists, and if....

This, but unironically.

(It's been noted that talking to a therapist about your problems is just the modern version of going to a priest to talk about your sins, but at least the priest doesn't ask to see your insurance).

More comments

I'm leaning towards "women are more likely to get diagnoses, at all" and "everyone have been this way all along" more than "women in particular are more crazy".

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