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Where do you see the Gender War going?
My Definition of the Gender War.
There are many fronts in the Culture War that can be more or less described as a 'Gender War'.
Front 1: Which pronouns to use? Does "gender even exist?
Front 2: Is Western society a "patriarchy"?
Front 3: Is Masculinity Toxic?
Front 4: "Incels".
This post is about Front 4. Growing male sexlessness. I am not going to make much of an empirical argument but more of a rhetorical one.
So what if men are having less sex?
A large enough contingency of young men not having sexual partners is almost always a precursor for political and social instability. All that excess energy needs to be directed somewhere (work to provide for the wife and kids), if it isn't it usually boils over towards the rest of society as men seek out more violent and high-risk avenues to gain social status let that be joining gangs or starting political revolutions.
Moreover, young men are the most productive demographic in society in just about every domain. If a large enough percentage of them don't see any reason/reward for working hard, they just won't.
It's getting worse.
A growing number of men not having sex is a canary in the coal mine. That whatever was holding the socioeconomic fabric together is deteriorating. Let that be worsening economic conditions (we got plenty of that), worsening economic inequality (plenty of that as well), or just worsening social institutions (Online dating is the plurality method of how heterosexual couples met., It's growing rapidly.).
The cultural wind is blowing
Not only that but the two sexes resenting each other is mainstream. As I was growing up in the early 2000s there were 'boys vs girls' conversations. But those conversations were light-hearted and there were no hard feelings.
Nowadays browsing through social media comment sections and talking to other young guys. The tensions are much higher. I see normies spouting black pill talking points all over Instagram and TikTok. And that seems to be the majority ideology. This is in stark contrast to the early 2000s and even the 2010s were the majority consensus amongst men could have been described as 'RedPill' or 'BluePill'.
If you want an example of the above, Read the comments of this video (Videos like this are an entire genre among zoomers). You can feel the tension in the comments. To me, it's obvious this girl is joking, even if the joke isn't all that funny or whatever. The comments don't suggest most people viewed it as such, the men are on edge. I'd wager they wouldn't have reacted like this a decade ago. Another interesting phenomenon is that unattractive girls produce content like this imitating the attractive ones who can actually get away with it and just end up sinking the sanity waterline further as young naive men peers who know her think "wait I can't even this this bitch?" and the women gas up their egos without being able to back it up.
I mean Andrew Tate is actually popular FFS! I have had so many of my normie friends and acquaintances ask me about what I think of Andrew Tate, and most of them say the same thing. "He's got a point, I agree with a large part of what he says". The man is a clown, he's a comedian in my eyes. The fact his rhetoric resonates with men despite all else is a testament to the times we are living in.
On the female side of the aisle, it seems like they are doubling down too. They will just make more TikTok videos like the one I linked above.
Where do I see all this going?
Increasing political and social tension. More fringe political parties are elected, and how that happens will be left as an exercise for the leader.
One can make the argument that countries like Japan and South Korea are already further along the line of atomization and sexlessness (their TFR is atrocious!).
I don't think East Asian countries with the rice farming optimized culture (and genetic predisposition against inhibition, extremely interesting but I can't find the link) are good proxies to model the rest of the world after.
India might be a candidate they have a Front 4 gender war as well, arranged marriage puts a damper but Hindu Nationalism is clearly on the rise.
It seems that we are in the perfect storm for worsening Gender relations. Economic struggles, increasing OLD (that comes with a massive amount of its own problems) app usage, increasing atomization, recommendation algorithms primarily suggesting media that lowers the sanity line (rage bait of the likes made by Ms Andrea Subotic), gender confusion, Males being vilified for???, Women specific AA, all of them compounding on each other...
On a personal note: My man, I don't want to be a jerk, but you had it right in your post a month ago when you said
And you gotta realize that to say it's difficult to find a woman who meets your specifications:
is as absurd in a free sexual market as a capitalist worker saying the only jobs he can find are beneath him. My brother, what you can get is your market value. A guy is a 6 if he can attract a woman who is a 6, a woman is a 7 if she can seduce a guy who is a 7; QED. It's like ELO, you're as good as the opposition you beat, in real life not on paper, this isn't college football where the analysts decide the rankings. So when you say
All I can think reading this is, do you maybe have a little Greco-Roman homoeroticism hiding under all that "just 'mirin the dudes?" So when you say:
You seem like a great guy, a man after my own heart {other than your opinions on glute development}, so it shocks me that you say this. It is not that hard to go get laid.* You can show me stats that the median man is fat, that doesn't make it hard to run five miles or hard to lift weights, it means those men aren't trying. You can show me stats that the median man reads no books, that doesn't make it hard to read a book. Those stats are reflective in large part of a huge number of men who just flat out aren't trying, are ambition-free automatons of fat and grease and CoD achievements, are marginally employed in dead end jobs they hate to pay for their takeout and Xbox(whatever the fuck it is now). Those guys are losers. It might be slightly worse to be a loser today than it was 50 years ago, in the interest of charity and having a happy and functioning society it might be worth exploring how we can make life better for losers, but in a meritocratic sense it is their fault. They aren't good enough. It's a low bar, and they tripped over it.
Which brings me to another question I've been pondering across other circumstances lately, what makes a meritocracy good enough? The platonic ideal of a meritocracy, where effort and talent are distributed and rewarded perfectly fairly according to some innate virtue of humans involved with no luck or unfairness whatsoever, has never and will never exist. All meritocracies we seek to implement are imperfect, all meritocracies produced by nature are imperfect, ruined by genetics and circumstance if not by loopholes and local knowledge. But when is it good enough that we are allowed to just blame people for failing to put in minimal effort to succeed.**
The classical liberal/capitalist/equality of opportunity view is that as long as everyone gets a fair opportunity to apply, whoever gets in gets in, what's a little nepotism or inheritance between friends as long as everyone gets to play and we pick the best people who apply at the end? I tend to fall here, and for the most part I think the dating market sits here right now. Everyone can apply, but the people who get in, get in; the distribution might not be fair in the sense that everyone gets enough, but it is fair in the sense that everyone gets what he deserves.
The Civil Rights law/protected characteristic view, is that certain traits can be discriminated on while others cannot. I can discriminate for a job on intelligence, but not on race; by strength but not by religion. An actress hired for her looks is fine, as is a basketball player hired for his height and speed; but Goddess forbid we should limit either opportunity to whites. So the above, but if you refuse to date Black guys that is fucked up; if you refuse to date Jewish girls that's wrong. There are elements of this to dating today, but they are small enough that while I am sympathetic and think they should be addressed {for the happiness of all, Love Hard was the Xmas romcom of the year}, I don't think discrimination as I understand it undermines the basic meritocracy of the system. Some wokes are trying to expand the categories of protected characteristics in dating, to race and weight and height and birth-sex and whatever else people are bitter about. That is just goofy, and undermines the entire point, as they could always just date other ugly people.
The pseudo-Marxist/Kendi/equity view is that a meritocracy cannot be a meritocracy if it does not deliver some reasonable shot at happiness to everyone, no one can be left behind. In dating, this is the view of the body-positive and the incel. The fact that the system offers no shot at happiness to an individual means the system is unfair by definition, a true meritocracy would have to deliver fair (in the sense of livable) results to everyone. The problem here is the confusion of need with want, of living with standard of living, of pride with survival. Make everyone equal on whatever basis, they will find other bases for discrimination.. Hierarchy, uh, finds a way. Maybe there's something to moderating the consequences of failure to whatever extent possible, but to try to equalize outcomes completely is madness and deleterious to humanity.
What's everyone else's opinion?
*In America or the EU, for middle class white men. I can't speak to anywhere else or any other cultures.
**@SaruchBinoza if you think the responses here are anti-male, try posting the same story but for women being unable to find a good man, and watch the claws come out. The responses aren't anti-male, they're anti-whiner. I expect the responses would be the same here if someone posted saying "Maaaan, I just can't find a job, no one wants to pay me enough for my skills!" or "I just can't learn to do math" or especially "I just can't lose weight no matter how hard I try!"
This is still partially true. But I did not let that color my perception when making this post. I made it with the assumption that said worsening gender relations are something for which there is a signal, independent of my personal stake in the matter, which I didn't mention in this post at all.
Moreover, I did not intend to talk about myself in this post at all. But given some people are steering the conversation in that direction, I'll go with it for now.
I don't believe so. Some of those things only exclude 50% of the population, and they are not all mutually exclusive. If you can convince me otherwise, I'm open.
FYI I don't live in America where The mean -1 standard deviation of women is "fat" so that specific standard isn't as all-encompassing as some people think it is. Where I live, around 60% of women would pass that qualifier. I mean no offense to Americans, but you have some FAT people among you; It was just impossible to not notice while I lived in the US for a short while.
I am under no illusion that "SMV" is graded on a point-based system. I know it's an ELO score.
But once again, I wasn't really complaining. I was telling 2cim that just getting A partner is not the goal, getting a good enough partner is. A distinction that is central to this conversation.
An analog being that someone is talking about food price inflation, and 2cim says "gruel is still cheap". Paying for gruel what you used to pay for steak kinda stings.
No. I said that because I genuinely think that is a pattern. Why would I rate younger men higher than older men? I might want to, but I want to speak the truth more. I tried to account for all possible biases and confounders before I put that statement out into the world.
What if I cut your and everyone else's salary in half? But everything costs the same. At which point do you raise the "wait this is getting kinda hard?". Not buying food and surviving hard, but sending your kids to college hard? After all we don't want a life, we want a good life, right?
I am making a similar argument for the dating market we zoomers found ourselves in. The girls are what they used to be nothing has changed (an argument could be made they degraded because there are more fat people across the board now). But you need to be better to get them relative to before. As a result, a growing number of people are not getting any (this is a fact).
And I know this. Because 20-year-old me had an easier time courting 8's than 24-year-old me had with 6's. What gives? 24-year-old me could bitchslap 20-year-old me out of the room.
Once again, I am under no illusion of the dating market being the platonic meritocracy.
In the simplest of words. I am trying to say that, the dating market for zoomer males is actually worse, this time they are not crying wolf, and there are some stats and a sea of anecdotes to back that claim up.
Yes, the people who talk about this one specific problem endlessly (incels) muddy the waters. They might have cried wolf far too many times. But this is not that, it wasn't intended to be that.
Easier than it used to be? For the exact same caliber of girls?
If you are openminded enough, go to /r/dating and run an experiment, to see how many people are complaining today, compared to when the sub was created a decade ago. If you have an explanation that explains that, I'm all ears. Maybe the internet went through some kind of eternal September where the people who used to post on forums 10 years ago were just that good with the ladies.
I hope nobody minds, but I'll be replying to @substantialfrivolity and @hanikrummihundursvin in this comment as well, it's all one big mass of the same questions. And coincidentally, between sets, the perfect theme music popped on my workout mix! "Although you can't see them, or hear their breathing sounds, someone in this world is having sex right now."
I assumed you were American because you cited American statistics from the GSS in your original post. I'm just going to stick with the USA because, wisely, you haven't even told me where you are so I can't really talk about it.* Conveniently, the USA has tried this IRL, so we can look at the results and how people feel about it. Let's look at another, similar graph. And a third, here.** And the bipartisan response, across multiple presidential administrations from multiple parties, has been, not a whole hell of a lot. And the general opinion on the right has long been, Capitalism is competitive, if you aren't you need to become competitive. It's fuck or walk.
You are not the first to draw this comparison, SA did so in Radicalizing the Romanceless in 2014, long before you think things got hard for you.*** And he seemed to think, addressing Feminists who were presumably on the left, that "you wouldn't say this to anybody about work" was a bulletproof argument. But, what if I would say this to somebody about work? What if I'd tell a guy who couldn't get ahead to learn refrigerator repair? Because genuinely, for able bodied American white men, I think both are true: it's not hard to get a job or get laid.
But I'll ask, are you consistent on that analogy? Do you think housing costs are a crisis that should be addressed, or that people get the wage they deserve economically in a competitive market? My feeling is that we need to make sure that the disabled and the very weak can have a livable life, but that beyond that it's all competition, that's the best way to improve society.
So, we should do a little something to make sure they don't starve; but college, for example, is basically a positional good. There's not much personal economic value in having an education, there's value in having as much or more education than those you are competing with. If you can get into college, you try to get into a better college, you get a master's, you get a doctorate, it's all the same treadmill (really, watch that Enemy at the Gates clip, or the whole movie it's pretty good). Same with "hot" women, it's all a positional good, status games {verse 2}. If you can get an 8 you'll want a 9; if you can get a 9 you'll want a 10.
So let's get to the meat of the question:
or to take the fun way
Charles Murray (more famous in these parts for The Bell Curve) wrote this out so long ago I had to do a presentation on it in undergrad. Coming Apart's essential argument was that the divergence between upper and lower class Americans had to do with divergence in values, with upper class Americans showing little or no reduction in religiosity, industriousness, propensity to marry; and new lower class Americans showing marked reductions in all three and more. Part of his argument was that rich white liberals advocate for "freedoms" that work for rich white liberals, but don't actually adopt those freedoms themselves, instead leaving them to lower class Americans who can't hack it.
He has a decent point when it comes to economics and "big" life outcomes, but there's something missing, expanding inequality is all around us, even in fields that are totally unrelated to work or family, hobbies and interests. Look at Frank Sinatra's body in this scene in From Here to Eternity**** Or Steve McQueen literally lifting. Those were two sex symbols of the day, and their bodies would not be shown erotically on camera in a film today.
Or an extended hypothetical I brought up to make the point when I was arguing about it in the gym once. If you took the boys in a high school senior class, from 1960 and from 2022, and took them all to a rock climbing gym. I would bet that almost all the boys, the vast majority, in 1960 after a quick lesson could be coached up a juggy 5.8 or 5.9; a few athletes might be able to hit a 5.10. But basically no one in 1960 climbed, and those who did often couldn't climb 5.10 anyway. The 2022 boys, probably one or two of them would actually be climbers and zip up 5.11 or 5.12 no problem, and the freak athletes are more athletic than ever they'd get up the 5.10s, but a quarter of the class or more would be unable to climb 5.8, too fat or too weak or too cowardly. The numbers back this up too. Stronger and stronger athletes professional and amateur, weaker and weaker populace.*****
We're coming apart everywhere, in fitness, in sex, in income, in talent, in intelligence. Hell, I'd say there are more guys that can cook a beautiful chef quality meal in today's 25yo men, and fewer who can do basic cooking. More guys that can deadlift 500lbs than at any point in history, more men that can't deadlift 300lbs. More 25yos that have read >500 books, more 25yos that haven't read 50 books in their life. Solid mediocrity, in the positive sense, is disappearing in favor of min maxing. What do we blame this on?
It's the opposite of the participation trophy joke typically leveled at supposedly soft millenials/zoomers. It's Ricky Bobby ethics: if you ain't first you're last, second place is the first loser, do whatever you want but be the best at it. More and more men find that if they can't be really good at something, it isn't worth doing at all. And that tends towards more men simply giving up on romance, going herbivorous, retreating into video games and social media and bitter online subgroups. The substitutes are good enough to make the effort seem futile.
The flip side of all the min-maxers landing on "min" for things like fitness, appearance, and romantic skill is that it isn't hard to win over the median in those fields.
*We are really, almost uniquely, disgustingly fat. That is a big throw-off for the whole bit, unfortunately. Glad you live somewhere better.
**This one's from 2016 but amusingly enough while housing costs have kept climbing higher and higher, the federal minimum wage hasn't budged in that time, despite both parties separately taking unified control of both houses of congress and presidency with a stated agenda of helping the American worker. And as soon as lower-quintile incomes began to climb to any significant degree independent of the minimum wage, the Fed sought to induce a recession to prevent rising wages. Go figure.
***I actually did dig up /r/dating top posts from a random period in 2016 and from 2022. I wasn't determined enough to read them all, but just glancing at them and rating as positive or negative on "getting some" for January-May: 2016 14/25 negative/whiney; 2022 5/14 negative (however 11 were deleted in 2022). June to September: 5/25 in 2016, 5/25 in 2022. So I'm really not seeing an increase, though this isn't exactly scientific.
****Trivia: this is the Sinatra movie that inspired the plot in The Godfather with the actor, the producer, and the horse
***** @substantialfrivolity This is what I mean when I say it's easy. Basically everyone used to be decently fit, it's only in recent years that we're seeing obesity and inactivity be a norm. Fewer and fewer men can really help you move, or dig a ditch, or join a pickup football game. I'm not saying it's easy to get jacked, I'm saying it's easy to be mediocre, and mediocrity is all you need to be above median today.
Either you are the fastest typist in the world, or you are taking some long rests.
I cited American statistics because America produces the most statistics, they are the easiest to find, And most of the audience of this post would be American. And of course, because we are all living in America.
I live in Dubai. I'll bore you with some details about the dating market here.
It is Nightmare Elder Child Sacrificing God-level difficulty compared to America*. The male-to-female ratio is 3:2. There is a mix of people from all over the world with a much larger contrast compared to even the most "International" cities in the US or Canada. Maybe twice as mixed as Toronto. You have to navigate language**, cultural and religious barriers. People are overworked to shit (worst work-life balance in the world, i.e some people are just too tired to go out after working 11 hour days for 6 days a week).
Also, people are always coming and going. Given that most of them are tied to their work visa, the churn is relatively high (You lose your job, you are kicked out.). I had to cut things off with the last girl I was seeing because she left the country and LDRs really suck. This is a very common story for young (middle-class like me) people here. They end up losing a large chunk of their friend group as they leave for higher education (very common for people to go to Canada/Europe to get their undergrad). More of my high school buddies live in the state of Ontario than in this country. I suppose Americans can relate to this a bit given that the country is large enough that "moving for work" means effectively moving a few countries away.
OLD is even more winner-takes, the mechanisms for which I am not entirely sure of. But I ran an experiment by setting my location to NYC in Tinder 6 months ago. I got roughly 2 matches/100 swipes (this informs me that I am probably average looking, notice the extremely large variance in answers) with location as NYC compared to 0.5/200-300 I get here.
But anyways, I'm not complaining. I am applying to graduate schools in Canada and if all works out, I will escape this current Hellscape.
*My friends who grew up here but live in Canada say as much.
**Language barriers really suck. I can speak 3 languages but heaven for me would be if all languages suddenly disappeared and English was the only one left. Fairly large amounts of nuance are intransmissible even if the other person is proficient in English but not at a native speaker level. I assume my English is closer to that of a Native speaker than whatsoever the rank below it is. It's a shame that we can't communicate easily with large swathes of humanity.
I never said any way there should be any redistribution of means of sexual reproduction. You can assume that I would be sympathetic to such sentiments/narratives, but I am not.
I write a post that hints at my discontent at this issue maybe once a few months. In real life, I am working, earning, lifting, and doing everything it takes to maximize my net worth (for various reasons).
I am a staunch capitalist in matters of Economics and everything else, but that doesn't preclude me from feeling the plight of the poor. And I can wager I am probably more of a capitalist than You. But I do think, I ultimately want my fellow man (and woman) to live better.
Nature is a Molochian hellscape, Deer die because they grind their teeth out and die from starvation. It's a miracle at all that humans can experience Life AND Liberty AND Happiness. And if we are losing some aspects of that, I don't think it's too unforgivable for some to lament that. First world problems or not.
I got your general point. Winners win harder, and More losers, in all domains.
All the examples you listed illustrate the point. But I don't really need to respond to all of them. Yeah, the best rock climbers now are better but there are more worse ones, same for lifters, bankers, programmers, and {literally everything}.
We are all riding on the waves created by the true greats. This is more evident in Computer Science (I'm a programmer) than in any other field. So it's not that we should want less of this. But at the same time, I do feel the plight of those who will drown.
And on a personal level, I am not unfamiliar with winning at all. I am not going to say what it is because it would be too beside the point and bragging, but I am within the top 5 in the world in a not-too-specific thing. Unfortunately (in the context of this discussion), it's not the kind of thing that nets you massive amounts of wealth (in the short term) or something that you can put on your Tinder profile. But nevertheless, winning is soo good that 1 second of being a winner is worth more than a lifetime of not being one.
That's awesome! And realize that I don't criticize your thinking because I think you're a loser who should recognize that you're an evolutionary dead end and hop on an ice flow to spare us the trouble, I criticize your thinking because I think you're a smart talented guy, and this kind of thinking can poison smart talented guys into thinking they are losers and evolutionary dead ends and convince themselves that they should hop on an ice flow to spare us all the trouble. It's what people around here are fond of calling an "infohazard." One should optimize some of one's beliefs for what they provide you, not always for their perceived truth value, which we are astonishingly bad at recognizing in the moment regardless.
So what do you propose doing about it? Nothing? Recognizing how bad it is but leaving it alone?
The problem with the theory that this will lead to social unrest is simple. It is more or less self-evident that as long as there is a basically meritocratic system underlying the selection process, any rebellion will fail, because the people who would rebel are already selected failures, and anyone who could rebel would first need to make themselves a success. This goes for antiwork and similar communist efforts of the modern left*, it goes for HBDers as per our own @DaseIndustriesLtd , it goes for the incels. Guys who truly can't get laid on the current system are some heavy mixture of short, poor, stupid, introverted and not outgoing, antisocial, ugly, weak. By the time one gets the charisma sufficient to actually lead, he'll be co-opted by the system, and the provision of pussy will soften his resolve to conquer. The Revenge of the Nerds ends when the boys get laid, they don't then need to burn down the other frat house or something to prove their point. For any of them to get energized enough to do anything about it would require acquiring exactly the traits that are still enough in the partial-meritocracy of today's dating market to make good.
PS: Reading your thoughts on Dubai, I apologize for being pedantic about n/10 scoring, it makes more sense if you're talking about your experience in Dubai as being somewhat unique (ie you're an NYC 8 but a Dubai 4 or something like that) which is much more coherent.
*This gets into the conspiracy theory that college affirmative action is primarily an effort of The Man to keep strong Black communities from forming. The Talented Tenth is plucked right out of the ghetto, feted with scholarships and biglaw jobs out of Harvard (or Howard), and coalesces into part of the system. Without affirmative action as it is currently practiced, the Talented Tenth would be leading the local Panthers chapter and building local businesses; with affirmative action they get a DEI sinecure at Blackrock while Blackrock's REIT buys homes in their community and rents them back at a huge profit.
I'm not entirely sold on this line of thinking. Sure, the pragmatic value of a belief is at odds with its truth value. After all, I won't tell my mom she's being a bitch if even she is (armchair psychologists would say there is a lot to unpack there). But outside of close interpersonal relationships, And regarding matters of ones model of The World. I do think, thinking as such as at the root of many of todays irrationalities, the inability to stare at the uncomfortable truth at its face.
Speaking in less abstract terms. Let's say being 'blackpilled' is infohazardous. In so far as it prevents a guy from exerting disproportionate effort towards "getting laid" because he knows his effort is disproportionate. Ultimately leading to an unhappy and lonely life. That's a failure mode for sure.
But one man's infohazard is another man's wisdom. If the non-Blackpilled guy fails left and right, he has a dim chance of figuring out exactly why (assuming BP is true). The BPed guy at least knows how to chisel away at the problem.
Knowing it's all fucked. But having the resolve to carry onwards anyways is a more than good enough approximation of the Heros Journey. Lest we not gimp the strong to protect the weak. The people who "deserve" it the most as per the purest meaning of that word.
I believe absolutely nothing can be done about it; in the absence of forcing people to do things they really really don't want to do.
I don't have a good enough mental model to describe the process that encompasses all the variables. But I intuit that there are many things we want that are tradeoffs against other things we want. For example TFR (weak proxy but lets use it for now) might just be inversely correlated with Economic strength. In other words, it's a control system.
And if we want to be really pessimistic. I don't think humans want it any other way. I don't think the drive to pair bond in humans is that much of strong one (across both sexes). After all, we do possibly have twice the number of female ancestors. In the simplest of words, I got nothing. If I was Tsar, there is absolutely nothing I could do. You can't have an ELO system without losers, its not possible.
But let's assume as a Tsar, my people don't expect too much from me. I am tasked with just restoring male sexlessness to the early 2000's level. Then there is still not much I can do that isn't overtly authoritarian, the cats are out of their respective bags. I might think about this and post a top-level later.
The relationship blackpill is best approximated by the online discourse around "hardgainers" in lifting, which given you're a lifter and online I'm sure you're familiar with, where beginner after beginner hops on /r/fitness or /r/weightroom and announces that they just can't gain/lose weight, it's not working and I'm doing everything right. Most of them are not doing everything right, or even most things right, 50% of self-described hardgainers have their calorie counts wrong, a good amount of the remainder literally aren't doing the exercises they said they were doing if you dig in a little, and almost all simply haven't been trying long enough to say whether they are hardgainers or not.* The lifting community basically rejects the idea of hardgainers because individuals are so bad at determining whether they are personally hardgainers, everyone thinks he's a hardgainers when he isn't jacked after eight weeks or whatever the magazine promised him. I've been around long enough to have seen it over and over in real life, I'd guess that 80% of lifters will at some time think they are a hardgainer, and that less than 10% are true hardgainers (can't achieve an above average physique with reasonable normal efforts).
There are, of course, a percentage of men who are genetically cursed, who simply don't put on muscle from ordinary exercise (just as there are men who put on muscle seemingly without ordinary exercise). But if the lifting community embraced hardgainer memes, if the conventional wisdom online was "if you think you're a hardgainer you're probably a hardgainer and should give up/take steroids" rather than "you're not a hardgainer try harder," what would happen is that the 10% of true hardgainers would say "phew, now I don't have to waste my time on this" and have slightly better lives, but the much bigger group of guys who think they are hardgainers will stop lifting and never find out they weren't hardgainers after all and their lives would be much worse.
The latter is the problem with forwarding black pill narratives online. My belief is that most, if not all, men go through In(voluntarily)Cel(ibate) phases in their lives. I suspect that if I had found the modern, polished black pill discourse when I was 17 I might have thought to myself "yup, that's me" and never grown into myself. And, moral cards on the table, I guess I value the suffering of the true hardgainers banging their heads against the wall less than I value the possible winners who never discover their potential. The former's lives were probably going to suck anyway, the latter have a chance to do something really great. And when we talk about "a bigger percentage of men never getting laid could destabilize society," the latter are the marginal cases and also far more important than the former.
I'm interested to read your ideas on What is to be Done?. Looking forward to it. Just do me a favor and never sell yourself short irl.
*Speaking personally, my "hardgainer" phase in lifting consisted of doing bad rep schemes, and at one point literally being too stupid to realize that my old barbell was 10 lbs lighter and my sand-filled vinyl plates were off.
As I'm often inclined to do, I'll addend your observations on the lifting community by saying that this exact phenomenon replicates itself in the running and cycling communities. I guess there's an except to that, in that the /r/running community and others like it are kind of rah-rah, blackslappy bullshit that tells everyone they're doing great, and that it's not their fault that they're slow, but that sort of shit doesn't really fly as soon as you're into boards that are actually more performance-oriented. If someone say they're having success running 30 miles per week, the answer is going to be "congrats on the talent, but you'd be a lot better if you ran more". If someone insists that they don't get significant aerobic fitness gains from running big miles at easy paces, the response is going to be, "post your logs and we'll help you figure out what you're doing wrong". Pretty much no one accepts that someone is running 70 miles per week, knocking out legitimate track reps and tempo work, but just stuck at a 21 minute 5K. Doesn't happen, not real outside of legitimate medical issues.
Of course, in both worlds, there are going to be legitimate differences in genetic talent and ability caps partly determined by what you did in early life, but the reality is that the vast, vast majority of people that would like to run decently fast, put on significant muscle mass, or ride up Alpe d'Huez in under an hour can do so with tried and true training methods. The best advice for almost everyone is going to be based on helping them figure out what they're doing wrong rather than coddling people and telling them that it's not their fault.
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