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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35344 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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The guys I know who can’t seem to find a single woman to date… you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation.

One such man I know IRL, who I was friends with at the time, said something like "I would ask Gaashk out, but she would probably stab me," in front of me. He did not in fact ask me out), and is still single and complaining about it on Facebook.

Yes, men are not women.

Right, he was using a women's strategy and women's strategies don't work for men. Maybe that would have worked if he'd seen her reaction, decided he wouldn't get stabbed (or "HELP, AUTHORITY, REMOVE THIS CREEP"), and then asked directly.

But the direct methods of trying are forbidden for men (see above in all caps) unless they succeed, and the penalties have done nothing but increase.

Isn’t that asking someone out? Or at least heavily indicating a desire to do so?

My understanding is that both parties provide plausible deniability whilst looking for positive indications. So the reply might be a laugh and a change of subject for no and a smile + ‘you’ll never know unless you try’ for yes. Am I totally off here? Paging @TitaniumButterfly here also.

Nobody teaches you how to do this stuff, unless you’re lucky and have generous male friends who know better than you do.

My general impression is that women seek plausible deniability (sometimes to the point of sabotaging their communication to men), but they want men to be direct with them (insert Darth Plagueis meme here), at least within the bounds of decorum. i.e. women want you to ask them on a date directly, not to talk about how you want to have sex with them if it goes well.

That is unfortunately true. I wish that such blatant double standards didn't exist, but what can you do.

Forgive my directness, but as someone who desperately needs reliable advice, is this coming from an experienced participant or an onlooker like myself?

If a woman is interested in you she wants you to be direct.

When I decided my (now) wife was the one, I didn't pussyfoot around. It does take a lot of confidence to pull off though, which is why step one is "Become someone you can be confident about being."

A bit of both I guess? I'm married, but my wife and I met through OKCupid a decade ago. So there wasn't the need to navigate asking her out on a date, because we met in a way that made it clear what the expectations for the relationship were.

Literally every experienced participant will, if being honest, tell you the same thing.

So... would you have stabbed him?

No, I wouldn't have even pretended. I would, at worst, have sighed a bit at his puns.

To be sure. Just had to note that you hadn't actually denied the allegations =P

All the best to you if you're still on the market.

Haha, I'm now married with children. Because he kept asking me out, more than once, to interesting places, even though I turned down the initial invitation and even gift.

That's a bit tricky though.

You turned him down, even after he invested in a gift, and he kept pursuing. And I don't know what if any signals he was reading that led him to think it would succeed.

Meanwhile, the advice that men would get, both from most women and men, is you have to move on after a rejection, because continuing on is 'creepy,' or is 'simping' (ESPECIALLY the gift-giving), or maybe even straight up stalking or harassment. How many rejections is a man supposed to 'ignore'? How much should he invest before it becomes throwing good money after bad?

There is no good answer. And there's the risk of a woman actively exploiting this tendency in men to pump as much money and effort from him as possible.

This pursuit model of the man slowly, politely grinding down a woman's barriers and making increasingly enticing offers for her time and affection is one that I personally prefer. But it just doesn't work very well when women have many available options, and to continually pursue one who has already rejected you just reads as 'desperation' which is a turnoff on its own.

Simply put, why would a guy put himself through that without some reasonable expectation of success?

Yeah, most of the married people I know met their husband in a fairly small cohorts, such as a church or volunteer group (not rotating volunteers, a specific stable cohort), where that sort of thing is more likely to work out, and both parties will experience negative repercussions if they act badly.

It used to work when you could do this in the context of socially sanctioned courtship. The man knows he isn't being played too hard because no one is having sex with the woman. Women in turn get to get more exposure to a man and test his level of interest commitment. I think it's a W for both sides. Certainly women seem to still like it today (why is Pride and Prejudice still so popular).

Yep.

I said recently:

I think men find it more tolerable to compete for the hand of the 'fair maiden' who is making everyone play the game to win her affections, than to have to face the reality that the maiden isn't so fair after all and they were burning efforts trying to get her to pay heed, meanwhile she's banging Sir Lancelot on the side and was never actually considering his proposal.

Rejection is less likely to convert to resentment when a man is at least 'in the running' for a woman's affections. When he's one of twenty dudes, 4 of which have already banged her, and another 10 have her nudes, its like... what is the point?

A guy being tested by a woman, rising to the occasion, passing the test and earning her hand in marriage is a pretty solid cause - effect /action - reward path. Humans are persistence hunters after all.

But a guy putting in effort, getting rejection, then seeing that the Chad (whom he KNOWS has got four other women on rotation) get the prize with much less investment, well, that's going to sting, it feels personal, even if it isn't.

And of course worst is when the women CONCEALS her other paramores (as they are wont to do) so its only AFTER one man has put in tons of effort that he realizes he could have just used standard pickup artist tricks on her and gotten the sex without the emotional distress.

Having an easily legible, mutually agreeable path for successful courtship solves for all the uncertainty and makes it so much less stressful on men and women, but we've fucking THROWN OUT the rulebook.

The core problem seems to be that the assumption is that the man is trying to immediately sleep with the woman and dump her after. So a man who’s persistent isn’t expressing how inexhaustible his passion for this particular woman is, he’s trying to wear her down so he can pump her and dump her.

Or at least that’s the fear, which leads to feelings of disgust at persistence. All it takes are a few experiences of being used and discarded to make someone put up massive guardrails. Heck, men feel terrible at being rejected and it’s easy for that to become resentment and contempt. Men (not all of them!) are perfectly willing to lie to score, and that’s a kind of rejection, too. A woman I was in love with once offered a friends with benefits arrangement when I told her how I felt about her. I felt terrible.

Dating in the courtship model only works when people can trust each other; when they’re worthy of trust. That’s broken down.

Yeah.

Fixing it doesn't depend SOLELY on reining in female promiscuity (although that's a major factor), we would need to PUNISH male promiscuity, or at least the brand of it where a guy exploits a woman's naivete and leaves her more cynical and closed off than before, because he pays no cost for it.

I'd suggest execution, but the nice compromise solution would be castration.

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Well, would you have gone out with him?

Maybe. I'm not sure. It probably wouldn't have worked out romantically.

Well, I don't know what it's like to be a woman, but when I try to imagine that situation I feel pretty turned off. Somewhere between cowardice and whining. Like he's trying to plausibly-deniably get you to initiate.

Anyway congratulations on your husband and family. WAGMI.

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