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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Maybe it’s down to my social bubbles, but the way men are described in these kinds of posts just doesn’t mesh with the men I know.

Like the supposed truth that men aren’t big spenders and would happily sleep on a mattress in a cardboard box that had wifi. Sure men don’t tend to own as many knick-knacks and care less about interior decorating, but men loooove to spend big time on things they care about, like “gear” for their hobbies. Who’s buying $2,000 GPUs, 4k ultra wide monitors and pricy mechanical keyboards? Expensive guitars when they can barely string together a few chords? Ridiculously pricy sports gear? Who tends to spend extra on high performance sport version of cars even though they look basically the same as the base model? I don’t know any women who are impressed by a $1500 espresso machine, but I know guys who have them.

I’ve never seen an “average” man have issues with dating (casual sex, sure, but not dating). 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. It doesn’t take the average guy an inordinate amount of effort to find an average woman and get married. Even awkward nerdy guys I know are getting married as long as they’re not actively unpleasant to be around.

I feel like that kind of malaise and blackpilling mostly happens to neurotic, terminally online people. If you touch grass in a first world country, those issues aren’t really there.

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.

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?

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.