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Big problem with this analysis and those like it: these men don't seem to be promising anything, like at all, and these women are still laying with them.
A large part of modern seduction theory involves redirecting any conversations about commitment during the early stages. This is so no promises need to be made while dangling an implied possibility of a relationship at least until after sex. No lying except perhaps by omission.
Not all men put the above into practice however. Some genuinely aren't sure if they want a relationship with the woman until things progress.
That's not even getting to the women that are very willing to (or even prefer to) have sex without commitment.
I think this is a decent amount of it. There's plenty of people who are just cruising for casual sex, but on the other hand if you're expecting to fuck by the 3rd date and within about 10 hours of meeting there's gonna be a ton of situations where the match was good enough to get that far but isn't going to work longterm.
Still the broad tragedy of the matter is that the average man could likely solve the online dating woes of the average woman within about 30 minutes if placed into their body by simply adjusting their expectations and being more willing to fight through the Ick. The average woman if placed in to the body of the average unsuccessful male will have to, at bare minimum, go on the normal journey of self improvement in most cases. I had to do it myself a couple years ago, and have the vivid lived experience of going from a 4 as a guy to a 7.5 over the course of a year or two and it's insane how night and day the two experiences are.
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That's a pretty naive take. What is "it feels like we're falling in love" followed by "I did say that. But that’s also how all my good first dates feel. Like we could fall in love!" if not clear and obvious duplicity? That's straight from the top-level link. Haven't you heard of lying with implications before? You don't have to spout literal falsehoods to deceive someone as to your intentions. And intentions are what romance is about.
I mean, sure, you could overindex in on the worst example on offer. But the average between the men she's describing seems to offer little more than a shrug when it comes to commitment.
I'm assured that this is enough to completely befuddle the average woman, as though she were being promised lifelong marriage. I'm not sure what to make of this.
Oh, the women are idiots, rest assured. They've presumably been raised on low-quality romance literature and misinterpret the least effort towards a pleasant date from an attractive man to be a sign of deep and abiding love. So when some socially adept and quite rapacious men figure out that there's an ample supply of idiots out there who just need a meager offering of romance-lit aesthetics and who can't initiate or sustain a real romance from their own abilities, said idiots have no idea of how to approach romance from... well, not exactly an adversarial stance, but at least an active one, where you accept the base fact that life between man and woman (possibly man and man or woman and woman, not much personal insight there) is always a negotiation and you need to stake out your own ground to get what you want. And a relationship without disagreements or fights is either a temporary anomaly or an active con. But I won't say the men are acting in any way reasonable or just in this case. I can get a young idiot screwing up and breaking the heart of a woman, but doing it repeatedly shows that he doesn't care about them at all.
I don't think these are representatives of the average woman, either. At least, I really hope not. Although the simple fact that I haven't run into women like this is not any evidence of anything in particular.
This is a really long sentence — can you clarify who doesn’t know how to approach a relationship from an adversarial stance?
Apologies, friend - I switched out the pronoun for a noun. Does that read better?
Thanks for the reminder to not let these posts get too stream-of-consciousness.
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Sure, at the ELO we're listening in on, it's trash treating trash like trash and vice versa. I fail to see why I should be feeling bad for the women specifically. In fact, I see no reason to believe that the women who stick around to replay this arrangement aren't themselves fucking around. We know the men in this league aren't being completely forthcoming, why believe the women?
In all of this, is there any standard of duty, even to herself, that a woman could fail? Or is she always the one failed? Is there any point it makes sense to ridicule her for being book-porn-brained, or outright write her off as a player in the game herself? Only when she starts an OnlyFans and not a moment sooner?
Of course - it's the duty to understand these dynamics and rise above them. Pretty similar to the duty on incels in that regard. Nobody can ever really help you but yourself. And in both cases, the fact remains that the typical support structures that defend adolescents as they try to work this out have been undermined.
There's one particularly salient fact for women, though, which is that they suffer increasingly severe setbacks as they fail to work this particular issue out. Your average man who can't work out appropriate sexual practice has a long runway. There's no real consequence, long-term, of virginity qua virginity. I was a late bloomer myself. It wasn't really a problem - I wound up coming into my own in my mid-twenties with no harm done. Women, on the other hand, are running down the clock of their fertility and the visceral attraction of youth, alongside the concrete health risks of sex and the severe consequence of an unintended pregnancy. A woman in her mid-twenties who only just starts to figure romance out is on a very tight clock, and has to get up to speed on the actual elements of romance, find a good partner, marry said partner, and then start having kids. This has to be a very matter-of-fact business for her to be able to start before 30. Any further errors, like getting stuck with a sweet but unambitious boyfriend and not knowing when/how to pull the plug, will potentially set her further years back. And if she's stuck with a kid, good luck; if she's had an abortion, then it may be easier to date, but it's a concretely bad thing that will stick with her.
And women get cast into this sphere much more aggressively than men, just by virtue of biology. A woman is sexually grown, to a great extent, somewhere in the realm of 18-22. At that point she receives full sexual attention and has to "debut," as it were, whether she's willing or not. Men aren't grown in the same way for several years past that point, when they start to get their careers in order. But wisdom comes at a year-over-year rate regardless of physical growth, and so women are thrown out into the open with some four or five less years of material experience compared to their developmental male peers. Compare how pretty much every woman has some sort of story of going through puberty in her early teens and immediately starting to receive open sexual attention from men, which they are nowhere near ready to handle at that phase. It's the same sort of problem, just at a different stage of life.
So I think it makes sense to say that, given the plain and simple disadvantage women have here, that society can stand to adjust itself a little to buffer women against the worst harms here. I recognize the typical term for this is patriarchy, or possibly paternalism, but it seems to me quite fair to say that people ought to go out of their way to stop men from obviously preying on women in the vulnerable range. The women from the story above are NOT in that vulnerable range - hence losers - but many women are, and do not benefit from getting tossed into the shark tank. For what it's worth, I'd say that men need a parallel kind of deference in childhood, mostly focused on their much delayed organizational skills. A boy who struggles with the rote elements of schoolwork is not necessarily delayed or misbehaving, and comparing him to a girl his age on those merits is quite cruel - and probably why college is getting so lopsided these days (which, in turn, feeds back into the ladies' problem from the start). Or for romance, boys tend to need a lot more mentoring and structure - the few outliers who "get it" tend to really overperform, or you get older men who swoop down to eat the boys' lunch, which is both problems rolled into one.
Maybe my view of the world is more strongly sexed than yours. But I hope I've laid it out fairly clearly, and shown that it isn't all a one-sided affair. On the individual scale, everyone always has nobody but themselves to blame. But on the larger scale, it makes sense to talk about the larger pressures, because those are what determine where the line between success and failure falls.
Have you just considered scaring the ever-loving shit out of them, coupled with describing organization and neatness as a moral virtue - and the opposite as a MORAL failing? I am reasonably sure that a sufficiently extreme level of shame, fear, and valorization of neatness and organization could make most boys well-organized. If we see a teenage boy's messy room as an indicator of moral failure and potential evil, rather than a common peccadillo? Teenage boys will have cleaner rooms.
I mean - I successfully applied Cold War-era deterrence theory at 11 to a family argument that I was highly motivated to win and perceived as an existential danger; Westerners in the middle class are generally uncomfortable with threatening this level of consequence to preteens except in extremis.
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It's clearly possible to dangle a relationship in front of a girl who likes you without referring to the possibility directly, men do it on accident all the time.
I was responding to what this poster said, what was discussed in the article, and what you yourself said above:
Is there something between the lines here that I'm missing? Do you consider a man promising nothing and promising marriage to be basically the same thing? Where does women's personhood enter in to this equation?
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Women laying with popular men is the feminine form of the 'nice guy' who orbits, hoping to transform a sexual relationship into an emotional one. Some of them do understand, eventually, that the sexual appeal is the stronger card they have to play (which is why they suddenly become frigid after a girlhood of being a slag) but a lifetime of using their strongest card has inflated their sense of self worth, and neglecting the other aspects of their personal lives hits home all at once.
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