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The specialization of [parasocial] romantic/sexual partnership
(More than a shower thought, less than a fully formulated theory.)
While the median person in the US is still in a romantic relationship, singlehood is on the rise, with some claiming a prevalence of 30%.
It is very apparent that the median man and the median woman have quite different ideas about what they seek in a romantic or sexual relationship, with men being more interested in casual sex and women being more interested in long-term relationships.
(
This seems plausible from a kitchen table evo psych point of view: in the ancestral environment, all things being equal, the man who jumped at a chance to have no-strings-attached sex had a greater inclusive genetic fitness than the man who did not. Realistically, quite a lot of the opportunities for no-strings-attached sex in the ancestral environment were probably wartime rapes, but there were likely opportunities for consensual casual sex as well.
For women, it was likely more complicated. There was a selection for pair bonding to secure paternal investment -- because that increased the reproductive chances of the kids. If one had paternal investment, one would have preferred someone had has the status or ability to provide well for ones family.
On the other hand, one also wanted to select for genetic fitness to boost the reproductive chances of one's offspring. For a lot of traits, this coincided with being a good provider: being a great hunter is partly genetic, so there were both immediate and genetic reasons to prefer such a mate. While being the victim of wartime rape was quite bad also from a genetic point of view (zero paternal investment!), having a partner who was genetically inclined to wartime rape was preferable. One also wanted a partner who was winning the Keynesian hotness contest in your society, because that will bode well for the reproductive success of one's sons. If all the other women of the society thought that men with blue eyes were icky, marrying a blue-eyed man was a very bad reproductive strategy!
In short, from kitchen table evo psych, the ideal man was someone who had a lot of sexual success who was also willing to enter a committed long term relationship.
)
In my world-model, the median single woman going on a successful tinder date is going to meet a man who is great at getting tinder dates and convince them to have sex with him. This is a highly specialized skill. Women pass 95% of the suggestions. Together with a 2:1 gender imbalance towards men, this means that the average man who gets a match probably had to outcompete 30-40 other men to get there. However, being found hot by one woman is strongly correlated with being found hot by another woman. Of course, part of being found "hot" here is "being willing to breadcrumb women into thinking that there is a long term potential".
There are probably men who are moderately successful at dating which use apps for a while, find true love in their fifth match and live happily ever after, but those are also unlikely to stay on the apps (and if they are, will likely state outright that they are in a happy primary relationship, which will likely lower their appeal significantly).
While most of the men using online dating are trying to get laid with little success, I think that for the few men who are able and willing to sacrifice time, money, and ethics to get really good at tinder (or the offline equivalent: being a PUA), stringing along three or four women seems achievable.
While the link in the last paragraph bemoans the fate of these women, I think that it is fair to say that their revealed preference is to pay with sex for the illusion that a hot promiscuous guy is going to go exclusive (or primary) with them any day now. There is a difference between being the hottest unconquered available woman within driving distance on some cloudy Wednesday and being the woman who will make him forget about all other women, forever, though. Relatedly, if a real Nigerian royal had trouble getting money out of the country, chances are they would contact specialized firms on the Cayman Islands, not random owners of email addresses. (That does not change the fact that scamming or lying to get laid is evil, though.)
(Of course, this is not only an online thing. For most offline social situations, the workplace rules are more or less in effect. You have to know what your relative status and SMV is and what you can get away with. Also, flirting is all about deniability and avoiding establishment of common knowledge. I would argue that the possibility to commit a social faux-pas is intentional, being willing to do something which would be transgressive if you had read the signs wrong is a costly signal to send and generally appreciated if you are right. In the real world (at least outside Aella's RMN parties), people do not wear wristbands indicating what they are comfortable with, so engaging with women is left to those men who either are good at reading the cues or who do not care if they come across as sex pests to any women who are uninterested. Dark triad and all that. For spectrum-dwellers like myself, the main advantage of online dating is that women there can be safely (if mostly futilely) approached: as long as you do not use crass sexual language or send unsolicited dick picks, you will be considered background noise, not a sex pest.)
--
On the flip side, catering to the sexual and romantic needs of single men is also a trade which greatly benefits from specialization. Para-social relationships allow for economics of scale far beyond what the fuckbois can achieve. With straightforward porn, there is little malicious deception going on (stepsibling status aside), but I think that there is a niche of softer content (e.g. without guy participation) where romantic attachment from the audience is actively encouraged, and the relevant persona's foster an air of singleness despite being in a happy relationship or married.
--
This symmetry is not perfect, of course. The fuckbois are motivated by their sex drive or some obsession, while the women selling sex to men online are mostly motivated by cash.
Given that this is the CW thread, I should probably show some links to the culture war.
If this counts as "plausible" according to evo-psych, then evo-psych is even more of a joke than I already thought (I did not hold the field in high esteem as-is). No, a casual fling would not have been an advantage in the ancestral environment, because one or both would have been killed by the rest of the tribe, and they sure as hell wouldn't have pitched in to raise the kid.
A wise man once warned of crafting just-so stories, never do we ask "What does the world look like if this is true?" We can also ask "So, does the world look like that?" Our ancestral environment was not one in which Single Female Lawyers could get knocked up, yet remain sexy and self reliant; it was one in which chid rearing was insanely hard, and required the support of the tribe, who had no incentive to aid someone who couldn't be bothered to stay loyal to tribal hierarchy. It was also one in which the sexes were segregated, meeting the needs of the tribe as their sex allowed. Opportunities for surreptious coupling would be few and far between; a man and woman - who the tribe did not already recognize as coupled - would have arroused suspicions.
All this talk of evo-psych as applied to modern (emphasis on "modern" as opposed to "traditional") mating practises sounds like nothing so much as the never-ending attempts to square the absurdly high rates of obligate homosexuality in humans with basic evolutionary theory; perfunctory just-so stories that fall apart under the slightest investigation (something something "reasoning from first principles doesn't work for human interaction"). We know what kind of animal selects for female preference, and it doesn't look anything like human social organization. Even more, if we evolved for female preference, then why the hell is it failing so badly on the one metric that counts, human reproduction?
It should be blindingly obvious that humans short-circuited mating by means of social mediation, much like our simian relatives. This is far from uncommon in the animal kingdom; on the one hand, I can click on a Youtube video and watch the larva of a parasitoid wasp that has evolved an insanely specific method of feeding that allows it, without anything that could justify being called intelligence, to carefully eat only the parts of its host to provide nourishment without killing the host as long as possible. Then I can click on my "recommended" list and see a cheetah mother trapping a helpless foal, and spend hours watching her dumb-as-shit cubs play with said foal, lacking even the basic instinct to hunt. They literally didn't evolve the basic senses necessary to get food, they have to learn it from observation and trial-and-error, is it really so hard to imagine that humans didn't evolve mate selection, it's just something that has been passed down from generation to generation (see also farming, which isn't an evolved instinct in any human observed)?
Woah. Here I was irresponsibly speculating how mate selection might have worked in the ancestral environment when I should have just asked you because you know exactly how it was.
Contrary to common belief, the ancestral environment was not the biblical Middle East. We can infer from the relative testes size of humans relative to other primates that women were unlikely to mate with different men during their fertile period compared to Chimps but probably still somewhat likely compared to Gorillas. Of course, there are all kinds of confounders -- the most important one probably is that with humans, female fertility is not obvious.
The existence of biological fatherhood explicitly seems to be a rather recent discovery made by early agrarian societies, probably in the context of domesticating animals, and gave rise to patriarchy. Different pre-modern societies have very different attitudes to fatherhood. I will grant you that a gene which made you bash the head in of anyone who fucked your wife (if you can get away with it) would probably have been select for, though.
From a genetic fitness point of view, cheating is a numbers game. As you point out, getting caught cheating in a society where it is against the social norms will probably severely limit the male's genetic fitness. On the other hand, fathering a child which will be fed by some other guy gets you a lot of fitness for basically free. If the likelihood of getting caught is high, the punishment is severe and your legitimate opportunities for procreation are plentiful, then cheating is maladaptive. If the opposite is the case, then it is adaptive.
For women consenting to cheating, the potential gains are much lower (unless her husband is infertile). In a society with little property and no Swiss bank accounts, any bribes were probably not worth the risk (if the society was strongly anti-cheating). The main reason would be that the guy she cheated with had a higher genetic fitness than her husband, which would benefit her child. OTOH, if ancestral societies had opinions about female infidelity, they probably had no sophisticated theory of culpability and consent. Telling your husband "Tribesman Urgh tried to touch me, tell him to stop" would be one thing, but if you were raped in the context of intertribal warfare, you likely had little to gain by telling your tribe about it.
I do not think that they were segregated as nuns are from monks. Sure, they had mostly different roles, and at times these roles might have separated most of the men a day's march from the women. I will also grant you that their life was a lot more communal, so texting "honey I have to work late" while you had an affair in some motel was not a thing.
But the ancestral environment was also not as dangerous as a horror movie, where slipping away from the main group for a minute (especially to have sex) is a death sentence.
I think a lot of basic sexual behavior is innate. If you raise teens without any sex education and give them the opportunity, they will sooner or later figure out sex on their own. I also think that basic sexual attraction is innate. Probably something on the level of "I am into boobs-havers".
A lot of specifics are then learned, as your brain matches the kinds of humans it sees to its rough templates. If high heels and red lipstick are a reliable predictor of the wearer being a sexually available woman, and your brain is wired to be into women, then you might end up associating that with this.
I also think that some things are mostly innate turnoffs, though. Facial asymmetry. Birth defects. Clear signs of sickness, or starvation.
I am sure that there is some primitive tribe where being small and weak is considered attractive in men, because there is some tribe for everything, but in the ancestral environment, muscle mass and size was likely capped by lifetime nutrition. So you are not selecting for giantism genes, you are simply selecting for "was able to secure a good calorie intake for himself", which is a very desirable trait, so I would suspect that there is a genetic predisposition towards preferring larger men.
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People been farming long enough that we’ve evolved some instincts. Little kids will plant random stuff in the dirt as a form of play. And theres just a satisfaction from eating your own homemade fruit that doesn’t come from store bought stuff, even the fancy organic kind. Likewise people seem to generally like animal husbandry.
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Hard disagree. Sex has to be really bad before I would prefer to just crank my hog.
Also, why are you using algospeak? We're all friends here.
Even in that case, you can easily satisfy yourself using hookers. According to quick AI search the prices ranges from $20 per hour for street hookers to around $150 for average escort to $300 plus for high end hooker in USA. For a price of your average car lease, any single male can have a different hooker every week, getting his body count to triple digits easily thus matching any redpilled macho. And we are not even talking about sex tourism, where you are a cheap flight away to some 3rd world country where you can enjoy orgies for really cheap.
The OP's point of course still stands - even if you satisfy your sexual desire, there is still the social aspect that many people fill parasocial relationships. Although even those are not the only options. There are hookers who act more like your lovers where you are something like a sugar daddy. They have stable clientele of multiple men with their own schedule, so you can visit regularly and get not only a sex but also massage or even homecooked meal.
To be frank I find this as highly distasteful and unsatisfying relationship but I used it only as an example. In the end there is not much more difference between people obsessed with sexual conquests or people who obsesses about masturbation or people who just chase hookers. The difference is only in degree.
This fails to "price in" the associated legal risks — reputational damage, arrest, fines, jail time.
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Whoa, at those rates, degeneracy sounds alright! I thought the average escort was like $500 judging by what
BackdoorBackpage or whatever the hooker website is called, and then on that site, they were all covered in piercings and tattoos or were unshaven and all had descriptions about discovering themselves or something. Somehow your $150 average number sounds wrong, though.That's very high. In germany in a legal bordello it’s 50-100 euros for half an hour.
Outside very limited areas, there's no such legal thing in the US. Though of course grey and black markets exist. But the prices there must be higher, to account for the risks. Probably not an order of magnitude higher, but still higher.
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This is like saying "source: I made it up" except you asked a computer to make it up for you.
So give me your sources. The AI gave me Gitnux and 2date4 love or Worldmetrics as sources. I don't want to research that stupid shit too deeply, if you have other numbers just send it. The point still stands, sex is relatively easy to purchase for almost any single male.
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If the AI was searching then it's about as valuable as searching it yourself, which is how everyone learns everything now.
If they had AI guess with no search grounding, then yeah, that's useless
This is not true. AI search is not programmed to be critical of sources, so it becomes a pure garbage in garbage out situation.
On heavily SEOed queries, AI search is in fact much much worse than just asking the AI directly. In August 2025 I will not touch "grounded" AI with a 10 foot pole it's dogshit.
This guy asked AI for a "grounded" query and the AI happily cited a fake scam website front and center.
I just read that whole comment thread, very interesting.
It's been a few years (sad) since I grew anything and I forgot how awful the SEO was in the plant space, holy shit lmao.
The basil article was an infinite rabbit hole of AI basil articles linking to AI basil articles.
I don't think most humans are much better at detecting SEO slop, but that's not a very high bar.
Personally, I find AI search quite useful (both personally and at work) but I mostly use it as a results aggregator. I check the links it finds me, especially at work, my biggest fear is to confidently present something that turns out to be an AI hallucination.
So it's pretty great for that, it's basically like having an intern who Googles things for me, and I pick the results to look at in more detail personally.
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I agree, but I think this is mainly a result of our modern techno-dystopia. No one enjoys swiping right on hundreds of profiles just so we can "take whatever we can get" from the bottom 1% who swipe back at us. No one enjoys being the orbiter/reply-guy on social media. No one enjoys fighting for the attention of the one semi-hot woman at a party/bar/club when she's surrounded by men jockying for her attention, with a 10:1 ratio of men:women. Noone enjoys doing our best to make witty conversation while she just stares into her phone (or even worse, texting her while she takes 48 hours to reply "lol") . Noone enjoys going into some women's space like a yoga class/book club/knitting circle and feeling the suspicious stares and closed-off body language. Noone enjoys awkwardly shaking our butts to shitty hop hop at the generic dance clubs.
What I do enjoy is if I can actually meet a woman IRL and have some sort of real connection. It could be dancing, a good conversation, sharing a meal, anything really, as long as I can tell she's actually focusing her attention on me and feeling something from it. But modern life makes it so damn hard to get even that... one time I was a cocktail bar talking to a woman who was not very conventioanlly attractive, but she was still fun to talk to. I was having fun until she mentioned that she was surprised how many men were trying to talk to her, including much younger men. I was like... "look around, you're the only woman here, and there's so many single men here. Of course we all want to talk to you!" The single women are all at home hiding out on social media and I have to pay them if I want even digital attention.
All that said, I still kinda like paying women to hang out with me and give me attention sometimes, just to have that kind of "great date" experience even if it doesn't lead to seggs. They're just way better at entertaining men than any normal woman. So maybe it makes sense for this to be the modern division of labor.
Saw a tweet that made the specific argument that men aren't really competing to be more interesting than other men for a woman's attention at any given time (sometimes they are, of course). He's competing to be more interesting than her phone. Which is a difficult lift. She's got a dozen apps on there for various forms of communication, another dozen for feeding video slop, and then probably a half dozen games to fill in the gaps.
Up against that much dopamine-hacking technology, what can a given guy sitting in front of her do or say that will actually get her to stop thinking about her messages, or her latest instagram post, or make her want to engage in conversation instead of scroll tiktok.
I feel like I can do that, provided that she's sufficiently motivated to get off her butt and go out into the real world to meet people in meat-space. I also like to play with my phone when I'm sitting at the bar, but I'll put at away as soon as I meet anyone interesting to talk to. The real challenge is the women staying at home, using the phone as their sole means of communication... which is most women these days. I went to three bars tonight (fancy cocktail bars in a trendy neighborhood) and there was literally zero women there who weren't there as part of a date.
Yeah. I can't say for sure how much of it is just my own perception, but the time of a single woman going out by herself to places where she might get noticed and approached seemed to be literally over.
Its always a girls' night thing, or she's with a group of friends for a specific event, or maybe its a date she pre-arranged on the apps.
If you spy a woman sitting alone, wait five minutes and it'll always turn out she was waiting for someone. I've avoided some embarrassment by slowing my roll when I see them, even if shooting my shot was the 'right' choice.
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You might as well ask what a given woman can do to be more appealing for an average 2D aficionado than his endless, effortless, potentially AI-enhanced harem of 2D waifus.
From AntiDem's Ask.FM account:
As well as:
And from the comments of "Asia Is Not Our Salvation; It Is Our Suicide" by the same:
Man, do you just bookmark every woman-hating rant on the Internet? I deeply regret learning today what "3DPD" means.
Not at all; I simply remember them, then look them up at need. For example, I recalled that the first two were from AntiDem's Ask.FM page, so I trawled the cache archives (which list several years worth of question and answers) with Ctrl+F until I found them. The last one I saw reblogged on @Capital_Room's tumblr once, so I searched and, sure enough...
A good rant lives rent-free in my head.
I aim to please.
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I think guys like boobs enough to put down the phone if there's a real pair in front of them, at the very least.
Well - getting a pair of boobs in front of you while you're still secluded at home is, as they say, a coup-complete problem.
But the point I'm trying to make is - you can't appeal to the dopamine-hacked, at least not without significantly sacrificing your own preferences and incentives. They have to realize the error of their ways and make efforts to fix them.
And if they, "the the dopamine-hacked", collectively don't realize the error of their ways?
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Oh, that's easy. Blowjobs.
The respective answer for faceh's question would be "just buy GFE from her onlyfans".
A girl with OF isn't going to hold my hand while we walk into Home Depot to pick out supplies for our weekend project.
...well, not unless I pay her an obscene amount of money.
I'd assume a companionship service to go to a specific public location would be not much more expensive than a regular escort (which seems to be the original source of the euphemism). But maybe handholding is just too weird for modern whores.
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The thing that seems to be missing in your description of physical and social needs is essentially non-sexual/quasi-sexual physical touch. I could probably go without sex in life, but not being able to cuddle, or romantically kiss, or hold someone as they fall asleep, or just sit on the couch, or caress someone's back or arms... well, I'd find that hard to bear.
Most people under discussion here barely experienced that. Don't known what they're missing.
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That's why you get a body pillow of your oshi
I have tried this, but it does not actually work. Maybe I need to upgrade my daki to a DHR7000 or something, but most fantasy centers around the closeness, etc. rather than just fucking.
I have no idea how people do it directly to pictures; I just lay on the bed and read them for the articles, so to speak.
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Not good enough, damnit, not good enough!
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Uh, how common is gooning really?
Like regular masturbation, sure, real common. But I was under the impression gooning was some technologically driven different thing.
My understanding was that gooning is reserved for any particularly degenerate and indulgent forms of masturbation. Like when I think of a gooner, I think of someone for whom cranking it while looking at porn sitting in front of his computer doesn't work anymore, he needs to be watching 10 videos at once for hours on a multiscreen setup laying down in a reclining chair while vaping weed.
I've always looked down on "gooning" as degeneracy of a high order but damn you made it sound kind of fun
I think I just miss smoking in the reclining chair I had before I moved out on my own
It is kind of fun. No multiscreen needed, just a weed vape, a laptop, 30+ tabs, and a few hours to kill.
It gets old pretty fast though (same with porn in general). I quit weed to get a better job and don't really miss it. Kind of a shame, because fake weed vapes are dirt cheap while getting bored and going to the bar 4+ nights a week gets expensive in a hurry such that I kind of need a side gig to help pay my bar tabs (Last time that happened it spiraled out of control such that I wound up being a bartender, a fun but very time and money intensive way to develop a friend group of mostly fucked up people.).
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Funny, my impression is that it was a drug driven thing. People being high would explain the repetition, the weird descriptions of physical sensations and how long they go.
And I think that would place them on the far end of consumption habits.
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Technically it means people keeping themselves aroused with porn without ejaculating for 30mins to hours
Used also as a shorthand for people who use porn to jerkoff widely in excess of what nature would allow.
Wow, so "gooning" is like synonymous with "edging"? In that case I'm not sure if I've ever "gooned".
You can edge without gooning, but you cannot goon without edging
So say skibidi
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I think the trance state is the main criterion. I doubt edging is required.
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My question was about prevalence. Yes, any 14 year old has probably figured out regular masturbation but I thought gooning was something different.
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I'd argue assigning the loser label is pretty far from the logical intellectual perspective. It presupposes that male social status (as per the standard of being able and willing to date) is axiomatically good without explicitly stating that axiom.
under what logic can the simp not be described as a loser?
Under the logic that winning and losing can only be defined in relation to criteria and the criteria of being successful in life are subjective. Yes, even the criteria that have to deal with reproduction and Darwinism and so on. These are all parts of the same reptile brain that makes the simp happy with his lot.
If you want an explicit ruleset that would define the simp as being better than the player, then "don't waste time and effort on getting the approval of others when a simpler lifestyle will do just as well for physical needs" is one. If only hunger could be sated merely by rubbing the stomach.
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The points that you are making have become commonly accepted, at least among highly online people. I'm saying this as a social observation, not as a criticism of you.
The modern highly online understanding of male-female relations is pervaded by PUA teachings, attempts at evolutionary psychology, a general notion that "the game" is a brutal Darwinian contest, and a deep mutual mistrust between men and women. Many of the modern dating conversation's insights are accurate, and the conversation is not new - men and women have been treating and discussing the art of finding a sexual partner as being a skill or an optmizable strategy for probably almost as long as there has been language.
It's good to look at sexuality from this analytic side. But past a certain point, looking at it analytically becomes very drab, boring, and limiting. Viewed through the lens of purely analytic sexual gamesmanship, both men and women seem like horrible creatures whom no-one would really want to be with other than for a cheap temporary bodily satisfaction, an ego boost, perhaps money... just not for the joy of being with them.
If one doesn't already know the vital lessons that the analytic perspective teaches, it is very useful. Lessons like: Don't be a simp. Have confidence. Don't automatically trust people just because they are attractive. Flirting is largely about nonverbal communication. Don't expect the logic of sexual attraction to work the same way as the logic of friendship. Women are attracted to status to some extent. Etc. These lessons are especially important to pick up if one is shy and/or inexperienced and/or neuro-divergent, or has some other issue that has prevented one from already learning these things.
However, the analytic perspective by itself is joyless and one-dimensional. If taken too far, it reduces romance and sex to a real-life equivalent of grinding a video game. Joy re-enters the equation if one sees the other person as someone who transcends yourself and your image of them and predictions about them. The jaded perspective thinks "oh boy, here's yet another woman who is just like all the other women". And while there is a grain of truth in "all women are like that" (or "all men are like that"), it is not actually true. All women are not the same. All men are not the same. And to over-analyze them, to treat romance and sexuality like attempting to optimize a game strategy, turns the whole thing into a meaningless chore.
By the way, I think that what I am saying applies equally whether you're looking to settle down monogamously or whether you want to go out and keep meeting new people for sex. My comment should not be taken as advocacy for settling down.
I like your perspective. Particularly this:
That's what it feels like to read a lot of the more negativistic takes on dating, from both men and women. At some point I just wonder whether they even like the opposite sex in any sense whatsoever. I see so much talking about status and power and affirmation and sex, and almost nothing about a connection where you see yourself in the other and realize you're not so different as you thought, or the physical pleasure of a cuddle, or the joy of making your partner laugh after they had a bad day, or the calm peacefulness of a weekend spent living domestic life with your partner, or what it's like to look into someone's eyes and see them dilate and soften as they look at you. I would cut off my dick and throw it away before I gave up these things.
In particular, a lot of takes from men on the dating scene, even those I see on the motte, sound like they were written by people from a completely different planet from me -- men don't pair bond, men don't talk about their feelings, men are only interested in harem-building, men are only monogamous because women make them, romance is a game that men generate to get sexual access from women. I don't know to what extent this is just posturing, machismo, or a real difference in psychological experience. But those things just... don't describe me.
I guess I never went through a redpill phase. I certainly went through a phase where I realized that you do need to make your romantic intentions known early on with a woman, and trying to build a relationship on top of a friendship just doesn't work. But I only rarely encountered women who were "hooking up with alphas" as I was trying to date them; okay, maybe a couple times, but it was obvious pretty quickly that those ladies were emotionally troubled anyway, and a relationship with them would simply be unstable.
But I've also had women ask me out, women hunt me down or drop notes in my locker or use mutual friends to try and get me to ask her out, when I was back in school. In college I was asked out once, and had a few women who seemed eager for me to ask them out. Not every woman who's been interested in me has been my type -- but most of them were perfectly normal, stable people, and the relationships I've had, though fewer than perhaps I'd like, have been founded in mutual vulnerability and intimacy. I could always share my emotions with my partner, and we looked out for each other and cared for one another. When my relationships have ended, it was either because of a natural falling-apart (moving away, mutual loss of interest) or it was my fault. So the stereotypes of what male-female pairings are like, in TV sitcoms and motte posts and redpill guides isn't my experience of love.
I guess my few interactions with women who seem like the redpill stereotype involved me bouncing off them -- I don't play games, and I don't chase skirts. I don't sit for shit-tests and I don't like coquettishness. My yes is my yes and my no is my no. If women want to create drama for the sake of drama or engage in verbal sparring like a Jane Austin character, well, they're welcome to find this somewhere else. So I suppose my romantic style heavily filters against manipulation, and firmly towards well-adjusted, romantically decisive women. I intend to keep it this way.
So, similarly, I've also had plenty of people express interest in me. Enthusiastic, plentiful, sometimes even stalkery. Been asked out multiple times on the street in broad daylight, in fact; three months ago someone cold approached me on my way to work and told me I was really attractive. The thing is, they were all men. Which is fine: I'm bisexual.
But that same kind of ease is something I have never once in my life experienced from women. It was always a complicated process to get even the slightest time of day. And I think that's the difference: for some people, they've got to approach the process strategically and analytically, or they will never have any success.
Which is exactly the issue: many men do want relationships to form through the same process as friendship. Something organic where both people naturally recognize the value of the other person. And, for dating other men, it can and does happen exactly that way (though there are even simpler ways...), simply because baseline attraction is more evenly distributed. But, for dating women, getting over the attraction hurdle is a huge, difficult step, and TRP (at least in its lighter, non-neurodivergent varieties) is useful for understanding how to actually do that, even though the initial dating process remains entirely devoid of pleasure.
(A critical piece of context: I'm also 5'3", which explains why I have such a different experience between the two audiences. In my online dating days, when I as a test listed myself as 5'10", I got all the same enthusiasm from women as I did from men, and so I doubt it'd be necessary to rely on eldritch rituals to find success).
Let me rephrase.
What I learned in that phase is that -- like you say -- attraction is something that you need to cross as the "first hurdle."
But my argument would be that men do the same to women: it's just that men are more visual than women, and it's not at all hard to create a vague spark of attraction in a man. I don't think I'm saying anything you don't already know -- if I read your post right, that's what you're arguing.
That said, I absolutely have had relationships form through the same process as friendship. It's just that the friendship began with us both having at least a mild attraction for the other. The friendship served as a soft courtship. But I absolutely believe that every time this was the case, a relationship could have started much sooner. But I liked how it went down; like you, I take no pleasure in the initial stages of dating.
Sometimes this happened because I was in a relationship at the time, but drew the attention of someone else (this has happened exactly once, let me not exaggerate), sometimes it happened because I wasn't sure of whether I felt like dating, sometimes it happened because I was literally an oblivious idiot and I didn't know what I'd done and I spent 4 months of high school thinking my crush didn't like me when she wanted me to grab her and kiss her.
But, on that note: I also 'won' the attraction by being, in some way, performative and high status.
Birds build nests to attract lady birds (insert LBJ joke here), fish build a wonderful habitat to attract lady fish, peacocks look like a color television advertisement to attract lady peacocks (or just put extended editions of The Office on the platform)... it just is the case that, in most sexually dimorphic species, males attract females by demonstrating high status in some way. I don't have any complaints about the reality of it; it is what it is, and none of woman born controls it or chose it. However people would like it to happen, that's how it happens.
But for me, it absolutely happened organically.
I would argue strongly that I'm less attractive than you -- I don't care if I set my height to 6'7", I wouldn't get the kind of attention you're describing on dating apps. That said, short men have a really rough time, and it sucks that you've struggled because of a baseball statistic. While I have maybe once or twice been asked out by a man, I strongly doubt that gay men would consider me a catch. I can't confirm that -- I'm from the bible belt, gay men don't exactly ask out strangers on the street.
But I have a secret weapon.
I love public speaking. I absolutely love it. And when I'm in a meeting, or discussion, about something I find interesting, I can command attention.
Now, be careful what you take from that. I am the world's worst smalltalker. I hate calling people on the phone. I will avoid talking to shopkeepers if I can. I feel anxious just thinking about introducing myself to a new person. Sometimes I'm so lost in thought that I don't hear what people are saying to me, and I'll just respond with whatever I think will move the conversation along. My friends and I once played a party game where we had to imitate a randomly-picked member of our friend group, and someone imitated me by sitting, silently, with his hands clasped in his lap. That's me. When I'm not speaking, you might confuse me for a piece of furniture.
But if you say, "hey, urquan, create a presentation on the economic problems of socialism in the USSR", boy am I already excited. I'm already thinking about all the strange memes and fun analogies I can use to explain Stalin's effort to rapidly industrialize. And I'm thinking about how I might be able to make people chuckle, and remember the presentation despite the dry concept.
When I held an officer position in a club in college, I used that to springboard a few fun lectures on relevant topics I felt like sharing. I don't think most of the other members loved it, but I don't care. I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it.
And do you know when I met my girlfriend? She came to one of these lectures. She came up afterwards, started talking to me, and wouldn't let me out of her sight until she got my number. This is by far the most interested in me a human being has ever been -- male or female. And her own recollection of the event, she told me later, is, "I saw you, and I knew I had to have you in my life." How's that for crossing the attraction barrier!
I'm not Terrance Tao. I'm Rain Man. I have some special abilities that can be quite attractive, to Miss Right, but it's not something I do with intention or structure. It's something that's only mildly under my control. And I have a lot of deficits -- I don't think anyone should be envying my social charm!
There was a motte post a long time ago that replied to people talking about social competition among women; you know, sorority girls, mean girls, female bullying in school, all that kind of stuff. And I loved the comment and have tried to find it many times, without success. It went something like this: "The women I've generally been friends with or dated have been rejects from that culture of competition. And I've seen the scars that competition has made on them."
I thought that was very wise. The women I've dated have universally not been "sorority girl" types. They're not the hot girls out there doing hot girl summer. They've just been average, kind of quirky, intelligent, and warm people. I can't say a bad thing about them. I feel like I found the crown of France in the gutter. "A good wife who can find?"
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Which makes you very unusual. Most men have to chase. You're basically Terence Tao wondering how people can find calculus to be so hard.
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So now I wonder, are you one of those mythical, well adjusted, family oriented men who other mythical, well adjusted, family oriented women instinctively seek out? Or are you an oblivious alpha-chad who's mere presence is capable of making women act right? I have so many questions about your experiences, and how on Earth so many seemingly well adjusted women approach you. Or are you an unreliable narrator? How old are you? Do you go to church? Did you get married? Do you have a family yet? I'm so curious.
Cause I mean, the advice of "Just be yourself and don't tolerate women acting like that" isn't uncommon. And maybe it's regional, but after HS I never once encountered a woman who wasn't "acting like that". It's like after being released into the wild, all the good women got locked down or went to ground, and only the predators were out at night. Following the standard advice of "Be yourself and don't settle" was a recipe for being always alone. So instead your learn how to defang the predators.
Ah, this reminds me of an effortpost I wanted to write. There is definitely something to this. After college, there is absolutely a group of women who totally vanish. Unless one encounters them at work or TJMaxx (or whatever place they use to sate their shopping addiction) or the grocery store, it's effectively impossible to meet them.
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This feels so bizarrely foreign, because almost every married couple I know, myself included, built their early relationship in a way that closely matches @urquan's account. This happened mostly in college, but with a smattering of post-college relationships as well. Just a lot of average-looking, average-quality people hanging out and doing random social club things, shyly getting to know a similarly average-looking person and asking them to a play or movie or something, eventually getting serious then either breaking up or getting married and starting a family in a more-or-less dual-career household. Nobody "acted like that," that I'm aware of. No first-date hookups, negging, harems, nude pic demands, findom, tradwifery, false or true rape accusations. Very rarely any cheating, even. The guys were mostly respectful, earnest and nice, the women were mostly honest and friendly. Some of those marriages got worse over time, but many are still doing OK.
I would really love to know where all these apparently horrible young singles (of both sexes) come from. Are people trying to date way above their league and getting toyed with as a result? Did all the helicopter parenting just raise a generation of unpleasant narcissists who will never play well with others?
The world has changed:
https://www.statista.com/chart/20822/way-of-meeting-partner-heterosexual-us-couples/
It’s unfortunate that a majority are now meeting in situations of initial anonymity (online + bars), which makes it hard for anyone to judge safety and makes performance utterly necessary. I wonder what the percentages look like in 2025.
Every time I look at that chart, it scares me.
It still leaves unanswered questions, though, because however cursed bars and the internet may be, it's not like they actively interfere with developing relationships by more normal means (do they?).
Nobody needs another rape-culture/ perving-at-work debate, so let's set aside the decline in school and workplace relationships, but that chart also shows an approximately 35% drop in the proportion of people who met through friends and a 50% drop in the proportion who met through family. Say in 1995, Ann's cousin might have set her up with his cute pre-vetted army buddy Jim, or Cathy might have invited her friend Dave to a board game night with one of the single girls from her softball league. Well, cousins, army buddies, softball leagues, personally compatible humans still exist, so what's happening to interfere with those connections now? Do Ann and the army buddy still meet, but now he thinks she's too fat or she thinks he's too short compared with the hotties they shop online? Do Dave and the softball friend still do board games, but now they're under-socialized and both kind of self-absorbed, so neither of them makes a move while still feeling offended at the other sex's lack of interest? Or what?
Social media and the internet make entertaining yourself without interacting with other people trivial.
And informal clubs, softball leagues, board game nights, trivia nights, social organizations, religious services, all that kind of stuff have been in secular decline for decades in the US. Bowling Alone was written long before the advent of the smartphone.
And people have fewer friends, which means fewer connections, fewer friends-of-friends, and fewer Jims or Cathys to set up:
Even the government has taken notice. They’re calling it an epidemic!
And many people don’t even feel this very strongly, despite feeling loneliness — parasocial relationships, internet videos, gaming, TikTok, weird Internet forums based on discussing culture war dynamics, all of these things can supply enough entertainment to make many people feel satiated enough to be complacent, with maybe one or two close friends you might see rarely. I can’t deny I’m a part of this, I last met up with friends a couple months ago and have spent most of my time with my family or my girlfriend.
But one thing that the internet can’t successfully fulfill is the unique pleasure of an intimate partner. Friends don’t cuddle you to sleep at night, or make love to you, or kiss you under the stars. Internet porn and fan fiction can maybe satisfy people a bit, but it’s not good enough.
I think this pull gets at guys more than ladies, it’s just my impression from having male and female friends that my single male friends have felt particularly lonely while my single female friends have been content to pursue their careers, or school, or hobbies, while letting romance come when it will.
The stats bear this out. Pew Research states:
Keep in mind, of course, that senior women are likely to be widows if they’re single, because men have a shorter life expectancy. But among non-elder people, young men have it rough. The stats are so skewed, though, you do have to wonder if this is where the “are we dating the same guy?” TikToks come from, and if some of those “single” men have a woman in their life who would be quite alarmed to hear that. But I believe that can’t fully explain what’s going on.
So young men are single more often than young women, people have fewer friends and less desire for friends, and intimacy is the big draw to get people to go out and meet other folks.
So, what happens when people hang out at those social organizations you were talking about?
The women who show up, and are single, get SWAMPED. Most people are meeting online nowadays, which has shifted the culture to one where in-person dating often feels quaint or unwanted. And even if these young women would like to make a connection at these events, well, there’s going to be more men than them and that’s overwhelming. That means that they will often find those environments frustrating — they’d like to meet in person, but also be able to enjoy whatever the actual purpose of the social gathering is without having to fend off 4 guys who all want her number. Hence, “GUYS ONLY WANT ONE THING…”
I confess I was that guy — you know, in an organization or club in college, asking out women occasionally if I liked them. I had little success. The one time it worked, well, it’s because she asked me out. And apparently I struck her as attractive when I met her; “I saw you and I knew I had to have you in my life” is her recollection.
So I guess I have a dual narrative: I’ve struggled with loneliness at times, I’ve been single more than I’d like, I have friends who are good, decent people who’ve struggled more than me, but I’ve gotten lucky a few times and sometimes women have seen things in me I didn’t always see in myself. I’m so grateful to my girlfriend — she was very brave, decisive, and persistent, and has always treated me with love and kindness. But I know not everyone has been lucky enough to catch someone’s attention the way I’ve done a few times.
So there are absolutely people who meet in “the old way.” I did. But it’s less common. And the sort of broad social connections that make the kind of matchmaking you’re describing possible have decayed.
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You have it exactly backwards. Everyone starts here. Well, I donno, maybe I shouldn't say that. Maybe kids these days really are growing up on a steady diet of Andrew Tate and Pearly Things instead of romantic heroes in fiction. Maybe I'll circle back to this.
But back when I was a young man, this was our default stance of myself and the peers I knew. Overwhelmingly myself and my male peers viewed and treated the women we tried to date as a person who transcends ourself and our image and predictions about them.
And overwhelmingly we were disabused of those notions. "All women are like that" doesn't spring out of the void. It springs for many from spending their entire 20's experiencing women like that. Some of my peers made the adjustments and adopted what "red pill" truths and strategies they could stomach, others were too disillusioned at the amorality of dating to continue.
Amen. The core of RP ideology is that there are strong, gender-specific trends in what women like that you can change about yourself in order to be more successful dating: all women are like that is an overstatement, but its cousin "most women are like that" is spot-on.
Growing up, I took all of the mainstream advice to heart, which aligned with my natural instincts anyway: just treat women like people, as if they were a friend you liked a lot and that you'd like to become a best friend you have sex with. This, surprise surprise, led to complete failure before picking up lite red pill tactics (much too late in my 20s, alas).
So long as men like relationships and sex, they will work to understand what factors lead to relationships and sex. And so long as all women are like that, men will notice that and deploy strategies to navigate that.
Not my ideal world, but short of a commitment to lifelong celibacy, there's not much I could do about it. The ball's in women's court.
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Sure, many people start there and then get disabused of their original innocent notions. I know that well. I went through some of that journey myself. My point is that, once you've reached the point where you've absorbed the lessons that a more analytic and cynical perspective has to teach, it's good to go to something more innocent and joyful, to a perspective that respects the cynical lessons but is not hollowed out and made joyless by them. I think it is possible to be a romantic without being a clueless simp. The red pill cannot be the final stage, at least not for me. It is just so utterly boring and unappealing to look at romance and sex from that perspective. When I read most red pill authors I get the sense that they're not even enjoying the sex that they are having, it is just an ego boost for them.
If a man is not succeeding sexually because he has not absorbed enough red pill lessons then by all means, he should absorb those lessons. But if he gets stuck at that stage, it's hard for me to imagine him being actually happy with his sex life. The red pill people don't seem happy or sexually fulfilled no matter how much sex they're having, they seem constantly angry and they seem like they hate the women they are fucking.
I am absolutely not advocating that guys stay stuck in some kind of simpish innocent outlook. I went through the whole PUA thing myself, that's part of why I'm writing all this. My point is just that there is something more out there. I'm not saying that one shouldn't "spin plates". What I'm talking about is separate from the question of whether one should be with one woman or many. My point is that even if you "spin plates", it's pointless unless you learn how to deeply enjoy it and be happy with it. If it's just a chore to get ego boosts, it's rather valueless.
That's the beauty of the red pill. It treats women like they're crazy, and by acting like a red-piller you ensure that you only interact with the crazier women (as the saner ones self-select out of your way).
There are actually some foundational truths in RP mythos, although the vast majority of them apply to men and women (everyone likes people who are attractive and confident, if you have a lot going for you in life people will find that cool, etc).
As a teenager I actually started trying to write a short book of all the Red-pill truths I saw, while stripping out all the stupid misogyny. Then I got a girlfriend and stopped caring, and by the time we had broken up fully lost interest.
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I guess let me be clear. Not I, nor any of my peers, were spinning plates.
Well, there was one guy... but there's always one guy...
The point I'm trying to make is that red pill observations about women where the only thing any of us found with any explanatory or predictive power. They were horrifying, and reduced women to attention seeking narcissist/children most of the time. But damnit if they didn't work. And frankly, at the time, they hardly seemed worse than the covers of women's magazine's you'd see in the checkout isle proudly advertising ways to "train your man".
But all the same, when your attempts to treat women as people with equal agency and responsibility to you fail miserably for 10 years, and the advice you constantly receive is "Treat them like narcissist/children" and it works... I mean... how do you go back? How do you compartmentalize that back away? And once again, this isn't in the effort of getting laid all the time and having as much sex as possible, but merely getting a second date. Merely not being immediately rejected. And then maybe, if you are lucky, having her decide to decamp the cock carousel for you, and hoping she doesn't regret it and go back on your commitments to each other.
Now, I suspect there is a hidden breed of woman out there, well adjusted and predisposed to marrying a humble well adjusted man, and starting families. I may have seen a few back in my highschool days. I think some of them even married their highschool sweethearts, and I think some may even still be together. I think by some degree, if you are still dating in your 30's, you've got problems, and you are picking through other people with problems. I also think our society is destroying the environment that raises well adjusted, family oriented people, and they are damned near an endangered species at this point, such that the modal advice to treat women like spoiled children is probably the most actionable, especially into your 30's.
I intellectually understand the possible seduction value of treating women as narcissists/children. I broke into sexual success years ago through PUA, so I'm not unfamiliar with those concepts. However, my actual experience with the women who wanted to be with me longer than a one night-stand has not been that of being with narcissists/children. The women I've had long-ish relationships with have mostly been smart and decent people. Not without their problems, of course, and some of them were no paragons of mental stability, but neither am I, and they were decent... very far from this nightmare image of women as treacherous harpies. I'm actually probably more often the one who screwed up those relationships by being narcissistic/childlike myself, and/or by wanting to spread my wild oats. At least, it's 50/50. The women I've gotten to know, as opposed to one-night stands, I mean, they were often weird, but in the same way that I'm weird... neurotic, well I'm neurotic too... not totally rational, sure, but not any more so than I am irrational. I've also had some cool female friends. And as far as just sexual level stuff goes, I'm no Don Juan, it's not like I have hot girls beating down my door, but I've been with some really attractive women.
You say: "Treat them like narcissist/children" and it works... I mean... how do you go back? How do you compartmentalize that back away?"
I just don't think of it in those terms. Treating them like narcissists/children bores me, it's not arousing or stimulating for me in any way. Even if it works, it's not my thing, it's something that I don't enjoy and doesn't turn me on. I've had enough sex by now, and have satisfied my old painful teenage virgin frustration enough, that now I'm at a point where I'm not willing to do X Y and Z like a chore in order to get to sex or romance. I'm into having fun. I personally enjoy a very minimalist type of seduction, so for me fun in that regard is about just trying to use eye contact and other kinds of body language mainly. But not all guys are into that, I'm all for every guy just doing whatever kind of flirting he enjoys the most. What I enjoy most likely doesn't maximize my success but whatever, as long as I get laid every now and then with attractive women I don't care. I fall in love with every woman I see more than a few times. Not in a simp way, I don't lie or compromise or pretend or put them above myself. And I've never had a woman who I was with for a while actually disrespect me or screw me over in any way that wasn't justified by my actions, so that's never been an issue. I fall in love partly in a painful way, because I tend to get attached. But also in an expansive way, I genuinely become interested in who they are as people. I dunno, I'm still in touch with a couple of my former lovers. It's nice. They're people. Different people than men, sure. But interesting people... I don't even think about things in terms of cock carousel or whatever. If a chick wants to fuck 40 guys in a year I'm like, cool, go for it. I don't want a girl I'm seeing to fuck other guys but if I'm not seeing her then my genuine reaction is like "awesome, hope you have fun fucking".
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Women have had the knowledge that men are sex-crazed brutes forever, they tolerate us anyway.
I think the issue might be the implict (?) belief that there is some kind of genderless human standard that women (or men) need to meet. There isn't. There's men and there's women, as different as chalk and cheese. Holding women to male standards is like expecting the cat to play fetch. The wise woman doesn't expect her husband to talk deeply about his feelings or know that she's upset even if she says she's fine. You should take the same attitude to women and their foibles.
This is true, but it begs the question. Yes, men and women have different foibles, but how do they compare? How do the standards for men stack up against the standards for women?
As WhiningCoil expresses above, the redpill perspective on women essentially considers them as men's lessers, baser creatures driven primarily by instinct. This is a perspective with strong cultural precedent, and its echoes persist to this day, even in aspirationally egalitarian societies. When feminists keep talking about wanting men and women to be equal, despite their equality before the law and the outright preference shown towards women by our cultural institutions, this is what they mean.
In this way, I'm sympathetic to both feminism and the redpill perspective; I do believe that women are to some extent more childish, instinctual, etc. than men, but I also think that this is a highly unfortunate reality, not something to celebrate or appreciate, and hopefully might be ameliorated by whatever means necessary, social or biological.
See, I'd just call that 'hating women'. I like women. I think it's good they're women.
Imagine someone suggesting that we somehow 'fix' children such that they just start as adults!
People usually don't want their children to remain children forever. That's called Down's syndrome.
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If we regularly expected children to be helicopter pilots, doctors and heads of state, then yes I think them acting like regular children would be a big problem.
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Would you then contest the assertion that women are fundamentally lesser than men? I think that @To_Mandalay is essentially correct in this thread about how women have always been considered lower on the Great Chain of Being than men, do you disagree?
I don't hate women at all, though I do empathize with women who seem to hate themselves like this poor soul. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for women to feel trapped by their biology, to despair that their ordained purpose is mere continuance of the species while the men drive forwards the transcendence of Man.
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Before jumping to such conclusions, have you seriously considered why nature saw fit to select this reality?
I have indeed done some pondering on the origins of femininity. I think my strongest hypothesis is that female neuroticism largely stems from the zero-sum nature of female intrasexual competition, with utility in childrearing being a highly secondary cause. Agreeableness and consensus-seeking seem to me as less of a socially useful trait and more an adaptation towards self-preservation around potentially hostile men. Others have argued for the social utility of women's agreeableness, but I'm still pretty sure that nothing particularly bad would happen if the agreeableness distribution among women was shifted, say, 30% of the way towards the male distribution.
I largely accept the axiom that the world would be a better place if women acted more like men, though I'm unsure of the optimal delta. There are legitimately complimentary aspects to femininity, but to the extent that women are in fact "like narcissistic children", it would be better if they weren't.
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And that is evidence that feminists are either too incompetent (they aren't...) to understand the reason for this or are deliberately maintaining (or feigning) ignorance for social manipulation. The idea that men are by nature baser creatures driven primarily by their instincts (eg, "They think with their dicks.") is widespread in culture just as it is for women. Men are not seen as inherently better than women; people who control themselves and don't give in to their base instincts are seen as better than people who don't. Society expects this of men in a way it doesn't of women and in return grants them greater status for achieving it, as well as punishing them much more harshly for not. Feminists typically focus on eliminating the greater status granted men without eliminating (often rather reinforcing) the greater pressure nor the greater punishment.
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Debatable, but also, let me compare the information ecosystems at work here. Men's many faults and failure modes are part of mainstream culture. Women can open say, in mixed company, in virtually any setting, "All men want is sex." And all the men will nod thinking "Not me, but those other guys sure". If they have daughter's they'll think of all the men they hope stay the fuck away from her. The women might still be thinking of their husbands. But generally, nobody will protest the statement, and it's treated as just obviously true and uncontroversial.
Knowledge of women's many faults and failure modes exists in a ghetto and is profoundly stigmatized. It's not worked into mainstream culture at all. Father's rarely pass the information they've learned onto their sons, lest their wive's overhear and lose their shit that their husband is teaching their sons to "hate women". All we ever hear is a litany of "Women never lie about rape/lie about paternity/baby trap men". To accuse any woman of doing so sets off the entire cartel like you have personally accused every woman of doing such a thing. They cannot dissociate from the "Women lie about rape" the same way men can from "All men want is sex."
So most women are armed against male excesses, and most men are fed into the wood chipper repeatedly until they rediscover the forbidden knowledge from first principles yet again. Or they get lucky and find even some light red-pill takes.
X. I remember a lot of ‘yeah, son, women are emotionally unstable’ and the like.
Yeah, but that's up there with milquetoast phrases like "Boys will be boys" IMHO.
Like, by comparison, it is not uncommon for women to check in with friends before and after dates "Just in case". It's just common knowledge that it's a thing you should do. Maybe mother's tell their daughters, I wouldn't be shocked. But I knew many women who had this sort of buddy system when they were going on dates. Along with dozens of other rules of thumb to protect themselves in case the man was a scumbag or violent.
What defenses are men armed with? "Don't stick your dick in crazy" I guess that works, but what is crazy? Well now we're right back to red-pillology as the only definer of women. And generally, after they've slept with a woman, everything that happens after, even the most nightmarish abuse and family terrorism, is viewed as something they brought on themselves. All they do is shut their mouth, get a lawyer, and say goodbye to half their assets and income.
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Can you please give some specific examples about how treating women like narcissists/children works? Like specific anecdotes and stories. I've always heard that the red pill implies this interpretation, but I've never read any stories that actually show this phenomenon.
I'd say the absolute floor is to be aware of how to handle the "shit test". The fact that women are relentlessly probing your boundaries for weakness, and like children, if you give in they lose all respect for you. If you treat women like peers with mutual respect, you might foolishly give into one of these "shit test" and then you're fucked. You can literally watch them lose interest in you and check out of all future dates.
I have no theory of mind for this behavior. Red-pillology says there frankly isn't one, it's entirely biological. They don't even know they are doing it, and don't even know that's how they are reacting to it. Maybe that's a less inflammatory theory than thinking it's on purpose, maybe learned from those "How to train your man" magazines I always see at the grocery checkout and never read.
I think it’s about safety. If a woman cant absolutely feel safe around you, you are done. And one of the best ways to find out if you’re able to stick up for yourself is to try to push on the boundaries until the choice is you stick to your guns or you cave.
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I can probably dredge up a few if I thought for a bit.
But women will tell it to you directly if you let them.
This video also lives rent-free in my head.
Even straight up liberal bisexual chicks will let it slip.
Also, try flipping through any given Romance book on the bestseller's list these days.
I love the recurring word "organically" here. Translation: "I didn't have to ask for this dammit."
I'm sorry I missed this entire discussion by two weeks, but I won't reanimate it now.. I'm sure it'll come around again, and I hope you can forgive me this one necropost. A lot of people in this thread could take advice from each other, but I'm entertained by the pushback you and mrvanillasky are getting on what is basically the attracting-women equivalent of Calories In/Calories Out.
Its also entertaining to me, or else I wouldn't persist so much.
I actually get where they're coming from. I was taught a narrative for 20 years that women generally dislike being told what to do, that you should be nice and unthreatening when talking to them, and that "no" unequivocally means "no" every time, rather than "CONVINCE me."
You really have to internalize rules 1 and 2 (be attractive, don't be unattractive) and then notice how if you're attractive, you are already 80% of the way to winning, you just have to play the game correctly and overcome some token amount of reluctance and 'close the deal' (for whatever "the deal" is). This means being assertive and, frankly, treating them as if they don't know what they want, and you're just the man to give it to them.
One observation that really made it click for me was "if they really want you to stop, they'll leave/avoid you." If they aren't actively packing and heading for the door, you're still in play. For some people reading actions comes naturally. For the guys who have been taught their whole lives to take women at their word, they're left VERY confused as to why ignoring their words would work so well.
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It's another trope / basic lore in RedPill forums that your "blue haired, heavily tatted, super pierced" feminist is probably into pretty rough sex / degradation / submissive kink.
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Yep.
I can distinctly recall the dawning sense of disgusted realization when I began implementing the Red Pill stuff in small doses with women I was interested in and saw it working in real time. Very consistently. Even against women who were anti-redpill.
The easiest way to notice it nowadays is see how any given woman will 'ignore' most compliments paid to her by onlookers... but A SINGLE VEILED INSULT and suddenly all her attention focuses in and she responds ONLY to that. And the nature of her response will vary entirely based on how attractive the insulting party is.
Its tapping into baseline truth more closely than the narrative I was brought up on ever did.
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Its probably fair to say that the bottom 50% of men, in terms of attractiveness, are functionally invisible to the average woman. And you ever heard the saying "the opposite of love isn't hate, its indifference?" Yeah.
Which is to say, they don't actually count those men in their own personal calculation of what "men" are like. If you tell these women that a huge portion of men are actually not able to get matches on tinder, or can't successfully approach women, and thus are unable to find a relationship despite honest best efforts, these women will simply disbelieve you. Availability Heuristic and all that.
So from their perspective, the men that they notice and pursue, i.e. the ones that actually 'exist' for them, are doing just fine. In fact they're doing TOO well, its not fair that he can just pump and dump her because she's one of 5 or 6 others he has on tap!
I'd say that most of the intersex animosity is because women see the top, call it 20% of men as "men" and the bottom 50% as nonentities that don't enter their thought processes at all. And then there's that awkward 30% of men who are in a superposition of 'man' and 'not man' unless and until a woman decides to pay them attention.
If they only compare themselves to the upper 20% of guys, and ignore the bottom 50%, then mentally yeah it feels like SHE is the disadvantaged one in this situation. They can ignore things like the male suicide rate, the fact that most of the crappiest jobs are male-dominated, and that men are generally disfavored by the law because they only see the top 20% of dudes, who ARE in fact doing really well, and assume that's representative. And boom, there's your patriarchy.
Meanwhile, the other 80% of men are painfully aware of their own status, and are finding that every woman they attempt to approach is in fact pursuing those top 20% of guys, and, as noted, is un-self-aware of this factor, and disregards the experience of the vast majority of men when judging them.
So women are mad at 'men' because the only men they care about are rejecting them in the end, refusing commitment but taking sex.
Men are mad at 'women' because when women get mad at those top men, they put ALL men on blast, and that catches a lot of guys in the crossfire who have not done a damn thing to deserve it. They're being treated like villains ON TOP of being rejected by women en masse because those top men are gleefully exploiting their position, and women are incapable of regulating their own marketplace so are getting increasingly distressed and lashing out.
And uh, it looks like said men are getting very, very fed up with this.
And no, this is NOT explained solely by manosphere influencers. Even men who are successfully dating seem to believe less in gender equality. Because those top 20% of guys probably have come to understand women from the other side.
One possible solution I've been considering recently is forcibly marrying and then if that doesn't work, castrating these men. Of course I would like women to shape up too, but that seems like a tall ask.
The thing is, the top 20% of these men that don't get married are frankly throwing a lot of their life and use to society out the window by continuing to live the lifestyle of a Lothario. Not only does stringing 2-4 women a long at a time embitter those women and make it more difficult for them to stably pair bond, the sheer amount of time that it takes to juggle these relationships impacts your ability to do work, have friends, take care of yourself, and generally contribute to society. These men are also ruining their own ability to pair bond by engaging in this lifestyle. Consider two examples. One of my current roommates, let's call him James, has lived like a Lothario almost the entire time I've known him. Long term "girlfriend" back in California who he constantly cheats on with a rotation of 2-3 women here in Baltimore. Some of my resentment towards him is certainly jealousy (he has recently been fucking a girl I went on a date with and mildly liked), but it's hard not to see how this behavior is ruining his life. When I first met this guy he was deeply interested in history and biology and in pretty good shape. Now he doesn't do anything except scroll on instagram, watch retarded kids TV shows, and have sex with these women. He also recently got his PhD, but with ZERO publications, despite being in a computational biology lab where the expectation is 3-4 papers by graduation. This guy is smart and should be contributing to society, but instead is mooching off the NIH tit and ruining women. The other example is my friend Saul, who used to live this kind of lifestyle, until he started dating this girl Deborah. They got married last year, and since then his efforts around the house, at work, with friends, and with his art projects have skyrocketed because all that time he was spending at bars and on tinder is now going into his actual life.
I didn't reply to your original comment in the small-scale thread, but since you posted this again in the CW thread I feel obliged to say something.
This is unhinged and unreasonable, and genuinely alarming. This just further confirms my prior statements on the hypocrisy and one-sidedness of many people (including many social conservatives), in that they like perpetually invoking men's supposed degenerate nature and women's supposed inherent vulnerability and manipulableness (which of course implies nothing about their ability to occupy positions of influence), and will routinely place extra responsibilities for prosociality on men that they won’t on women.
Expecting women to shape up and stop participating in antisocial and reckless behaviours of their own isn't something to be advocated for since it's too tall an ask. Expecting women to regulate their own sexual behaviour, sensibly assess risk and accept the consequences of their bad decisions like adults apparently is not reasonable, and they deserve recompense for their freely-made decision to have sex with obvious players whose intentions would be clear to anyone with an IQ above 20, like children who must perpetually be sheltered from the repercussions of their actions. Judging women for their sexual behaviour and placing restrictions on them is also a no-no. But ordering forcible marriage, castration, etc on men is I suppose no big deal. I'm not even a fan of lotharios or players and don't believe it to be a particularly beneficial life choice, but this is an extremely disproportionate punishment relative to the actual harm caused. But hey while we're coming up with bright ideas about how to fix dating, perhaps we should infibulate women or something for engaging in acts of deception in the sexual marketplace like gold-digging and serially stringing men along for attention, and “ruining men”.
This kind of casually expressed sentiment nudges me closer and closer to harbouring @Sloot's positions every day (a user who is very abrasive, very different from me and wants vastly different things out of life, but who I actually think is more right about things than people here give him credit for). I am always amazed by the sheer unparalleled power of women's tears, such that it can get people to order atrocities for offending them.
Of course these lotharios are doing something bad, should they not have consequences?
I agree that castration is dumb. But what’s wrong with seduction laws?
Well, women are actively giving Lothario what he wants. It's not like women should be considered incapable of assessing their own risk or bearing the consequences of their own decisions, and it's often trivially easy to identify a cad - they barely even need to hide that fact. Personally I think that if women decide to play with fire, it should come as no surprise once they get burned. You did a stupid thing and had unrealistic expectations of a man you probably already knew wasn't looking for the same thing you were, learn from it and grow.
Perhaps seduction laws make some level of sense within a traditionalist sexual/moral framework, but right now, we don't live in that world. We live under a bizarre marriage of Victorian era morality and female sexual liberation that is the schizophrenic brainchild of modern gender feminism. Most people are somehow still capable of harbouring the traditional idea that female sexuality is a Big Deal and must be guarded closely; that any woman who feels violated (by her own free choices, mind you) is an agency-less victim who should have the ability to shift responsibility onto the man and obtain restitution of some form from the one "responsible", while somehow also holding the liberal idea that women are agents who can freely make whatever sexual choices they want without outside constraint or any personal responsibility to safeguard their own virtue. All the choice, without any of the responsibility.
Men and society have no ability to police women, despite the fact that once the sex they assented to does not result in what they want, it is the responsibility of society - whether that be the men around them, or society as a whole - to intervene on their behalf. Historically this would've been a woman's father beating the daylights out of the man in question and forcing a shotgun wedding, today it comes in the form of public cancellation and blacklisting of the man as a predator and objectifier of women. In effect, this means that men are policed, whereas women aren't even expected to accept the consequences of their own behaviour. Introducing seduction laws into this clusterfuck makes the situation even more unbalanced, not less.
At the very least it should go either way - sexual liberation or sexual traditionalism. But we fall short of even that basic standard at the moment. Right now many people's moral evaluations are incoherently structured around what would be most convenient for women, switching between traditionalism and liberation in a way that allows them to maximise the benefits women extract while minimising judgement and stigma, and that is something I do object to. It needs to be consistent.
Eh, the case for sexual traditionalism is pretty strong.
No one has every died from being too horny. If this were the case, men would have an expected and maximum lifespan of 16 years.
Men commit the overwhelming majority of murders and violence crime. The are, generally, three broad reasons for this; money/currency (including drugs), respect or prestige, and access or exclusive access to women.
The near human universal antipathy towards prostitution is largely based in concerns for a) health and b) preventing the breakup of families due to infidelity. I know it may come as a shock, but our hundreds of millions of illiterate agricultural ancestors weren't actually involved in a highly ideological effort to "own women's bodies and sexual agency" -- they didn't want creepy-crawlies in their pants, and also knew that Uncle Nimrod was one seriously horny dude.
Won't pay it much attention here but; pregnancy and abortion.
Simply put, sexual hyper-liberalization is obviously high risk for society. Risk, even when high, isn't inherently bad, but one then has to weigh it against the other side of the equation; reward.
And what is the real reward for sexual liberalization? I mean this genuinely as a question, not a rhetorical device. The most common responses I have heard or seen fall into a bucket of fuzzy, highly emotional self-justifications; "People should be able to express themselves however they want" , "sexual agency is a necessary requirement for personal liberty" (I don't know what that means) , "people have a right to love whoever they want to love." None of this is very concrete and side steps the entire risk-reward framework.
I also haven't seen much in the way of good faith or realistic discussions of the downsides of a return to sexual traditionalism. The Handmaids Tale LARPing is, hilariously, just a publicly accessible BDSM fantasy. Sexual traditionalism wouldn't mean women couldn't vote or drive or have "real jobs" (read: high status wordcel jobs). I can see slut shaming becoming a little more prevalent but my thought there is that it still absolutely exists, but is just done in layers-upon-layers of backhanded compliments and covert communication styles instead of out in the open.
Does it? "Not having a fundamental moral right infringed upon" is a kind of reward, surely. You may as well ask why a traditionalist sexual mores shouldn't simply shoot all transgressors without a trial. I'm sure a practical argument could be constructed on why such a policy would be detrimental to society along some tangible metric, but that's not why any sensible person will immediately reject such a proposal with horror: it's because they feel that killing people is, all else being equal, morally wrong. This isn't "concrete" and it "side-steps the risk-reward framework", but all the same, you can't have a real conversation about the issue without bringing it up.
In the same way, as a true liberal, I feel it is, all else being equal, axiomatically, fairly wrong to prevent people from doing whatever the hell they want; and doubly wrong to force them to do things they don't want to do. Society naturally has to mandate a little bit of each to keep itself running, but that's a trade-off from the word go, and you should only add more restrictions and duties with the understanding that you are doing harm to your citizens with each new bylaw by infringing upon those basic rights, so the payoff had better be damn good. Traditional sexual norms include a fair bit of forcing women to do things they don't want to do, and positively enormous amounts of preventing people of both sexes from doing things they want to do. There's an enormous penalty in the "cons" column on that basis alone, and in a world where STDs and unwanted pregnancies are under control, the fuzzier benefits just don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of making up for it. It's like asking what kind of subtle improvement to demographic statistics would be worth mandating that people whack themselves in the knee with a hammer every morning.
I want to sincerely thank you for creating such a succinct illustration of why liberalism always fails within its own framework.
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Gonna go off on a tangent here that's unrelated to what you were trying to say, but I'm just going to point out that this is largely down to their risk taking and greater aggressiveness within the public sphere, which also means that they are responsible for the overwhelming majority of acts of heroism (men are 90% of those who have received the Carnegie Hero Medal, for example). Of course, the negative aspects of these traits always get discussed so much more than the positive ones, and by virtually every political group in existence. Wonder why. Then there's also the reality of violence-by-proxy by women, which is yet another thing that fuels male-perpetrated violence. I wrote a longer comment about all of that here.
I wasn't so much advocating sexual liberalisation or disparaging sexual traditionalism as much as I was simply pointing out that if we're accepting a sexual framework, we need to fully accept all of its consequences. Sexual traditionalism doesn't just mean "shotgun weddings for men" and "penalties for cads for having deflowered a woman": it also means stigmatising and penalising women who have premarital sex or tart themselves up inappropriately or use sex/intimacy to wheedle money out of men, granting the men around them the power to vet and police who they can go out with (since they will have to defend any breach of their honour), and placing responsibilities on both husband and wife in a marriage to put out and provide sex to their spouse. The responsibility for maintaining a pro-social scenario was not placed only on one party.
Note I don't consider this to be the Handmaid's Tale either. I very much agree with you that that's basically feminist oppression porn and an unhinged caricature of traditional sexual mores which borders on the fantastical. I think all of these traditional strictures are just a consequence of accepting that entire framework of looking at things, and I don't like how we've basically adopted a chimera of sexual liberalism and traditionalism, having accepted only the parts of both worldviews that benefit women while discarding all the bits that may inconvenience them. Within this current context, I won't accept any more sexual strictures being placed on men; the system is already engineered to give women maximal choice while displacing maximal accountability onto men. If we're advocating a traditional society, the obligations of women that made it make sense need to be enforced. We need to pick a lane and stick with it, instead of relying on women's tears to help us shape our approach to everything regardless of how conflicted and schizophrenic things get.
What makes you think I have a problem with any of that?
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thejdizzler's comment is pretty extreme, and if I had to bet I'd bet that this is just him coping with his own jealousy and shortcomings while trying to find a "logical" solution to the problems that affect his type the most. It's not rational though. It's an absurd proposal. It seems like he's just grasping for straws in hopes that some others will empathize with his situation. I do empathize with the sort of turmoil he's dealing with right now, because I think it's become a broader societal problem.
It's reasonable in the current moment because current society allows it. The problem is that it has the potential to bring about societal consequences that people no longer seem to think are possible. A group willingly volunteering to scale back the most freedom and opportunity they've ever had for the sake of the other half of the population will not happen. If I were a Western woman in the current environment, I too would not want to willingly give up my position in society.
What's likely to happen though is that after this has run its course for a while, either A) some capable portion of the lower 80% of men, accompanied by a handful of the top 20% of men, will make increasingly harder pushes for men's control than the one that's happening right now, or B) AI will increasingly fill the emptiness these men feel, come up with new methods to prevent human violence, and stave off a chaotic uprising. Plenty of other scenarios could play out, but these two seem the most obvious in the current setting. Any other scenario that trends away from prosperity will be much worse for current women's rights, because ostracism, shaming, and emotional manipulation will take a backseat to the threat of violence.
Right now, warning the population about the possibility of something violent like this happening just rings hollow. Nobody in the lib or progressive camp actually believes that their behavior fuels the fire they most want to put out. Worst of all is that there's nothing to be done about that on a macro level. In my opinion, the only real way this shakes out is people learning the hard way, like we always have.
My predictions are obviously open for criticism. I present two distinct possibilities and a vague third one, when in reality there is an infinite number of possible outcomes.
Here's my prognostication:
A disproportionate number of western women enter their 40s and 50s single, never married, and childless. It doesn't matter if they "realize" they want a family or not. Instead, the tyranny of aging means they will simply get less male attention as time goes on. Gracefully accepting defeat isn't something many humans do, so they will rebel in their own way. Not against men in some sort of wide scale "Go Girlboss!" moment. Instead, they will attack the easiest to spot targets with the lowest possibility of retaliation; young women.
The great reckoning will thus be these spinsters attempting to shame or otherwise emotionally blackmail these younger women not into avoiding the older generations mistakes (see: failure to accept defeat) but into agreeing with the spinsters ahead of schedule. Recommended Slogan: "The only way to be a feminist in 2035 is to admit that all men are evil. Defund the patriarchy!"
But young women themselves will largely see this for the spite fueled grift that it is and veer away from anything that even resembles this. They'll continue to be pretty and young and go on dates, but perhaps not put out as much, and perhaps seek the counsel of trusted male friends on their potential mates. Play this tape forward enough and all of a sudden the "cool girl" thing to do is to take things slow, pair bond hard, and get married early and have babies.
My primary support for this prediction is that it's already happening. Gen Z women, from the survey's I have seen, are super divided between "all men are evil" levels of feminism and "lol, I just want to be a mom" levels of trad. There isn't much of a middle ground. I've also seen some millenial women, after having become moms, hit the hard defect button out of the sisterhood. My anec-data of note was seeing a FAANG director-of-something-made-up leave that $500k / yr job to be a SAHM after taking an extended maternity leave and changing her mind to "whoooaaa babies are way better than spreadsheets."
In business, there's always a lot of discussion about the unit economics of company. Simply put, does selling one unit of your product to a customer cost more than you're selling it for? In startup land, the answer to this question can be "yes" for some amount of time. In a high growth setting, paying to buy up market share can be a viable strategy. But, eventually, the answer has to be "no." If it isn't, you're running a structurally negative return and it's just a matter of time and debt before the company dies.
I see failing ideologies like third wave feminism in this regard. You can have whatever worldview you want, but if having and professing that worldview leads to a lifestyle that cannot support itself in the long term, eventually that worldview dies out. Freezing eggs, looking for sperm donors, and then being a single mother is a far far higher risk, lower return, more expensive, and more complicated strategy than "get married. have kids" You can try to find some sort of grey middle ground, which has been the entire experiment since, roughly, the late 1990s / early 2000s, but I think the experiment has shown that middle ground is, at best, a thin isthmus rather than a lush and wide peninsula (geography metaphors for the win).
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You and @Tree and @Sloot are correct. Upon reflection last night, I think I don't want to hold this position, and at least some of it comes from rage at my personal living situation. The prosocial thing for me to do would be to move out as soon as my lease is up (which I will do). It's not good for me to hold enough rage in my heart that I'm willing to advocate for castration (although everyone seems to miss the marriage part which is much less severe), and to hold such a dim view of women that I think they are fundamentally incapable of change. Thank you for helping me realize how ridiculous my position here is.
Good. Soaking in that much bitterness is not healthy. Poor James never knew how close he came.
It’s rare for people to admit they’ve changed their mind as it happens, so thanks for that. Hard to say if in this instance it’s purely the result of rational argument, or the moral condemnation by multiple people (in addition to describing it as low status), and if so, if that is just as legitimate a reason to use/change one’s mind. Probably.
According to OP James has a pattern of stealing women from his lovelorn roommate. Such a fellow is lucky to still have all his teeth, and if he continues in that vein will not have them all for long.
The problem here is that James will not lose his teeth and everyone knows it, especially James. What pretty much everyone misses is that patriarchy is fundamentally about dealing with male intrasexual competition. All the stuff psychoanalyzing women largely misses the point.
Patriarchy wouldn’t have applied to begin with; these aren’t chaste Virgin daughters he’s laying with. They would, by the standards of a patriarchal society, have been reckoned as prostitutes.
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Please say more about this!
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I think a combination. There's rationally no reason for me to hold this opinion, as it's not actionable (unless I want to end up in jail). It also implies that women are not accountable at all for their actions, which I disagree with. It takes two to tango, and most of the time a women knows what she's getting with Lothario (she thinks she can change him however). It would be abhorrent to me if someone advocated FGM or something similar for women in this situation, so my position on castration doesn't make sense.
And then morally it makes me sound like a whiny bitch that is upset he isn't getting any. That's not the kind of person I think I am, and it's certainly not the kind of person I want to be. Although I agree with most of the arguments that @faceh here and in general, I'm starting to wonder what the use of arguing about this on the internet actually is for me. It's not fun like other debates here are, it doesn't help me develop my arguments for the real world, and it doesn't really help me improve my own attitude and life. Think I am going to ban myself from discussing these topics further on here (@Mods feel free to enforce this from now on).
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That's reasonable, and for the record you do have my sympathies - I do understand the rage at your living situation and at your roommate, it seems rough.
Definitely you should move out, I wouldn't like living there either if I were you.
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The whole point of pursuing money and status through your career is to gain access to women. If you can cut out the middleman, why not? What's a job other than working 40 hours a week to make your bosses richer?
Hate the game, not the player. The problem is that society allows James to get access to women without contributing his fair share. The only way to stop this is to prevent the women from going to James by force, and that we are not willing to do.
You fantasize about castrating James because you are not allowed to fantasize about locking up the girl you dated.
Style and phrasing is straight out of The Last Psychiatrist and Sadly, Porn.
Well done.
I was actually repeating what the little copy of the Dreaded Jim on my shoulder said (it looks like a tiny Foghorn Leghorn).
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The other point of going to work is to have money, and potentially social status. People like the things money brings. As the old saw goes, a woman makes a house better- but it still beats a cardboard box under a bridge.
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So why do straight women and gay men have careers then?
In my experience, for the great majority of women, they don't. They prioritize either fun, free time, self-actualization, etc., on the one hand, or they prioritize safety, stability, morality etc. when making job decisions. The former for the young and attractive, the latter when older and settled down. Money is a concern insofar as it is necessary to guarantee a certain minimum living standard, and is preferably gained through parents, partners or the state.
Going for an actual career is, by and large, a thing men do. If this post may read too anti-women for some, there is also plenty of dysfunction in male life decision making, mostly centered around taking unnecessary high risks that are believed to plausibly have high returns but really don't, and/or playing competitive negative sum games on the mistaken believe that one is surely far above average.
Not sure if this is a class or geographical thing but that does not reflect at all the reality I live in, and it still doesn't answer why Tim Cook or Sam Altman are billionaires despite having zero interest in women.
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Low-effort answer:
Straight women have careers because they thought they could have what the men they see have without giving anything up. That and wartime conscription + companies realizing they could devalue labor + governments enjoying a larger tax base.
Gay men have careers because that's where all the men are, duh.
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Boats, nice cars etc can absolutely bring the ladies.
They can act as a multiplier for someone who already has game but really isn't a method with high returns.
Boats boosts it by approximately four billion.
Owning a boat is financial masochism. I've never done it because literally every blog on the planet - including super bro boat blogs - categorically informs you that it's a horrible idea. Yes, yes, "if it's a true passion" -- but, if it is, then you'll deal with the logistics of renting or chartering.
But got-damn to the bitches love a boat. My first experience with this was doing a half day rental of a pontoon boat on a B-Tier lake in greater Appalachia. This was not Miami, Catalina Island, Mykonos, what have you. This was a hot-ass august day on a "lake" that was made when Uncle Sam dammed a river 80 years ago.
The bikinis were on only until they were off. Sound track of Sports Illustrated Photo Shoot giggles. As I was the guy who decided to rent the boat and then drive it, my girlfriend was the ring leader and, although I didn't pursue it, I kind of felt like she was listing threesome on the menu.
Although I now see it for the moral sugar-high-and-crash that it was, and would never orchestrate a similar scenario, I cannot lie and say the memory isn't a warm one.
I have zero inclination to buy a boat, but when I drive past a marina in the summer in some of these mountain lakes, I smile, turn up the Kenny Chesney, and go back.
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I got laid plenty before I had any serious money or status. The main reason why I pursue money and status now is so that I can stop working and enjoy life in many dimensions, only one of which is women.
I don't consider that to be a problem.
Sure he is, who would stop him about fantasizing about it? Even if we mean "fantasize about it openly", I don't think that the average person would be much less disturbed, if at all, about hearing someone say "I want to castrate a man because he is getting laid without contributing to society" than about hearing someone say "I want to lock up women so they don't have sex with men who do not contribute to society".
No, the second would be way, way more offensive.
‘Fuckbois who lead women on should get their dick chopped off’ will make people laugh or grimace depending on how you say it, but ‘women should be kept chaste for marriage’ will get you labelled as an misogynist and people will vanish at the speed of light.
Why not frame it like cigarette smoking?
I don't think people look down on people on a deeply moral level for smoking nowadays, but it's definitely at the level of "Yo, how can you be so stupid? Those cause cancer. And we've know that for years"
I won't judge a woman for going through a ho phase, but I'll shake my head and think "Any smart and respectable man is going to find a subtle way to filter you out. And we've know that for years."
I would also apply this exact same logic in reverse to a man. You spent your 20s and 30s dogging chicks and being a cad / skeezer? Well, in your 40s, any worthwhile woman is going to find a way to filter you out as well.
It seems worth noting that there are very few chaste virgins sleeping with Casanova. Very promiscuous people mostly have sex with each other- even if certain cads like to insist they introduce chaste virgins to the lifestyle on the reg.
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Wait for marriage isn’t the coolest opinion, but it’s not offensive, either. More old fashioned.
In London the social dynamics are pretty different. More importantly, though, there's a BIG difference between
and
It doesn't just sound like someone's grandma?
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Plenty of people in London wait for marriage, they just tend not to be natives.
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I think this a rather cynical way at looking at the point of a career or society in general is. There are many other goods and services that I enjoy in society other than WAP because people have been driven to excel at their careers. Women are one lever, but we also used to have other levers (empire, community, religion) that we have systematically dismantled.
There's also a lot more to life than women. As @faceh has explained many times, he's very happy with his life outside of the romantic sphere. I would count myself in the same boat. I like my job (mostly), I have intellectually fulfilling hobbies, I'm very fit, I have a pretty good platonic community where I live. James has none of this stuff and all the women. I frankly would not trade places with him.
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I’ve been inwardly giggling at you and @faceh’s recent comments matter-of-factly talking about castrating or even executing “Lothario” men.
Like the state of affairs is so bleak, the cultural inertia too powerful to reverse, that such a practice is more realistic and further within the Overton window than marginally but directly limiting or inconveniencing the FUN or freedom of young women in some way to increase the protections afforded them.
lmao, epic roommate-mogging.
Do you have to listen to her moaning when he’s taking her to poundtown in your apartment? If I had a roommate, I’d be looking into lease-breaking options before subjecting myself to potentially seeing a crush, even a mild one, walk into a roommate’s room—much less listening to her moaning when it’s her turn out of his soft harem to get railed, at which point the recently discussed option of assisted suicide would rise in temptation.
Maybe he could kindly grab a PoV cellphone sex tape with her for you. It might break her spell on you, cure your crush on her, for you to see her Wonderfulness get defiled. On the other hand, it could also skyrocket your seethe and jealousy.
Well, he’s laying pipe left and right, so it sounds like he’s still in decent enough shape. The market speaks. What better judge of shape than what’s deemed sufficient by various young women to dick them down?
That’s disgusting: scrolling on Instagram, watching TV shows, and having sex with various women. How does he meet these women and how does he seduce them? Just so I know how to avoid such a lifestyle.
“What do you call someone who gets his PhD with zero publications?”
“Doctor.”
If he’s not intending to go into academia or pursue one of the rare industry jobs that cares about such a thing, publication grinding is a poor use of time. If he indeed is intending to do so, the only real victim of his lack of publication record would be himself.
If he’s “mooching” off the NIH, to the extent this is an injustice, the fault primarily lies with his PI and/or dissertation committee for letting him coast his way to a PhD. Otherwise, I disagree he has some unilateral duty to Contribute to society based on some nebulous Social Contract, a duty rarely demanded of women or non-Asian minorities.
Expecting him to labcuck and publication grind Just Because instead of chilling out and slinging dick would sound like Calvin’s dad and “misery breeds character” to me.
You should invite James here. Would be entertaining to hear things from the perspective of jdizzler’s rizzler roommate.
ETA:
I was mentally formulating a response to @mrvanillasky's reply along these lines with a tag to @thejdizzler, but given @FCfromSSC's reply this is combined with the follow-up to that too.
I did not intend to insult nor antagonize @thejdizzler with the portion @FCfromSSC quoted, nor any of my original comment. The opposite, actually: I was expressing to @thejdizzler the sense of horror and hilarity I got from the situation like I would have if a close real-life, similarly-aged male friend recounted me such a tale. Perhaps I was in an overly jovial mood from the comments about castrating/executing "Lothario" men,* for the reason described in "like the state of affairs is so bleak..." But then again, one's crush signing up to be on a Lothario roommate's roster of fucktoys—what is this, if not a plotline out of some dark comedy?
I was not trying to "teach a lesson", nor was I (on the other side of the coin) trying to provide @thejdizzler guidance, gentle or otherwise. As at least for the immediate situation at hand, I didn't have anything in mind to be taught or guided beyond the generic "just live solo," which is a common suggestion of mine, especially to young men having anything less than a blast of a time living with (a) roommate(s). Or "just don't have crushes on chicks who are potential soft harem members for other guys," which might not be all-too-actionable advice.
Conditional on having-Lothario-roommate-casually-piping-down-your-crush, @thejdizzler's tolerating the situation with better chillness than I likely would, hence my partially joking comment that such a scenario would make me feel more tempted by assisted suicide on the margin.
* If I wanted to object to such proposals I would have (time/energy permitting), but I didn't—the proposal(s) of castrating/executing "Lotharios" strikes me as mostly amusing and fanciful. The thing I did want to provide a friendly objection for was something more grounded, the notion of a unilateral duty to "contribut[e] to society," and/or an obligation to for some reason having to go above and beyond in completing one's PhD (or any degree, for that matter). This was unrelated to the section @FCfromSSC quoted.
This shit turns people into the Joker.
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This is maybe the funniest comment I've seen in all my years on SSC/CWR/Motte
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Do not use edits to argue with a banning. You may send us modmail if you want to plead your case, but normally post-ban edits like this are grounds for a permaban.
I concur with @FCfromSSC that regardless of how you "intended" it, this post was clearly a direct attack on @thejdizzler, and it did not strike me (nor him, apparently) as good-natured at all.
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Indeed. The wars of the sexes, and the resulting fertility collapse, have gotten so bad that people are willing to resort to literally anything to fix them: killing womanizers, paying women to birth orphans, anything at all...
...except the one thing that we know works, and that kept civilization running for the past 5,000 years. De-emancipate women? Never! Better to go extinct.
Having been around de-emancipated women it isn’t a panacea.
Sand wigger white sharia posting tends to fail to realize that sharia- and deeply oppressive traditional cultures more generally- have a lot of supporting social structures which are much harder to generate de novo.
On the one hand, yes, this. It's why the atheist Confucian Xunzi is rather more conservative than many of his contemporaries — social technologies are a fragile inheritance, the accumulated wisdom and social capital of centuries, and are not easily regained (if they can be regained at all) once lost. I, too, find myself frustrated by people who act as if generating such institutions de novo is trivial or easy.
But on the other hand, the second best time to plant a tree and all that. Sure, working to rebuild all those social structures is, again, a multi-generational project requiring a lot of hard work and sacrifice… but what's the alternative?
Yes, we should plant trees. But can you blame women for not signing up to be de-emancipated in the hopes someone else solves all their problems? Putting the cart before the horse there.
I think what puts us between a horse and a hard place in this situation is that the default that women have chosen - something I certainly can't blame them for - is to be emancipated and then hope that someone else solves all their problems, and this combination of emancipation + hoping for a savior seems to result in poor life satisfaction, arguably even poorer than non being emancipated and then hoping that someone else solves all their problems. Whether this means that de-emancipating and hoping that someone else solves all their problems will have positive impacts is an open question. It's also arguable that being emancipated and using free will and agency to give away control to others and be unsatisfied about it is better in some way than to not be emancipated and while being forced into a life that's more satisfying. What I think most people would consider the golden path or the ideal outcome is women embracing their semi-recent emancipation and the agency and responsibility that goes along with it to solve their own problems, but recent history in sociopolitical movements relating to women's issues shouldn't give us much hope for that happening anytime soon. Hence why there appears to be no good option, just awful and more awful ones.
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Women are currently too valuable as a political force for the political class to remove their power to vote, let alone reduce them to chattel.
So that is DEFINITELY a 'coup-complete' sort of solution.
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If it worked, it would still persist. Clearly it does not work now. You go on and on with intellectual historical arguments in favor of de-emancipation, yet those are not enough because there is no more hard physical dependency of women on male physical labor. Inb4 "what if all male power plant workers quit": they won't. The dependency of society on strictly male labor has grown too abstract to leverage or to bellyfeel.
Given that civilization ran in the same ways for 5 thousand years, you should expect whatever broke the cycle to be a pretty fucking good reason to break it. You act like it was just a whim, a momentary lapse of men to free women and if they just Rise Up and Retvrn, the toothpaste can be put back in the tube.
I expect the societies that do not go full Amish to crush the ones that do before the latter can outbreed the former, or in spite of it. As to what happens to them later, maybe they will start killing womanizers or otherwise solve the equation of the sexes infavorably to men. No one said that personal physical strength and long distribution tails is going to be king forever. I do not expect the intellectual desire to not go extinct to be sufficient to revert all existing societies to Amish mode.
Islam is on course to dominate Europe within the next generation or two and Islam's take on the gender culture war is much closer to the Amish than to the descendants of the sexual revolution who are currently being displaced in their ancestoral homelands.
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Any app can be a dating app, Instagram included.
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Thank you for your service, keeping me inside the overton window.
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Compare and contrast:
My assessment is that you are intentionally aiming to be as inflammatory as possible to another commenter with the above, perhaps in an attempt to "teach a lesson" to someone you disagree with. Your post appears to me to be well outside the sort of discussion we aim to foster here.
Your record is four warnings and three AAQCs, and no warnings this year and the last two notes being AAQCs. If this were the usual line-toeing, you would get a warning, but as it stands you are getting a three-day ban. Your record shows that you have a fairly good understanding of where the line is, so I am not buying the scenario where the above is anything other than a willful choice. If you decide to make a habit of this sort of comment, you can expect further bans to escalate rapidly.
??? I think it's because Sloot didn't want to be castrated, or be 'erased from the gene pool' for the crime of not living up to his full potential or fucking girls @thejdizzler pines for. Which aside from being petty and mean is quite a hardline policy, let's face it.
If Sloot or anyone else wishes to object to the policy of castrating or killing "Lotharios", they are as free to make their case as those in favor. I think the ludicrous nature of such a policy is sufficiently evident that arguing against it is a waste of my time; others who judge differently are free to discuss as they will. We allow people to make foolish and even insane arguments here, because we are not interested in accepting responsibility for policing which ideas/positions/ideologies are good and which are not.
What we do not allow is commenters using their posts to directly attack each other, or wind each other up. It seems obvious to me that this is what @Sloot did, and doing so is a violation of several rules here.
It's also worth pointing out that the interpretation of the rules that I am applying here is the reason @Sloot has not himself been banned up to this point. He routinely makes comments that could be described as "petty" and "mean", as well as "advocating hardline policies". He usually does so from behind a level of abstraction similar to that employed by @thejdizzler above, which helps a great deal to keep him on the right side of the line.
It sounded to me like you thought sloot's inflammatory tone came out of nowhere. But it was the equivalent of an inflammatory response by a woman to a 'misogynistic' policy someone here might propose.
Sloot talks like this all the time. If he felt particularly threatened or incensed by the castration comment, it did not show.
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I recognize that it's a pretty hardline policy. I'm throwing it out as a potential solution to the Lothario problem because every other solution other than "bootstraps" I see as equally outlandish in today's political climate.
I really shouldn't have stated that I was interested in the girl at all, or done any introspection and admitted I was slightly jealous of the guy. Like at @faceh has stated before, even trying to discuss this gets you labeled as an incel.
Yes, violent fantasies of what you're going to do to Chad and Stacy is standard incel fare. I don't see it as serious discussion of policy.
If it was, I'd say morally it's an evil policy - you need far more, and more tangible evidence of harm, to harm others. Practically, it would require the incels to win against the chads on the battlefield when they couldn't on the football field.
To be completely fair, lots of societies have policed cads. It’s not some drastic never before tried policy.
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The Incels don't need to win against all Chads or even most Chads. The problem is not Chad, it's Lothario. Look, I've said it a billion times on this thread and others, my problem is not with guys who can lock down hotter girls than me (although I would be lying if I said I wasn't jealous). It's with guys who churn through tens or hundreds of girls by lying about their intentions, making those girls slightly less dateable for a healthy Chad, and with standards that make relatively normal dudes invisible. In this case forced marriage, followed by castration when there's adultery, doesn't actually seem that far outside of the historical wheelhouse as a way to rein these guys in.
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Yup.
Its not so much a complaint that the playing field isn't level or fair, "Wahhhh Mommm they aren't sharing the pussy, make them share!"
Its objecting to playing the game this way at all because its making everything worse for everyone involved. Either crack down on the people who are making it suck so much... or make everyone play a different, friendlier, more fun game.
But both complaints read like you're sexually unsuccessful and crying for someone to give you a boost, to the uninformed observer.
If both men and women are allowed to lie, misrepresent their intentions, back out of their agreements, and undercut each other, in other words, to defect without penalty, this is where the game spirals to. And there is no obvious bottom.
Coordination to improve things is fuckin' hard, but it requires people to admit the problems that exist and to being impacted by them. And we can't even get to THAT step without people dogpiling on the ones who admit weakness.
And when the people most capable of effecting and coordinating change are also one of the few ones who benefit from the status quo (high value, somewhat sociopathic dudes), its even harder to shift. They don't see a need to adjust things.
I also appreciate your posts. Modern "dating" just seems like the mother of all coordination problems. And people have been playing defect for so long that we've forgotten what it's even like for cooperation to be possible. The guys bragging about their success seem like some "fisherman" who's bragging about how he made a bunch of quick cash using dynamite to exterminate an entire lake of fish.
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Don't have anything more to add, but just wanted to say that I really appreciate your voice on these topics. You're one of the few posters who actually seems to take suggestions in this sphere seriously, rather than trying to question the psychology or underlying deeper motives of the poster in question. And maybe these are my insecurities talking, but this kind of thing drives me absolutely up the wall. Like yes, I am sure there is a little bit of jealousy involved in my reaction to Lotharios in real life, and my life could be improved by following the PUA handbook a little more, and not caring what women think a little bit more. Yet I fail to see how this reflects on the deeper problems that you and I both are pointing out.
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Alright man this was a little far.
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Just wanted to say that this is extremely shitty and I'm sorry you are going through that. If you have a friend who is also having a hard time with girls and he gets with a girl you liked that sucks, but you can at least be happy for him. Having that girl instead get used by a guy who is already having an order of magnitude more success than you is just shit all around and makes you lose all respect for both of them. Hang in there.
Thanks man. I've decided to stop dating for now so it's not weighing on me too much, but definitely does breed a lot of resentment. This is not the first time this dude has done this to me either. Should have moved out last year, but didn't want to pay more rent.
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Maybe your and @faceh's sentiments are more motivated by jealousy than you consciously realize? I don't know, maybe you guys really do care deeply about the health of society and about protecting women from being emotionally damaged by Lotharios. But in my personal experience, whenever I had such intense negative feelings about Lotharios (one of you suggested castrating them - which, even as a joke, is pretty intense...), it was actually motivated 100% by jealousy.
The reason I don't talk about my own success or failures in this arena much is that it simply doesn't matter for the arguments I'm making. I don't want people to give my words more credence or less credence based on my own personal status. Read the stats, bring your own stats, make the arguments without regard to personal achievements.
My romantic life is kind of a mess on the whole, lot of false starts and pursuing the wrong people. But I've never had actual trouble getting dates. Its finding the right person and getting them to commit where I've struck out.
I was at one point two weeks out from being married to a girl that I truly loved. Then SHE cut it off, shacked up with 'the guy I didn't have to worry about' for a bit, then flew off to the other side of the country. I felt (still feel) a sort of irrational fury towards the other guy in the situation. I would gladly go a few rounds in a boxing ring with him, for instance. "Jealousy" ain't it, though. He'll never have what I had.
I currently have a second date scheduled with a cute redhead that I met through an old friend of mine. About a month back I had a couple dates with a petite little Haitian girl that I could literally toss over my shoulder with one arm and carry off to bed.
I feel what could be described as jealousy towards the type of guy who just lines up women for almost every day of the week, rotates through them, dumps them when they become inconvenient, and literally never ever commits but uses commitment as a carrot for getting laid. I'm sure that lifestyle has tons of perks in the current social environment.
But then I think about how corrosive to their own wellbeing that process must be, and I lose the part of the feeling of "Man I wish that were me" and its mostly replaced with the anger of "he pays no cost for ruining them, then leaves the rest of us to deal with the fallout."
I'm about as jealous of these guys as I am of a guy pissing in a swimming pool. Sure, it's easier than getting out and going to the designated bathroom, but I know that if everybody starts doing it, we all end up swimming in urine.
Because of the aforementioned woman I almost married, I know full well that my actual preference is to have a long, established relationship with an intimate partner and having regular sex with the same person is qualitatively superior (to me) than a few flings per partner with many partners in a row. I've run the experiment on both sides, I know the outcome. I act accordingly.
But none of what I just said changes the nature of the stats out there. A small portion of men are being chased by a large proportion of women, banging them, getting their hopes up, breaking their hearts, and moving on, leaving the women bitter and with heightened standards going forward, making life harder on all the guys who come after.
And believe me, I am GENUINELY WORRIED about the social effects that will arise if those guys continue to struggle. I can't hate women. Its not in me. I see them as 'different, but not inherently lesser.'
The generation that's coming up? Many dudes don't seem to have that restraint. I'm trying to warn people, and hey, I worry too because I live in this society. But believe me I ain't the one struggling.
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Certainly jealousy is a factor. But I don't think that explains my feelings. I've been jealous about many things in my life, but the direction of the jealousy is that I usually want to become like the person I'm jealous of. Be faster, more witty, etc. I don't want to fuck an untold number of bitches, I want to pair bond with a stable, well-adjusted woman whom I love and respect.
Fair enough. For me it was 100% jealousy, but you and I are different.
I don't think that the Lotharios are actually a major problem preventing you or I from finding women to pair-bond with.
No they are probably not THE problem, but they certainly don't make it easier.
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I'll do you one better and suggest summary execution.
The logic being that screwing with a relatively fresh, innocent, 'happy' young woman and leaving her worse off is irretrievably depleting a scarce, somewhat fixed supply of a critically valuable resource.
There's legitimately no way to repair the 'damage' through monetary compensation alone, and in a sense, the extent of the damage is probably 'incalculable.'
So hey, just remove your ability to do further damage via permanent incapacitation, rather than risk your continued despoiling of the dating pool.
But yeah, castration seems a reasonable compromise position there. I don't know how many it'd take to successfully deter, but its probably fewer than you think.
I mean, most historical law codes proscribed seduction of a virgin as a crime that could be made up for by marrying the girl as if she was a virgin.
In fact, Frank Sinatra was once charged with seduction for promising to marry a woman if she slept with him then backing out. Turns out the woman he banged was already married but didn't tell police (or him) that so the charges got dropped, but it led to his famous mugshot. This all happened in 1938, when Sinatra was 23, so it's interesting to see it predate the sexual revolution by so many decades.
https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/celebrity-mugshots/frank-sinatra/
What?
I assure you adultery was a thing for the entirety of human existence. The sexual revolution just ramped it up by saying "it's a good thing, actually".
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