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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.
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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.
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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