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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.)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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