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I was following the latest flame war regarding the human mating marketplace on this board (see here and here, for those that are unaware) with mild interest and was considering posting some dudebro take on the matter by using as an educative example the story of the now largely defunct Christian men’s identitarian group in the US who called themselves ‘Promise Keepers’, of whom I learned a long time ago completely by accident. Then I realized this may not be the best idea, as I imagine only relatively few people are even aware of their (past) existence. So before I decide to proceed I’ll ask this very question: how many of you have ever heard of this particular sad bunch?
I remain perpetually confused as to how a group of Tough Minded Rationalists™, who believe in the invisible hand of the free market and facts over feelings, can be so concerned about birth rates.
Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.
Why so much ire over nature taking its course? Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering that would cause civilization to deviate from its current course in order to force it to align with an abstract values framework starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.
I've only ever encountered birth rate concerns in the predictable context of "p.s. they should get out of my workplace and onto my dick"-type sentiments, but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.
Tinfoil-hat read is that the whole fertility panic was deliberately astroturfed on Twitter as a way to lay the groundwork for "....so this is why we need to invest heavily in artificial wombs," with incels as useful water-carriers for the interim messaging. I can certainly think of entities who'd plausibly want to push that based on stated values, but speculating about end goals gets too bizarre to waste much time on.
I don't find it so tinfoil-hatty because I do believe artificial wombs need to be invested in. It seems like things that are meaningfully different about the West and made it good inevitably lead to things that make people find something better to do than coerce half of the population into being the means of reproduction and little else.
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
I know plenty of mid-20s women who would love to find a kind, conscientious guy to have three kids with, followed by a nice Boomer-style dual-career middle age. I know absolutely no real-life girlbosses wishing someone else would pop eggs into a slow cooker so they could get back to those late-running meetings with Marketing. Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.
You believed an innovative solution would come from
what passed for progressive thought 50 years agotraditionalist thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is just mostly just men being butthurt.You believed an innovative solution would come from
what will be traditionalist thought in 50 yearsprogressive thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is mostly just women being butthurt anyway.There are no table stakes. We're not interested in investing in youth outside of how much interest that student loan is going to generate, we banned all development that would make their current salary appropriate, and we're too invested in "teach men to not rape" to make sure that those who weren't going to do that anyway aren't getting treated as pre-emptively guilty (we have taxed their virtue to redistribute it to rapist men and stupid women, and now wise men don't want to exercise that virtue or see doing so as too risky? And now they have anxiety and won't come out of their room(s)? couldn't have seen that coming).
Sure, there seems to have been a cohort of hyper-conscientious Millennial men of ~Scott Alexander age that got traumatized by Title IX culture and now complain about it. But those men are now aging out of family-starting age, anyway. And Title IX was never actually about gender relations, just about a parasite class of university administrators finding an excuse to justify swelling their retinues.
I don't see grounds for presuming that "teaching men not to rape" has created any more recent crop of hikikomori-style dropouts, if that's what you're arguing. I haven't heard a Zoomer say they didn't want to date because rape accusations, just that dating feels awkward, is a PITA and they worry the girl would be judging them. I can spin about ten different just-so stories for why they might increasingly express those feelings, but "because they were taught not to rape" is pretty low in the plausibility ranking. Certainly it's far below "too little free play as kids, now permanently anti-social"; porn fucking up sexual desire and behavior; Netflix, weed and videogames fucking up attention and motivation; collapsing economy fucking up developmental pathways; anti-family culture fucking up availability of role models; and youth mental-health memetics destigmatizing "I can't, I have anxiety" as a life narrative.
On the other hand, assuming that Anti-Rape-Culture Did It means you can blame the whole thing on girls being so darn sensitive, so there's that.
The "awkwardness" comes from the heavy cloud of social and legal consequences men face for making just one wrong move on a date. The longhouse taught us that we need explicit verbal consent at every step of foreplay.
Men overwhelmingly make the first sexual move (and then make 3-5 moves for every 1 his female partner makes). This roughly 4:1 sexual dance is preferred by the overwhelming majority of men and women. Add to this the lingering social stigma for women to be viewed as sluts for making the first move or evening out the 4:1 ratio, and many possible romances fizzle out on the first date. Modern dating markets are so flooded with men on the supply side of the equation, that women rarely invest their time in a second date for "no chemistry" suitors.
Men have a perfectly rational fear here: the bar for what counts as felony sex assault has been lowered to "he made me uncomfortable when escalating (but I didn't say no)" from "he overpowered me after I said no." The legacy definition is extremely clear, but this new grey zone of flirting/foreplay is unmapped by normies. Pickup artists have been studying this for decades, but there's no universally agreed upon set of rules. On the other hand, insing women ignorant of the territory have come up with a reasonably self-consistent set of rules around dating (chad is exempt). Insings have also taken over the disciplinary boards in universities and some district attorneys offices' with these new rules.
The existential threats to young men who actually absorbed some of the "don't rape" lessons in grade school include:
All of these life-altering consequences may be applied over something relatively inconsequential as fingerbanging a drunk girl who verbally asks her date to "fuck me" over the course of about 5 minutes
Or two drunk teenagers flirting through text, mutually kissing, moving to a private location and then [disputed testimony]
I may update this post with more examples, but the first link took a massive federal lawsuit to reverse Ben Feibleman's expulsion from Columbia. I doubt his legal win has done much to repair his social life.
I'm not advocating for a retvrn to the 50s-70s dating rules (which were much clearer), but something must change on a cultural and legal level here. This is a primary variable in demographic collapse, although relatively unstudied. Men and women simply can't agree on the rules of flirting. Women have a near total legal control over sex, whereas men have near total physical control. A non-trivial number of men and women will refuse to compromise on this issue, at the cost of marriages and future children.
I think it's moreso a compromise rather than a mutual preference. I feel like most men would ideally want something like a 1:1-2:1 ratio (and with bigger tits) and most women would ideally want something more, ah, romance novel-esque (though only with the most desirable men, of course).
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I mean, it seems like you could wait to have sex until you're married or in a long-term relationship? A super-majority of those scary situations you mention are driven by casual hookups or first through third dates. I know of no girls who, even if they came on to a guy in those circumstances, would object to his saying "Hey, could we wait a little? I really like you and I want to spend more time getting to know you before we get physical."
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You go to Room 101. 1984 is literally a book about this exact thing happening. The English released a modernized version of that (from the Party's perspective, of course) where [a younger] Winston just straight up kills Julia, as was his fantasy [and per his justifications] of doing in the beginning of the book.
Men and women will not be allowed to agree on the rules of flirting. That's what the Junior Anti-Sex League does (the attempts to make all intimate images [implied: of women] legally equivalent to child porn are a pretty good example of this). If they figure out a way to get along the older femcels (and the Chads who find that idiocy useful, since it keeps men from things like "having standards") will lose their power.
Now, if society somehow evolved past the notion that women are more inherently valuable than men- and in modern times they are less valuable due to the way they actively damage society for shits and giggles- then that might change. But that's going to take some doing, and it's not going to fix the damage that's already been done.
It's also going to have to be women that disarm first (and fight other women on that point, and train their sons out of the "don't rape" propaganda), and stand firm against the hedonic treadmill of risk mitigation (or just insist on having more daughters, I guess), though it's possible that this continues forever since a birth rate of 0 still won't imbalance the genders. We can't retvrn to the 1950s-1970s; we aren't as rich as we were back then, and to be more precise women are [at the same point in their lives] comparatively richer now as compared to men, and therefore [feel, and are] in a better position to make demands like this.
If men are in socioeconomic oversupply, and as we can see clearly from the dating stats that they are, then there's still going to be sufficient men willing to enforce the physical-control-by-proxy (as no law survives an intentional lack of enforcement). Men can't enforce a fix for moral hazard from a position of relative weakness.
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