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Notes -
Just to make a general observation about the gender war as a followup to my comment on the Promise Keepers organization:
I think we can generally observe is that women’s main complaint about men is that desirable hetero men are unwilling to exclusively commit. If we accept this, we can also see that this is actually two complaints rolled into one. 1. The men that are willing to commit are undesirable (icky, clingy, lame, “chopped”, entitled, toxic, porn-addled, skinny fat etc.). 2. The men that are desirable are unwilling to commit. (On a tangent I’d argue that most of the lipstick feminist complaints made in the mainstream media by middle-class women about men in general do usually boil down to the rather similar complaint that 34-37-year-old successful, well-paid, charismatic, tall, ambitious etc. urban men are in no rush to marry 31-34-year-old college-educated middle-class office worker women.)
If we look at this logically, to the extent that it even makes sense to try doing so (which is a valid question in itself), there are two potential remedies for this problem. 1. Focus on the undesirable men that are willing to commit and somehow transform them into desirable men i.e. alphaize the betas 2. Focus on the desirable men and incentivize them to commit i.e. betaize the alphas.
Now I don’t know about you but to me it seems self-evident that #2 has more potential for success no matter how you look at it and yet virtually everyone who makes any sort of recommendations regarding this entire issue (and that does not only include Red Pillers) is promoting #1. No, really – I’ve never seen anyone advocate for #2, not even the Promise Keepers or, for that matter, any other similar group that does not claim to be feminist and is at the same time pushing the nebulous concept of a new positive masculinity.
Am I seeing things that are not there or is this really not the case? Because as far as I can tell, it is. It seems like there is a general unspoken consensus in society that trying to compel sexually successful men to commit to women is a completely impossible, pie-in-the-sky idea that deserves no attention at all; that, in other words, expecting modern women to elicit commitment from the men they are attracted to is laughable lunacy.
I think people tend to talk about (1) because they perceive (accurately) that it is where the change has been in the last several decades regarding relationship formation. I'm not aware of any data indicating that "desirable" men are less willing to commit today compared to, say, 20 years ago but there is some data showing women are less interested in getting married over that period. Additionally it's a little unclear to me how large the pool of "desirable but unwilling to commit" men even is. Are there a large fraction of men out there who women want to marry but do not themselves want to marry? That's not clear to me. I can think of some high profile anecdotes but not sure how generalizable that is.
On (1) my pet theory is that women's expectations for marriage and relationships have evolved along with their economic development in ways that men's expectations have not really caught up with. If your pitch, as a man, is that you are going to be an economic provider that is probably much more effective as a pitch in 1982 (when men's average wage was 50% higher than women's average wage) than it is in 2025 (when men's average wage is ~18% higher than women's average wage). Among young people (aged 25-34) that gap is even smaller (35% advantage for men in 1982 vs 5% today). Add to this that it seems women are more comfortable being single than men are and a drop off in relationship formation is not that hard to explain.
Yeah, I think the old belief that women are more romantic than men, on average, isn’t true. That’s not to say that women don’t read romance novels more than men, or that many women don’t have a great interest in romance, but there’s a revealed preferences sense in which men feel the lack of a partner more acutely than men do.
Is it just sex? I don’t know. When I was single and lonely obviously that played a factor, but more of a factor was falling asleep alone, missing subtle physical affection, enjoying telling someone I love them, giving little gifts and seeing someone’s eyes light up, cuddling on the couch, etc. Having a partner feels physically grounding. Do women just not experience that kind of lack as acutely? Am I just weird?
There is a large and real asymmetry to these two types of singles. Any woman that is not currently sleeping next to a man has the option of doing so so long as she is not completely grotesque. Like any of the "girlboss" types that are single and are proudly single, still can call or swipe on any single guy in the vicinity and simply trade a little fornication for companionship for at least a few days. A single man simply doesn't have that option. Even the guys who are 6'+ and great looking don't routinely get instant hookups from the apps.
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