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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 saying that men are the more romantic sex, masquerading as the more pragmatic one, while women are the more pragmatic sex, masquerading as the more romantic one.
From speaking with my female friends, vs my male ones, there are dramatic differences in how they talk about their partners/potential partners. My female friends, specifically, tend to literally talk about how much the man makes, how good of a partner he appears to be (as in, if they were out in public, how well would he make them look), and how high status he is (expressed as what would their parents/friends think about him); whereas my male friends tend to be a lot more about how their partner makes them feel (some of which is appearance, but it also includes things like how she thinks about them, or does them little favours, etc). A book I read by a female author (The Black Magician, by Trudi Canavan) had a line in it that was something like "People in the slums tried to find a man who could provide, but often married for love instead" (in the context it was in, it was presented as a contrast to the well off people in the city, who married specifically for providers).
Actually, come to think about it (and it's a little bit of a tangent), one of the things I've noticed from reading a number of books is that you can always tell from how the romance is presented whether it was a female or male author, even if the rest of the book passes fairly well for either gender of writer. Off the top of my head:
(I do realize all the books I mentioned above are both YA and fantasy - I'm trying to maintain a tiny bit of opsec here, even if I've basically given everyone enough info to identify who I am with even a trivial amount of work).
I'm pretty sure this reflects only on what is acceptable in the publishing industry.
I would agree except that it’s exactly the opposite for female authors - like, another Trudi Canavan book (Priestess of the White) has the exact dynamic of young girl raised by an elderly man in her village, and ends up with him in the second book.
It’s just not something men think about putting in their books in the same way women do. It’s hard to describe the exact difference, but a while back, I read a bunch of books that ranged from “romance” to “kind of smutty” to “basically just pornography” by both male and female authors (with the goal of comparing and contrasting how men and women approach the genre). With male writers, a dynamic like that is more of a “sleep together once,” while with female authors, it’s presented as a healthy relationship.
Seriously, it is very very easy to tell - the male smut novels were honestly kind of hilarious in how they immediately presented exact measurements of every female character who appeared - the female ones were much more likely to focus on how well dressed or wealthy they were.
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