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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.
Many of the problems with modern dating aren’t specific to dating, they’re common to every type of social relations.
The loneliness epidemic is getting worse and worse and if a huge chunk of modern men can barely make a single real life friend, what are the odds they can find a girlfriend?
None of the gender war arguments explain why same-sex friendships are more difficult nowadays. But all the reasons that explain the loneliness crisis - social media addiction, an increasingly individualistic culture thanks to technology, the breakdown of communal third spaces, the fact that everyone is moving away instead of staying in the same town all their life, etc. all explain why people could be struggling to find a romantic partner.
Or a very simple explanation: the poorer, the less technologically advanced you are, the more socialising becomes a necessity. If you’re in a poor rural village, you need to socialise with your neighbours because they’re the ones that will help you if you get sick, fall on hard times, or just need an extra hand to help around the house/the farm. You need to get married and have children, not only because of social pressure but because family is both a safety net and a labour pool.
The loneliness crisis didn’t happen overnight. As we got more technologically advanced, we needed to rely less and less on other people for survival and even entertainment. People bring up how people in the past complained about every technological invention ruining the fabric of society as an argument on how social media/smartphones/AI isn’t that bad, but the past complaints were essentially right.
Books made it so you could stay home and be entertained without talking to anyone, although you had to be literate and still go out to the shop to buy them. Daily newspapers meant you didn’t have to get your gossip around the dinner table or at the pub. Television meant you didn’t have to leave the house to see a movie or a show. Smartphones let you have all of the above, and let you talk anywhere with anyone at anytime on your own schedule, replacing frequent in person hangouts where you could actually bond, with group chats and shallower, asynchronous text conversations.
AI is taking it a step further and making it even worse. Do you really think that the vast majority of people, who are now currently addicted to social media and scrolling TikTok all day instead of going out to make friends and romantic connections, will somehow be able to resist the slurry of AI generated content tailored precisely to engage them? LLMs designed to be the perfect conversation partner, the perfect friend, the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend, accessible 24/7 as a gorgeous realistic avatar that fulfils all your fantasies?
Great post!
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