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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27238 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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I keep engaging with the gender wars/fertility crisis topic even though its slowly driving me mad. But its too important to ignore.

Actual title of a paper published today in the Cambridge Press, by a Norwegian research team:

Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men

Not paraphrased or exaggerated. Apparently published by a team of two males and a female. I don't even mean to attack the authors, the paper doesn't seem to be 'slanted' in its presentation... and this implied solution just appears to be the sort of blunt facial honesty that Norwegians are known for. I'm not attacking this paper.

We had the discussion just yesterday where a German Police Chief (himself male) says women should avoid relationships with men for their safety. My commentary is on the larger cultural trend.

Now, the paper itself draws some specific conclusions using data from the last ten years. (i.e. when the gender wars really accelerated) From a twitter thread:

Women's freedom is strongly correlated with declining fertility.

About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men. I have to interpret "most promiscuous" as "most attractive," because very, very few men are able to be promiscuous without being hot. Likewise, this looks VERY suggestive of a broader 80/20 rule in place.

Women can't all form relationships with this top 10%... so more women are single... so they are less likely to have kids.

Ultimately they suggest that solving the TFR crisis means getting single women to have more kids. Hence the 'marginalization' of men.

This paper so readily confirms almost everything I've talked about in here I'm worried its designed precisely to trigger confirmation bias in me, specifically. Read it and decide for yourself, I guess.

As I've said, going off of the last 10-20 years of data:

Women probably only view about 20% of men as 'people' worthy of attention.

Women who got to college and enter careers tend to have the highest standards... regardless of their own suitability as a mate.

Lotharios exploiting the current gender dynamics for low-commitment sex are a problem.

Of course I note that every single bit of this is explained by shifts in female behavior, which is to say there's not much shift in men's behavior, so the overt focus on men's alleged failures seems... odd.

I do not find it pleasant to believe all these statistics and their implied conclusions, but no matter how much I ask for challenges, every bit of data just adds on to the pile of confirmation.

I'll throw out hope spot because there is a small bit of data that contradicts the overall narrative... South Korea is actually seeing a bump towards increased fertility!. I am watching this very keenly to determine if there is much hope of pulling out of the spiral.

I've genuinely got very little new to say on this topic. Its beaten to death. Its a bloody pulp, we're standing ankle-deep in the putrid mix of entrails of this topic as the waterline slowly rises every day. I've very interested in workable solutions, though.

I am a very reasonable person. I do not get angry at mere insults easily. Call me whatever you want to my face, your words have no power. But what sets me off is when someone pisses on my leg and tells me its raining, when I can look up and see there's not a cloud in the sky. "Men are horrible, and it is socially good and necessary to marginalize them." The insinuation against my person doesn't bug me. Its the blatant lie contradicted by all available information. It is simply false (especially in the West). It is epistemic malpractice. And it seems intentional and malicious, on some level.

Every. single. day. I am faced with a loud cultural message that (unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed. And, as a kicker, that 80% or so of men are unattractive to women, so its the majority of them who are marked for evolutionary failure.

Today its this paper.

Yesterday its Mr. German Policeman.

The week before it was that Manosphere documentary.

Last year it was that British Miniseries.

It is a neverending cascade. And of course there's zilch, zero, nada content produced in the mainstream that examines if female behavior is becoming more toxic and suggesting intervention.

Me, I have the mental fortitude to put all this in context and ignore it as an influence on my individual behavior. I have my internal locus of control and the self-confidence to believe I will succeed anyway.

Yet there's millions of young males who are vulnerable to this message, and it is killing them, metaphorically and often literally, and nobody with any authority is doing anything about it or even talking about it without also piling on with the exact same rhetoric.

I simply don't see how one can claim that there's any true 'Patriarchy' in the Western World when government officials, scientific papers, nationally broadcast documentaries, and general everyday people can happily proclaim that men ought to be marginalized for everyone's good if they can't accept a lot in life that amounts to being a second class citizen in their own country... while women are elevated to the level of landed aristocracy on their backs.

Meanwhile the main voices speaking on the other side are inherently outsiders like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.

I don't even think we have a matriarchy to be clear, it really does just seem like society is organized around the "women are wonderful effect" and the average person is psychologically incapable of deviating from this programming.

Where does this end?

nobody with any authority is doing anything about it

The only feasible thing to do here is to have your own children and use your authority to allow them to understand the sexual market without revealing your true power level.

My father did it reasonably well for me, I'll do it for my kids. I have no way of making enough money to produce any mainstream art for it.

All that said, the closest thing I've seen to sympathy is DTF St. Louis (perhaps worth a post of it's own). It takes a look at male loneliness and sexuality. Still unsatisfying but it's all Hollywood could ever do in today's climate.

Where does this end?

It ends with women importing a patriarchy willing to force their fertility in accordance with tradition. Handmaid's Tale is a utopian fantasy, and only one religion fits the bill currently.

(unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed.

There are some different things going on.

Yes, men who act like depressed women are unattractive to women. Very clearly so.

You say that women's actions have changed, but men's haven't. That is untrue. Men's actions have changed from running an economy where most of them were farm laborers, and many of them are soldiers at some point in their lives, to one where most of them are doing basically the same work as women. It's romantically neutral to negative to work the same job as a romantic interest, but it's unwise for a woman to choose to try to attract an older man and become his tradwife, because there aren't actually that many such positions available (it's much harder to find a breadwinner husband than a job), he has to actually be extremely trustworthy, because being a divorced housewife is pretty lame even with alimony (it probably won't work twice), and they actually have to get along, we all live in nuclear families now.

Yes, of course a man who expresses that the particular woman in front of him is wonderful, and he would be so pleased to write her a poem, take her out to dinner, dance with her, and stare longingly into her eyes is more attractive than a man who expresses that she's fundamentally just acting out her sordid evopsyche roles, that she is in fact a cheap whore.

That's not to say that there aren't women who are achingly badly, or even that current social systems don't produce more bad action from women than some other systems.

Should we as a society do something? Should we pay women to be single mothers?

Paying women to be single mothers seems like a bad idea: children should have fathers. Not enough having involved fathers is part of the current social malaise.

Perhaps we should live in smaller social groups. The only time I've gotten romantic attention from men, and eventually found a husband, was through small social groups. It's not that women find 80% of men unattractive full stop. They find 80% of men who are strangers unattractive. If there are 10 eligible bachelors, it's much clearer whether any of them are a good match or not. I would like my children to be involved in smaller social groups, including in high school, college, church, and clubs as teens and young adults. Even modern churches are the wrong size! Many are tiny, weird house churches or enormous, town sized mega churches. People are meant to interact with about a hundred people or so, the appearance of infinite choice is going very badly. We've discussed moving to some more village like environments when our daughters are older.

How do you define a breadwinner husband? There are 4 considerations I can see.

Making a certain amount of money commensurate with a small family size with room for growth, ability to adapt to changing circumstances, etc.

Having a decent family that can and wants to provide local support to your new family.

Being averagely disposed psychologically, without some obvious schizophrenia or other mental afflictions that may come in late twenties but might be indicated by similar problems in older family members.

Last one would be that he actually wants to settle down and provide for a family, which is not as common as it used to be, along with the first.

Optional 5th is belonging to the same faith/church, which is solved by only fishing in members of your church, but then it's a matter of weeding out all of the bachelors that do not fit the previous criteria.

Yes, something along those lines. For most men, that he is able to, and wants to, work an ordinary, predictable, man in the grey flannel suit kind of job while his wife has and raises children for a decade, then spends several more years training for and finding outside work.

So the plan would be that single moms get much higher welfare than today. But for this to make a difference, this transfer would probably have to be very high, like the support obtainable from a high status "sugar daddy". There is just not enough productivity even in rich countries for this to be feasible. Not to mention that men won't really like seeing their taxes go to strangers' kids en masse as the norm, while they live and die alone without a family.

The retort could be that AI will turn everything on its head and all our current intuitions about the economy will become useless, as human labor ceases to have market value. Another problem, though, would be that women who don't want to raise children even with such extra welfare money would probably also not like this program. "Why do these other women get so much cash for having a hobby of raising kids? I also want that cash, we should all receive equal money." We've seen this in Hungary that many single women were quite angry at all the tax cuts for mothers and similar programs.

I'm also a bit skeptical whether there is a cohort of women who really "mother-material" and strongly want kids while not being "wife-material", ie women to whom single motherhood as a openly declared end goal from the get-go is attractive enough, and they want to live in co-housing presumably with other women like this.

Also, how would these women's romantic lives go? Some kind of sequential monogamy or promiscuity on a parallel track, fully decoupled from reproduction? Like a sequence of step-fathers to their child, and the father merely contributes attention and other non-material emotional things? (because the copious amounts of welfare already pay for a great life to mother and child?).

I find the article quite well written, and they have a poke at almost all quickly thought up counter-arguments and speculate about different alternatives and do discuss the likely downsides and upsides and how they would be received by different demographic groups.

My own prediction is that AI and robotics will reach sufficient levels in the next 10-20 years that automated elderly care will not be a catastrophic problem when the demographic imbalance really hits us (of too few young people and too many old who need care), and the rest will depend on whether and to what extent superintelligence works out. If things remain mostly "normal", I'd count on genetic and cultural evolution towards more pro-natality in values and temperaments simply through natural selection. If immigration from poor countries towards rich countries remains high, this kind of evolution would also strengthen the most conservative elements of these groups and that doesn't bode well for the whole liberal value system either. If things don't remain "normal", then I can't even speculate.

But this topic is still getting too little attention. And it's not one that you can just wish away, or reframe and "dissolve" or simply let fizzle out like some debate on some aspect of theology or something. The next generation will consist of the children of those who reproduce. People who don't reproduce will not have children in the next generation. It's obvious but it sometimes seems online as if the "debate" or the conflict was between groups who like chocolate vs vanilla ice cream, or one hobby or another, but there is a very strong asymmetry that if you chose one side you are eliminated from having a "representative" in the next round.

There's also the possibility that even without evolutionary selection effects, the tendency of young people to distrust what the older generations tell them may shift the value systems and cause a different attitude towards relationships and the other sex. This may not have any signs today but might become a thing when longer term consequences of the current generation of 20-40-somethings come to be realized and upcoming young generations (maybe those who are yet unborn) will be in opposition to those value systems.

Of course I note that every single bit of this is explained by shifts in female behavior, which is to say there's not much shift in men's behavior, so the overt focus on men's alleged failures seems... odd.

Agreed. Men have always wanted free milk without having to buy the cow. Now that women have been persuaded that it's liberated and modern not to expect them to put a ring on it, men are only complaining that they are not the ones banging all the bitches but some Chad gets more pussy than he can handle.

About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men. I have to interpret "most promiscuous" as "most attractive," because very, very few men are able to be promiscuous without being hot. Likewise, this looks VERY suggestive of a broader 80/20 rule in place.

Nope. Maximus explains it better than me.

According to the 2022 NSFG data:

  • 9.76% of men have 52.6% of lifetime female sex partners. This is pretty close to 10/60, however...
  • 11.18% of women have 50.0% of lifetime male sex partners

So, it’s not that 10% of men are with 50% (60%?) of the women. It’s more like 10% of the men sleep with a bunch of women, but those 10% of men are all sleeping with the same 12% or so of women. It’s not that they are “Chad”; there’s little correlation between attractiveness and promiscuity, it’s that they are promiscuous, and usually have other addiction patterns and attract similarly addicted women.

Indeed, there was a reply to that tweet claiming 60/10 making the same point.

Edit I have read the source paper.

It makes the following claim:

We have around twice as many female as male ancestors, as most men did not prevail in their intrasexual competition over women, and were thus deprived of becoming our ancestors (References: Kruger, Fisher and Wright 2014; Wilder, Mobasher and Hammer 2004)

However, Kruger et. al. 2014 makes no such claim. The Kruger paper make the opposite claim that the source paper makes: It says that it’s violent patriarchal societies that cause polygyny (i.e. one man many women), not female choice. The paper does not compare the number of male to female ancestors at all.

The second reference, Wilder et. al. 2004, makes the claim that the time to the last female ancestor is twice as long as the time to the last male ancestor, which is a very different claim than the one that two females historically reproduced for every man. The actual figures are that about 1.3 more women than men historically reproduced.

So, here, we see the paper trying to make the same point some guys make online (that women only want sex with very few men), but it makes one claim based on two papers which make no such claim.

It then goes on, citing Harper 2017 for evidence of increasing polygyny in modern society. The problem with Harper 2017 is that its data has not been replicated in more recent surveys.

Point being, the linked paper either completely misreads other papers or uses dubious research to force a narrative of a few men monopolizing all of the women.

(The paper then talks about dating apps, a popular boogeyman with guys who argue for modern polygyny, but dating apps do not affect the sexual marketplace that much.)

Edit 2

Mads Larsen is well known for believing 80/20; if his name is on a paper, it’s a big red flag that the claims in the paper are very suspect.

Robert Frost poem Mending Wall

'He will not go behind his father's saying,' And he likes having thought of it so well

It is an allusion to people just following what their father told. And they never counter it back. It is a deep programming of the subconscious.

Over that, they will think that it is what they thought themselves. Kind of Inception, but without the sci-fi stuff. Deep ingrained system of thought which appears like the person has thought it out themselves (makes them feel rational too, so the counter logical arguments do not work easily). They call it conviction, when it is just inheritance.

They follow what the father told, and find that things (the world, their life) doesn't quite work well that way. And they still don't go beyond them.

They find someone with a new set of sayings, and again never go beyond them.

They continue to behave like Blind Bats with new Beepers, never considering that they have a built-in navigation system and never using it.

The father said. The mother said. The society said. The priests said. And the automaton follows.

The Whispering Earring also fits here. The perfect guide able to tell you what you need to do to have lot of money, social prestige, big house, car, kids, happiness, everything what one can want - you just have to follow what the earring says and you get that. All these people want their father to be that Earring.

But there is no such earring. No such perfect sayings exist.

Trying to correct the sayings, to correct the priests, or the earring, is still the same problem. Somewhere in that solution, you still want people to follow the new corrected system. You are changing the voice in the earring, not the ear.

Yes, there is wisdom in what one's father says. But there are also things which are wrong also. One needs to be able to differentiate the right from the wrong. Then have the courage to discard the wrong things and add new right things.

Stop blindly following your Maps app when you can see that there is no road in that direction, no bridge across that river.

Frost would have liked that son to be able to assess if the neighbor was good or bad. Look at the apple tree. and Decide for himself whether to mend the wall or let it fall.

So it's an important point here- the book of Job is an absolutely terrible sales pitch. People want to do the right thing, but they want it less than they want to have things work out. But on the other hand, broader society really wants people to do the right thing, far more than it wants things to work out for anyone in particular. We call it moloch, I suppose. But the obvious solution is incentive alignment- make 'doing the right thing' work out more often, even if it's not perfectly efficient. The military does it all the time to regulate soldier's personal lives and it works.

The problem for our society is a fifth column- yes disproportionately Jews and women but that's more of a correlation, or perhaps causation in the other direction- which just disagrees on what the right thing is, which has immense amounts of influence and uses that influence to redirect government policy.

The military does it all the time to regulate soldier's personal lives and it works.

The military example actually supports my point. A soldier who stays within the system, gets to reap the advantages, but under a threat of court-martial. Which means it is an external earring, with harder edges. The incentive alignment has changed the cost of disobedience, not the mechanism.

My point is narrower than the social alignment. You have told about systems which may work better for the individual. my point is what should an individual do when the system, whichever it is, is not working for them? Not revolts, not reform the priests. Become autonomous- assess independently, act on the assessment, and live with the results.

The fifth column segment is very different from my argument line. i am arguing against all priestdoms equally, including whichever corrected (or broader) one you may prefer. Substitution of one earring with another is still the earring problem.

Frost would have liked that son to be able to assess if the neighbor was good or bad. Look at the apple tree. and Decide for himself whether to mend the wall or let it fall.

Wait until you get into a boundary dispute or want to sell land or buy land or are in a court fight with a neighbour over whose responsibility it is that that tree branch broke off and fell on the roof of your car and damaged it. Arguments over closing off rights of way. Access to your land through someone else's property.

You'll see the point of maintaining established walls then. "Here is the land registry where the boundaries are marked. Here are the traditional paths."

Suppose Frost decides not to keep the apple orchard, now he's keeping goats or pigs. Or he wants to expand the orchard. Let the wall fall, then encroach on the neighbour's land and claim no, that was his patch all along. Same for the neighbour. I'm sure Frost would have been all for the neighbour making up his own mind whether to mend the wall or let it fall - right up until it came to "hey, why are you on my land?" when the neighbour started planting pine trees beside the apple orchard.

"Good fences make good neighbours" because it keeps you out of court.

the fence in Frost's poem is a metaphor for inherited rules (and sayings). i am not arguing for removal of literal property boundaries but for assessing which traditions serve us before mending them reflexly.

Before the metaphor, there is the reality of the falling-down wall. Fix your leaky roof first, then philosophise all you like about "but isn't this just blindly reflexive tradition?" Though if you like sitting under the rain streaming down your walls, well that's your choice.

i agree that practical walls (and roofs) serve real functions.

but do you ever assess which walls require mending? or do you mend every wall on reflex?

The broken wall is the wall that gets mended, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: maintenance so the wall doesn't break in the first place is cheaper and better.

i think we are operating at different levels. my original argument was whether one should assess which inherited rules to maintain, not whether practical maintenance is useful. i agreed (later) that it is useful.

but "an ounce of prevention" applied universally to all walls, all rules, all traditions, sometimes with the urgency of leaky roofs, is exactly the unreflective position i was describing. the question is not whether to maintain walls, it is which ones, and why?

With regards to examining and addressing issues with men and boy in Western societies, I like to follow Richard Reeves. You can either watch the Big Think video or this interview he had with Ezra Klein

'Abolish the family' is not a new trend in left academia. Some noregsmen publishing it this time is, I mean, is Norway known for its social conservatism in academia? Fertility worries are trendy and blaming low fertility on strong family values is, yes, a take, but one which contradicts the available data much less than the average for the sorts of academics that dabble in family abolitionism.

Every. single. day. I am faced with a loud cultural message that (unattractive) men are expendable, mostly unwanted, dangerous, useless, and generally deserve to be lonely, poor, and depressed. And, as a kicker, that 80% or so of men are unattractive to women, so its the majority of them who are marked for evolutionary failure.

And why are you faced with this cultural message? Because you’re in a social media bubble designed for maximum engagement, and judging by how often you post about this topic, they’ve found exactly what content causes the most outrage for you. A feminist would get the exact opposite impression and their feed would amp up all the threats, and violence women face - there’s no lack of misogynist outrage bait nowadays to make you think the majority of men are Andrew Tate supporters. If you’re an environmentalist, you’ll see constant panic on how it’s the warmest year on record and the sea levels are rising and yet we’re emitting more CO2 than ever. Right-wing populists will see news about how immigrants are flooding the country and taking all our jobs and grinding the healthcare system to a halt.

I’m part of a minority that faces much worse vitriol than what you see about unattractive men. I can read article after article, post after post, even on this forum, about how I’m mentally ill, worthless, predatory, dangerous, and the percentage of the opposite sex that wouldn’t date me is much higher than 80%. But I don’t, not anymore, I don’t engage with that kind of content even though I would be entirely justified to, wouldn’t I? But I realised the vast majority of articles I was reading were written by insane people, that most people didn’t have those viewpoints, and that the only thing engaging with this content was doing was make me depressed, angry and full of self hatred.

Just delete the stupid apps. Talk to people, read a book, find another, more constructive topic to obsess over.

Ignoring something doesn’t mean it’s not happening. OP doesn’t seem to be having an issue with it - just annoyed that the message is so mainstream.

Totally agreed. I don't even care if a lot of women are or aren't like what these articles portray them as. There are still lots and lots of groups where women by and large don't behave in the manner suggested. I've structured my affairs to steer away from these sorts of people, and it isn't hard to do so. For all I care nowadays these hypergamous man-haters (to the extent they exist) might as well be living on Mars vs two blocks below me in how much of a direct impact they have on my life. They can live their life, I will live mine.

I think I agree with you, even more than who you were responding to, because I feel like these conversations always mix the personal with macro level problems and even those problems may be a vocal and significant minority rather than the majority. As you said it's fairly easy to structure your life to have essentially zero contact with these types. And all but one of male friends have paired up with women who are also not like this, even if some may be a little woke, and only one or two ever spent significant time on the apps the rest just met at work or school like the old days. I feel like half of these critiques imply that the only type of women are the pretty but annoying ones on tiktok and instagram or the mid versions of the same. But America is way to diverse for that to be more than an own goal. and you can always cheat and look abroad. IDK I feel if most men put half the money, time and thought they do into their career into finding a wife they'd see good results. But it also requires a clear headed view of what you want.

And all but one of male friends have paired up with women who are also not like this, even if some may be a little woke, and only one or two ever spent significant time on the apps the rest just met at work or school like the old days.

Exactly, and all my female friends and family members also all have paired up with entirely normal men (desperately holding out for Chad to finally commit never seems to have been an important part of their lives). The vast majority also still get married.

With regards to the fertility crisis, the real problem seems to be that all those "normal, old school" couples seem to consciously choose to have exactly zero or one child. Even two children is rare in my bubble, three or more totally unheard of. Which, of course, results in exactly the TFR we're seeing.

I don't really understand why. Especially the in-official one-child-policy baffles me. Maybe having one child already scratches the itch of parenthood enough? Maybe the tolerance for discomfort has gotten lower, and most young parents end up being surprised how difficult (especially without significant support from family, who universally live far away now) the first few years are - and choose never to do that again? Maybe the "universal theory of housing" is correct: most of us live in classic 3 Bedroom apartments, condos or town houses, which works out exactly to parent's bedroom + child's bedroom + study/guestroom?

I feel like half of these critiques imply that the only type of women are the pretty but annoying ones on tiktok and instagram or the mid versions of the same.

If you’re a terminally online man, that’s the only kind of women you’ll be exposed to. You’re going to be checking out baddies on instagram, not some woman sharing her hobonichi setup and fountain pen reviews.

hobonichi setup and fountain pen reviews

Funny enough, this describes my SO and probably about half of the girlfriends in my friend bubble (as in women who I know because I was friends with their male partner first). Is stationerycore the meta for Mottizen types to find well-adjusted gfs?

well-adjusted gfs?

Tolerably-adjusted, yes. Usual risk factors apply. Filtering by twitter tolerance too might help.

My mom's social media is like this with lots of office setups, planners, and forms of paper-based organization, in addition to street food vendors and "OMG life in Japan/Korea is like the 22nd century." Organization and orderliness appeal to the professional woman.

My girlfriend's new obsession is mechanical keyboards, which girlyTok has discovered and is now a part of the "complete the ultimate feminine office setup" social media trend rotation. Linear switches are now being called "creamy."

I have no problem with this -- women deserve good keyboards too -- but yeah, women love stationarycore and office setups. I think it's just part of the larger trend of women beautifying any space they enter into.

It’s also something I feel men could easily get into! It might be a hard ask to get Mottizens to be interested into crochet, but surely writing systematic colour coded checklists and buying fancy Japanese notebooks has to appeal to guys who are somewhat on the spectrum.

fancy Japanese notebooks

I highly recommend Maruman Mnemosyne paper if you use fountain pens at all. Expensive, but absolutely worth it. Far better than the Midori MD Paper stuff which is decent but doesn't have that premium feel of Mnemosyne.

I agree with this advice. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of women one talks to "in real life" are not ridiculously hypergamous man-haters.

Actually there was the New Stateman article recently that found such a radical shift. It is paywalled but the shift even between Millennial and Gen Z women was staggering when it came to basic attitude of women toward men. I think 21% of women said they have strongly negative attitude toward men compared to 7% of men saying the same. It is hard to imagine that there will be meaningful pairbonding between these groups.

I do think that individually you can get away from it - what else is there. But there is a strong trend that is hard to overcome. Women attitudes and political leanings are shifting en masse, it will have macro impact on society, there is no ifs or buts about that. Maybe it will be passport bros or some other shift, but there will be one.

I agree with this but also from having a bunch of female friends/my wife's siblings and social groups I've seen what the dating app era is doing to a lot of women which is definitely views trending in that direction.

"Smart" people are more wont to firmly believe wrong facts precisely because they in their smartness know better and so if they convinced themselves of the truth of a fact it becomes that much more difficult to persuade otherwise than a low brainpowef normie.

Similarly, women so convinced of the total vileness of men are that much more resistant to acknowledging their own foibles contributing to their failures in acretive mate selection, which kind of just lengthens the periods of misandrist seething in between shortening decision windows to determine that Politically Tolerable Good Guy checks the right boxes just to prove a point about how she has gotten One Of The Good Ones.

The baseline probably is "men are capable of being threats women need to be aware of" which is by itself a much better framing than "girlboss your way to making any man your bitch" but too many contradicting messages merge into a soup of mutually incompatible messages for women. He must love you for who you are, also youre perfect as a fatty fatass emulating lizzo, also be fucking real ozempic exists just fucking hse it. You are a queen whose body is a temple no man must violate but also billionaire bestiality rapefics are what you crave.

Thankfully IRL interactions do in fact break this mental pattern pretty hard and pretty fast since most men like most women are harmless normie dipshits who are simply stumbling through life and that ruins the mystique. The challenge is to persist social interactions past the mandatory go home and sleep phase, and there the seduction of the algorithm versus the real person becomes a real demon to manage. Im in favour of leaning into the parasocial ai companion torment nexus outcome and mandate that the ai daemons gently but firmly encourage their humans to become competent socially if only to reduce token burn on a strained chipset.

I mean in my experience it's more 'people are increasingly doing the vast majority of their dating through the apps' which is then triggering a bunch of stuff like what would classically be called the 'Alpha Widow' situation in which a lot of the female POVs I'm seeing are of women miscalibrating their own value in the dating sphere, getting played a few times and then settling into '#AllMen' and taking their frustrations out on the lower-tier guys who they're in a position of relative power over.

I'm also seeing a lot of people just kinda failing to launch on relationships and only starting to really pursue anything in their mid twenties and having no idea how the game is played. I'm married now to a woman who I met off the apps, but I had more than enough instances of 'awkward date with a girl with literally no experience who's treating it like a HR process' to know that's its own universe of frustration and nothing happening.

I think you are being slightly unfair to the authors of the paper. You say they are arguing that "men ought to be marginalized for everyone's good," but what they are really saying is two things:

  1. Free mate choice and sexual equality leads to women being more selective, and thus less likely to find an "acceptable" man to pair with. (The same thing you have been arguing, essentially.)
  2. The solution is to make it more attractive for single women to have children.

At first glance, it's easy to see why this is setting you off, but if you read the paper carefully, they kind of admit the other part of your argument: "... because the only other alternative would be changing society in ways feminists won't approve of."

The authors maintain a dry and and academic tone throughout. It's not unlikely they are, in fact, pro-feminist and agree that yes, any other solution would be unthinkable. But it's also possible to read them as saying, "Well, we know no one will accept any other proposals, so let's just point out the only thing that's left."

Are they knowingly winking so they can get the paper published and not wreck their careers, or are they drolly accepting the thesis, as you assume? Who knows? But it seems they are at least aware of the contradictions.

That’s how I read it as well, a cheeky Straussian implied reductio ad absurdum. Especially because they choose to articulate it as “marginalization”.

I think you are being slightly unfair to the authors of the paper.

I did mention explicitly that I am not attacking the authors... and that I'm lamenting the larger cultural trend where the only solutions allowed to be discussed are those that aim at male behavior.

Hence my suspicion:

and this implied solution just appears to be the sort of blunt facial honesty that Norwegians are known for. I'm not attacking this paper.

But its all part of this larger trend. The Manosphere documentary is aimed at deflating male influencers, but offers no good solutions to men write large. The only people apparently allowed to publish their perspectives on gender issues are women. The disaffected male point of view gets no play at all.

The fact that nobody with any perceived authority can just say "men have valid grievances, and some solutions may inconvenience women" is symbolic of the issue. We can't make good progress without getting over that hump.

Well, here is exactly the toxic female attitude you describe, and one I think is disgusting. But it's also anti-feminist and playing with not against the patriarchy:

Alice, a former escort and sugar baby, promotes a self-developed dating strategy based on what she claims is her unique insight into male psychology. It’s called the feminine recalibration method, designed to teach women how to win the devotion of a “high-value man” — shorthand for rich, successful, decisive and ready to lavish his chosen consort with attention, expensive gifts and luxury travel. It’s what she calls “the princess treatment”.

Dreaming of “equality” in romance is a mug’s game, according to Alice, who posts on Instagram as femmefatale.elite. Instead, she says women should leverage their desirability as a means of getting men to provide them with the lifestyle of their dreams.

...Such attitudes are common in the online world known as the femosphere. Its other credos include all men are toxic; heterosexuality is a curse; and online dating is riddled with danger.

The femosphere is, of course, the female answer to the more notorious manosphere, the online network of communities that circulate misogynistic content and radicalise disaffected young men. Contempt for the opposite sex, received wisdom dictates, is mostly a male problem.

So the results of a recent survey carried out in collaboration with the British publication the New Statesman come as a surprise. It found that 72pc of men hold a positive view of women. In contrast, only 35pc of Gen Z women have a positive view of men.

Online, a new generation of experts and influencers has sprung up around the idea that “men are trash”. They have created an online ecosystem of commentators vying for the attention of a growing female audience, eager to consume the narrative that feminism has trapped women in a false consciousness that is keeping them exploited and unhappy.

Women have been lied to, this narrative goes. They have been conditioned since childhood to approach the modern dating market with all the earnest, open-heartedness of a Jane Austen heroine or a Disney princess. But the credits rolled before we got to see Prince Charming’s entitlement and toxic masculinity up close. And today’s wannabe Elizabeth Bennett must navigate a wasteland of dating apps, ghostings and dick pics in their fruitless search for Mr Darcy.

YouTuber Thewizardliz has no time for this. “Stop dating broke guys,” she tells her almost 8.5 million followers.

“Some of you women out there have been making men so spoiled. These days women are expected to be mothers, women are expected to be a chef… a cleaner, a nanny, a personal therapist, to give all of our energy. And then, on top of that, people also decided to say, ‘You know what? Let’s split the bill!’”

Female Dating Strategy, a female-­only forum on Reddit, has grown into a community of over 100,000 subscribers who regularly share advice on how to present as a high-value woman. Key strategies include being aloof and foregoing sex with a new partner until he has expressed commitment.

Instead of continuing to fight the patriarchy — a fight that to them seems a lost cause — these women have resigned themselves to operating within it, channelling their hopes for agency through the ability to attract powerful men and sustain their attention.

Once you have accepted that true equal partnership is a doomed aspiration, it makes more sense to treat love as a zero-sum game of strategy — a transactional arrangement in which the winner is the person in the relationship pulling the strings.

Liberal feminism, a growing number of young women seem to feel, was a lie.

How else to interpret the mountain of evidence exposing the burden of invis­ible labour on women? Or the unfairness of the double shift of having a job and running a home? Or the research that shows that if a woman earns more than her partner, he’s five times more likely to cheat and no more likely to help out with household chores?

And you know, I can see some rationale behind all that? The complaints on here, and the solutions proposed, are enough to turn women off. Women have too much choice! They're not taking available guys, they want the best guys out there! What we need to do to solve this problem is take education away from women, take choice away from women, make them marry the guy their father picks out, and what they need to do is be the traditional wife: compliant, attractive, attentive, never argue or talk back, let the guy make all the decisions, always be sexually available and perform the sex acts he wants no matter if the wife enjoys or likes them, never ask him for sexual favours, he's the master of the house, have kids, raise the kids, never ask him to get involved in raising the kids, oh and she should also pay her own way so have a job/career of her own even though she is also not supposed to have a job/career of her own since that would take away from her needing to marry a man to provide for her and having kids.

So women are leeches who don't deserve anything in a divorce because they never contributed anything to the marriage since they were stay-at-home wives and mothers, if the guy wants a divorce. But if they have jobs so they do contribute financially (since financial contribution is the only measure of contribution) then they are also wrong, because that makes them too independent and not being dependent on a man to live means they can refuse that available guy. Women should be economically dependent on men to force them to get married, but that economic dependence means they have no value in a divorce if the man wants a new, younger, wife (since men are attracted to the limited age range of nubile women and once your wife 'hits the wall' and stops being sexually attractive to you, time to trade her in).

I think the "femosphere" is a terrible idea. But sometimes, yeah, I see the idea: if men only value you for tits'n'ass, then maximise that to get the richest guy you can and get all you can extract out of him while you're still young and sexy.

I think it is much better if we treat each other as people, not as meat products to serve our every need with no wants of our own.

It's worth noting that 'marry the nice guy your parents pick out when you're in your late teens in lieu of job and degree' is simply not an option for most western women.

It doesn't sound like it's an option for most Eastern women anymore, either.

From the abstract:

A viable means for aiding the survival of low-fertility nations could be to provide women with the economic and social resources necessary for them to conclude that having children alone makes for a better life than remaining childless.

So the authors are suggesting that, as women seem increasingly unwilling to couple up with men, the solution is to rid ourselves of the nuclear family entirely. If you no longer need a committed relationship to have kids, and having children is economically incentivized by the state, then the problem is solved.

This is certainly a refreshing take, compared to what we usually see here. Not returning to tradition, but moving towards further individualization and reliance on government. Is that what this is really about? Increase the power of our leaders by making people completely dependent on the goodwill of the state?

Skimming through it, this article reads almost like an overall warning rather than a genuine suggestion. Is this actually a veiled way for academics to criticize feminism and individualism? Show clear evidence of all the harms caused, theorize that things will become much worse, then propose a solution that is compliant with the ideology while at the same time obviously inhuman for anyone giving it serious consideration. It is almost like they are looking at the slippery slope of current dating norms and suggesting we move to its logical conclusion as an attempt to shock us out of it.

This is pretty much the logical end result of feminism and the progressive left's social project, so I don't see why you find it surprising or refreshing to see it written out.

I got halfway through typing an angry rant about how the unholy alliance of progressivism+neoliberalism has hollowed out western society and then realized a large % of what I am pissed off about and attribute to fertility decline, etc to is happening in China which is not experiencing a lot of the same issues we are.

Societies without antinatalist policies like italy and the nordics experienced organic fertility declines. Antinatalism didn't reduce african birth rates. The only thing that actually works is womens economic empowerment and a tradeoff between autonomic hedonism versus domestic partnership, and lets be fucking real for most societies domestic partnership kind of left women on the short end of the stick once the gossiping church ladies became insignificant as a social power vector.

China korea japan do have their problems and their dating markets are insane (plus the dudes are just really fucking rizzless) but thats an issue of social outcomes being determined by rival economic activity (property+education) that just makes status a red queen race there. The gender wars are restricted to korea, and many east asian women are not keen on the western feminist literature because it has made western women ugly and miserable at the same time. Better to cry in the back of a BMW than ride your own bicycle. Maybe BYD dirt cheap cars having built in massage chairs and friendly AI changes the calculus though.

Progressivism and neoliberalism having the same effects on society as a communist revolution that killed tens of millions is, uh, not the exoneration you think it is.

I'm not a communist nor a fan of the CCP.

But this is a hard subject because it's so global, despite politics and economics being more regional.

Also hating neoliberalism is a MAGA policy. Have you seen Trump's economics? LMAO

protectionism, state owned shares, the rejection of globalization

Mitt Romney is rolling in his grave

That is also not the gotcha you think it is. China today is vastly different from when it was undergoing a communist revolution. China, when it was killing tens of millions, didn’t have a fertility problem.

Peasant farmers always have high fertility, regardless of culture. The urbanization crash, however, is not a universal- not at the level China did.

If I came to the conclusion that the only way to maintain replacement-level fertility was to spend 25% of GDP on a brand new "Department of Reproduction" tasked with paying millions of professional surrogates to gestate eugenically selected embryos to ensure a viable next generation, that's probably what I would put in my abstract for publication too.

Its hard to tell these days.

I also have to suspect they added the female author on there to pre-emptively deflect certain types of critiques that would arise when people see what their data says.

Its why I suspect that we'll eventually, finally see a politician try to place male's concerns front and center.

I think there will definitely be some kind of backlash if things keep escalating. Even young women seem disappointed by the kind of men created under the current norms. The anxiety about approaching and escalating is unattractive. The ambiguous nature of any given relationship when the man does not clarify what he wants is uncomfortable.

It is hard to see how this can last.

This is perhaps my biggest concern.

If there is no controlled unwinding, the upcoming generation might be particularly amenable to a drastic policy shift.

Whatever happens when a young man is raised to internalize the opposite of the women-are-wonderful effect...

faceh, are you married? Do you want nine kids? People in past generations had large families, and raised those families in conditions much less appealing than the way we live today. Are you prepared to be economically responsible for a wife and multiple kids, and to be involved as a father with those children?

Because we all have to be honest. Large families stopped being the norm because spending that money on ourselves was more appealing. Not putting the physical, emotional, mental strain on ourselves was more appealing. Not having the shortage of time, space, and resources was more appealing. The 1926 Irish census is online. My paternal grandparents, at that time, were 10 people in 2 room house (2 parents, 8 children in ages from 17 to 2 years of age). My maternal grandparents were 8 people in 2 rooms (2 parents, 6 children in ages from 13 years to 1 month old). Nobody today wants or is able to live in those circumstances.

In my darker moments, I think if we do manage to crack the problem of cis men being able to carry pregnancies to term, it will be very revelatory. All the partnered guys on here who want four or five kids? Now you can have that! You can carry those seahorse pregnancies to term! Let's see how enthusiastic the "barefoot and pregnant" guys are when it's them barefoot and pregnant!

But those are the dark moments, so let's move to a better way of thinking.

Whatever happens when a young man is raised to internalize the opposite of the women-are-wonderful effect

We'll go back to how history used to be. You are making dark hints that this will be a terrible new dawn, for women it will just be Tuesday.

EDIT: Gentlement of The Motte, what do you want in a girlfriend/wife? What do you bring to the table? And please, "I have a good job and earn good money" is not enough. If you're going to treat it as "my value is solely financial", then why be surprised women chase after high-status guys?

In my darker moments, I think if we do manage to crack the problem of cis men being able to carry pregnancies to term, it will be very revelatory. All the partnered guys on here who want four or five kids? Now you can have that! You can carry those seahorse pregnancies to term! Let's see how enthusiastic the "barefoot and pregnant" guys are when it's them barefoot and pregnant!

I may not be representative here, but my partner and I have actually discussed this before and lamented that I was the man and she the woman — we both think I’d be more willing to put my career on standby and suffer the physical consequences for children than she would be, though it’s difficult to say for certain given the biological impossibility in practice.

That said, I do most of the housework/chores in the household, and we expect if/when we have children I’d probably spend more time with them than she would. We both work in similar roles as well, so it’s not like I’d be giving up less than she would be — it’s just that the way things came to be, I happen to have occupied the stereotypically feminine part of our relationship and she the more masculine part. We might both just be built different.

Though e.g. Shanghainese men are very whipped stereotypically do cater to their women very much, so it’s not like this is unheard of.

You are making dark hints that this will be a terrible new dawn, for women it will just be Tuesday.

This is quite particular and hard to generalize worldwide.

Large families also stopped being the norm because people realised that spending the same amount of money on three kids versus nine results in a much better quality of life for the kids. They can get better clothes, healthy food, and afford a lot more free time. So it is not necessarily selfish! If you want your children's childhood to be as good as possible, it makes sense to limit the amount you have.

If you want your children's childhood to be as good as possible, it makes sense to limit the amount you have.

Is it better? Are the kids having more free time, because we're now starting to worry that all that free time is going on screen time.

Screen time is an entirely separate issue. Families were shrinking way before screens became commonplace.

More comments

Whatever happens when a young man is raised to internalize the opposite of the women-are-wonderful effect...

What do you expect to happen?

My sense is that there historically were stable societies with all sorts of different attitudes towards women. In very broad terms, around the end of the 19th century, all "white" countries were already fully committed to a proto-version of their present-day attitude to women; East Asian countries were broadly genuinely committed to something close to the opposite (China's selective abortions are just the tip of an iceberg of attitudes); and Arabic and African countries maybe were neutral. (Note I'm trying to analyse the moral attitude to women orthogonally to their sociopolitical rights and privileges: it's entirely possible (and was common) to think of women as wonderful creatures who need to be coddled and managed, like children, and conceivable to think of them as sociopathic parasites who nevertheless have a natural right to hold the reins, which in a way gets closer to the world of a whipped 1960s Japanese salaryman).

The share of boys agreeing that women deserve equal pay also fell

How much of that can be attributed to them disagreeing with the idea that there's a significant pay gap for equal work to begin with, and instead just selecting "disagree" to represent that?

Where would they derive that idea from?

Contact with reality.

Aella Twitter poll: If you ended up in a romantic relationship just like that of your parents, would you be happy?

Yes - 31.2%

No - 68.8%

The decline in marriage makes a lot more sense with this datapoint. Does anyone have any idea what is going on here?

I'd happily pick yes. My parents care for each other and have been married for four decades.

I'd vote "no" because my parents' marriage was fine (they had a rocky patch when I was very young but got over it) but I don't want a marriage or romantic relationship, knew my mind on that since I was nine, and had I been forced by family and social pressure into marrying someone I would have been very miserable (and so would they). There were a couple of mild hints, in my late 20s/early 30s, about "hey, here's a distant cousin with all this land, someone ought to marry him" but that all bounced off me.

So 'yes, my parents' marriage was fine, no, I would not be happy'.

Probably an adversely selected sample given Aella's audience, and going by my past talent for ruining millennial "complain about your family" sessions by talking about actual bad stuff I'm among the "adversely selected", but as a millennial with Gen X parents, uh... The two of them were married four times (Mom twice, Dad thrice) and of those four, my father's third marriage is the only one that I would call successful (and even then, I have no idea why my second stepmom puts up with my father's shit). Of the six aunts and uncles on both sides, none are married to their original spouses, save for one who is merely separated (They'll likely never divorce, just live in separate trailers in the same park; they had dinner together during Easter.).

My parents' marriage and divorce were insane disasters that only could've gotten worse if my father had given up and walked away, someone actually got murdered, or mom had been clever enough to accuse him of "abusing" my sister and I in court instead of just painting him as an irresponsible alcoholic and lecturing us about her victimhood in their episodes of domestic violence (Yeah, she lost some fights, but she won some too, and after their divorce mom kept having problems with domestic violence while dad did not. She hit my sister and I, not him.). They split for good when I was six and their post-divorce war dragged on for 15 years after that.

If we're swapping anecdotes about domestic violence and old-fashioned marriage, my mother used to tell me about a cousin of hers (who had a brother who was a priest, so VERY RESPECTABLE FAMILY) and how he helped solve a problem of that kind.

Another relative was married to a guy (again, outwardly respectable) who used to beat her. The family strongly hinted that this was not acceptable. Guy didn't stop. So Cousin warned him off by beating him up so badly he had to spend a week in bed (and his wife made excuses to work for him) and told him if he ever laid a hand on his wife again, Cousin would kill him.

That stopped it.

I never understood why she stayed with the guy, but think about it: this would have been in the 50s or 60s. No divorce in Ireland. Marital separation considered very scandalous and disgraceful. Women were supposed to put up with it. Economically dependent on husband. So really the option of leaving him was not there.

This is also why "let's go back to making women economically dependent on men so they have to get married and have kids" is never going to fly again.

Well statistically, wouldn’t “just like that of your parents” mean “divorced” for about half of them?

That’s still insane. The Protestant Reformation and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

“Selected for Aellea’s social network” makes any kind of social commentary or inference from the results completely meaningless.

Total guess: A majority of marriages from the boomer generation are actually at least somewhat unhappy. Marriages lead to children pretty reliably though. Given lack of social pressure to marry, people choose not to marry, believing it will lead to greater happiness.

Marriages lead to children pretty reliably though.

Used to, until one child/no children marriages became acceptable. We've redefined marriage as solely a romantic relationship between two individuals for the purpose of self-fulfilment, nothing more (see gay marriage, where having kids is wiped out of the picture completely as one of the aims of marriage; remember all the arguments about "so if a heterosexual couple are infertile, does that mean they can't get married?") and if either or both parties gets bored or falls out of love, they can get out of the marriage because it is cruel and mean to keep them trapped where they're not happy. Marriage is about being happy, forget all that old-fashioned stuff that came before.

Also, having a baby in order to patch up a failing marriage doesn't really work, and may indeed precipitate the breakup.

I view having the baby to save the marriage as a high-risk, high reward hail mary gambit. It has a good chance of working on the right type of guy, the guy who will support his offspring and offspring's mother, if only because motherless children have poor outcomes.

It will definitely not work on a deadbeat dad.

Watch out for reverse causation there; a bun in the oven is frequently a trigger for people to actually tie the knot.

Oh, yeah that's true. Even happened to a friend of mine about a decade ago. Probably more true for the boomer generation than younger generations.

Still, where there used to exist general social pressure to marry (without a bun in the oven) it no longer exists outside of some foreign cultures, religions, and insulated subgroups.

The divorce rate for American parents with children is somewhere between 40-50%. Aella's Twitter followers might select for kids of divorced parents so the result may reflect straight forward thinking that they'd much rather be in happy marriages.

Yeah, it also gets complicated when your same-sex parent has been married multiple times, as the implicit terms are "with nothing else for the rest of your life" even if your same-sex parent did in fact have other romances at other points in his life.

About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men.

Notice the slight of hand there. 60% of partnerships with 10% of men. Not 60% of women sleeping with 10% of men, but 60% of partnerships.

Because those men are sleeping with...the most promiscuous women. Chads aren't monopolising all the girls, it's more that the frat boys are sleeping with the sorority girls and the young men and women who don't leave their rooms aren't hooking up.

That is 1 guy sleeping with 6 girls.

It's more like six guys sleeping with six girls, in various combinations. If the incel is upset that chad is 'monopolising all the women', that is mistaken. Because he isn't monopolising all the women, only the most promiscuous women. You could equally frame it as one promiscuous woman 'monopolising all the men' but that would also be wrong, for the same reason.

60% is counting pairings, not people.

For example, population 100 men and 100 women.

Top 10% men and 20% women each have multiple partners between each other, create 120 sets of "pairings". This is 10% men sleeping with avg 12 unique women and top 20% women sleeping with avg 6 unique men.

Other 90% men (0.89 partners each) and 80% women (1.0 partner each) create 80 pairings.

Here's a fictional population with similar numbers and no gender mismatches:

  • 90 women are in dedicated monogamous relationships with 90 men (90 relationships total)
  • 10 women have broken up and gotten together with each of 10 men (100 relationships total)

100/190 = 52.6% of partnerships are with 10/100 = 10% of men. It's one guy sleeping with ten girls, but it's also one girl sleeping with ten guys.

and the young men and women who don't leave their rooms aren't hooking up.

Quick question. If these young men and women were to leave their room, which would have an easier time getting laid?

Also dating apps means you can locate a hookup without leaving your room, funny enough.

Guess what dating app dynamics look like. What % of men would you guess are getting the most matches?

Even if your point about kids not leaving their room is correct, it doesn't actually refute the core issue.

If these young men and women were to leave their room, which would have an easier time getting laid?

faceh, the solution is for men to raise their standards. Get more picky. Stop thinking with your dick. Stop being pressured about "you have to get laid or else you're a virgin loser". Be as fussy as women!

You can have fifty whore women out there spreading their legs for any man with a pulse, but if no man is going to fuck them, then there is no "one guy sleeping with all the women". Prostitution doesn't exist unless there's a demand for it. I'm not saying sex work is real work, I'm saying if guys didn't want quick casual sex for relief, novelty, and just a meaningless fuck when they're kinda drunk or horny, then there wouldn't be whores or porn because there would be no market for it.

Guys wanted quick sex. They got it. Now they're complaining that women are behaving like men, in wanting sex without commitments, but not enough like men ('fuck it, he's breathing, that's good enough') in sleeping with them when asked.

If these young men and women were to leave their room, which would have an easier time getting laid?

Women, obviously, but that's been true since the beginning of time.

The thing is, 'getting laid' is not something women aim for. They want relationships. It's a failure of theory of mind to pretend that 'the ability to get laid' is a manifestation of female privilege when women don't want it.

Guess what dating app dynamics look like. What % of men would you guess are getting the most matches?

All the more reason to leave your room instead of staying inside scrolling. Tinder is difficult for guys primarily because the ratio of men to women is so skewed. That's like going to a DnD convention expecting to pick up girls.

Of course, zoomers have realised this, which is why the apps are in decline.

Oddly enough, D&D is becoming more and more popular among women and queer people. I know a surprising number of D&D groups where cis men are in the minority.

Yes, but those women all hate men unless they're gay.

I'm quite serious about this; the great proportion of the biological women who got into D&D, 5e specifically, are walking stereotypes of leftists with all the accompanying attitudes and annoying habits. Everything they don't like is a dog-whistle for something bad, every work of art is evaluated based on how queer it is, they're all "neurodivergent" as of six months ago, they formally announce their (she/her) pronouns in casual social interactions. The first words out of one of their mouths were a tirade about how someone gatekept her and mansplained her, another one would never go on a date with a man because "she doesn't want to get assaulted", then abruptly lavished affection on some random guy when he mentioned being gay. They're surrounded by the nicest, most cautious, most overwhelmingly leftist feminist anti-racist cis men you're going to find, and have nothing but scorn for them. These weren't people I was chasing or even chatting up, this was all ambiently observed. I have worse stories about the one I chased.

It's singularly upsetting for me that my fucking hobby puts me in contact with these people whenever I interact with any part of the hobby outside of my little NuSR club.

Women, by and large, do not want to 'get laid', they want to have a meaningful relationship which includes a sexual component. This is no easier for the fairer sex, and they run a few risks that are not realistic for a man to concern himself with.

There are some genuinely promiscuous women who enjoy sex for the sake of sex, but they're pretty minimal

'by and large'

About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men.

As ever, I am going to request the original source. You link to a tweet, which sticks in a graphic of a pie chart and says "In US data over the past decade, a tenth of men accounted for 60% of female sexual partnerships."

I can't see the chart very well, but it seems to be 95th-99th percentile of men with 58% of sexual partnerships, so whatever that is in the "percentile bin" measure they seem to be using? Which seems to be "guys self-reporting how many women they've had" and that's not the same as "most promiscuous" (and not even "hottest guy", you would be surprised at the guys who apparently have no problem getting a trail of girlfriends).

The data is "mean number of female sexual partners since age 18 by male percentile bin" and the 99th percentile bin are claiming a mean number of 287. I don't know how much I trust that number, but also we don't have ages to go with it. Is this a 60 year old guy saying that over 40 years of being sexually active, he has had 287 partners ranging from one-night stands to long-term relationships?

The tenor of the original post seems to be "a few guys RIGHT NOW are banging all the women" and I don't think that's necessarily so. I agree that sex, romance, children and marriage is a mess right now, but we put ourselves right there because this is what we wanted. We wanted freedom, we wanted to throw off the restraints of the past, we wanted to have sex without needing to get married for it (men) and we wanted sex without childbirth being the consequence (women, but men also) and we wanted casual sex to not be stigmatised any more but taken as a normal, natural need and indeed a human right (hence the complaining about not being able to get girlfriend/boyfriend) and we wanted living in sin to be renamed as cohabiting and accepted as "it's just sensible and reasonable to test out if you're both ready to commit to marriage first".

Thank you, I am going to have to dig into this more later, but I was immediately suspicious as well.

This topic is just too perfect for everyone to project their pet issue onto it as the "dominant factor" and everyone gets so deep into motivated reasoning to get there. And its so complex no one can prove anything more than handwave vibes and because it's so complex, no one can be totally "wrong" while still failing to explain the issue in a useful way.

Personally, I think it's all because housing

"a few guys RIGHT NOW are banging all the women"

Well, the data is in the actual study.

And the data they are using is drawn from the last 10 years (as I emphasized).

And I think the last 10 years is when the gender war trends became most pronounced.

The similar trend is that More young men are reporting having less sex. Young women are having about the same amount, although there is decline.

Women also report more sex partners prior to marriage then in decades past.

Who are the young women having sex with.

I don't think you can finagle out of this one.

Women having more sex partners.

More men reporting less sex on average.

Women's self-reported standards for partners being raised.

Solve for X.

Perhaps there is an increasing number of celibate women... but this doesn't help with the actual problem in the slightest.

Where does it end? Dunno, but my magic 8-ball says 'outlook not so good". You, alone are not responsible for civilizational decline. Attempt to guide your friends and family to take advantage of the situation as much as possible. Women of repute will continue to be in high demand, and should be reassured of this and protected. Men should emulate Lothario. Alternatively, join a social/cultural/religious group immune to the current trends.

Where does this end?

In the short term, robo-caretakers for the ballooning aging population. In the medium to long term, artificial wombs for mass production of wards of the state. Sexbots will help top off the bread and circuses. AGI will pay for all of this of course.

Or, continued mass migration from the wellsprings of fertility. One seems more realistic than the other.

Or, continued mass migration from the wellsprings of fertility

Bad news there, even Africa is on the decline

This is why I consider the problem too important to ignore. The "organic" solutions are not solving.

I keep engaging with the gender wars/fertility crisis topic even though its slowly driving me mad. But its too important to ignore.

I've already written a several write ups about how to solve this. The solution to the current problems are likely combination of getting non-college educated men decent paying work, and increasing socialization. We'd also need women to be more receptive to approaches, in an era where there are too many people attempting to demonize it.

Another thing too add that I think is fascinating, that is even a blind spot of myself, is that we don't really uphold womens end of the social contract in the same way we do with men a la Lauren Chen. Its more permissable to say that men have social/moral obligations (get a job (well, yes, a bum women isnt necessarily praised either, but I think its clear that men have more pressure on them in this regard), military service, etc), but not women, (get married, obey husband, have kids.) Perhaps this double standard should be reconsidered, and applied to women as well. If one wants to shift the needle in the other direction, change material conditions (automate the jobs, build skynet, etc) and "male liberation" would follow.

Personally, I favor the former over the latter - though I would emphasize partner cooperation over just blindly obeying your husband.

I think most of your suggestions are spot on, however, one that im concerned about is the lack of incentive and ability for young adults to meet other young adults in person. The decline of cheap or free activities specifically for young adults to meet other young adults is a huge problem. Even something as simple as meeting for a meal often requires a minimum of $50 and add $10 each if you’re having wine or a mixed drink. Movies are not cheap, but also not great for getting to know the person you’re dating. Most places that people used to meet other young adults before college became the default are gone. Dances no longer happen except for in junior high. Parks are hard to get to without a car. Clubs are expensive. So then where do people end up hanging out?

Add in that people are spending more time online and more time alone at home, and it’s just hard to get the ball rolling toward family formation. If you’re isolated in your home and mostly gaming, watching TV or doomscrolling there, it’s not very likely that you’ll meet someone you want to have children with. Especially given that everyone is working and doin* chores after work. It’s like, you don’t do things with people in the real world outside of work, you don’t meet the opposite sex, not love, no marriage, no babies.

Parks are hard to get to without a car.

Kids used to typically drive at 16. Thank the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety we largely put the kibosh on that.

They still do in the West, where it's basically mandatory.

The decline of cheap or free activities specifically for young adults to meet other young adults is a huge problem

Robert Putnam wrote extensively about third space decline in Bowling Along, these trends started long before the smart phone. I think the abundance of technology has caused third space decline. The monetization of them isn't as big a barrier at its been made out to be, indeed people were partying more in the past compared to today, its not like those things were free back then either. Hell, Putnam documented the decline of picnics! In any case, id be fine with a state policy making these spaces low cost to free in order to incentivize socialization. Going beyond that, you could begin a more authoritarian crackdown on technology. Not ideal, but I've been flirting with the idea of doing some kind of creative crack down on screen time. Im well open to (& and I'd honestly prefer) less authoritarian solutions before that.

I think the tech isn’t helping, both because it’s ubiquitous and easy to access (including being portable) but also because it’s free and frictionless. When every home has an arcade and a movie theater, it’s a harder sell to get people to go do things outside of that. Add in the money and set up time of planning a meetup and a lot of people are just going to binge Netflix at home or scroll.

One thing that I’d love to see tried is to essentially force kids in schools to join a club. So you’d have an hour of time set aside during the school day, you’d have an hour in which you would be forced to join a club and do club based activities. It could be a sport, art, robotics, anime, movies, science fiction, whatever. But you have to pick one, and you have to participate. I think this would get kids a bit more social and hopefully push them to form bonds that would last outside of school.

Those clubs sound like they would be highly gender segregated. That's fine, I think basically banning gender segregated spaces was a mistake.

One of the things that people did in the past was to have tension between most activities, which were sex segregated (school, sewing circle, calling for tea, books, cigars, and talking about politics, etc), and a few activities, which were not (church, dances, dinners). Then the people in the segregated spaces are not datable, but those in the mixed spaces are. That seems probably better for romantic tension than the current set up where a bunch of people at work or in the robotics club or wherever seem like they might be datable, but in practice aren't.

I think the habit of going out to places with other people helps the process indirectly by creating the opportunity for one member of that group to introduce some members of the opposite sex. They might have a sibling, or a platonic relationship with a man or woman they’ll introduce to members of the group.

My son's school high school does this. He says about half of the clubs actually function as study hall.

That makes sense. School is long, it's a full work day, so if you want kids to actually engage with the clubs (unless they're high energy and in a sports club, but those are mostly sex segregated), you have to cut school. I like the idea of the Alpha School half day academics, half day clubs set up -- they aren't even loosing that much academic time, mostly just re-organizing it.

Doesn't research claim women are unhappier than men? That recent UK polling data certainly claimed that, despite women officially doing better than men. AFAIK being unhappier makes you worse off, period. So don't sweat it!

Correct.

All that extra freedom and they're less satisfied than ever.

Its almost like the female gender is an inverse utility monster. Almost.

About 60% of female sexual partnerships are with the 10% most promiscuous men. I have to interpret "most promiscuous" as "most attractive," because very, very few men are able to be promiscuous without being hot. Likewise, this looks VERY suggestive of a broader 80/20 rule in place.

I was intrigued, so I clicked through. This statistic appears to be derived from randomly-chosen men's self-reports of the number of their sexual partners on the GSS. It also appears that the sexual-behavior portions of this survey are entirely self-administered.

So I guess if you believe guys are always scrupulously honest about their sex histories, and there's no way that 10% of men, filling out a survey in the privacy of their own home, would ever vastly over-report their number of partners for the lulz?

I can totally believe that 10% of men have wildly disproportionate sex partners. Note that that is not the same as wildly disproportionate amount of sex; by the sex partner metric, a one night stand counts just as much as a 50 year sexual relationship. I think men having a lop sided partner-count distribution isn't indicative of most men not having sex.

Oh so we'd expect most surveys on the topic to be an over-report on the men's side.

Okay.

Interesting that young men are claiming fewer sex partners and less sex, recently.

What changed? Why'd they suddenly stop overreporting?

By your logic, the sex recession among men is EVEN WORSE THAN IT SEEMS from this data.

(women remain more steady on this, btw)

I have yet to see a SINGLE data point that goes against the "lots of women are actually hooking up with relatively small portion of men" talking point. And the dating apps seem to have exacerbated it.

China saw it as such a huge problem so they've taken drastic action.

Yeah I've discussed this before too.

(women remain more steady on this, btw)

I've analysed this NSFG data myself and found different results for past-year sexlessness and virginity in the 2022-23 wave. Lyman Stone, the author of that article, has admitted there was some kind of coding mistake made. You'll notice the same widening gap doesn't appear for the 'past 3 months' measure. The sample was also smaller than usual due to being limited to offline respondents in the post-COVID survey for consistency with prior waves, so the sex gap wouldn't likely be statistically significant. I'll also note that this gap only beginning to emerge post-COVID doesn't seem consistent with the narrative that the sexual revolution or dating apps enabled this dynamic. The small gap that does exist can be explained by age gaps in relationships as well as a slight male surplus among young adults.

I have yet to see a SINGLE data point that goes against the "lots of women are actually hooking up with relatively small portion of men" talking point.

Data showing similar sex partner distributions for men and women isn't sensational and lacks the same emotional pull or viral potential. Hopefully with how pervasive this narrative has become this data will slowly begin to get more attention.

And the dating apps seem to have exacerbated it.

The idea that dating apps are facilitating sexual inequality hinges on women swiping right on fewer profiles and fewer of men's swipes resulting in matches. What this doesn't take into account is 1. the skewed sex ratio on dating apps, and 2. how the swipes are distributed. However, a lower rate of right-swipes doesn't seem to mean that these swipes are more concentrated on the most desirable profiles, and matches actually tend to be very close in terms of within-sex desirability. Moreover, looking at actual outcomes like dates and sexual encounters, we see no population-level sex imbalance, and sexual partner data post-dating apps don't show increasing concentration among the most promiscuous men, nor do we see the expected divergence in heterosexual men and women's STD rates.

I appreciate that you're bringing some actual data and nuance.

But its still slamming headfirst into the reports that half of young men just... aren't dating.

And that the average # of sexual partners reported by females (prior to marriage) has climbed over decades... even as marriage rates fall. Women are clearly having more sex with a variety of men.

This can still all track if the average man is having more sex than they used to. But that doesn't appear in any data, although we can see signs that some small subset of men are getting laid a ton. Women are not having sex with a random selection of the male population. There's a lot of overlap in who they're having sex with.

Whether this rises to an 80/20 ratio is debatable, but I don't think you can look at one of those guys in the 50% of non-daters and say with a straight face "statistically, you're having sex somewhat regularly."

By your logic, the sex recession among men is EVEN WORSE THAN IT SEEMS from this data.

That does not follow. For example, there could be an overreporting recession, rather than a sex recession.

If there's any reasonable explanation for why it would be relegated entirely amongst young males, I'd be interested to hear it.

Interesting that young men are claiming fewer sex partners and less sex, recently.

What changed? Why'd they suddenly stop overreporting?

Oh, I'm not disputing that everybody's having less sex lately. Everyone's very lazy and anxious, young people seem pretty undersocialized, AI will feed your delusions, videogames are more entertaining and porn's more extreme than ever, and dating-app interactions seem custom-designed to drive everybody into celibacy.

I'm mostly disputing the Chads-and-sluts narrative, because every time I look into cited evidence for this it seems to be built around long screeds and BS evopsych rationalizations, propped up by just the flimsiest social science imaginable.

Yes, and you've got an actual piece of research saying that 10% of the promiscuous men are accounting for 60% of the sexual encounters women have.

You've also got the data that shows fewer young men are having sex, young women are reporting about the same amount.

And the additional factor of women having more sex partners on average than years past.

So whomst are the young women having sex with.

Then of course you can watch a Clavicular stream and see that exact dynamic play out in real time.

I dunno what type of evidence you would find convincing, but it is likely available.

Yes, and you've got an actual piece of research saying that 10% of the promiscuous men are accounting for 60% of the sexual encounters women have.

The reason people keep questioning your numbers is that the math doesn't math. At least not without some creative explanation of what "the sexual encounters women have" means.

So let's say we've got a group of 100 sexually active men and 100 sexually active women and assume we have normalized all other factors (they are all in the same age range, social class, all straight, etc.) so we have a hypothetical dating pool of 200 people.

According to your interpretation of the research, 10 of those men are fucking 60 of the women. Or they are fucking almost all the women, who are also giving sloppy seconds to some of the other 90 men. And the other 40 women are, what, being shared by the 90 lesser men? Do you see how this doesn't add up? Do you really think the 10% most attractive/desirable men routinely have harems? Sure, a young guy with options probably sleeps around, and so do women with options, but... most people neither want to be part of a harem nor necessarily be permanently spinning plates.

The research shows the most desirable men sleep around a lot more than the less desirable men, which is hardly a new phenomenon. And it shows women, given options, are pickier than when they didn't have options. It does not show that the most desirable men are hoarding all the women.

Likewise your figure that "80% of men are unacceptable to women" does not fit real-world observations. Are 80% of adult men today incels? Really? Are 80% of young men not dating or having sex at all?

If you give a woman a lineup of 100 male profiles, and she only checks 20 of them as attractive enough to date, it does not follow that the other 80 men will never find a woman.

You point to real problems but you abuse statistics to make an exaggerated point.

I think ironically you also ignore a factor that would also explain a lot of male datelessness: a lot of women are just... not desirable nowadays. Obesity is a big part of it. Outside of danker corners of the Internet, there isn't a lot of straightforward discussion about the fact that a lot of women are fat nowadays and most men don't want fat women. Then add the shrill brand of feminism that even among straight girls (whether or not they call themselves "bi") sneers at the idea of pleasing men in any way, and it's not surprising that the dating landscape has narrowed for men. And in ways they find socially unacceptable to state out loud.

"I'd rather jerk it to AI porn than settle for a septum-pierced landwhale who hates me" is also a problem, but it's not actually a problem of female pickiness!

As an aside, Amaden, the main points brought up by the crowd that believe in 80/20 (some form of the false notion that 80% of the women sleep with 20% of the men) have been extensively studied and refuted by one Maximus.

What both him and I have found, after looking closely at the research, is that about 20% of the men have 80% of the female sex partner count, but, likewise, about 25% of the women have 80% of the male sex partner count.

There is no polygyny. It’s just that the most promiscuous men tend to attract the promiscuous women.

On a personal note, I know I have a lot of recovery, because I’m no longer attracting only ultra promiscuous women. They’re still around in my life, as platonic friends, but that as far as it goes now that I have a very good girlfriend.

According to your interpretation of the research, 10 of those men are fucking 60 of the women.

Not quite.

There's some subset of women who aren't having sexual encounters at all.

Of the women having sexual encounters, this implies that about 60% of those encounters are with a particular subset of men.

And then we ALSO have data that women are on average having more sexual encounters than ever.

So contingent on the amount of women actually having sex (somewhere around 80% of young women, based on self reports) the vast majority of their sex is with a small cohort of men.

And the contingent of men having sex is decreasing fairly quickly. Suggesting that the % of men on the receiving end of these sexual encounters is getting even more exclusive.

The only sane interpretation is that women are having more sex, on average, with a smaller pool of guys.

Which is, ONCE AGAIN, backed up by data from Dating apps.

A small % of guys are even matching with women, let alone having sex with them.

80% of men are unacceptable to women" does not fit real-world observations. Are 80% of adult men today incels? Really? Are 80% of young men not dating or having sex at all?

Am I the only one that uses google anymore?

Half of Young men just aren't dating.

Around 45% have never asked a woman out at all.

That's 50% out of the pool already. Do you think a guy who turns 25 with minimal/zero dating experience is likely to turn that around and have success with women by age 30?

As of 2023, 60% of young men reported they were single. That number. 34% of young women reported being single. WHO ARE THE WOMEN DATING if not those young men?

As of 2026, around 34% of young men report being in a 'serious' relationship.. Situation is not really improving.

So we're hovering somewhere around 70% of young dudes who are not currently on trajectory to get married.

You tell me why that would be, if men actually want to get married. What's the holdup, why can't they attract a partner?

There's little reason to think that'll improve.

And you can hear women tell you the exact same thing straight from their mouth.

"If your standards don't eliminate most, they're not high enough."

"I'd rather die alone... ...than know that I didn't get it all."

This is being openly stated, in publicly viewable forums, young women TELLING YOU DIRECTLY that most men aren't sufficient for them. THEY'RE NOT HIDING IT.

Why would that be? What possible explanation is there other than... some large % of men (60%? 70%? 80%?) don't rise to their notice.

I've discussed each of these individual points before, of course. Its getting very rote to have this discussion when the data still says the same thing, and all the new data just reinforces the existing point.

My precise position is that about 50% of men are invisible to women, with an additional 30% that only become visible on occasion once acknowledged.

As of 2023, 60% of young men reported they were single. That number. 34% of young women reported being single. WHO ARE THE WOMEN DATING if not those young men?

Maximus goes in to it with some detail

The most likely explanations:

  • Age gaps: Slightly older men tend to get together with slightly younger women
  • The 2022 Pew Study was an outlier; most studies of this nature show a smaller singleness gap

As of 2023, 60% of young men reported they were single. That number. 34% of young women reported being single. WHO ARE THE WOMEN DATING if not those young men?

You really have to click through and look at the methodology itself, not just copy-paste whatever clickbait summary it's posted with. Best I can tell, you are misreading this survey in a way that actually reverses its findings.

Here are the actual questions and responses from the Pew survey. Notice how "dating casually" in this survey falls in the singledom region! The figure in the article also confirms: "single" as a category refers to respondents who are not married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship.

So for this survey, all your Chads playing the field are showing up in the same 60% as the incels. Given that respondents aged 18-29 get binned separately from respondents aged 30-49, it's plausible the entire story with any disparities is just the completely unremarkable fact that women date men a few years older, so many of the committed partners of mid-20s women are showing up in the 30-49 age bracket (25% not married or LTR).

They asked additionally about people's relationship goals, seemingly using a single question: "Are you looking looking (for committed romantic relationship, casual dates or either one)?" Answering "yes" to this could match either the Chad seeking more flings or the incel seeking to lose his v-card, and answering "no" could equally well mean "I've given up" or "Nah, I'm cool with hookups, no relationship." So again, AFAICT this study gives zero way of differentiating between incel and Chad; the questions route them into the same buckets.

(Lastly, 39% of women aged 65+ are not married or in LTR, versus 25% of men in that bracket, but I notice you don't express the same concern about those ladies' lonely fate. Why is that?)

Seriously, all survey-based social science is terrible, but it becomes 1000x more terrible if you start with a preconceived conclusion and just Google around for supporting headlines. Consider all the much-hyped survey-based studies claiming to show that Republicans are inherently stupider and less empathic than Democrats. Do you accept these summaries uncritically because Science! No? Then should you also exercise some critical scrutiny about studies like these? [edited for clarity]

As of 2023, 60% of young men reported they were single. That number. 34% of young women reported being single. WHO ARE THE WOMEN DATING if not those young men?

It's like a combination of several factors, the largest being the Dave Chappelle skit about 'I don't have a girlfriend, but there's some women'd be upset to hear that'.

Mitch Hedburg line, I believe.

Can you just give a direct link to the academic paper from that first posted link? I've heard concerning things about the safety of archive.is lately. As to the "actual piece of research" about the 10%/60%, well, I also could butcher a rabbit and read its entrails and get back to you, but bad methodology yields bad conclusions, full stop.

Clavicular is practically a child, with what seems to be a serious abuse history leading to addiction problems and terrible body dysmorphia? I think the dude needs an intervention more than anything else. I have no idea who donates to him and no intention of trying to find out, but I'd imagine there's a fair proportion of gay men and Russian bots in there. What is his relevance to the claim that women are sluts who only sleep with Chads?

If there is some pristine piece of data out there that doesn't rely on self-reports and somehow peers into people's sex lives directly to make conclusions about the rates of pairings I'd love to see it.

I've sure looked.

But when all the extant stats point approximately in the same direction, I feel pretty confident drawing the most obvious conclusion.

Especially when you account for dating app disparities too.

Do you think there's any downstream effect of some small % of men getting the highest % of matches on such apps? Would that increase or decrease the amount of sex partners they'd have?

Especially when you account for dating app disparities too.

It's crazy to me that people keep citing this. As far as I can see, this dataset indicates literally only obvious things that everybody agrees are true:

  • that Tinder is 75% male users and 25% female users
  • that some male Tinder users are normal, but a large majority are weirdos with weird perfunctory profiles, there to spam every possible woman with dick pics, bizarre sex requests and demands for n00dz.
  • that men like visuals, don't fear violence on dates, and are generally OK with short-term hookups, so they pursue a low-effort, high-numbers strategy: most women's profiles with any photo will easily pass the bar of "sure, I'd hit that, why not?"
  • That women are more attracted by social interactions and need to be careful about violence on dates, so they flock to the few users whose profiles indicate a modicum of effort, social connection and emotional intelligence.

Do you think there's any downstream effect of some small % of men getting the highest % of matches on such apps? Would that increase or decrease the amount of sex partners they'd have?

It only suggests "80% of women are sleeping with with a few looksmaxxing Chads" if you assume that this data is somehow representative of men/women overall (clearly false, it's self-selected and doesn't even encompass all Tinder users!). And that a person's profile pic is identical with their fuckability; and that swiping someone is equivalent to having sex, or at least wanting to have sex with them. Neither of which is remotely true for women.

It's a real pity we can't see current dating app data. Just for science I'm sure theres all sorts of interesting things that could be noticed.

Seems fine to me and it seems like a self solving problem. Women have more negotiating power and they are using it.

Eventually the next generation would have woman with lower standards and males with superior genes. Because everyone else would have died off.

This would also lead to cultural shifts so that both sexes are more accepting of each other.

Hell it may even improve women genetically because only the hottest women would get laid with hottest men.

Sadly since genes for autism and IQ are correlated we may see a slight decrease.

It's a single generation so it should not matter much.

With AGI lots of people are not needed. I don't see any wealth redistribution happening. People with money would have kids and equally distribute their wealth among them.

Besides in south korea the wealthy have a high fertility rate not replacement level but it's double the normal average.

Eventually a better culture would emerge out of all this, especially with AGI because the remaining people won't need to work that hard and maybe they would have more time for family and romance with a cultural inclination for those things.

Well unless we go extinct which is pretty likely too.

Women have more negotiating power and they are using it.

Which makes it odd that they're

Less satisfied with their status in society

More mentally ill

More medicated

Have more debt

Are more likely to be single and childless

And are overall less happy than they were 50 years ago

(married women are happier, BTW.)

Oh, and a huge portion of them claim to hate men even though the reverse isn't true.

Does that seem fine to you?

All that negotiating power and they claim they're worse off than before. Odd.

Hell it may even improve women genetically because only the hottest women would get laid with hottest men.

That would require them to have actual children. As it turn out, if women control more wealth, they have fewer kids.

I think the opposite of what you're expecting is happening... since as stated in my original post, more educated women have fewer kids. So the most genetically fit women are the ones burning the most time on education and careers.

Whoops.

Anyhow, What do you think happens if 50+% of the males in a society are no longer bought in to its success because they have no stake it future generations?

Who fights your wars, builds your machines and buildings, maintains your power plants and roads.

I beg you, I PLEAD with you, consider second and third order effects. We have built the most functional and successful society the planet has ever seen on the norms you're asking us to discard.

Best justify it.

Yes, I've had every single iteration of this discussion a dozen times by now, I think I can address any argument by simply pointing to data I've already cited and comments I've made in the past.

I don't know if it would be for better or for worse. I was being descriptive rather than prescriptive.

As for your points, I think you are overestimating how disenfrinched the average male is. I don't think there is going to be gender war or slow crumbling of society. South Korea still lives on.

No matter how disenfrichesed men get, it won't matter because I am betting on AGI.

I am not even saying woman are acting rationally in their own interests for happiness.

My main opinion is that a lot of people are going to be very unemployed and die without ever having kids.

A lot of cultural change is going to happen because cultures where men and women reproduce survive.

I also don't think much can be done about this.

Honestly this low reproduction rate seems like an artifact of rapid technological advancement and cultural change which is going to fix itself eventually in a century.

I was being descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Me too.

Descriptively, women are, on average, miserable (especially millenials and Gen Z). What good is all that extra leverage doing them?

As for your points, I think you are overestimating how disenfrinched the average male is.

If you limit it to men under 30, They sure feel that way.

South Korea still lives on.

Objectively, they will not be a functional society in <60 years without something historically unprecedented occurring.

I also don't think much can be done about this.

Well better hope the AI thing works out then.

Someone on this forum pointed out that the ability to make more people without men and women having sex at all is technologically possible. So don't sweat it!

Well that's even better isn't it. With gene engeneering we would have humans which would age slowly, get sick less, have higher IQ and fitness. Even if somehow HBD turns out to be true we will simply fix it.

People might just start to have AI companions for romance and human race continues in baby fabs.

Though I find it unlikely, doesn't seem culturally feasible yet but maybe in two centuries.

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On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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