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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.
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.
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?
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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.
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?
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.
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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.
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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 ofvwomen 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.
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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.
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