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Has the Occident betrayed its young men?
I have been feeling intense abjection lately vis-à-vis my culture, and I wanted to explain why here. Much has been said about how the West treats its young men, particularly with respect to feminism and and wealth redistribution. But more and more, I have been feeling that the state of things is truly one of complete betrayal. Complete betrayal is weighty and generally seen as impossible to come back from. This is different from simply feeling that something is off.
My argument for it constituting complete betrayal starts with the following. Humans are fundamentally animals. As animals, they require resources and reproduction over everything else. The West provides a lot of distraction for its young men, that is true. It provides, certainly, a lot of education, whether they want it or not. Many such things are provided better than ever before. But at the end of the day, humans are animals and the true duty of a culture is to provide those it is loyal to with reproduction and resources, namely resources which convert to shelter, food, reproduction access, and child investment. Humans have a useful single number for all of this called money. So for a human animal, it is really about reproduction and money. Culture/society might provide young men with distraction, but does it provide a mate and an income?
I believe the situation is one of complete betrayal, because culture/society actually deeply interferes with young men getting income and reproduction, and does quite a lot to prevent it and keep young men alone and poor. This is nothing less than complete betrayal. Let me explain the specifics as to how this is done.
Sexually, every revision to law and culture in the last 100 years fit the pattern of preventing, delaying, or degrading the marriages of young men. Every prohibition that was dropped was a prohibition that served young men. This includes adultery laws and laws against divorce. Every prohibition that was strengthened is a prohibition against young men. These include prohibitions against marriage at certain ages and prohibitions against the husband's authority in the home, as well as prohibitions against having sex in many other circumstances, especially on university campuses, which in the late 20th century were the last great place for spouses to meet. On top of that, every sexually related cultural movement interferes with the reproduction of young men. LGBT is a great distraction and tells young men to have sex with each other instead of with women. Modern dating culture says have barren, temporary relationships with the opposite sex. Radical feminism teaches women to be functionally lesbian or asexual and otherwise to avoid romance with men. Taboos have been created to ostracize young men who criticize these cultural movements. It is extremely easy to imagine a culture that better serves its young men reproductively. The fact that it only ever gets worse is a sign of the betrayal.
Economically, credentialism has eaten away at the right of young men to have an income. They are now commanded to stay in school to later and later ages. When they work, the tax burden is immense; more and more money goes to foreigners, single women, and the old. Every government handout taxes young men and married men and pays out to women, children, pensioners, and foreigners. More controversially, I also believe young men are systematically underpayed when they do work, although mostly this goes to redistribute wealth to middle aged men, which young men become, so it's probably the least bad of all the problems and is best fixed by reversing the tax burden on young men from heavily taxed to becoming net receivers of welfare even while working. Credentialism also needs to be curtailed, and then younger men can build more marketable skills at younger ages, boosted their base at any given age pay insofar as the age-income correlation is meritocratic.
Young men pay taxes largely so family courts can threaten whatever marriages they do establish, instead of defending them, so that their money can go to the education system that robbed them of several years of income and work experience, so that their money can go to old retirees who set up this system, so it can go to immigrants and foreigners, so it can go to single women who won't get married, and so it can go to police who will arrest them if they ever end up breaking one of these back-breaking rules that were set up to oppress them. That's complete betrayal by culture & society.
What does complete betrayal imply? It means Western young men should never die for their country. Don't ever join the military. If you get drafted, dodge it if legally possible. Young men should never contribute to their country. Insofar as legal, enter a parasitic profession like finance and drain your country dry. They deserve it because they allow it and they hate young men anyway. Young men should leave their country; move away from the west. Start a city-state in Latin America with a charter from Honduras where young men are served and not betrayed. Go help develop a 2nd world country where young men are served and not betrayed. Pay taxes in the new country. If your old country demands taxes abroad, renounce your citizenship, because your country is a traitor.
In other words, young men are like a Jew in Christian Europe. They are hated by their neighbors, so lend to them and charge as much interest as possible. They are hated by their neighbors, so never fight invaders for them, strike a deal with them if they win. They are hated by their neighbors, so they should move between places and never settle in one place. They should demand maximal pay for minimal work, because they are hated by your neighbors. They should be a Zionist, and dream of the foundation of a new Israel. A place that does not despise them.
I appreciate feedback on this. Maybe I am overreacting or got something wrong here and the situation is not so dire. But as I have lived my life, this is the conclusion I've increasingly come to.
With Friends like these, who really needs feminists... Yes lets put all young men into the bucket that makes them just animals, justify all the stereotypes that men just want to fuck and breed. The level of misandry in this post is quite high and you even have to the gall to pretend you are championing men's rights. You going around and repeating boomercon sexism: "all men are pigs that just want sex" is not revolutionary. News flash, men are people! And people want more than to just satisfy their base urges to have sex and spawn heirs.
Maybe Herbert was more prescient than he knew. We need a Gom Jabbar. Kill off all the men who's sole goal in life is to be an animal. They are holding back our species.
They don't even want to breed, that's part of the problem. Porn in all its easily available varieties, 'love is love so nobody can kink-shame you', and real life relationships being tough because there's another human being with their own wants, needs, and desires in the mix who isn't there just to jump on a trampoline for you, means that sticking with the stimulation you accessed first at age ten and which warped your emerging sexuality into this particular mould is the siren song drawing them away from marriage and fatherhood.
Pornography is a symptom of the problem. Men often go to porn because they can’t get it normally. And it’s not to say men aren’t willing to work for it. If you want to get to the apple, you’ve got to climb the tree. But if someone comes along and tells me I have to climb the Eiffel Tower to get it, I’m going to ignore them.
I'm inclined to think it's both a cause and a symptom. There are observable issues that can be directly linked to widespread pornography use, including porn-induced erectile dysfunction.
Men go to porn because it's easier than dealing with a real woman, men also have more difficulty doing what has to be done to get a woman because of porn.
This is by no means intended to imply that modern women don't have their own major issues going on.
I think you’re both right. Porn has a lot of social and sexual downsides, which we find hard to talk about, because they’re squeezed between feminist critiques of porn (which don’t really care about practical effects on male sexuality unless they can be marshaled for critiques of objectification), religious critiques of porn (for which any objective problems are post hoc evidence for a position already held), feminist arguments in favor of porn (in which case male sexual consequences are almost irrelevant), and general male liberal arguments in favor of porn (for which any sort of critique registers as one of the above, and thus dismissed).
Porn-induced is a strong word, but certainly porn-exacerbated sexual problems when encountering a real woman are real and serious. As is what the nofappers talk about with escalating pornographic taboos, where the attraction to normal vanilla content becomes exhausted by the massive overflow of sexual novelty available in porn, leading to attraction to more taboo kink content to get off, leading to exhaustion of attraction to taboo kink content, leading to more taboo kink content just to get the same arousal…
It’s not hard to meet men who’ve never touched a person’s genitals before but their entire sexuality is organized around complex kink structures. And you can’t run before you can walk, so the young pornbrained guys are unable to comprehend vanilla sex experientially.
That said, I think tretiak is right that young guys feel like they have narrow options in terms of sex. And I’m not actually convinced that men are using porn instead of meeting women, as I think men’s desire for companionship is much more complex than just locate nearest vagina. They use porn to get off, but of course the emotional longing and the desire for intimacy and the want for someone to hold on cold winter nights still remains.
Where porn damages sexuality becomes prevalent much later, if they do meet a woman they like, where they realize they’ve seen a thousand women have sex with men, but don’t know the first thing about what they’re doing.
Introversion has something to do with it, and the internet in general, but this affects both genders, and the flip side of the young men playing video games instead of touching grass are the young women scrolling TikTok instead of touching grass. I’ve met women like that. They’re often very dateable, especially if you’re an introvert. But unless you get very lucky, you’re not going to meet them.
What your argument seems to suggest is that men aren’t meeting women as much because their hunger is satisfied by porn, but I’m not at all convinced that lonely men are that way because they’re not hungry enough. But the young men we’re talking about are simultaneously ashamed, inexperienced, overexposed, under-touched, desperate for intimacy, terrified of humiliation, and living inside a culture that offers him infinite simulacra and few bridges to reality.
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