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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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More debates revolving around young single men in the mainstream media. Particularly, who the young women are dating due to them being disproportionately in a relationship. The article provides some insight, stating that many are dating older men and each other. This has led to a more intresting conversation of if older men are increasingly monopolizing women. Leaving younger guys out to dry supposedly, however a good chunk (acutally half, according to study from pew research). The data gives two large reasons, mainly: Having other shit to do & just like being single. What i always found frustrating with the mainstream progressive view of this matter is that they seem hell bent on blaming Men for this problem. Greg Matos, who wrote this (in)famous article which pretty much embodies the progressive view on the matter, has stated: “Women don’t need to be in long-term relationships. They don’t need to be married. They’d rather go to brunch with friends than have a horrible date,”. The argument from the mainstream being in a nutshell: that these single men are misogynistic, shitty bums and deserve to die alone. That take leads to some rather intresting conclusions however, when looking at the data. From the first pew research link and another one. The people who are most likely to be single are men who are: Black, young, only highschool educated, low income, and living with mom and pops. Are we suppose to assume, blacks, the youth, poor men, men without degrees, and guys without their own place are inferior romantic partners, and or more misogynisitic than their rich, old, white, college educated, apartment renting counter-parts?

Could it not simply be that these mens moral characters are fine, but they simply lack the resources and experience many women desire? Is such a thing their fault? Is the black man to become white? Or the poor man rich (or at least reasonably middle class)? Could there not be barriers preventing them from achieving such feats? In most cases, progressives would be open to outside forces interfering with ones ability to succeed. The matter is being treated as if all of this is entirely within their control, and their failures are a simple matter of poor character. The issue appears far more complex is you ask me.

Perhaps a bit of a divergent, but the entire dilemma has led me to a larger question of how much of life success (in dating, in work, in school) amounts to hard work. There was a post about on star slate codex sub reddit about how good IQ was at predicting life success. There is a bunch data about how expensive being poor is, poverty traps, and how difficult escaping it can be. Disputes over gender wage gaps. Not to mention all the discussions being had about how race impacts such outcomes. Id be interested if there was some huge of huge meta study done on what percentage of these factors (IQ, class, race, gender, ect) all impact your chances at life success, if anyone had such information on hand. Though my intuition tells me that such a study would be insanely difficult to do, if it even exists.

Of all the debates on here but HBD, this is the one that tires me the most, because no matter the conclusions, there is no solution that powerful and culturally-dominant societies are willing to accept.

The sexual marketplace is Moloch's little bitch. Women control access to reproduction. As long as women control access to reproduction, they gain power by withholding it. A man acts, a woman chooses. Q.E.D.: it's in the interest of women to withhold it to their own benefit for as long as possible (what if a better mate comes along?) while the world feeds them a constant parade of men to swipe left on. Sufficiently large network effects mean that this, at scale, will mean that reproductive access is limited to a smaller and smaller % of the populace.

There's no fixing this in ways that the currently dominant social and cultural paradigm will accept. How can you, when women can actively weaponize men against other men with nothing but the mere promise of access to reproduction?

There's nothing left to debate. At the rate things are going, either find a first world society someplace where TFR is above replacement so we can isolate the factors responsible, attempt some solution sufficiently alien the memeplex doesn't recognize it as a threat to women's autonomy, agency, education or power, or get women to actively seek reproduction with males they consider low status.

I consider freely available access to cold fusion, FTL, and entropy an easier nut to crack than the latter.

Argentina, Turkey, Mexico, and Israel are the industrialized countries that have spent significant amounts of time at above replacement fertility in the recent past.

Argentina and Mexico are not really first world societies. Turkey and Israel both use fairly oppressive religions to control women's reproductive behavior.

Argentina and Mexico are both industrialized middle income societies, and in Argentina’s case was an upper income society fairly recently. In the specific case of Mexico the idea that the fertility advantage is all peasant farmers in the third world states in the far south is militated against by the declining incidence of the Mongolian spot in Mexican hospitals, which absent outside immigration from Europe indicates a higher white(that is, the Mexicans most likely to be exposed to the industrial economy, as opposed to those southern subsistence farmers) birthrate. It’s plausible that relatively high religiosity coupled with very strong remnants of the actual patriarchy is the reason for this fertility advantage, but not anything I have more than anecdotal evidence for.

I’m not well versed on the details of Turkish or Israeli religiosity, but if what you’re saying is true, that’s more or less 3/4 examples where patriarchal religion is the reason for higher than average fertility- Argentina’s is driven by a crazy-high teen pregnancy rate.

I can't produce stats right now but at this point Turkish fertility rates are about to go (or already gone) below replacement, and a large chunk of this is actually the rural Kurdish population. On the positive side, we are at these rates with virtually no teenage pregnancies or out of wedlock births. On the negative side, in the next decade we will almost definitely be dipping obviously below replacement level and in my lifetime the country might become half-half Kurdish.

Women control access to reproduction.

This is oversimplified.

Women tend to control access to sex: most men are more willing to screw a wider range of women than women are willing to screw men.

Men tend to control access to commitment: most men are more attracted by the idea of avoiding being tied down (figuratively, not literally). One of the more absurd things I see in these discussions is the notion that men are desperate to get married, have a lot of kids, and have said wife/kids impressing demands on these men's precious time. It's like when Chat GPT suggests "MOAR feminism!" as a solution for low birth rates: it's going against what I thought was basic knowledge about male/female psychological differences in humans, which has been deeply ingrained in our cultures since before the invention of writing.

Perhaps the "men are frustrated in their efforts to get tied down to a life of changing nappies and sleeping with just one woman" online memes comes from incels who think that, if only they had the chance, they'd be women's Perfect Partner, as in Futurama: "My favourite things are commitment and changing myself." "Does that robot have a brother?". However, most nerdy guys I know who suddenly started getting laid easily - myself included - played the field, like a normal guy in that position. Then, as naturally tends to happen, they found a woman that they wanted to sleep with repeatedly, developed an emotional bond, and married. I suspect that this is healthier than both the man and the woman being keen on commitment: just as sexual romance needs a partner to be seduced, marriage needs at least one partner to need to be (non-verbally) persuaded that a long-term commitment makes sense. After all, commitment is good for the economy:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=7ADncN9HIa4

I donno... maybe I'm simple but most of the guys I knew weren't really excited to play the field, but it more came of necessity. They wanted a woman they could settle down with, but most of the women they'd meet were deranged. Entitled, controlling want beasts that demand all the say and none of the responsibility. Our path through our 20's and 30's towards marriage was a process of getting worn down by the realization that yes, all women are like this. Between the 6 of us, and the 30 or so long term relationships we've all had, it's been a constant. The women feel entitled to make outrageous, thoughtless demands, and throw full blown adult temper tantrums to get their way. Up to and including claims that we don't love them, some other partner of someone they saw on Facebook did it, they don't want to be in a relationship anymore, their friends all think we're terrible, etc, etc, etc.

Eventually we met women who seemed marginally less deranged than the mean we'd all collectively encountered, and got on white knuckling it through life because we wanted kids. I think the guy I knew who has it best (near as I can tell) went hardcore Christian. Like, the man is the indisputable head of the household style Christianity. I'm not sure it's stopped the relentless want beasting directed at him. But it's given him more backbone and moral authority to stand up for himself.

Well... about half of us did. The other half just couldn't take it any more and dropped out.

Sorry to pile on, but I dated pretty extensively in my teens and twenties. Out of the ~20 women I was involved with in some way, I'd say maybe 4 of them fit the definition of "deranged" and I only actually committed to one of those.

As @Harlequin5942 pointed out, not being a mark was key. My philosophy was always to treat anyone I was with (regardless of the scope of the relationship or quality of the woman) super well, but if there was a hint of disrespect or psychosis, I was out.

I’m sorry that you had to go through that, and depressed that it’s colored your opinion of all women.

I mean, the stats bear out the 'opinion of all women.' It's not hard to justify the opinion itself with reliable data.

I think you're more depressed that this is what an appreciable segment of women are like, and he's noticed it.

all women are like this.

They really aren't. I'd say many or even most women prefer a man who takes charge. And entitlement is much less of a problem if you aren't dating U.S. born white women.

I'd say many or even most women prefer a man who takes charge.

So why is the constant social/cultural/media message, across virtually every mainstream channel, that men need to step aside, elevate women, defer to female input, and basically give women every single advantage so they can 'level the playing field' that was made unequal due to years of patriarchal control?

You're basically suggesting that women want some form of patriarchy, despite it being a literal governmental policy to attempt to dismantle said patriarchy.

Square the circle for me. Why are women, especially the college educated ones, voting for policies that make women less dependent on men and further remove authority for men if they prefer a man who takes charge?

Why wasn't Donald Trump re-elected on a wave of female approval?

Presumably because what people want, what they say they want, and what they vote for are all different things. Why do feminists sleep with Chads and not the sensitive nice guys?

Square the circle for me. Why are women, especially the college educated ones, voting for policies that make women less dependent on men and further remove authority for men if they prefer a man who takes charge?

Being dependent on men in general is very different from being dependent on one particular man the woman has vetted.

I can grant that.

But the net result of making it harder for men to act as authority figures in general is to make it simultaneously harder for them to act as authority figures for a specific person.

So basically, if women want to make themselves independent of "males" so they're free to choose which male they want to depend on, it is fair to ask how that's working out for them.

I mean, dating preferences and politics aren't things you would necessarily expect to have a one-to-one correlation in. And both of these fields are basically filled with self deception to the point that that's the norm rather than the exception, so when you've got lies stacked up on top of lies, a square circle is entirely expected.

But to humor the question for a bit, I've heard an explanation that the type of anti-patriarchy politics you see are a sort of society-wide "shit test." The idea being that, if you fully immerse society in the anti-patriarchy message, then the only men who will be dominant are the ones who are so dominant that they refuse to submit to those messages. Thus it becomes easier for women to discriminate between dominant and non-dominant men, with the latter type of men having to face higher barriers if they want to fake being the former. It's a win-win for women, because besides the emancipation/extra power gained from reducing the patriarchy, they also only get hit on by men who are more likely to be actually attractive.

The possible obvious pitfall is that there are only so many Truly Dominant men around, so most women end up unable to pair with one of them, instead being another notch on their bed stands during their younger years before having to settle for a substantially less dominant and thus less attractive man or just singlehood. And if the anti-patriarchy messaging was strong enough, that substantially less could be substantially less.

Like most such simple theories, there's probably a grain of truth and a lot of convincing-sounding just-so stories to it. At the least, none of this seems at all intentional or coordinated, and it's mostly an emergent phenomenon from the aforementioned stacking of lies upon lies that leaves everyone confused, is my guess.

I can agree with much of this.

I've heard an explanation that the type of anti-patriarchy politics you see are a sort of society-wide "shit test." The idea being that, if you fully immerse society in the anti-patriarchy message, then the only men who will be dominant are the ones who are so dominant that they refuse to submit to those messages.

As you stated, there may be a grain of truth to this. But it's one of those things that might be workable in a small tribe or otherwise tight-knit community where the whole society willingly recognizes the dominant males and affords them authority.

Probably something that, when scaled up to a sizeable nation state, ends up leading he massive population of 'less dominant' males to defect in hopes of improving their own social position, and the relatively small, and vastly outnumbered, dominant males are now beset by a group with outsized political power which they cannot defeat without near-perfect coordination amongst themselves. And of course the issue where the women are all competing for this pool of dominant males and thus are happy to enlist the less-dominant males to their side as needed. Consider the rise of Onlyfans as a means of separating less-dominant men from resources en masse in exchange for no actual physical interaction, which then allows a woman to be self-sufficient while she seeks the ideal mate.

Other factors like the shifting of social status from males who are good at fighting, killing, and leading male-centric warbands to guys who are good at manipulating numbers on a spreadsheet, building technology, and navigating feminine social environments (I'm being pretty obtuse here, admitted) are also making it harder for dominant males to assert the sort of social control that might counter the feminine influence.

most of the guys I knew weren't really excited to play the field, but it more came of necessity. They wanted a woman they could settle down with, but most of the women they'd meet were deranged. Entitled, controlling want beasts that demand all the say and none of the responsibility.

If they were leaping into commitment, I'm not surprised. Not only are they letting the devil find work for idle hands (what's a woman supposed to do if a man is giving her what she wants? That's a recipe to make most people deranged) but they're walking around the dating market with a huge neon sign saying "I am a mark. You can take my money if you want and I shall love you for it." It would be surprising if they didn't meet emotional hustlers.

The female equivalent is a woman who acts very slutty and gets surprised that she doesn't meet gentlemen. Maybe she concludes, "All men are swine. Yes, all men."

This is why men ought to look for women in circles where women are competing on being 'trad'.

Find the right meme-culture and you will find women that are just as enthusiastic for breeding as you are.

Then all you have to do is compete with the other trad-minded men, and it's not that hard imo.

It comes with another sets of demands, like providing for a set of children, actually fitting the trad-meme culture yourself, etc, but what other choices do you have?

If you're looking for a woman to have 3 kids in the Bay Area or NYC, you're doing it wrong, but there are ways to get that done, like being an Orthodox Jew in the latter, for example.

Yes, and in general, if a man really wants to find a woman who is interested in settling down and having kids, that's hard only insofar as it usually involves things that are beneficial anyway: having a good job, being sober, being responsible/reliable, and being kind.

However, most nerdy guys I know who suddenly started getting laid easily - myself included - played the field, like a normal guy in that position.

I feel like a huge amount of this is the sheer grind required to 'ascend' and the rejection along the way, especially in the modern dating app sphere. IMO the majority of both gender rock up with more-or-less good intentions, but it only takes a little bit of exposure to the current culture to reach a state of Fuck You.

In my experience, the response of men about this depends on the context.

All male company: We pretend to be more averse to commitment than we really are.

Mixed company: "My favourite things are commitment and changing myself."

I see statements like this a lot on here and they always leave me so confused because it’s so far outside my own experience and the experiences of other guys I know. I’m an okay looking nerdy guy with a mid-compensation nerdy job in the Bay Area, which is apparently the epicenter location/demographic for these kinds of dating difficulties and yet neither I nor any of my male friends experiences them at all.

Ever since I moved here a few years ago there has been a constant flow of good looking, in shape, smart, well educated, my age-and-younger women who have their shit together and want to go on dates/sleep with/get serious with/get engaged to me, with honestly very little effort or grind on my part. Sometimes people don’t respond to my messages on bumble. Okay?

I could go on dates with women like this every day if I had the energy. And they’re almost all nice, not manipulative, not looking for handouts, not romantic climbers at all. It’s the same for all my guy friends. And we’re pretty average / below average in terms of income. Where are all these sexless dudes?

There was a thread on here last week about how the EA movement was basically a way for nerdy guys to meet women. Huh? It’s all so bewildering.

I see statements like this a lot on here and they always leave me so confused because it’s so far outside my own experience and the experiences of other guys I know.

Maybe notice your confusion, and then update your priors based on the data explaining that most men aren't sharing your particular experience and that the data you've got available from your own experiences may not be representative of the larger trends.

I come into these threads and see one side that points at various studies and polls showing "this is what dating is like for huge swaths of the population" and then another that says "that's weird, it doesn't seem to be true in [smaller area]" without really engaging with the information the other side points to.

Teach us your ways! I am a guy with a mid-compensation nerdy job in the Bay Area. I like to think that I am good-looking but I suppose that I cannot quite be sure. In any case, more than one woman has told me that I am attractive. I used to do quite well with women but then for various reasons I took a long time off from pursuing sex. Recently I have been trying to get back in the game and I have had some success - I made out with a few women whom I met at bars but have not gotten laid so far. I have never seriously tried online dating so far but given how often I hear guys say that they are getting good results from it, I think that I am going to actually seriously try it. I should just go ahead and put in the work of getting some good photos and writing up a good profile. At the same time I also intend to keep meeting women offline, since I find that it can be quite exciting and fun and anyway, I already spend more than enough time using technology at work.

How do you usually meet women? Got any pointers?

Also, to piggyback, in my normal life, the vast majority of the people I keep track of from my fairly normal suburban/exurban high school in Florida are either married w/ kids or serially in fairly long-term relationships. Even out here, in supposedly SJW-infested Seattle that's also a tech hub, do you know what I see when I actually walk around in the outside world? Lots of couples.

I really think the current "crisis" is a combination of some bad data (even the GSS data seems kind of flawed) and the type of person who's not getting laid being very loud and overrepresented on the Internet.

Also, to piggyback, in my normal life, the vast majority of the people I keep track of from my fairly normal suburban/exurban high school in Florida are either married w/ kids or serially in fairly long-term relationships. Even out here, in supposedly SJW-infested Seattle that's also a tech hub, do you know what I see when I actually walk around in the outside world? Lots of couples.

The type of person who is able to successfully attract a mate seems likely to be heavily overrepresented in any group where one has loose acquaintances that would even care to "keep track of," as well as walking around in the outside world. How many literally friendless people are you friends with, and more broadly, how many people who has no meaningful friend/acquaintance group are you enough of a loose acquaintance with to "keep track of?" How many people who spend their lives with basically no social contact are you running into when you walk around in the outside world?

There was a thread on here last week about how the EA movement was basically a way for nerdy guys to meet women. Huh? It’s all so bewildering.

I mean, you have to meet them somewhere right? They don’t just show up at your door. One of the most common pieces of dating advice I’ve seen is, “get a hobby and meet women there.” Maybe I erred in assuming EA to be a hobby.

I am starting to suspect that the dating scene in the Bay Area is just different. There was a post on Caroline Ellison’s tumblr about how she never got hit on in public before she moved to the Bay. Maybe once you reach some critical mass of nerdy people in one location they stop internalizing themselves as poorly socialized and become Chads and Stacys.

One issue is that vocal incel or incel-adjacent people tend to be higher income, higher education, and more vocal/online than the mass of men most affected by sexlessness. Sexlessness isn't driven by 30-something software engineers making $300k in the Bay Area; it's driven by 20 year, non-college educated men living in their parents' basement in Akron.

(That said, if you're able to get a date with a different attractive, successful woman every evening as a heterosexual man in the Bay Area, you're certainly in the top decile in how much you attract women.)

Dude you're almost certainly making something like five times the national median household income, you are not normal.

It's still a good rebuttal to the the EA claim, because EAs are also high income / class.

The median EA is probably closer to the 'autist unsociable nerd' side of the spectrum than bay area lothario, though outliers exist.

I just had the realization that maybe I, a middle-class man, could be having lots of kids (a desire of mine) if I would just go meet a nice working-class girl; and that I've maybe subconsciously been trying to "date up" this whole time. I am a fool!

(This is actually not sarcasm.)

Or date outside your race. It worked for Roger Ebert - not the world's best looking or chadish man - who married an intelligent, successful, and quite good looking black woman. There's the added benefit that Black Don't Crack, so even if your wife is not as good looking as your next white girlfriend in 2023, she'll be a lot better looking in 2053.

In my limited experience, it's very hard to stay single in America if you're white, middle class, and not obese. Not the easiest dating pool in the world for those demographics, though: Asia is outrageous, unless you have very particular tastes e.g. you like tall women.

it's very hard to stay single in America if you're white, middle class, and not obese.

I just have a rare talent for it, lol.

In all seriousness, I am in a long romantic cold spell that temporally matches up exactly with when I started working from home permanently during Covid. I have not managed to successfully adapt my life such that I am meeting people IRL at the same rate I used to. There are lots of viable solutions to this, but my job is difficult and tiring and makes me want to stay home. I may be displaying a revealed preference here.

Still - I have indeed dated women from social strata above mine, and they did not want to settle down with me. I did not make the appropriate connection before. (Bearing in mind of course that I may just not be that cool, and they found they could genuinely do better.) Especially because I grew up in a working-class milieu myself, you would think I could get along very well with a girl I met at the local dirt track, if I would only go there myself. And I'm not looking down on people like that. It is not as though my existence in this other social class has brought me any exceptional happiness.

date outside your race

This is good advice. Perhaps this is something everyone simply already knows, but when I have done this, I have been surprised at the extent to which it feels just the same as dating within your race.

This is good advice. Perhaps this is something everyone simply already knows, but when I have done this, I have been surprised at the extent to which it feels just the same as dating within your race.

Pretty much, except probably easier if you are white. I also think that attitudes have changed tremendously in the last generation, especially for white man/black woman relationships.

I have a lot of confusion about this topic and I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me understand this complex of problems.

Most of the discussion around this topic here seems completely divorced from my lived experience. For reference I am male, live in Europe and make decent but not fantastic money. Assume I am average in all important respects. I could have had "access to reproduction" from when I was 18 until now without issue. There are plenty of mildly-attractive women that would gladly start a family with me simply because I am middle class and they are working class. So is this a problem affecting only working class men? I also know some working class men, some of whom have problems finding a mate. All of them are either obese or have severely lacking social skills, both those problems could be solved with maybe a year of consistent effort. I don't know any man that has no glaring problems and wants a long term relationship with a (any) woman but can't find one. Sometimes it looks like that but on closer inspection it always turns out that they are shopping above their price range so to speak.

My toy model for the "sexual marketplace" is this:

Both men and women are open to long-term committed relationships only if they get a great deal. People who marry often think that they both got lucky in the sense that they self-rate as a 6 but rate their partner as a 9. Of course this doesn't happen all that often.

Outside of that women put a premium on a long-term stable relationship with material benefits. So they will get into a relationship with someone they would not outright marry (and have children with) if that person pays their rent and makes them look good socially etc etc. This often leads to disappointment and conflict later on.

Men value non-committed casual sex with multiple partners, probably out of some mesa-optimizing desire to shotgun their genes in the gene pool. So they will lower their standards if the woman is sexually available and does not demand exclusivity.

I know men who want to have a "player" lifestyle and struggle to have that happen and I know women who struggle with domesticating an attractive man. From the article it sounds like that is not what is going on. It sounds like there are many men who have already lowered their standards as much as possible, who are willing to commit, provide etc and are still struggling to find any woman at all? Why am I not seeing that? Is this less prevalent in the EU? Am I too isolated from those men by being middle class? Or is there some other misunderstanding here?

All of them are either obese or have severely lacking social skills, both those problems could be solved with maybe a year of consistent effort. I don't know any man that has no glaring problems and wants a long term relationship with a (any) woman but can't find one.

This is my experience as well, but quite a few people pushed back against similar sentiments when we discussed this last week. There are at least two ways of interpreting that pushback:

  1. I'm wrong and many men that are reasonably fit, healthy, socially competent, and employed struggle to find relationships. My observations fail to capture a broad enough sample and the men that I know that are romantically successful all could have failed if not for a fair bit of luck.

  2. The responses are largely coping mechanisms - romance-less men are much more socially incompetent or physically unattractive than their defenders admit.

I know I favor the second explanation, but I'm open to being cautious about applying too much of a just-world fallacy. Still, I can't think of anyone I know that persistently fails romantically that doesn't have something that stands out as severely unappealing to women.

I'm wrong and many men that are reasonably fit, healthy, socially competent, and employed struggle to find relationships.

This is circular, since "socially competent" implies that they are able to find relationships.

I'm a bisexual man, attractive enough to be asked out on the street (by men), who has struggled to meet women to date. There's not really any mystery as to the cause: I'm 5'3, and testing suggests I'd get around a dozen matches with women per day if I were 5'10", as compared with none at my actual height.

Which kind of covers both your explanations: a man can have all his bases covered and still be unattractive because of a single trait outside his control; masculinity is stridently policed by women when it comes to dating, and a single deviation incurs a very heavy cost in terms of attractiveness as a mate. Pick out half a dozen normally distributed, uncontrollable traits like height, and it's inevitable that something like half of all men will be more than a standard deviation below average on at least one and be cut out of the dating market. Most of those men would do perfectly fine if they dated men.

You know, it's going to sound incredibly stupid, but I actually didn't even consider height as a variable in this conversation, which is obviously foolish and wrong. From everything I've seen, height is favored to an incredible extent, with many women outright excluding all men that don't clear a given bar (which may be several inches taller than them). Even petite women frequently demand men of average height or higher. There probably isn't any other trait that combines a complete lack of male control with strong predictive power in romantic success.

I also know some working class men, some of whom have problems finding a mate. All of them are either obese or have severely lacking social skills, both those problems could be solved with maybe a year of consistent effort. I don't know any man that has no glaring problems and wants a long term relationship with a (any) woman but can't find one. Sometimes it looks like that but on closer inspection it always turns out that they are shopping above their price range so to speak.

Now what does this reminds me of... Oh right, Scott's Annus Mirabilis.

According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

Now in 2023, according to Pew Research cited by OP already,

among men under 30 years old, over 60 percent are single, almost double that of women in the same age bracket. Not only are more young men single but their opportunities for developing a relational and sexual repertoire have all but vanished, as levels of sexual intimacy across genders appear to have hit a 30-year low (Lei & South, 2021).

You must be in a fortunate bubble indeed, to now not know of any among those 60% who aren't obese, autists, basket cases or aiming way above their level!

The explanation, shifting midway from male withdrawal to increased standards (because of the pandemic, bizarrely) and the solution offered, are pretty cool:

As young women continued to pursue intimate relationships less intently post-pandemic, men could have increased their relationship skills to close the effort gap. They could have confronted their relative avoidance and challenged the gender norms that made them so anxious about intimacy. They appear to have done the opposite, turning even further away from real-life relationships and into the virtual world. [...] The good news is that all of these young single men can choose differently. They can choose to focus on developing the necessary relationship skills to be more successful in dating. It starts with re-prioritizing the development of close, intimate relationships in their life for their own well-being and as a counterbalance to the shift in priorities for women. They must do this to reach their fullest potential whether or not they have had great male role models illustrating these efforts. By no means will dating in 2023 be an emotionally painless process, particularly for heterosexual men who are attempting to date women. Rejection may be a far more common result given competitiveness and higher relationship standards. Therefore, young men must be inoculated to avoidance in their dating life by normalizing women’s selectiveness.

My toy model of this issue and its discussion is very primitive. Standards really are rising quickly, and roughly 30% of marriage-age men are now, for all intents and purposes, incels. (This checks out, in my experience: even fit, okay-looking, psychologically stable guys with degrees and high-percentile (80-95ish) incomes often cannot find a 5/10 woman for a long-term relationship who isn't (physically) dangerously psychotic, a drug addict, an insufferable whore, or otherwise critically compromised). Men in the lower half of the distribution who are still viable begin to feel the pressure, and so double down in all usual tactics: «improving relationship skills» (which in practice means either deluded male feminist antics or PUA-like bullshit), distancing themselves from incels, ostentatiously signaling that they are «not like that» and have no problem scoring, then moving on to intense bodybuilding, shoe lifts, cosmetic surgery, TRT... As a result, everyone is awash in gaslighting. Normie men who feel they still have a chance will never admit that they may not have it tomorrow, because this in itself feels like diminishing their chances.

What has changed was the passing grade, but men are graded on a curve, so in effect the proportion of rejects has increased permanently. This rat race is pathetic and unsustainable, as are copes.

You must be in a fortunate bubble indeed, to now know of any among those 60% who aren't obese, autists, basket cases or aiming way above their level!

What percentage of Americans are obese, autistic, or mentally ill?

42% obese, 2.3% autistic (1 in every 44 children, according to the 2018 data; can't find any data on prevalence in adults) and 20% mentally ill (1 out of every 5 Americans will experience a mental illness in a given year). All figures from CDC.

There’s no significant gender difference in obesity. Who are all the fat girls dating?

Well, a lot of them aren't, isn't it the best predictor of single status ?

Those who do, they date mostly guys who settle for them. There's a preference for fat women but it does seem very rare, on the order of genuine male homosexuality. Maybe there's more men who don't mind it, but I've never seen much of an indication that they exist.

Even as an obese girl on online dating you're getting arbitrarily large amounts of interest in casual sex, which tends to lead them into an equivalent of the '7/10 girl gets casual sex from 10/10 guy but cannot get commitment but refuses to compromise loop' but instead it's 2/10 girl gets casual sex from 6/10 guy but cannot get commitment'

Black guys /s

find a first world society someplace where TFR is above replacement so we can isolate the factors responsible

Israel?

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