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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32949 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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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.

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