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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.
I’ll just throw my hat into the ring here and say I’m surprised that more sex-starved white guys aren’t looking overseas for partners, especially to East/Southeast Asia. Quite beyond sexual reasons (Asian women tend to be considered highly attractive by westerners as judged by eg response rate on dating sites) and cultural reasons (Asian cultures tend to be more family-oriented, with loyalty especially being highly prized), there’s simple market dynamics — a white guy in Vietnam or the Philippines or even Hong Kong has massively inflated Sexual Market Value.
Of course, the way to approach this is NOT to go via some skeezy online site, but rather to spend time in relevant country. If a single white dude saves up his money and vacation days, he can spend 6 weeks in the Philippines or Vietnam having a fun time, and if he does his research first, he can go to places where he’ll meet smart accomplished trendy young women rather than just bargirls, especially if he’s spent a few months acquiring rudiments of the relevant language. This can easily lead to relationships and marriage, and I know several “success stories” like this. Ideally, though, a single white guy would simply move out to the relevant region for a while — maybe a year — and conduct the matchmaking under a more relaxed timescale. The best life stage for this would be a gap year or similar, or just a career break. English language teaching is an obvious pathway here, but there are usually industry-specific routes too.
Finally, if you can’t bring yourself to leave your home country, you could just try spending more time in relevant foreign-origin communities. Take lessons in Malay or Vietnamese or Tagalog or Mandarin, get to know your local Asian restaurants and cafes, go to cultural events, etc.. Obviously, though, don’t be a creep about it — you’re going to these places to be in an environment where you’re hoping romantic interactions are more likely to occur spontaneously, rather than specifically going there to hit on women.
I’m not saying that white guys should give up on white women — some of my best friends are white women, and I’ve had lots of rewarding romantic relationships with them — but I do think Western gender relations are in a really toxic and fucked up place right now, and I’m surprised more men aren’t looking for more genteel and constructive alternatives.
Does it work for white guys or just white guys with citizenships in rich countries? How would you know a SEA woman isn't just looking to move to USA with man they are not really attracted to and then drop them once they have acquired citizenship? Hans/Nina Reiser.
Easily. Tell your beloved you decisively denounced America, renounced US citizenship and are ready to live with her in her home country for the rest of your life.
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Getting a green card currently takes 12-18 months, and if it's through marriage to a US citizen it's conditional for two years on the marriage being bona fide. Getting full blown citizenship takes five on top of that. I'm not saying that US citizenship isn't a significant attraction for people from the developing world, but you'd very much have to be playing a long game, especially since you're presumably going to be having sex with a partner (and potentially having kids). Combine that with residual stigma around divorce in some SEA cultures and their tendency towards pragmatism around marriage (it's about building a family and shared financial platform, with sexual attraction relatively de-emphasised) and I think this risk is overblown. Sure, it happens sometimes, but most SEA women who partner up with American guys are going to be entering the marriage in good faith on the assumption they can make it work and build a better life for themselves, rather than intending to bail at the first opportunity.
Wealth gap between USA and, say, Philipines is immense.
Oh, those women going to marry an American aren't average in their country
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Though one should keep in mind the children of such a pairing. The hapa subreddit has famously a massive chip on their shoulder, oscillating between self loathing because their racist Asian mothers worshipping whiteness (and they are no blue eyed blonde Aryan) and their racist tall White fathers being disappointed (for being short chubby chinks).
https://old.reddit.com/r/hapas/
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This would 100% work and probably lead to a happy relationship. I am a decent looking white guy. Realistically maybe a 6 or 7. In Asia it is not uncommon for me to get unsolicited complements about my appearance. This has literally never happened to me in the U.S. from anyone who wasn't a granny. And the looks I got from girls on the street... It was almost uncomfortable.
For white guys, you can probably add 2 or 3 points to your 10 scale appearance rating. Then factor in that the average woman is also 2 or 3 points higher than in the United States. It doesn't seem unreasonable to be dating 9's.
I know appearance isn't everything but it gets you in the door. And the cards are massively stacked in your favor as a white guy in Asia.
Okay, that said, this isn't going to work and here's why. For someone to do this, it would require the man to be both a) fairly desperate and b) quite good at planning and achievement. I think the subset here is small. Probably the only group I can see fitting the bill are otherwise perfect guys who happen to be short.
How much of this is just the relatively tiny rate of obesity? I have always felt Asian girls tend to have a higher median but smaller standard deviation in terms of attractiveness. Even here in the West I'll tend to date majority Asian girls, but it's more due to the fact that they're less likely to hit a hard disqualifying factor for a first date than due to an actual preference.
I'm trying to hard filter for single mothers, obesity, complete lack of career/life-seriousness and overly alt tattoos/piercings/whatnot. Those criteria knock out like 3-4% of Asian girls and like what feels like a majority of white women on the apps. Which I think also contributes to a lot of the 'Asian women are most favorable on dating apps' studies since I feel like a lot of men are going to be swiping similar to me (albeit probably not as hard on 3 & 4 but just as hard on 1 & 2) and Asian girls who are fundamentally ineligible tend to be a lot rarer.
A large part of it. But Asian women are more feminine generally (smaller frames, more neotenic features, etc...) And after age 30, the hotness gap becomes a chasm because of reduced appearance of aging, lack of hideous tattoos, and less abuse of alcohol.
I agree that the differences are much larger at the 50th percentile than at the 90th percentile.
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Hmm, I could see another version, which is a guy who slacked/screwed around in his youth and early twenties, maybe fit the stoner stereotype, stayed relatively poor and unkempt, but is otherwise naturally attractive (tall), intelligent, and good impulse control (i.e. no criminality).
And gets into his late twenties and decides to go on an earnest course of self-improvement and gets his shit together. And as he's finally building his life up it makes more sense for him to try to snag a loyal foreign-born wife than to wait to build up enough wealth to compete for Western womens' attention.
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Cheaper, yes, but humidity, mosquitoes, diseases, increased poverty etc.
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That's presumably why it's been tabooed. Any man who would say "Oh, I went to Asia to find a wife cause it wasn't working here" is...not going to be seen in a good light.
90 Day Fiance can't have helped, since it reveals some absolutely awful situations and power dynamics (as is expected for reality TV, but there is a basic point there).
Putting aside expense, wireheading and the basic neuroticism and anxiety as formidable deterrents, many or even most people care about how their social circle will react to their wife. That's its own barrier.
The other issue is that a lot of the benefits of 'traditional' women does not rest in one individual woman.
If you're not importing the whole family, your traditional SEA wife is going to have the same or a worse support system than your regular corn-syrup-fed one, so raising children will be tremendously stressful.
The other component of that issue is that the SEA women that choose to leave will be on the less-traditional side of SEA, otherwise they would not leave.
That should still put them on a better footing than the local women, but could also be worse, if they are 100% green card/golddiggers.
Or they have unrealistic expectations of life in the USA (thinking they'll be moving to Miami Beach or the Upper East Side or whatever sitcom/movie fantasy). Or they don't have unrealistic expectations and the USA are just as bad as they had the impression from their traditional village, and they hate being there.
If you're not specifically seeking a traditional woman, but just a woman that is able to stick to a marriage for longer than a local one, then probably some foreign college-educated, traveling-abroad one might be good enough.
The other option is the straight-off-the-boat, 1st generation English-speaker of the family, not completely disgusted by US norms but still retaining traditional upbringing and family nearby. It would take more effort to find and court these.
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There's obviously a huge difference between "mail order bride" scenarios vs "I met this amazing Cambodian woman while I was on a surfing holiday and now we're married and she's doing her ADN at SUNY Albany". The latter carries - if anything - positive social weight among the professional managerial class.
I believe 'poor mail order bride' will be conflated with 'professional agentic SE Asian wife' for the same reason that 'possible sex trafficked victim' is conflated with escorts. Its gatekeeping of women's power in controlling men through their sexuality. If men are shamed into not accessing foreign wives then it keeps the value of western women sky high.
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Seems to me that the only difference is whether or not you went surfing.
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You do realize the effort and investment you've described so greatly exceeds what most people are capable of at 25, right? 6 weeks of vacation? On what planet does the average guy making $40k trying to work up to a position that makes 60k have that? Learning rudimentary foreign language skills? You're talking about something most people simply cannot do. Those with high enough IQs are probably better served just putting in OT at their current company and getting promoted. Use that money to snag a woman.
Teaching English in Korea/Japan is not unheard of, and it does sometimes let you snag a woman, but its mostly a thing only an option for higher status men anyways. Those countries don't let McDonalds workers have work visas.
I have spent an almost full year of my life, at 22, backpacking around in 6 countries. I have done this by keeping a part-time job (paying around 1k per month) for the last 1.5 years of my degree and saving my student loan money for travelling. Overall the whole thing cost me less than 10.000 euros. Stayed mostly at mid-cheap range hostels but also shared a house with some other backpackers and occasional Airbnb when the circumstances were favorable :). When things got too expensive I volunteered and hitchhiked until figuring out a path to less expensive places. I dated a ton of other backpackers and local girls, learned the language to quite a decent degree, and had the time of my life. All it took was 10k, and I wasn't even being too frugal. I met a TON of people doing similar things.
Can someone PLEASE explain to me why every time someone mentions traveling around the world, there is this discussion of how difficult it is to spend some time in a $5k GDP per capita country as a $40k per year earning independent young Western guy? It is really, really, not unless if I am missing something fundamental here.
Its easy so long as you exist outside of the tourist ecosystem, which is verrrrrry hard for most people. Particularly we are talking about sub 100 IQ High school C students who don't have any foreign language skills, and will be very slow picking it up while there.
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This is actually easier if you're making less than 40k. It's very easy to find a shitty job so just quit and there'll be another equally shitty one available when you come back. I've got friends who have done this.
For who? 100 IQ short guys? Are those your friends that did that? How'd they even afford the plane ticket?
I knew a short guy with about a ~110-120 IQ who got a job teaching English in Thailand. After spending a few years drowning in a pile of women, he met a sassy Thai woman who was a good match for his personality. They married young (I think he was about 25-27 when they got married) and he came over with her back to the West. They're still together.
110-120 IQ still means excluding some 60+% of men... This isn't as curative a proposition as you might think.
Yes, I wasn't suggesting that it is easy. Very little worthwhile in life is easy.
Easy is different than outside of a person's capabilities. I am talking about trying to help C students who graduated middle of the pack high schools, like the dozens of men I know from my very own middling high school.
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Some were short, some tall and handsome. 100 IQ sounds about right, maybe less.
I'm not American so maybe it's different there, but it's not that hard to save up a few grand on minimum wage over the course of a year. If you're willing to work in a bar or something you can probably even find a job at your destination.
It is a very interesting idea and perspective. My problem with it is simply I look at my high school (different that most people here, although perhaps yours was similar, bottom 50% public school in the state, high hispanic population ~30%, no blacks really, a couple Indian families) and I very much see the problem described here. There were plenty of guys like me that went away to college and never returned. More girls than guys went to college, and thus also didn't return. The guys remaining either went military or some sort of low paying gig. Well, there are also the drug dealers. But the smarter, non college, non military, went into trades, mostly mechanics and carpentry. They seem fine. But its the ones that are more in the service sector that fall into the non-dating non-marriageable pool. They could probably save up enough money to quit and go abroad, but probably couldn't figure out how to obtain non-hotel/touristy housing, which would be necessary for an extended stay. Also, a 6 month gap on the resume would indicate to most of the employers that the guy went on a drug bender (which would be true for most instances) and they'd thus have to re-start at a super low rung with unstable hours. And I don't have much faith in them figuring out how to navigate the spousal visa process. Certainly hiring an attorney to help would also be a fairly extreme financial stretch.
This is not the case. I did 6 months travel in South America (no drugs) in my early 30's while in a very professional career with zero impact. My boss wished me well and my job was available on my return. Not the US though.
That is the huge difference. The people I am talking about are your Amazon warehouse workers, doormen, marginal salesmen, stockers, etc. Basically those people who are in the "be a warm body" positions. There is a path for almost all these people to a decent living. You just need to keep at it, because, like I've seen with so many kids from my high school, your competition will lose ground by going on a bender and being chronically late and end up with a resume gap, which ends up being a full reset to your progression. If you just start at an Amazon warehouse at 18 and work straight through to 26, you will be making decent wages by then. And probably be a manager soon enough, hell, they will pay for your night class associates (and its not just Amazon, they basically followed the wal mart model with a twist). But you can't take 6 months off at any time during the buildup unless you are doing it at a college with knowledge from the bosses who want you to get a specific degree so the HR lady won't pester them when they promote a "high school educated white man" to manager at age 27 (the HR ladies being both racist and classicist in these ways).
Even in early trades you need to be super locked in because a lot are controlled by ludacris union rules, even in states where unions are officially optional. Basically, because so many people in your area fall into bad habits, to succeed you just need not to, but also APPEAR to not to. And a big resume gap looks like doing meth.
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Maybe I'm putting too much weight on my social experience here, but when I think of "guy who can't get a girl" I imagine someone making decent-but-not-great money in IT or business (say $45,000 a year) who's just a bit of an introverted loser. That kind of guy can definitely say "fuck it, I'm going to do a one month CELTA course and move to Manila", and if their lack of romantic success is the main source of pain in their life, they probably should.
I know those people as well, and frankly they are not nearly as bad off. Those are the guys who often need to realize they also are engaging in excessive expectations. They want to get girls by swiping right and taking her to an Applebees. But if you see the real real. The bottom 30% of the White/Hispanic males, theres nothing for them. They make their $15-22/hr, now typically at an Amazon warehouse or the like, and if they keep at it, they will move up slowly. But they really need to keep at it.
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I think the proposal is entirely possible for a guy in his early 30's (and white western guys are unlikely to resort to a dedicated 'wife hunting' mission before then anyway).
I'll agree though that a lot of the suggestions in this thread won't work for all men, but its kind of 'save who you can' at the moment.
Perhaps. I still don't know many of the lower-half, unmarried, 30ish men that could take a 6 month break in the Philippines and not have to totally reroll their career dice. If we are looking for a doable solution at any scale, it would be some sort of correct application of refugee laws wherein we only accept women.
It definitely doesn't need to be 6 months, especially if you plan in advance and do your homework. My sister-in-law (Filipina) met her fiancé while he was on a 1-month surfing holiday in Siargao, and they connected and bonded and he came out to visit her a couple more times in the next 12 months, and now she's living in the Netherlands with him. She's also (I hasten to add) a very impressive woman in her own right, with graduate degrees from US and European universities, so their case isn't typical, but if anything that supports my case.
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