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Edit: I saw "reactionary-reactionary" and thought you meant the second blogger, but after posting I realize you may have meant the Dread Jim. I am leaving this post up in case I got it right the first time.
I'm not the O.P., but I would be curious to see how you frame them, if you've got the time and energy to make it legible to folks like me who probably share many of those assumptions.
My summary of the central claim: The complaints that modern men are immature or poor marriage material aren't wrong, but they are incomplete; modern women suffer similar faults, but they aren't discussed because socially prevalent forms of feminism excuse them, or even laud them, in women.
I think this false notion that women are somehow innately fit for marriage by virtue of having been born with an uterus whereas men need to basically be domesticated into this role is remarkably widespread even among people who should know better. I’m guessing there are two main reasons for this. One is that most people are capable of noticing that the average woman is only interested in one man at a time and thus practices monogamy even when she’s not interested in marriage. (Serial monogamy = promiscuity, as practiced by women.) The other is that when relationships are formed, the man is usually more averse to initiating commitment (averse to making this big change in front of his entire social circle, that is) than the woman is whereas the woman is more likely to be averse to staying committed. This means men and women are actually equally picky in this regard but it’s men’s pickiness that manifests earlier in the process which creates the notion that the average man is somehow a ‘commitment-phobe’.
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I'm using "reactionary-reactionary" as repetition for emphasis. Like how on the schoolyard people used to say "like-like" when they mean you have a crush on someone, that sort of thing. And yes, I was referring to the first article.
What else is The Motte for than writing a treatise on gender relations on a weeknight? Unfortunately, I attempted to write this reply and found that I was unable to do it sufficiently. I've been sitting at my computer for an hour and am simply not satisfied with the argument I've constructed because it effectively requires me to describe my worldview from first principles. This is proving to be a task too great for right now. I'll give you a bit, but it's not my best work. Feel free to ask me to clarify as necessary.
The nugget I can share is this: paying attention to the behaviors of "women" and "men" as a whole, when examining the dating world, is an incredible fool's errand and bound to produce resentment. I have a lot of respect for the courtship woes that swathes of modern men have experienced. Certainly, we can examine studies on hypergamy and track fertility rates and bemoan the state of the world when the latest ragebait Hinge exchange populates our Reddit feeds. However, that does not mean that anger is the appropriate response, nor do I think it necessitates wholesale societal revolution or a RETVRN of some kind. The pessimism that these authors radiate is entirely voluntary.
Let's say you are a conservative, marriage-oriented 25-year-old man. It behooves you to not give a shit about what the median woman is doing. It is incredibly easy to view the bad behavior of many women online, the vapidity, the promiscuity, the double-standards and essentialism and the blah blah blah. You can sneer 24/7, if you so choose. But you shouldn't. You likely aren't going to date those women. You absolutely won't marry those women. If you think modern woman is dooming herself to romantic suicide borne out of the sexual revolution, you can think that. But you wouldn't marry her anyway, so why sneer? Turn your gaze elsewhere.
Fundamentally, this is a multiculturalism and visibility problem. Past people had minimal exposure to dating norms outside of their community. The gentry did not pay attention to how the peasants were dating, and yet we insist on examining "men" and "women" as a whole. The women who get riled up at comments from traditionally minded men, too, are playing this game of vicarious imagistic anger. But she wouldn't date or marry him, either. We're driving ourselves crazy by looking at people who hardly exist in our dating sphere in the first place, with entirely different values and goals. The reality is that dating norms are so much more granular than that.
For the man struggling, the solution is to find your tribe as quickly as possible and be social within it. Find people, institutions, and places that give you the best odds to meet people with the same norms as you. Living in a coastal city and think the women are too feminist? Move. Having a hard time meeting religious people? Move. No luck on dating apps due to demographic asymmetries? Move. Dating and marriage, on the experiential level, have so little to do with the aggregate behaviors of the sexes, and everything to do with how one spends their time and the people they surround themselves with.
In the past, perhaps it didn't take as much effort to find your community, so I suppose there is some justified anger there. However, this appears to me a much more economic problem, borne out of our increased social atomization a la Putnam's Bowling Alone. Perhaps there used to be greater numbers of dateable women in one place. Interconnected economic networks result in more transience, less community, and more variance in local values, making it harder to find a mate that aligns with you. I just don't think "feminism" is the appropriate target. For every man that decries feminism, there is another man who finds the modern, liberated woman attractive. For every woman that decries traditional marriage, there is another woman who remains committed to those values. We can get into the fine-grained demographic data about how values are shifting between the genders, and so on, but again: what's the point? Know your place, surround yourself with people with similar values, and work hard at putting yourself out there. You will have a much better success rate than if you direct your attention toward those whose lifestyle you disavow in the first place.
I'll add:
This made me laugh. If anything, modern woman is less concerned with her looks than women in eras past. If anything, modern woman is less parasitically materialistic than women in eras past. If anything, modern woman is less of a gossip-vulture and has far broader interests than women in eras past. In eras gone by, when marriage was an economic institution above all else, women had so few opportunities to be interesting. Yes, perhaps the life of the historical homemaker was, in a sense, honorable, which hedges against accusations of shallowness. But her primary purpose was to be a womb, a pretty thing, and a domestic servant. Now, marriage is about romantic love - an extremely contemporary development. Consummate, equitable love is much harder to achieve with women who don't have lives of their own. We take for granted the extent to which feminism has encouraged increasing numbers of women to have dynamic personal lives, a developed intellect, and the inner richness necessary to be an equal partner. I cannot deny that there have been some unsavory excesses produced by the sexual revolution, and vapid, unscrupulous women exist. I just harshly question the hypothesis that if not for feminism, we'd be better off.
Feminism excuses women who aren't as well-suited for marriage because feminism is broadly about giving women more paths forward in life than dependency on a man. It's practically tautological. Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive, even if it alters their trajectory vis a vis marriage. In contrast, the ways men are dropping the ball - gambling, porn, anger, laziness, isolation - are extremely unattractive. I don't think it's a double standard for precisely this reason, even if there is some sociological analysis to be made about how these behaviors affect marriage. I'll save that for another post. My hands hurt from typing. Cheers.
Oh boy, I can relate to that. I appreciate the effort.
I want to give your post some more thought, probably review it after I've slept. But two differences stand out to me: One is that I think that different relationship practices vary in their conduciveness to human flourishing far more than you do. The other is that I'm not looking primarily at potential mates but at other people I care about being led into costly mistakes by a society that encourages them.
Sure, I did my best but judging by other responses, it leaves a bit to be desired.
I'll add that I don't believe in a libertine blank-slatism where all relationship types are created equal. I will assume that you believe marriage or stable monogamy are ideal for human flourishing? I don't disagree. I just think that the excesses of a state in which traditional marriage is enforced or even encouraged are less tolerable than the excesses of a state that is permissive of individual relationship choice. I do not believe experimenting with casual sex or premarital sex generally in your 20s, as a man or woman, is an inherently detrimental event, so long as it is done within reason. I do not believe that matters of the heart ought to be addressed with market-style approaches, wherein we examine the "price" that "women" "set" on "men." It's far too broad a level of analysis to be personally useful. Call me ignorant if you wish, but I think this is a situation in which ignorance is adaptive.
You could argue that marriage is unfairly pilloried these days to our societal detriment, which is fair, but a different conversation.
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I’m sorry but the female equivalent to male gambling, porn, anger, laziness and isolation is by no means merely ‘getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex’; it’s credit card debt, female anger (publicly directed at men and usually getting zero social pushback), (obsessive) female porn consumption (of trashy YA literature, dark romantasy or whatever and emotional porn marketed to women in general), social isolation (see the latter example), trashiness, frumpiness, OF ‘modeling’, camwhoring, pigging out, getting addicted to painkillers and alcohol etc.
What getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex represent on the part of women is simply them abandoning the social roles that the bygone Christian patriarchy expected of them – it does not necessarily entail personal degeneracy and dysfunction. Men abandoning the social roles that the bygone Christian patriarchy expected of them simply manifests as one no longer interacting with women from the perspective of responsibility and protection but from the perspective of pleasure and fun – in other words, delaying marriage and fatherhood, not marrying your first sweetheart etc. It's an overall situation where women no longer feel accountable to men and men no longer feel responsible for women.
Do you think it's a reasonable request to be made to average single men or women to upend their entire lives just to supposedly increase their personal chances of finding a suitable partner?
+1, fair elaborations. I'm not claiming that the current dynamic is perfect, just t
I suppose I was speaking a bit harshly in my haste to respond. My ultimate point is that changing one's voluntary associations is likely to have a far greater impact on one's romantic satisfaction than paying much mind to aggregate female behaviors. "Moving" in the sense of physical relocation is one way to do that, and perhaps the most dramatic way to do so. To those unwilling to move, there are still many ways to change one's voluntary associations.
You're correct that in many cases, it is unreasonable for one to move and it's a highly personal decision. However, for the motivated partner-seeker, taking concerted steps to engage with more potential mates, up to and including moving, is hardly upending one's life - it's choosing the life that one wants. Under the age of 30, it pays to be flexible.
Now, there may be some dissatisfaction that such a suggestion is even necessary these days. Again, I don't think this is "women's" fault any more than it is the fault of cultural balkanization in the U.S., and women often find themselves in similar demographic quicksand that they have to escape by moving, too. For example, many young heterosexual women bemoan the fact that NYC has a highly skewed male-female ratio, making dating much harder.
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Honestly? Yes, because that’s probably not their only tension with their local community, and the alternatives (changing the rest of the community for your niche, or resigning to loneliness) are more unreasonable.
We should normalize people intentionally moving to regions with like-minded individuals. It would reduce tension and restore community, desperately needed in this era. Already, moving once or twice in a lifetime, like leaving for college then working somewhere else, is fairly typical and not hard for most people, especially with fast travel and instant long-distance communication. Moving more shouldn’t be necessary.
This has actually been happening on such a scale and for such a long time that a popular book was released on its harmful effects back in 2008. I know this is somewhat off-topic but still.
People prefer those like them, attempts to disturb this amount to the Berlin wall, the argument against it happening within the US afaik is «it's bad for undesirables» whether they be blacks (in the case of white flight) or the dumb (in the case of whatever Charles Murray was complaining about in the first part of the Bell Curve). Personally if you want me to be around such people you have to grant me elevation and authority, or else I will resent it and try to escape. From what I see of arguments like the one you link to they tend to refuse or ignore the authority component and instead they want people like me to accept some kind of duty to lower ourselves by living equal among people we don't want.
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That link is dead for me, just fyi.
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Interesting. Looking at district maps like this, I had the impression that even many “one-sided” areas had a decent share of the other side: the darkest red and blue regions still have 1 of every 5 members voting the opposite.
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You have correctly identified that DreadJim is a male feminist. Feminists take the posture that women are better than men and tend to take "well, what are they good for" for granted. So does DreadJim, with the valence swapped.
Anyway:
Yes, it absolutely fucking does.
It does in the same way and for the same reasons as the listed behaviors make men unattractive to women. You're making the same tired mistake the social conservatives and feminists (though I repeat myself) do where they fail to weight the desires and worth of men and women equally in an environment where they by all rights should be.
Which is why the assertion it's a double-standard is correct: what you've listed are all the ways men want to skip the bill for providing what women want, and you claim that's bad, and then you list all the ways women want to skip the bill for providing what men want, and you claim that's good.
Now, in the before times, "it's worse for men to skip the bill" was OK because there were external factors that balanced it out; mainly that, because women were not capable of primary resource extraction, women were dependent on those resources and had to sell (which is why you correct observe marriage is an economic bargain).
But, exactly coincident with the dawn of feminism, men destroyed that constraint in a massive wave of automation. So the instinctual double-standard remains, but now nothing else exists to moderate the impulse.
I'm not really going to bother refuting the rest of the post since most of it's just a word-for-word transposition for why the dead weight loss in a market that a cartel inherently creates (the cartel here is "all women" and the product is "family") is morally justified.
I really don't believe you are as free of resentment as you claim to be. Systems design begins with observing the users.
That is completely acceptable and is reasonable as an individual preference. I am not so stupid as to suggest that no one cares about promiscuity when thinking about family formation and long-term relationships - read me charitably here, please. I'm not trying to moralize: every person's icks and turn-offs are acceptable in my books. I'll admit it wasn't a very well written sentence. I'll clarify:
It's a matter of prevalence. I imagine there are far more women who are turned off by the median man than there are men who are turned off by the median woman. Of course, there are women with stratospheric body counts, and for those hoping for virgins, any number above 0 is too high. Still, I am doubtful most men would throw a fit that their girlfriend wants to have a career or slept with 4 or 5 people. These women are not "skipping the bill" for most men - the bill has simply changed as attitudes have shifted, and perhaps your attitude has not shifted with the majority. That is completely fine.
Truthfully, this idea is not a lynchpin of my views if you still find yourself in opposition. What follows is more important and definitive to me.
If one is a family-minded traditionalist, it's fair to say that one's values have decreased in influence over the years. That's certainly upsetting if one wants to preserve that way of life. That said, these values haven't decreased in frequency just among women. This is a society-wide change, with plenty of men along for the ride. The idea that there is some grand war in incentives between women, as a class, and men, as a class, is precisely the mindset that I think is fallacious.
If you honestly think that "all women" are in a sort of cartel where they determine the cost of entry for "family formation" or engage in "resource siphoning," I'm not sure we will ever see eye to eye. Cartels coordinate. Certainly, social movements have developed since the 50s, feminism among them, but I don't believe that the outcomes of feminism were a coordinated effort to create intractable dating standards for men. I have not observed any sort of unity in female behavior. Instead, I think there are loose federations of women with their own sets of values, who coordinate to the extent that their values change concomitantly. Perhaps you find some of these federations virulently offensive to your preferred way of life. My suggestion remains the same: disassociate from the federations of women you find disagreeable, and associate with the federations of women that you find agreeable. Otherwise, it just is an utter waste of time to talk about "the women." It's a floating signifier, so broad as to be practically useless on an individual level.
I'm not sure where you're deriving resentment from my comment. I think it's fairly lucid, even if you disagree with it.
That's called an in-group bias. Women have one, men not so much.
Since the amount of available product on the market depends on women and not men (also for biological reasons), we put women on the selling side and men on the buying side.
If sellers co-ordinate, then it's a cartel, by definition. Slut-shaming (a classic practice among women) is kind of the basic example of this: given women form a union, that is scab behavior [it's working at a discount from the cartel's perspective, defeating the power of collective bargaining], and discouraged accordingly. See also the concept of a "pick-me", where the woman throws in some other value-adds to gain an individual advantage, and the chain is similar: why would you do that, unless you want to sell -> you're trying to undercut everyone else = slut = scab -> punish.
This isn't really a conscious thing; it's merely human instinct. Revealed preferences by the relevant actors (as buyers compete with buyers, as sellers compete with sellers, and as both negotiate between each other) demonstrates the collective negotiation between men and women has the character of a market, so economic analysis is the correct framing with which to make predictions.
'What the average market participant is willing to afford' is actually kind of the central issue here, so 'attitudes' are inescapable here (and again, this has biology/instinctual roots). Sexual attraction obviously has a lot to do with that, and that's something you simply don't get to decide.
In this case, the clearing price of the sexual marketplace has risen to the point where it's created a much larger proportion of men and women who are either unwilling or unable to afford each other; even when they can, they have far smaller families as a result.
Feminism is to blame for a little bit of that (in the "why bother buying into someone they're only marginally attracted to" and "government-enforced wealth transfers from men to women handicaps buyers and frustrates price discovery for sellers"[1] senses- this also matters on the seller side, particularly when considering [2], but inherently affects buyers far more than sellers), but a lot of it is that the substitute goods have become far better and cheaper than they used to be (and the cost of everything else associated with supporting a family has become far higher), so the value each party must bring also must be correspondingly higher.
Which means that, at the clearing price floor, attraction (and perhaps the compromises thereon) is making most of the difference (and perhaps providing more of the buyer's remorse upon purchase), so the fixation on it at that point makes sense.
[1] Forced-diversity initiatives as well as intentional subsidy of college degrees increase a seller's perception of their real value; once they realize they're overvalued, their more advanced age has devalued them further (again, this is a thing men value, and no, you don't get to pretend they don't). Discovering this is more likely to lead to their leaving the market entirely, creating further distortion.
[2] Divorce laws in the "she took everything including the kids" direction result in buyers perceiving more risk than there actually is. This should actually decrease the price a woman can charge due to fewer buyers willing to take that risk, and can lead to sellers competing with each other in ways like "known adherent to a religion where divorce is a sin".
If you can't agree on the facts there's nothing further to discuss. Having interests is not inherently malicious; good and evil are not life's concern.
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Slut-shaming is an obvious case of such coordination, isn't it? Not the slut-shaming done by angry incels online, which is a huge social crisis existing only on the minds of feminist journalists, but slut-shaming done by other women.
This has always been the case though.
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Attraction is in the eye of the beholder. Many men are repulsed by women having more sex. Thus they say 'ran-through', 'whore', 'roastie'... Same with girlboss for that matter, with regard to careers.
Women are often repulsed by virgins. Their opinion isn't illegitimate. They use it as an insult: 'virgin' or 'have sex, incel' how could they be lying about what they believe?
Things that give men the ick aren't illegitimate while things that give women the ick are fine.
See my reply to ThisIsSin.
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