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I’m somewhat familiar with the work of the reactionary blogger Jim and one thing I definitely never expected him to do was to use the Japanese light novel series KonoSuba and its anime adaptation as a talking point. But now it’s here:
One aspect he left out is that Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest (also the notion that she is ‘drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age’ is questionable at best) and that the other main female character who can be called a fanservice woman (Darkness) is basically a delusional pervert which rules her out as a love interest as well.
Anyway, that’s not the main reason I’m linking to it here and I also know this subject matter has been done to death here. The reason instead is the reference therein to mainstream accusations about the ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ among single men. I think it’s a fascinating culture war phenomenon and I also think Jim misses the point about it here. It’s not that it’s a pretext for aging and frumpy hags to whine, it’s that it’s based on the assumption that women are innately mature enough for marriage. I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:
I saw the preface of reactionary and thought I'd be reading some Yarvin-slop, but this guy is reactionary-reactionary. Certainly it's the case that when you hold up the state of the world to the light in just the right way, a few reactionary glimmers appear. Speaking this strongly, though, seems irresponsible to me and there are so many disagreeable assumptions made that undergird this article that it's hardly possible for me to respond to it in a meaningful way. If there was one claim in particular that you wanted to highlight, what would it be?
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'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.
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?
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.
That link is dead for me, just fyi.
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