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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9848 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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You are asserting that there exists an injective function from the set of heterosexual monogamous men to the set of heterosexual monogamous women such that every woman prefers being paired to her corresponding man over remaining single or holding out (there are additional conditions, but this seems like the easiest one to break).

It's called Gale–Shapley algorithm. Oh, wait, I see what you mean: at some iteration women will start valuing staying single over the next batch of men asking them out.

Yeah, I think the closest thing to a solution would involve substantial government pressure to form heterosexual couples, potentially including criminal punishment for cheating.

This might not work and might have bad side effects, but every other proposed solution also wouldn’t work and would have bad side effects.

Last weekend, Aella and friends hosted SlutCon at Lighthaven in Berkeley. Described charitably, SlutCon seeks to heal gender relations by teaching socially awkward nerds how to flirt by giving them a sandbox of semi-professional “flirt girls” to practice on. This caused a lot of controversy in the community for reasons which people tended to dance around, but which boiled down to, “I don’t want the socially awkward nerds in the community to be trained to flirt with me.”

Your link is a wall of text, but this bit certainly sticks out:

Obviously, it's not slutcon's job to 'fix' any overly-pushy men. It wouldn't be possible to. But is slutcon making things better in teaching them skills, or worse in emboldening them to try in the first place?

Yeah, that's the problem: there are some men who are "overly pushy" but are also so timid that they aren't trying at all. LOL.

I feel there is a non-zero group of very vocal women who's core argument against stuff like this basically boils down to that they hate the idea of men having to 'learn' to be 'chads'.

They don't want to find out that the man who managed to get with them used to be a socially messed up and worked hard to be charismatically smooth. They want a natural. The guy who just 'gets it'. Like, how the hell do they expect regular and/or awkward guys to learn this stuff? Yeah, I know socially extroverted people who make connections as easily as fucking breathing, but the rest of us have to put in the effort at it to atleast pretend to be normal, or atleast not an asocial retard.

Ozy agrees with you.

Autistic people I know are vastly more likely to make the opposite error: to become so self-effacing romantically and sexually that they never express romantic or sexual interest in anyone, and end up loveshy.

In general, sexual harassment is caused by:

(1) A person believes incorrect things about dating in general (“women secretly like it when you crudely compliment them”) or about this situation in specific (“that person is so into me that they want me to hit on them even though I’m their boss”).

(2) A person knows they’re coercing someone else into sex or a relationship, or knows that they’re making someone uncomfortable, and is doing that on purpose because they want to.

Now, you might assume that #1 is a thing autistic people do, because it involves misunderstanding social situations. It is mostly not. Autistic people like following clearly laid out rules for social interaction. “My illegible social intuition says I can override the clearly laid out rules for this social interaction and it’ll be fine” is an allistic social problem.

@Quantumfreakonomics

It's literally me.

Being a homeschooled kid for everything before college already put me on poor footing, but attending college in the mid-2010's meant:

  1. exposure to university- and media-driven feminist messaging implying that all approaches were inherently [suspect, predatory, unwanted; from hereon out, "predatory"]
  2. the looming threat of turbocharged MeToo accusations for any fumbled encounter Additionally, I made the mistakes of:
  3. listening to a shrink who I now would classify as "body-positive" who told me looks didn't matter much (I wish I had embraced self-hate earlier instead of accepting affirmations from deluded authorities; at least I'm not fat anymore)
  4. hanging out with a D&D group for my social needs, a group that, on retrospect, I realize was socially policed with terminally Tumblr-brained women who collected left-coded quirks like the cowed men who dated them collected Magic cards; this group introduced me to the memeplexes surrounding subreddits like /r/niceguys and /r/inceltears, which led me to believe that there was no winning, since per those memeplexes, things like "trying to not be a predator" and "complaining that there's no winning because you are branded a predator no matter what you do" are also reasons to be mocked and branded a predator. I still catch myself thinking like this.

Thanks to all these factors, the risks of any approach were exaggerated (or more conservatively, were implied to be exaggerated) by authorities and by the groups I chose to associate with.

At this point I'm a wizard and just hoping I'll get over the hurdle of self-preservation soon; I can't talk with shrinks about this because despite the seeming pointlessness of life, assuming I do find a purpose to living I am provisionally maintaining a stable job, and I'd like to keep it stable with no employment gaps or institutionalizations to my name.

If any staff member would like to ban me, I think I'm going to keep using this forum for venting, at least as context and drive permits, and that is trite.

If any staff member would like to ban me, I think I'm going to keep using this forum for venting, at least as context and drive permits, and that is trite.

Why? Nothing you said seems remotely objectionable. You are sharing your experience, which is not against the rules.

Single-issue posting is against the rules, even if it's intermittent rather than constant. 1 2

Fascinating, so rules as written yes, but rules as intended? Haven't the mods clarified many a time that they define single-issue posters as "obnoxious" and "non-stop". My model for this is that you'd have to cluster closer the SS, or EC (might be remembering wrong) style of posting rather than this fairly timid mostly-lurker that occasionally comes in to vent about how homeschooling + feminism + Leftism fucked up his brain. He is essentially not prolific enough, aggressive enough, or obnoxious enough to seriously catch mod attention on the topic.

Seems like a case of: "Rules are a blunt hammer, sometimes you need the enforcer to recognize when they should be applied" or that you can't make rules for every situation that are 100% effective.

the seeming pointlessness of life

This comment seems relevant.

I linked the wall of text because it recaps most of the better arguments that were had. I probably won’t make a full post on the subject since everyone’s getting in their dating takes in this one, and a separate thread would just be dunking on Aella.

Speaking of: Singapore's govt dating app runs on Gale-Shapeley

Another demonstration of the incompetence of governments who also "want" to address the dating crisis but avoid this obvious solution.

This won't behave how we'd naively expect.

Let's take two hypothetical countres:

Country A : 1.5 men per woman

Country B : 0.75 men per woman

Mathematically, we'd expect the women in country A to want to pair since they will have higher quality matches available.

In country B, we'd expect women to resist pairing since high-quality men are scarcer.

Yet, the opposite behavior appears to be true. Given an abundance of thirsty dudes, women will often reject even high quality mates. See: San Francisco.

The supremacy of probability & statistics driven evolutionary psychology over specious econoreasoning. Gale shapley does not apply because women can be single and preferences are not stable in men. Women wield singleness to wait on the top men in the area for their temporary turn. They will do this in country B and A and this behavior means at any given time more men per capita in B are getting laid than in A.

high quality mates. See: San Francisco.

Sorry to burst your bubble but if wealth + intelligence is your only metric for high-quality mates you have a weird skew. As the saying goes: "The odds are good but the GOODS ARE ODD". Autistic nerdy men who happen to make 7 figures do not high quality mates alone make.

It's almost a tautology at this point, but the Bay has been known for this sort of male population for a long time. So if men in the Bay are still struggling then it would behoove you to update your model on what is actually considered high quality (different than high status) instead of what autistic nerds would like to be considered high quality

It's a nice story, and I agree with your assessment on status, but it doesn't hold water.

  1. SF has a bad ratio. This is the core of the problem.

  2. The same man who strikes out in SF/Seattle goes to NYC and drowns in female affection. It's a well-known phenomenon. There is no magic soil in NYC that makes men less autistic.

We don't have to make broad sociological observations. It's 90% just the ratio.

One would wonder why no women from NYC go to SF/Seattle. Why do we never reach equilibrium between two unequal states unless transfers are one sided or the transfers that are happening aren't the problem population.

It's a well-known phenomenon.

Theoretically, but among my remaining friends in SF/Seattle, including some who took 6 month hiatuses to NYC for this reason, I have not seen drowning. It's hard to prove or disprove this as phenomenon with relying on anecdotal data because while its theoretically possible its too multivariate to quantically determine it.

In SF, age 25-39, it's 52.8% male. In NYC, it's 48.8%.

While that doesn't SOUND like a huge difference, let's say 80% of each group are open to a heterosexual relationship (with the remaining 20% being gay/not looking). Then let's pair off 70% of the remaining women with men.

In SF, there are 1.4 single men for every women. In NYC, its 0.84. The difference is stark.

But in the modern world, men will always be at a disadvantage. 51.2% of people are born male absent any sex selection. It's supposed to get down to 50% by the time men breed, but we don't kill each other with sticks as much anymore.

Are those the overall sex ratio numbers, not age specific ones? The ones for NYC get skewed heavily by the older cohort of women if you use overall numbers, and it doesn't do the average 25yo male much good that there are loads of single 50+ women in NYC (jokes about cougars aside). You said 25-39, but those sound more like the overall ones I remember.

edit: this one I was thinking of is old data. I wish I could see an update with moveable sliders like this one has. Set to 20-39 and the oversupply of women seems to vanish.

Given an abundance of thirsty dudes, women will often reject even high quality mates. See: San Francisco.

Uh, in San Francisco, many dudes are thirsty for each other.

True. And it still remains the worst urban dating market for heterosexual men.

Pour one out for all the Chinese families whose lines are being ended because their one son ended up in Silicon Valley.

Honestly I've always been vaguely jealous of the Indian arranged marriage setup since it makes a lot of sense for socially awkward good provider guys. I'm sure there's horror stories, but the Upper class variety I've seen friends of both genders engage with just seems like a super useful social technology that'd broadly benefit the average Mottizen.

I've always been vaguely jealous of the Indian arranged marriage setup

I second this, having watched my socially awkward Indian friends fail at western dating but then have the cushion to fall back on arranged matchmaker setups, and get marriageable, family-approved women with good jobs and prospects, often fairly attractive with such comparatively low effort, I can't help but being a bit jealous. I went through the fucking trenches of the dating wars to find my girlfriend.

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