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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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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'm pretty sure on the aggregate the overly-pushy men are going to get more success than the overly-timid, anyways. Sure a certain amount will overstep lines and get pilloried, but also you miss every shot you don't take and more chance of finding somebody reasonably-agreeable to say yes if you just chronically go for it.

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.

Like, how the hell do they expect regular and/or awkward guys to learn this stuff?

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die"

That is, they don't, they just want regular/awkward guys to disappear and never bother them. Preferably doing something out of sight that helps them in some way, but the "out of sight" is the important part.

This is true for most signals. Guys prefer "looks effortlessly beautiful at 9am with her hair disarrayed" over "drops from an 8 to a 6 at night when the makeup comes off".

Most of these signals are about fundamental fitness, so faking them is both natural and something people select against.

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'.

I hesitate to get involved with gender wars, but this particular tendency I think is very understated and much wider than merely "non-zero". This has to be a large part of why women's advice on dating their own sex is so infamously useless/counterproductive; it's less that women are evil bitches colluding in a cabal to put down even their own flesh and blood, and more that natural instincts are not always your friend when elevated into the be-all end-all of attraction (never settle, slay queen, etc). The damning part that exudes the ick is not when you don't follow the advice correctly (which to be fair also happens), it's the very fact that you need advice in the first place, or generally heed any sort of external information to improve your chances, that seems to often be taken as deception of the most craven sort whenever it comes out. Crude analogy: when people tell you "just be yourself king", the unspoken emphasis is on king, not on yourself.

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.

I'm a lot older than you, and: It won't get better. The people who tell you it will are high-functioning, capable of navigating modern dating, and they pattern match "my life is intolerable" to "I feel you bro, it's been a few weeks since I got laid, too." The real world does not mete out suffering in a balanced way. And men in pain are not a problem modern society even acknowledges, let alone tries to solve. As you've mentioned, shrinks are legally mandated to make your life even worse if you're honest with them.

I have a few relatives who I stay alive for, but as I live a very unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle, I'm kind of looking forward to dying of a heart attack in a few years, alone as always. (Ironically, I do not think we're all going to get killed by AI.)

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

You have to really stand out and be persistently obnoxious about it for us to invoke that rule. Everyone has their "thing" that they like to talk about - that is not what the single-issue posting rule prohibits.

Yeah. Seems a lot more targeted at stopping people airing intellectual Fetishes or 'Da Jews' posting than just preferring to contribute to certain types of conversations.

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.