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Notes -
Women as a Monolith is Wrong
I am having a lot of trouble defining this argument I want to make, because its a classic motte and bailey situation. In the bailey is some version of "women are like x, and x causes all sorts of terrible things like less attraction from men, less kids, and ruination of society". In the defensible motte there is something like "of course not all women, there are some that remain virtuous, but maybe not enough to matter on a societal level".
The Bailey
Addressing the bailey feels trite, but also necessary.
There is a very real contingent of male youths that do not have enough exposure to feminine circles and social ability to navigate it in a way that allows them to acquire life partners. Men without sisters, female cousins, young female friends, etc. Maybe only their mothers and an aunt or two. They fully do not grok women as people and cannot understand them as anything other than sexual objects or distant uncaring scolds. They live in the bailey of this argument. A sad existence. Others only visit to make a point, but they are truly here in a hellish landscape of misunderstanding.
I've seen a few people extricated from this motte. Specific tale: A 6'3 male virgin that mistrusted all women as gold diggers, despite his painful lack of income. He participated in an obscure sport I play. One female participant in the sport was getting married. Invited 6'3 man, and suggested to one of her promiscuous female friends that maybe he just needs to get laid. The 6'3 man is laid at the wedding, turns out much more chill about women afterwards. Can even start dating, if not successfully, at least without full blown conspiracy theories about women trying to steal his non-existent money.
I personally grew up having a bunch of the hallmarks that make this bailey impossible to sustain. I have a younger sister. She was prom queen, sought after constantly in high school, guys in my grade were dating her. I have a mother that was very open to me about her per-marriage dating life. I had female friends that i managed to not sexualize, mostly because they were dating my male friends, and it felt very wrong to go after them. I had one or two ex girlfriends that turned out to be lesbians/bi. They were sort of off limits after i dated them and acted as a reality check on certain male-female interactions. I had female cousins of a similar age that I knew during puberty.
All of that culminates in a vague understanding of the opposite sex. I would have probably summed it up with these not so groundbreaking insights:
I think of these as not so groundbreaking thoughts. But teenagers do have to learn these things. And I do strongly believe that some teenagers are not learning these things or similar basic lessons. It leads to online personalities that feel pretty alien to most adults. We can't fit them into a normal model of human interaction without assuming them to be incredibly anti-female.
The Motte
This is obviously way harder to address. For a reminder, the motte in this case is something like "not all women are bad, its a small number dragging down the reputation of the virtuous ones, and leading the uncertain ones astray"
Any good motte is a spectrum. At the extreme indefensible end you have "basically all women are uber sluts". At the other extreme you have something like "some women are uber sluts, and it makes it hard on the many precious angel good christian girls to find their proper good christian boys for marriage".
Many ways to go after this, not any of them obviously correct.
I've posted some extremes. You probably will want to quibble with the details. That is expected, its rare to be as extreme as the extremes. But maybe not rare around here.
Again any good motte is a spectrum. If you are somewhere on that spectrum you are in the motte.
I'm not saying that as some kind of "fuck you for being against feminism". Being stuck in the bailey is sad, and I think you have missed out on some formative life experiences. Being in the motte is defensible by definition. But I still want to argue you out of it. Call me a stubborn idiot for that desire.
Sieging the Motte
Any good strategy on a fortified position requires multiple avenues of attack. Or at least completely overwhelming force on one of them.
I will first present possible avenues of overwhelming force.
Women are Humans
For certain avenues of Humanist and Christian thought this should be an overwhelming slam dunk. There is a responsibility on them to figure this thing out. If they need help they should request it. If they are failing they should acknowledge it. If they need more from men they should ask it. If they think what humanity needs involves changing their role in society they should discuss it. Its a sort of virtue ethics writ large.
Men are Broken
One of the big answers to "whats wrong with women in society" is always "well men suck". It is not automatically incorrect, even if something is truly wrong with women.
Men could have evolved for an environment too unlike the one we inhabit today. The stresses of adapting on the cultural and evolutionary level have overwhelmed us. We are seeking the quick bust of a nut, the ephemeral pleasure of a harem over the realistic pleasure and comfort of a loving wife.
Sieging the Motte pt2
Overwhelming force might not be so overwhelming for those steeped in the culture wars. I felt very disingenuous writing that last part. I don't think it is untrue. I do genuinely believe those aspects often overwhelm the brains of most people that get involved in this issue. Its just that for any budding medieval engineers that have heavily considered the aspects of motte defense and offense, they feel juvenile and half baked. Obviously that is where you start on the male and female culture wars. You must remember that there are normies out there that have not advanced as far as the enlightened folks of themotte.
We cultured few can explore the more subtle defenses of the motte. When overwhelming offense does not take the day.
Men and Women are Different
The first thing you might be wondering is "why is this not in the above section?". For most people, obviously men and women are different. There are biological differences based on hormones and genes. But I think what is different is a subtle and key distincter that makes this much less of a forceful offense, and more of a subtle one.
In my mind there is definitely a bunch of science and research that makes it obvious that women are better caretakers from ages -9 months to ~3 years. But there is also evidence that the absence of a father in the following 15 years has a negative impact on the child's earnings and general well-being.
Men and women serve different roles in society. 'hey cjet, why don't you say more obvious crap in your word vomit'. Its sometimes just necessary to state the foundational things. Because sometimes they might not be foundational to everyone.
I do remember having a debate class in high school where one of the proposed topics of "debate" was boys vs girls in sports. There was basically only one girl in the classroom willing to take on the girls side of the debate. Our teacher, a 5'3 self described 'wall flower', had to turn her down. Sometime before or after the story of her single-handedly breaking up a girls fight in the cafeteria by hulk pinning both of the girls to the wall in a stranglehold. Fucking awesome.
Its the algorithms
Its not ladies fault that they have been tricked into wanting so much D. Nor is it men's fault that they can't settle down for a lovely lady. No its the fault of the apps and the algorithms. They simple present too much available D and P. How can human brains overcome such alluring genitalia displayed in front of them and available for their easy consumption via quick hookups?
How about some self control? Crazy idea, but maybe we aren't the first generation to be presented with the concept of hookers. Maybe its called the world's oldest profession for a reason. The time to worry about this is not now, but about 10,000 years ago in ancient Sumer.
I think hookerdom is basically the price of short-term thinking. Choose the hot lady now right in front of you. Or the better match, the less crazy one, the one earning money in her career for the long term option.
If anything we have become too successful at not producing hookers, and not producing men that choose hookers. Or hookers adjacent.
Birth control is too effective
This is what the thought experiment of the last problem inevitably leads into. Ok, we have a hooker/slut culture. The obvious output of such a culture should be a bunch of babies. This doesn't happen because birth control exists. Ergo problem birth control.
We need to remember that birth control is a voluntary choice among at least one of the participants in sexual activity. To get rid of it means we want to substitute intentional choice in offspring for random chance. Which is fine if you are looking for raw numbers, but crappy if you want quality selection and upbringing.
The culture is just like messed up man
Kind of a last ditch psychological warfare against the defenses of the motte. Something is just icky and wrong with the culture. It just feels all wrong. Where is all my sweet strange puss. Why isn't my girl worshiping my hard schlong whenever it happens to get hard. Why aren't enough of my peers acknowledging how awesome and sexy I am.
You are thinking 'hey cjet, don't be an ass', but I'm just typing out thoughts I've had.
I do think there is a basic male urge to have it all. The strange puss, the loving baby maker, the children that look up to you as god, etc. I just also have an economics degree and i realize there are tradeoffs in life. Mostly I am in the "dad" spectrum of tradeoffs right now, with all that entails. Earlier in life I was in the "bachelor" spectrum of tradeoffs and that was fun for a little bit.
There is a philosophical conception of having as many of the nice aspects of tradeoffs as possible all at once. But I'd say that is generally unrealistic for most men. Figure out where you are in life, maybe figure out where you want to be, and adjust life accordingly.
Sieging the motte p3 / Sally forth from the motte
I probably didn't hide it that well. But I do think there are good defenses to the motte in this case of women.
To attack out of the motte, even past the bailey, I think it relies on the uniqueness of women. This goes back to women being human. Women are unique like men. Dumb statement, but also necessary.
Women are among the ultra religious, the ultra slutty, the ultra political, etc. We even shockingly have women that participate in themotte discussions.
I find myself always bothered by themotte discussions on dating. I have an abnormally female contingent of near relatives. One brother one sister. Cousins on my side 8 out of 15 female. Cousins on my wife's side 9 out of 16 female. 3 daughters no sons. 6 nieces, 2 nephews. As closest "grandparents" for my kids, 3 ladies, and one man. Nearest neighbors are a bunch of families with girls and no boys. Some slightly farther neighbors do have boys.
It all comes back to personal experience. I've known many different kinds of women in my life. I'm not a lothario that has dated them all. Simply having a large family has provided a wealth of experience. Any lack of experience there was made up for in the friends I've had over the years.
In general I'd suggest not viewing women as a thing to conquer/trick/subdue. There are intelligent women out there that would make a great partner in your life goals. Especially if those life goals involve family, happiness, well-being.
Adjusting to occupation
Okay the women armies have conquered you, what now? This is an abridged section. I'd like to add more, but its like super late and its been a few too many hours since I started writing.
I think there are significantly different groups of women. Lumping them all into a category is ok if you are going shotgun strategy at a bar. But it us much better if you can learn anything about them beforehand.
I think there are three general axis in modern society for women, and probably for men too. They are also human. But I know more about trying to date women.
Religious/Structured vs anti-religious unstructured
Spiritual/Neurotic vs atheist/rational
Left/Right
Different things will work for you. Different tradeoffs for each. I can think of relationships where one or sometimes two of these are fundamentally at odds but still works. Three off is definitely gonna fail, but probably produce some interesting kids. Speaking of kids, no guarantee they share any of these fundamental axis with you. Good luck raising them, relationship tolerances still apply.
Maybe I was supposed to be positive at some point. Suggest that the war of the sexes will be resolved. or that peace will eventually take over. Nah. That is up to you. There is definitely a trad wife out there for you. I believe that sincerely. You may need to compromise on how trad you want to go (amish anyone?), or how trad she needs to go (maybe she can have a job).
I have helped a few friends find love. I do have a knack for searching and accepting. If you are willing to take help in those directions I am willing to assist. Don't count out your lady friends. Or don't count out your dude bro lovers. I hope for a continuation of humanity via the mingling of genders and the traditional usefulness of penis in vagina cumming.
Feels like an odd thing to end on. But yeah, go humanity.
To quote a line usually attributed to Kissinger: “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.”
Man would know. Mao once jokingly offered the United States ten million Chinese women, and Kissinger responded by proposing to study their “utilization and allocation”. Presented with ten million prospective ABG baddies, the man commissioned a feasibility study. You can take the professor out of Harvard.
His name was also literally Kissing-(h)er. He'd know.
I, as a rule, tend to avoid the gender wars. I have too much sympathy for the opposition. I’m half-woman on my mother’s side.
I am fond of women, as a whole. Their strengths, as a class, seem reasonably complementary to mine. So do the weaknesses. I am sure there are men capable of independently organizing socialization, remembering the kid’s vaccines, and keeping track of the miscellaneous errata that constitute a functional household. Some of them probably even know when their bedsheets were last changed.
Women make this look effortless, at least until they explain, with considerable justification, how much unacknowledged effort goes into making it look effortless.
Look ladies, I open jars. I get you flowers. I work like a donkey to be a good provider. I even come with bad puns. Some might call me emotionally aware, with the usual parenthetical qualification: for a man.
I appreciate that this doesn’t settle who’s booking the dentist.
So you’ll usually find me sitting on the sidelines, sighing, and wishing we could all get along. Or get it on, given this is an age of declining TFRs.
Unfortunately, “have you considered liking each other?” is an inadequate explanation for how we got here. If I had to offer an overarching, semi-evidence-based account, it would go something like this.
First, the economic necessity of a husband has declined.
A woman with her own income, access to contraception, and some institutional support has substantially more scope to remain single than her grandmother did. Marriage can become something she evaluates on its merits. Is this particular man going to make her life better? Does she actually enjoy his company? What is his position on discovering where the laundry basket lives?
What do you offer her over a dildo?
This is quite rough, given that your grandfather’s principal qualification was “has a job”.
There are obvious benefits to being wanted. There are also uncomfortable implications for those of us who might previously have got by on being needed. A man can be perfectly decent and discover that his contribution no longer clears the threshold. He's competing with the life she already has, including her friends, her peace, and so on. Women tend to be happier without a man than vice versa.
Second, a great deal of socialization has migrated online, taking courtship with it.
The American research showing online meetings displacing introductions through friends is real, even if “online” is a broader category than Tinder and America is not the entire planet. Once enough people go somewhere to find partners, everyone else acquires a reason to join them.
Even the conscientious objectors feel the pressure. You might prefer meeting someone through friends, at a party, or during repeated accidental encounters that gradually become less accidental. Unfortunately, your friends are busy, the party is next month, and the attractive stranger has headphones in.
Your phone is right there.
The apps are seductive because the next attempt costs almost nothing. The cumulative experience can cost quite a lot. You can only resist so much solo, if everyone else caves.
They also make certain qualities much easier to evaluate than others. Height photographs well when expressed as a number. A capacity for affection under adverse circumstances requires considerably more demonstration. Being funny helps, but so does having someone around long enough to hear the joke.
A man who becomes attractive after six ordinary conversations may struggle in a venue where he gets half a second.
Third, expectations can adjust more slowly than circumstances.
Women’s educational and professional gains create some awkwardness for an inherited script in which the man is supposed to be at least as accomplished as his partner, preferably a little more so. If you want someone educated, successful, attractive, available, and enthusiastic about you specifically, the intersection can become rather small.
The female doctor and the well-paid electrician may look financially compatible on paper. Whether they meet, share friends, enjoy the same things, and recognize each other as plausible partners is another question. Money, education, and status overlap without being interchangeable. Men participate in this sorting too. Most of us are wonderfully open-minded about dating outside our milieu, provided the opportunity happens to someone else.
None of this requires a conspiracy. A lot of individually understandable preferences can produce unpleasant collective results.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t heavily weight gender-war rhetoric as a guide to what people actually want.
A surprising number of the angriest voices seem perfectly willing to shack up if they meet Mr or Ms Right. Their sweeping denunciation of the opposite sex contains an exemption clause for someone hot who texts back.
I suspect much of it functions as a fashionable costume for status-signaling, or as emotional armour. “I have rejected this entire category of people” feels rather better than “I would quite like one of them to choose me”.
Oh boy.
Call me cynical, but I suspect being 6'3 had something to do with how readily this intervention could be arranged.
Height carries a lot of... uh, weight.
I recognize some of the emotional territory.
My childhood and most of my teenage years were spent rather starved for feminine attention. I was either at an all-boys school or attending extracurricular tuition. There were girls at the latter, but the grind is a harsh mistress.
I spent years bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t getting laid, finding solace mainly in the observation that neither was anyone else in my cohort.
The exceptions were a handful of cool kids from socialite families, apparently operating under a different licensing regime. Everyone else understood that college was where you acquired a reasonable hope of getting poon. If that failed, well, you would eventually get married.
A surprising fraction of Indian men don’t have sex until then. Older research on Indian youth is consistent with premarital sex being far from universal, though self-reports on a taboo subject deserve the usual raised eyebrow. The restrictions apply to women too, of course. Parents tend to loosen the leash once you’re away studying or working, partly because surveillance becomes less feasible.
I remember the angst, the horniness, and the desperation. I remember how much of it subsided once I started having some luck with the ladies.
To this day, I have considerable sympathy for incels in the original, technical sense. It sucks to want a meaningful relationship and be unable to find one. The absence of sex is unpleasant enough. The suspicion that nobody will ever voluntarily make you their person reaches considerably deeper.
Then some well-meaning soul tells you to enjoy being single.
Yeah, thanks buddy. I have the experience, which is why I've avoided it the moment avoidance was an option.
I look at people who struggle and think: there but for the grace of $Deity go I. I could have been dumber, shorter, less funny, less fortunate in where I lived or whom I met. It would be flattering to interpret my eventual success as evidence of outstanding character. I wish.
And then I look at people who seem to have it all, who get laid effortlessly, and grumble to myself.
The cosmic irony of my gay brother being the handsome one is not lost on me. When we went clubbing in the UK, we seemed to attract exclusively feminine attention.
At gay clubs.
Bruh.
The disparity rankled more when I was younger and doing less well. Having experienced both the resentment and its gradual attenuation, I find it difficult to treat the resentment as either incomprehensible or particularly trustworthy.
You can notice a real unfairness and still spend far too much of your life staring at it.
This is where I would advise men to tend to their own. Quite literally.
Working out, getting a better job, dressing presentably, cultivating friendships, and simply putting yourself out there are all rather boring suggestions. They are also things you can actually do. Going on a grand crusade against sexual inequality brings about negative dates.
I understand why self-improvement advice irritates people. It can sound like an assurance that effort will eventually be rewarded, delivered by someone whose reward arrived before he had to test the proposition very seriously.
There are no guarantees. Some people try hard and remain lonely. Some have disadvantages a haircut won’t meaningfully address. They deserve sympathy without first presenting receipts from the gym.
But you still have decisions to make about tomorrow.
You can improve your chances while improving the life you inhabit between attempts. You can become more socially connected, more competent, better dressed, and easier to live with. Those gains remain available even when a particular woman declines to cooperate with your carefully constructed redemption arc.
The global equilibrium is largely beyond your control. Your own contribution is somewhat more tractable.
And I have trouble imagining what winning the gender war would even mean. Everyone becomes sufficiently suspicious and exhausted that they stop bothering? The sexes retreat into separate camps, each enjoying the satisfaction of having correctly identified the other as the problem?
I look at South Korea and feel little enthusiasm for exploring this possibility.
Face it. If you’re going to be k-selected, lean into it.
I use the term loosely. I mean the strategy of becoming a viable long-term partner, finding someone you like who likes you back, and investing heavily in the resulting arrangement.
I’m the product of quite a lot of this. Coached most of my life to be a Good Indian Boy: get into med school, get through med school, get into a specialty. Sex and love be
damnedsecondarytertiary.There were drawbacks to this upbringing. I have mentioned the horniness.
But I think it has worked out for me. I didn’t need the comfortable backup of an arranged marriage, and I appreciate that most people reading this don’t have that option. I also benefited from luck, including the sort you only recognize after meeting someone whose presence makes your earlier disappointments feel less consequential.
It really does take one lady you like, who likes you back. Then you bump uglies.
You can still notice the men with better cheekbones, the easier lives, the apparent abundance. I certainly do. But having someone whose company you actively want makes the rankings considerably less urgent. There are flowers to buy. Someone needs to book the dentist. With luck, there will also be some bumping of uglies.
So try some self-improvement. Give other people repeated opportunities to discover that you’re good company. If that doesn’t work, we can drink some pity beers together. I mean that sincerely.
Otherwise, I would like people to chill the fuck out a little. Enough of this battle takes place in your head that it is worth inspecting who keeps sending in reinforcements.
This is not a script, right, but a built in preference of women - like the equivalent of men liking well endowed 22 year olds? Is there any society in which women don’t go for men of higher social status or means, however that may be defined? I don’t know the answer, but it does seem that social status is really low on the list for men, and that elevating the earnings and educational outcome of women above men made a large swath of the population undatable.
Men do seem to care about the social status of their partners. Women care a little bit more, but it's not like height where many to most men see it as an irrelevancy and most women have strong preferences(although this preference is for 'taller than her' rather than 'being 6'3' and- gentlemen- cowboy boots are cool right now, you can add two inches for $200 with significant resale value and they never wear out).
For me(n?), status only matters to the extent its a signal of shared experience/interests and a baseline level of maturity (is she going to want to go to museums or discuss interesting books with me? Will she tank the family finances with irresponsible spending? Will she be able to help our children with their homework?). Social status only matters in itself at the extremes (I'm not bringing a stripper to meet my parents), and in that I have a slight aversion to dating someone who makes substantially more than me (I work at a non-profit, so I've made my peace with the possibility of being slightly outearned, couldn't abide a situation where I felt financially dependent). If anything, her father's social status is more important, because it speaks to how she was raised and how she likely intends to raise our children, as well as what her expectations are for me.
Elementary school teacher is the single most attractive profession for a woman, in my opinion. It's a respectable middle class career, not highly remunerative or prestigious, but strongly signalling an affinity for and skill working with young children, as well as with hours/benefits ideally suited for raising children if she chooses to continue working after starting a family. A "high status" job like doctor or lawyer is slightly unattractive, because it sends opposite signals. I'm not looking for someone to help finance expensive vacations or get me into exclusive parties, I'm looking for someone who I enjoy spending time with and who will be a good mother, which if anything slightly anti-correlates with a high status career.
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