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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Time for some good old fashioned gender politics seethe:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/11of65g/i_21m_asked_my_friend_21f_to_be_fwb_and_now_she/?sort=confidence

A clearly very socially awkward nerdy literal virgin (despite being 21 years old) guy thinks a cute girl in his study group is flirting with him. He takes her aside privately after a study session and asks her… does she want to be his FWB (friends with benefits)? He reasons that he wants to have fun like many young men and isn’t looking for a relationship right now.

The girl is shocked and taken aback. She turns him down flat and appears uncomfortable. He feels uncomfortable too and apologizes to her and leaves.

Over the next few weeks, she doesn’t say anything to him at study sessions. He tries to make contact again, not to proposition her, but just to resume their friendly acquaintanceship. She tells him directly that she doesn’t want to speak to him. He is hurt but understands and leaves her be. Soon enough, he learns that she has told her friends and extended social circle what happened, and he is widely reviled as a creep. He feels hurt and violated. He laments that he has lost a friend, and now feels like he’s being lambasted for an innocent error, and he wishes the whole thing would just end and go away.

My take on OP is sympathetic. He comes off as extremely awkward and clearly isn’t well versed in the endless myriad of opaque and seemingly contradictory rules of modern dating. He wanted an FWB, and he didn’t understand that the socially acceptable way to get one is to ask a girl out on a date (usually through Tinder), then hook up with her, then either stay as vague as possible for as long as possible about your intentions while continuing to periodically fuck, or to sort of half way shrug after a fuck session and say, “yeah, I’m just really not looking for anything serious right now.” OP genuinely thought he was being upfront and honest with another person, and assumed that he was proposing something mutually beneficial.

Yes, it’s not a good idea to outright proposition a girl to be an FWB in a library. It’s awkward and weird and I can see how it made her feel uncomfortable. But all signs point to OP making an innocent error. He didn’t know any better. When he became aware of his mistake, he immediately apologized, gave the offended party space, and only later attempted to reestablish contact in a friendly, non-threatening manner. He made an innocent mistake and responded in the best possible way.

And Reddit’s response to OP is… calling him a massive piece of shit in every conceivable way.

What I find interesting about the overwhelming criticisms of OP is that they split in two completely opposite directions, but seemingly from the same critics.

On the one hand, OP is relentlessly slut shamed. He is accused of treating this woman like a “flesh light,” of feeling “entitled” to sex, of creepily trying to fuck an acquaintance, of pursuing sex with a girl instead of trying to date thine lady like a proper Victorian gentleman.

On the other hand, OP is relentlessly virgin shamed. He’s an incel, a fool, a creepy moron. He’s daring to try to have casual sex when he hasn’t even lost his virginity because he is SUCH A MASSIVE FUCKING LOSER. OP doesn’t understand that casual sex is only for chads who have fucked a bunch of girls, FWBs are an unlockable perk, not a privilege of the sexually unworthy.

Fortunately, there is a minority of Reddit commenters backing OP up, but it is a small minority. Meanwhile, many more posters are saying that OP is well on the way to becoming an incel or Andrew Tate fan, and unfortunately, they’re right, just not in the way they think they are.

I don’t have a larger point for this post, only that it’s incredibly frustrating that a significant portion of mainstream culture has erected these standards for the dating marketplace where one false step not only does, but should result in social and moral annihilation.

Quoting my favorite Scott article,

"How could such a smart guy make such a stupid mistake? My guess: the Soviet government didn’t officially say “We will kill anyone who criticizes us”. They officially said “Comrade Stalin loves freedom and welcomes criticism from his fellow citizens”, and you had to have some basic level of cynicism and social competence to figure out that wasn’t true."

Now of course, dating advice isn't Stalin-era Soviet academia, but it is absolutely an adversarial information environment. If you're a 20-year-old dude and you see the top comment in a Reddit advice thread saying, "Tee-hee, just ask us. Girls like sex as much as guys do.😊" and then you take this literally and use your own sex-drive as a baseline to model the mental state of women you might be attracted to, you are going to end up like poor little OP here. You have to be smart enough to know immediately that this is obvious bullshit even though you still don't know what the correct answer is. You have to notice things like:

  • You see a lot of men trying and failing to get laid, but almost never see women trying and failing to get laid.

  • The overwhelming amount of porn is geared towards men.

  • There seems to be a whole lot of anger and vitriol on places like /r/creepyPMs towards guys who do in fact just ask.

Now, most guys don't end up like OP. It's not that hard to figure out some upper bound on how creepy and assertive you can be, below which you can be sure not to suffer social embarrassment (or worse). The main issue is that many men (myself included) will adopt the "never initiate a conversation with a woman IRL about anything except academic or professional topics," rule.

I'm fascinated by how the 'male looking to [dm]ate female' information environment became so over-the-top noisy and downright adversarial.

My theory is that;

  1. The lack of granularity in information. What should be a flowchart/decision tree based on features such as 'self attractiveness',' target attractiveness',' self social skills',' target social status', 'target flirting ambiguity', etc? (I've conjectured in the past that if a dataset such as this existed, modeling it would be trivial using a tree-based model.) Is just flattened down to lower dimensions and your end up with a shitty model.

  2. Wrong people giving advice: "You don't ask a fish how to catch it, you ask a master fisherman". That statement is absolutely on the mark. Women have 0 idea on how to attract women and you should just about never take their advice (The statement is always preemptively prompted with "the proposer is prince charming"). Having spoken about this with male friends who span the gamut of body counts, I have noticed that only average looking men with very very high body counts (>30) have any useful advice at all (controlled for confounders). At least pre tinder you didn't achieve that high a body count without being physically attractive AND having game, with OLD you can get away with shitty game if attractive enough.

    Moreover, everyone chimes into the conversation because there is some universal aspect to attracting a mate, so you get people who are just bad at articulating things shitting up the space even further and the entire circus along with it.

  3. Gynocentricism. Certain dating advice that will actually work might paint women in a negative moral light. This is verboten in the same way implying that black people have weaknesses as a group is just about verboten. Women's true preferences must not ever be discussed and you will be called an INCEL if you point that out, you must tow the party line that height/looks/wealth has nothing to do with it and its all about a lack of body odour and pErSoNalItY (Seriously, this is the most damning plot I have ever seen, and it doesn't get brought up enough, but it is seriously eye opening, my lying eyes tell me R >= 0.95, the perfect proxy variable, you tell me which is the cause and which is the effect).

    I'm not sure what the mechanisms for this are, perhaps just simple ingroup outgroup dynamics? I would posit that given women are the gatekeepers of sex, any line of actions that short-circuits the expected mating ritual is seen as the equivalent of the dark arts?

Another one is that the women who give out dating advice or write about relationships (and thus who's opinions you see in online discourse) are either useless or non-representative:

1.way inside the basic normie female bubble. Cosmo-tier advice.

  1. Extremely online and ideological (or cynical). Giving Dating Advice is really just them finding a soapbox to talk about how Men Need to Do XYZ. Often it's tuned to attract clicks, not to be useful to anyone, male or female.

  2. Extremely online and incredibly anxious and atypical, (and also ideological). Girls who think dating game begins and ends with avoiding being raped.