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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.

I also feel bad for the reddit OP, but I think it's important to put this in context.

What we're essentially witnessing here is the equivalent of someone who's 85 IQ, but specifically in the domain of social skills rather than general cognitive ability. Do 85 IQ people tend to have good economic outcomes in today's society? No. Increasingly, anyone who doesn't have the intelligence needed to be an engineer or a software developer will be forced to work shit jobs for shit pay, and they'll be pushed into the bottom rung of a class hierarchy that is becoming increasingly stratified. Does anyone actually care that low IQ people are losing out, aside from the low IQ people themselves? Clearly not. You'll get empty political gestures towards "teaching coal miners how to code", but ultimately society makes few affordances to try to make things more equitable.

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.

Society has always annihilated people over stupid shit. Try telling people in your small village in the middle ages that you don't believe in God, or try telling people in China during the Cultural Revolution that you support capitalism. Honesty has never been the best policy.

My point is that humans are assholes who are generally indifferent to the suffering of others, unless it's suffering along some particular axis that they personally identify with. The lack of sympathy for awkward sexless males is just one special case of this broader phenomenon. Social media has exacerbated people's worst traits, but it certainly did not create them.

People with 85 IQ cannot learn to be high IQ. People with "85 IQ in social skills" can, so IQ is not really a good way to describe it.

Also, society is not happy with shaming people for actually having 85 IQ.

Also, society is not happy with shaming people for actually having 85 IQ.

I don't know, I see that being the go-to insult for people on both the left and the right when wanting to denigrate their opponents. Remember all the "Republicans are dumb, science proves it" stories gleefully passed around about Democrats being more highly educated?

And I myself have seen some of the fine folks who comment on this very site casually referring to "IQ 85 normies" and the like.

This seems analogous to people using "virgin" or "incel" as an insult. When someone actually meets a literal virgin or incel (that is male above a certain age, etc.), I think the antipathy remains. When Democrats who call Republicans stupid meet someone who is literally 85 IQ with the documentation to prove it, do they also keep the antipathy? I'd guess that whatever antipathy remains is lessened, if anything, by the knowledge of their IQ.