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Earlier this year, the Swedish publisher Natur och Kultur released a new book discussing the rise of male sexlessness by the name of “Man går sin egen väg: riktningar i sexlöshetens dimma.” The title is an untranslatable pun on the Swedish word “man” which means both man as in “a man” and “one” as in “one does not simply walk into Mordor.” Rough translation: "Going your own way: directions in fog of sexlessness." The topic is one in which I am both deeply interested and deeply invested (the same way one might be invested in curing a debilitating disease) in, so I thought I’d relay the content to the Motte. Here's a link to the book if you want to check it out: https://www.nok.se/titlar/laromedel-b2/man-gar-sin-egen-vag-92ad4e66/a2ada8af-b732-488d-8a0e-937d6558b675
First off, the book does a good job of giving a concise overview of the situation for young men and forces at play. If you’re at all familiar with the ideas contained within, e.g, The Selfish Gene, these thoughts will hardly be mind-blowing, but it’s refreshing to see someone approach them with frankness in popular science/sociology. (Though if you’re unfamiliar here’s a good link to an interesting study https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/12/health/young-americans-less-sex-intl-scli-wellness/index.html).
The author also commendably takes a refreshingly global view of the problem, and has a lot of interesting facts from Japan and India which shed light on the broader dynamics of the sexual marketplace. For example, many of you might know that Tinder in the West has a verification feature for your face: take a selfie and prove you’re really you, and you get a little checkmark! Apparently, a Japanese online dating has adopted a similar feature - but for salaries. That’s right, just send a picture of your payslip and you get a checkmark letting all the women know you’re not horsing around with your six figure income. I don’t know if I should applaud the Japanese for their honesty, or deride them as crass. Maybe both.
Beyond that the book doesn’t have much new data to offer. The exact extent of the problem is difficult to assess given it relies largely on self-reporting, and the causes are equally difficult to pin down (though in India and China the uneven gender ratio is an obvious culprit, and the broader trend is also clear). Internet porn, Metoo, men being outcompeted in academia, rising obesity and women gaining status and increasing independence are all suspects, but the exact extent of their involvement in the conspiracy remains unclear.
The author doesn’t dwell on this. The book is more interested in categorizing and understanding the male response to sexlessness than in explaining the root causes: and it actually does a pretty good job of creating a frame to discuss and understand the problem on an individual level. The idea is that men without sexual success have four different strategies at their disposal (or copes if you want to use incel lingo) when faced with want of sexual success, namely
Folding: what it sounds like. the core of this strategy is simply giving up on ever really wooing a woman to whom you’re attracted, and doing something else instead. There are many variants but at its center this strategy is about recognizing that “it’s over” and trying to scratch the sexual itch with other and perhaps more attainable pursuits.
Fraud: unsatisfied with simply surrendering, some men instead turn to various forms of deception in order to overcome their predicament. This similarly diverse group includes pick-up artists and various other fraudsters who rely primarily on manipulation. The common denominator for this strategy is insincerity: the whole point is to trick, nag or fool women into sleeping with you rather than convincing them by improving the package on offer. Nowadays I see few “red pill”-folk proclaiming that all you need to do is learn to neg women correctly in order to get laid. Probably this way of doing things didn’t work very well to begin with, and the realization has set in.
Resentment: you already know this one. This is the strategy of Elliot Rodger, the violent rebellion of Cain against an uncaring God. Though seldom taken to its logical conclusion, this response has gotten a disproportionate amount of media attention since it often involves violence and hatred towards women. The attention paid to the worst of the incels have clouded the fact that many feel negative emotions affter rejection.
Improvement: Lastly, we have the most intuitive strategy. If no one wants to buy what you're selling, improve your product! The author neatly exemplifies this strategy with the cult of JBP and “12 Rules for Life”, and I think the connection between sexlessness and the rise of anxious self-improvement is fairly natural. Keep in mind there are many different ways to improve the odds. Improvement can also involve throwing a wider net, and doing other activities to improve not yourself but the general chances of attracting a mate.
This is by far the most optimistic and pro-social strategy, and it’s the overwhelmingly most common reply when men complain of sexlessness. Just get stronger, wealthier, cooler and smoother, and you will start to see success. If you’re a semi-nerdy intellectual guy – and if I understand the demographics here correctly you probably are – you’ve heard this one many times, I’ll bet.
Nevertheless, it’s evident the author himself is skeptical. He spends a lengthy section of the book detailing how JBP himself collapsed into a highly dysfunctional and disorganized existence. If you don’t have Tinder and never go outside you’ve got some low-hanging fruit to pick, but what if you have Tinder and you go outside, but still fail? In the end the book seems to purport that, whatever it is that causes women to reject a certain man en masse, it is quite difficult to change.
Summary
All the categories above represent extremes, and inescapably simplify complex human behavior. The book is well-aware of this, and makes a big point of emphasizing that most men employ a decidedly mixed strategy when faced with female rejection. After a particularly long dry spell the average man is more likely to spend some more time with other pursuits (folding), edit his photos to make them more attractive (fraud), vent his frustration to friends over a beer (revenge) and slowly build wealth and status (improvement) rather than going all-in on any one extreme.
Another point the book makes, which I mentioned before, is that no strategy really seems to pay clear and great dividends (though one is clearly worse than all the others). The book never says it out loud, but the data and the narrative it presents appears to hint that the only correct move in this sordid game is to not become sexless to start with. I think this might be correct. Constantly getting rejected by all women you consider attractive is something most men consider very, very bad, and for good reason. In evolutionary terms that form of harsh sexlessness is a strong signal that something is going terribly awry, and we should expect most young men to react very strongly if they were told, right now, that they’d barely have sex in their life.
Last but not least, I have a few closing remarks regarding the different strategies, and on the broader problem with male sexlessness.
To start with, I think folding is by far the weakest approach to the problem. In another type of society ignoring your sexual desire and doing something else might be workable as a last resort, but in a modern welfare state it is for many reasons a humiliating and degrading proposal. It’s well-known that women (at least in Europe) receive far more money from the state through welfare, maternity care and health care than they pay in tax, and that means all tax-paying men inevitably support women with their hard work. This has far-reaching implications. To put it bluntly: if you spend your entire working life as a man giving desirable young women your money while other men fuck their brains out, what does that make you?
The simple fact of the matter is that most men have no way to cut women out of their life entirely. What opting out really means is accepting all the drawbacks of having a girlfriend without any of the benefits. That’s barely even a strategy: it is more of an unconditional surrender than an attempt to actually handle the situation. Maybe I need to look at more OkCupid statistics to really get how “over” it is for most men, but the profound despair hidden in this sort of response does not appeal to me. I’d rather rage against the dying of the light than quietly accept defeat.
Improvement is the other strategy which deserves a response; and my response is that I’m far from convinced. The few instances in which I’ve had success with women have had an almost random quality to them, and have been seemingly unrelated to any obvious self-improvement project. Lately I’ve greatly improved both my wealth and general status, and yet success has been sorely lacking.
Frankly, if you’re having trouble with women as a young man – and I speak as a young man who has had much trouble with women – the problem is likely to get worse with age. It seems likely that for every step you take forward in self-improvement you will take another two steps back through aging. Another weakness in this strategy is that if you’ve gone without sex for several years then, well, that’s several years without sex. You are not getting those back! Dwelling on the past is never good, but I am unsure if investing large resources in order to marry 30 year old woman who would have rejected you if she was 20 is a sound or sustainable way to move forward.
Last but not least, a question to open further discussion: what is the optimal strategy, both in general and in more detail (i.e. should you improve, and what aspect of yourself or your dating approach is most fruitful to improve?).
When did you start pursuing women?
I started basically as soon as puberty hit, when I was about 12. It was another 5 years before I had sex.
Having sex at 17 isn't so bad, certainly felt like forever at the time. It was another 5 years and two girlfriends later before I could reliably have sex with new women after just a few dates. It was about a year of me being a bit of a manwhore before I met my now wife and settled down.
It took me about ten years and usually 40+ hours a week of dedicated practice to get good at it. I broke 6 figures in pay at a job faster than I broke into chadhood (and a very mediocre chadhood too, I've had only 20-30 sexual partners, but I was always a little more interested in long term relationships than just sex).
Being able to have sex with willing women is the most difficult thing most men will accomplish in their lives. And I think most of them have only managed it by sheer dogged determination.
And this is fine. Because on the other side of this endeavor is women, and they have at steak the most difficult thing most women will ever do: raise a kid.
Yes birth control exists, but it hasn't sunk into our evolutionarily thickened skulls. And why should it? Raising a kid is still at stake in the modern world. A woman wasting three years dating a loser might mean some prime fertility years are lost.
Improvement is the only option. The progress won't be fast, and it probably won't even be slow. It will be glacial. Circumstances and luck will always play a role, and the best you will ever do is to tilt luck in your favor. At best you might raise a 1% chance to a 5% chance. So instead of striking out 99 times you only strike out 19.
I'm running out of good advice to give to young men, and coming back to the one thing that I think made me successful: I was relentlessly horny and wanted nothing more than willing sex with attractive women. It was only once I got there that my fog finally cleared from my mind. I realized i wanted more (and needed more) after i obtained the goal.
Out of curiosity, is the picture in your profile you IRL?
I would call myself someone with modest but certainly above average success with the ladies, I don't know the exact percentile value, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number of partners I've had at this point in time put me in the 90th percentile for Indian men, even if in absolute terms they're an OOM lower. India is a rather sexless country after all, and a great number of perfectly average men (and women) don't get laid till they're packed off to an arranged marriage.
I certainly suffered from severe horniness as a teen, largely fruitlessly, but in my defense very few Indian teens hit third base, let alone get laid.
It took until I was in med school for things to change, something I'd certainly classify under "improvement", since it indisputably increased my status.
And since I've spent the majority of the last 7-8 years in a longterm relationship of some description, I count myself comfortably well off. While I wouldn't sniff at more ONSs, they're so difficult to get unless you're a 99th percentile dude here it's a bad standard to hold one's self too.
As such, while I wouldn't go as far as to call myself a Chad, I'm certainly further on that end of the spectrum than the other. I still have immense sympathy for incels/average dudes, because I had to deal with raging, all consuming libido for years, and still had dry spells afterwards. I look at the latter, and think "there but for for the grace of God go I". The Chads (and women) simply don't understand what torture that is, how corrosive it can be to your self esteem, even if most of your peers are in similar straits.
Agreed, you have only yourself to blame it you don't at least make an effort. I'm sure there are some poor buggers so cursed by genetics that they still can't get anyone to sleep with them, but the advice is sound for the average man who isn't getting laid much if at all.
Much the same, albeit those trysts usually ended up in relationships. I find myself immensely more successful through IRL approaches than the apps, though I have successfully slid into DMs and charmed panties off. This is likely true for most men, since Tinder and the like are all-you-can-eat buffets for women with 10% of the men getting 90% of the attention, and being hypergamous enough to satiate the needs of the majority of women.
I used to be highly envious of my brother, who got all the handsome genes, and I gape at how asexual he is despite the oodles of female attention he receives. It makes me mildly yet irrationally angry, I want to shake him by the neck and act like a 90s suburban mom telling him that he's doing the equivalent of throwing away his food while orphans starve in Africa. But at the end of the day, he's not hungry, so good for him. I wouldn't wish the curse of male libido on my worst enemy, even if I don't want to remove it (or, I would, if there was an simply, temporary pill without real side effects that did so, instead of the only real options being castration of the physical or chemical nature).
I myself, which distinctly average in the facial department (4-5 if I'm not putting effort in, maybe a low 7 if I am, going by a normal distribution of attractiveness instead of the typical right skew), but every day I thank myself for being tall, intelligent and charming with a deep voice. I appreciate and count the chickens that did hatch, because I see a lot of poor bastards pecking in the manure pile to this day.
Yes, that is me, in India actually. Random museum in Dehli, some back room had that portrait.
That pill is a low dose SSRI. I've had some mild depression my whole post pubescent life. Never really treated it until I met my wife and was planning to settle down. I thought I always had a low level of background unhappiness because I wasn't getting the amount of sex I wanted, or sex with the type of woman I wanted. Once I had that covered and still felt depressed I realized it was something more. It took me from like 9/10 libido to a 6/10 libido. Which is still higher than my wife who is probably like a 3 or 4. I don't know if it would have been a good idea to take it in highschool.
I feel the exact same way. By all metrics I am currently successful. But it certainly felt like it took a long ass time to get there and I was pretty miserable that whole time. I think it is quite likely that I was even viewed as one of those "chads" that just effortlessly got women. People mostly stopped saying things like that because I got unexplainably angry at what they thought was a compliment. No! It wasn't effortless, that was a decade of my life I spent getting good at that! And I was miserable the whole time I was learning! (okay that last one is obviously a lie, there were some fun moments of temporary success)
So you were a depressed teenager, had a grueling ten years, and were still depressed after achieving the socially approved goal. Then you got older, took a pill, settled down, and it got better. Isn’t the obvious conclusion that the aggressive pursuit of sex with women (as opposed to jerking off) was a waste of your time/actively harming you?
Achieving the socially approved goal may have been necessary but not sufficient for the above poster to overcome his depression.
If you replace ‘achieving frequent sex with various women’ with ‘climbing mount everest’ in the story, I don’t think that points to climbing mount everest being necessary but not sufficient to overcome his depression.
A prediction (‘My depression is the result of my "sexual failure", therefore fixing the latter will fix the the former’) was made, acted upon at great cost, and was falsified.
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