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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?).
Reality is not a morality play, it's perfectly possible for someone to vocally endorse the optimal strategy and yet have it fail them (or him fail it).
The benefits of low hanging fruit like working out, good grooming and fashion are so blatantly obvious that one man's failures do not derail them. I'm sure the author doesn't hold Jordan as the sole argument, but I still can't see it being true.
Scott drew attention to a semi-serious analogue to micromorts, micromarriages, as in an action that has a 1/millionth chance of getting you married. I posit that it's obvious that microfucks are a useful concept too, and that while you any individual act of self improvement cannot be guaranteed to lead to getting laid, they tend to add up over time if you're being diligent.
Handsome people are already born with a lot of (micro)fucks to give, but for the rest of us, we have to work to earn them. Very little guarantees getting laid, short of paying for it in cold hard cash, but it's still worth trying.
In my reply to Cjet, I elaborated on why, despite being significantly above average (at least compared to my peers), I have immense sympathy for incels and incel-adjacent people.
Others have already pointed out that women tend to prefer older men, at least in the age range when men are still desperately horny.
Firstly, you have to at least try at the "improvement" category. Go to the gym, dress better, get a nice haircut.
If you're extremely unlucky, then yes, this may not suffice, but I feel no qualms about endorsing it in general.
You are far less likely to improve things like height/intelligence/charisma. Some of that isn't outright impossible, since you can always do limb lengthening or keep on hitting the field till you brute force a pickup strategy that works. It's simply not productive.
That being said, it really is a numbers game. If you never try you'll never know, and modern men have a degree of shame and fear that is blatantly counterproductive when you don't have to live in a tribe with the same dozen women your entire life, who gossip about your pitiful failure to court them all. Hit on women goddammit!
Finally, avoid the apps, unless you're in the lucky 10% who get all the goods, in which case my advice isn't for you. For the majority of men, it's a painful, soul sucking process that only dents your self-esteem.
I am unusually good at both in-person flirtation and sliding into DMs, but the advice is still true for the average man. Women are far less picky face to face, and you get far more than a fleeting moment of her attention.
That about sums it up when it comes to general purpose advice, everything else must be tailored to your individual needs.
Addendum:
I'm not being facetious, but my (sweet and loving) girlfriend was looking over my shoulder while I write this post (of all the hundreds I've written lately!).
She would like to make the following statements, written by her own hand on my phone:
Do not listen to anything he said. Doesn't apply to most women. If I slide into her DM, don't expect to get anywhere. My boyfriend vastly overestimates his prowess in the matter of flirtation. He is a very nice man, and that is the 1sf and most important thing g. Women have a radar in detecting fake vs real. I was the one who asked him out, yes that does happen, but it was not because of the flirtatious attitude. Tbh, It was painful. Be yourself. Not everyone is suited to everyone. I can assure you, I like him way before he started flirting. Cause I thought we had a genuine connection and I cud talk to him. That is what we want I the end, someone to talk to, make a life with. Had I not liked him before, his flirting wud have been construed as creepy. So, find out what u like in a woman, and stick to that. Don't slide into peoples dm'z. I assure u, that is a full proof way of getting blocked.
Addendum to the addendum:
Thank you sweetie, of course you're right :*
(Quick, she's looking away!)
Ahem, I would like to add another point to my list of general advice.
Do not take dating advice from women.
I was actually the one who started flirting with her weeks before she even noticed, even if she was the one to ask me out on a date and the one who pulled me in for a kiss. Her mom called me handsome the day the two of them first saw me 😉
That's about it, I don't want to get too saccharine haha.
This is wrong I think. The apps truly are a painful, soul crushing experience. But if you are not very picky they will give you the chance to very quickly practice pitching to women. And there are few things that motivate sticking to the gym more than hour after hour of hard rejection.
Genuinely awful advice. Women have no such radar and that they think they do it very bad for them.
Sure, if you want to use them as training, they work fine, but unless you're already so gifted you don't need any advice, you won't be getting much in the way of dates out of them!
As much as I love her, she, like most women, has little insight into why she likes the things she likes in the realm of courtship.
It does get mildly aggravating when some of them well-intentionedly give advice that might be accepted by naive men, who think that surely words straight from the horse's mouth are of any help when you're trying to ride it.
If you're willing to spend the untold hours I believe practically anyone can at the very least get a match that will respond occasionally and eventually set up at least one coffee date. We're talking many hours here - thousands and thousands of miserable swipes. It worked for me, and the pretty tangible increase in hit-rate as the gym slowly paid its iron dividend gave me a latter I could feel.
It's very striking how bad the advice tends to be and it has caused me to introspect on the advice I give to women about men. I now try to keep my commentary to simpler things and be extra critical of any opinion that could be subconsciously trying to frame male behavior as pro-social. That said, unlike with women society at large is already pretty suspicious of male behavior.
As far as I've seen, men are far less likely to unsolicitedly give such advice to women, though I have no strong opinion on how good that advice would be if they did give it.
I think people, men included, give advice to women about men. Just probably not of the "how do I even get them interested in me" variety. My Fiance's sister is starting college in the fall and I gave advice to her today about how to be careful at parties.
Well I'd say that I don't think men do a bad job in that regard, from what I've seen.
I was more focused on the advice to women about how women should get the men they like category myself.
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