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Notes -
A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.
People like to believe that the world is fair and just; this is why the gambler's fallacy exists, this is why the concept of karma exists. The idea that someone can do nothing wrong and still fail through sheer luck is abhorrent to most people, so they will grasp for a reason as to why the failure is actually justified, up to and including inventing things as necessary to preserve their belief in fairness. If a perfectly fine young man can't attract a date, there must be SOMETHING wrong with him, it can't be that the world is simply arbitrary and unfair, that would be too painful a world to live in.
Among the people who are most likely to say this also, ostensibly, believe that the world is dominated by a white heternormative patriarchal tyranny, or something like that. They claim to believe the world is deeply unfair and they relish pointing out this unfairness everywhere, even when it makes no sense.
But even this "unjust" world is ultimately just in their belief system. Otherwise the concept of being "on the right side of history" would be incoherent. The good guys are destined to prevail in their eschatology.
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Right, and to acknowledge that the world is deeply unfair even for many straight white males would cause their worldview to crumble.
When women, people of colour etc. don't get what they want out of life, that's because of sexism, racism, bigotry, transphobia and so on. When a straight white male doesn't get what he wants out of life? Well, if even the white cisheteropatriarchy doesn't think much of him, he must not deserve it.
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