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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.
I have seen men get accused of being immoral for complaining about and criticizing women online, but I do not think that I ever have seen a man get accused of being immoral just for not doing well with women.
What makes you think that economically successful but sexually unsuccessful men are being routinely suspected of lacking in moral virtue?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/
Admittedly our culture has moved on from this specific discourse, but in 2013-4 the "Nice Guy™" debate was all the rage. The essence of the debate was intelligent, gainfully employed but nerdy men complaining about being unsuccessful with women, sometimes for the claimed reason that they are "too nice" or "women don't go for nice guys". In some cases the claim was a bit hard to take seriously ("fuck u u dumb whore ur ugly anyway") but in other cases the lonely men in question gave every indication of being kind-hearted individuals who treated men and women alike with unshakeable respect and decency.
The stock retort from feminists in this era was "of course women go for nice guys. If they went for assholes they'd be all over you", an argument which still occasionally gets trotted out as recently as this year on this very site. Note what this framing implies: that if a man is romantically unsuccessful with women and has the temerity to feel even a little bit upset or frustrated by this, he must be a bad person i.e. exactly what the OP is talking about. This was a key tenet of internet/nerd feminism for years.
Hmm. Around that time I simply concluded that what the disability theorists called desexualization didn't just apply to visibly disabled or deformed people but also to very low-status or unattractive ones as well, and that the RtR crap was just one more kind of desexualization: how dare you even want sex or relationships: know your place. Now. This applies to unattractive women just as well, it just manifests differently.
RtR?
Radicalizing the Romanceless
Oh durr, thanks
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