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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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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.

Because men are assumed to be the ones who have agency in this regard. Men act, women are. And therefore if something goes wrong it’s men’s fault.

Adding to that that many people, especially women, have experience with men whose approach to dating is morally undesirable, but no experience with men who are unsuccessful at dating for some orthogonal reason. Yes, men with morally undesirable approaches to dating are generally doing OK for themselves romantically, but that’s often what women have to go off of.

As for OP, there are many women in the Philippines and Ukraine who would be happy to have you.

To be blunt, a lot of men in the past who were just average guys with average jobs got married mainly because women had little to no choice but to settle for a guy in order to be economically secure. They had decent marriages, nobody expected a grand love affair or swinging from the chandelier sex lives, they got on okay, had families, lived together in old age. It wasn't fantastic, it wasn't awful, it was just how things were. So long as he didn't beat you, didn't drink, didn't run around with other women and brought home the money to run the household, what more did you want? And for the men, so long as she kept the house, was a good mother, and did her marital duty in the bedroom, what more did you expect?

People have much more inflated expectations, and much more choice, nowadays. Women can have jobs and support themselves and generally don't need to marry in order to survive. Men expect the swinging single lifestyle of sexual exploration when they're young, to have plenty of choice and plenty of opportunity, until they're ready to settle down. Women expect to have the same sexual opportunity as men. Somebody's going to be disappointed.