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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.

The actual reality is the Sex Recession was either something made up out of bad data, a temporary drop mostly due to women being more worried about COVID than men, especially among single people under 30, or was left-leaning women being more wary of "non-political men" and those men learning how to better sell themselves.

Why do I say this? Because according to the same data people used to write one zillion Hot Takes about how online dating has destroyed young men's ability to get laid, everything is fine - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyOlWt9aUAAYZsd?format=png&name=small

We're back to the only guys not getting laid actually being probably the guys who were never getting laid. Or maybe the incels aged out, and Gen Z, born into dating apps, know how to deal with them better as they enter adulthood.

I suspect it's end is bad data/ change in definitions.

People are fatter than ever. Then there's porn.

It'd be helpful to look at hard data on venereal diseases / STDs, to the extent it is even publicly available. If the sex recession is real, and I'm convinced it is, the data should show the following:

  1. A small minority of single men carry a large number of STDs simultaneously.

  2. A large majority of single men do not, and have never carried any STD.

  3. Regarding STD rates, the variance among single women is much lower than among single men.

  4. On average, single women are more likely to be infected than single men, and if infected, are more likely to carry multiple infections than single men.

PiV sex is nowhere near as risky as anal sex.

I believe condom use is quite frequent among this demographic.

What exactly does anal have anything to do with this?

That someone who has a lot of sex doesn't necessarily imply a high rate of STDs.

Not necessarily indeed, but the causation is undoubtedly there. If you're a hetero man, you'll only be infected if you have sex with multiple women, or if your sole sexual partner is having sex with other men.