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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.

Relevant recent comment:

it’s fairly well-accepted that men, for the most part, are thirsty coomers who will take what they can get. A lot of men will readily admit that they’re weak for female youth and beauty, and it’s morally agnostic just like how apples fall from trees. They don’t pretend their preferences have some sort of moral underpinning.

In contrast is the mainstream view that women are Wonderful, and that women’s attraction for men are but moral litmus tests for men who have the “correct” attitudes and behaviors, a view that in mainstream and online discourse many men will whiteknight and women will fight tooth and nail to protect and insist. It’s evergreen Just World insistence.

It's no surprise that sayings such as "you don't ask a fish how to fish, you ask fishermen" have been gaining ground. A few more thoughts:

  • The Women are Wonderful effect, Just World fallacy, with a touch of tautology. Only men with the “correct” values and behaviors are attractive to women, as women are only attracted to men with the “correct” values and behavior.

  • Control. It reinforces the status of women as social and moral arbiters. Coincidentally, the “correct” values and behaviors of men are also those that just so happen to benefit women (often at great personal cost to the men themselves) and abide by mainstream progressive norms: Being just as eager to wife-up women who’ve “had their fun” just as they would virgins, women who are single or divorced mothers (Real Men don’t care about biology) just as childless women, tattooed women just as tattoo-less women, “plus-sized” women just as slim women, old women just as young women. In “mistaken” paternity events (which totally don’t happen by the way, but when they do it’s because you stupid men deserve it), men shouldn’t punish the children and should continue to raise the children (because the biology of it doesn’t matter, as mentioned).

  • Virtue signaling. If I’m a mid-male who gets tepid once-in-a-month sex with my mid, aging wife who’s already had her fun and is weirdly protective of her phone, at least I can lord my greater morality over you in that I have the “correct” values and behavior and you don’t. If I’m a woman, let me deign to descend from my pedestal to educate you on reasons why you and your icky incel morals suck.

God Almighty, Sloot, reading your view of what women are like and why won't the bitches just open their legs for any guy without strings attached except and until the guy wants to marry a virgin after he's had his fun, it makes me want to introduce mandatory castration for all men, and I generally like men. I want them to be romantically and sexually successful! I want those who want romantic relationships to be able to have them!

What the fuck is it about sex that makes humans crazy?

  • -13

FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.

I think Sloot represents the cleaned up, highly rationalized anti-women maximize your 'game' rhetoric that we saw get developed by people like Heartiste and Rollo Tomassi. Unfortunately this entire worldview towards dating and relationships grew up as essentially a counterpoint in a mimetic arms race as feminism grew into an ouroboros that began to eat it's own tail when it started trying to feminize men far too much during the early 2000s.

While some men, like myself, were lucky enough to stumble upon less blackpilled, non women-hating writers like Mark Manson and eventually and pull ourselves out of a toxic, anti-social and antagonistic mindset towards women, many other young men who grew up with the internet and /r/redpill telling them how to date instead of a well-adjusted father figure have continued to go down the dark left hand path. The prevalence of single mothers raising young boys can't be understated in terms of causing this phenomenon as well. I know we talk a lot about inceldom and the future of sex here, and unfortunately I think men like Sloot, who from a homo economicus standpoint do have a rational set of values and goals, are going to dramatically worsen the problem of sexual relationships as the gender war heats up.

At it's core the dating market is suffering from a sort of tragedy of the commons issue, or perhaps a prisoner's dilemma. The societally healthy, pro-social approach that Christianity and most religions have endorsed for essentially the last ~10,000 years give or take of marrying young, being loyal to your partner, reproducing and teaching your sons to do the same is at risk. More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.

It doesn't spell a good future for either sex, as far as I can see. I hope that our modern rationalistic worldview can produce an answer as compelling as the old religious framework, or we're in some serious trouble.

More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.

To be fair, it wasn't men who defected first, men are finally playing catchup after women have been defecting for the last 60 years and men have finally realised that women aren't going to stop defecting. Unfortunately everyone is worse for it.