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This isn't convincing at all - The trendlines for men and women largely track each other and women commit suicide less than a quarter as often.
Wait a second.
Race to the bottom to get male attention at all? I think you are being hyperbolic here.
Everywhere I see innumerable women complaining about.. too much male attention not a lack of it! All those pesky guys sliding into their dms, bothering them at the gym, bothering them at the coffee shop, on the train, on the library, etc. Certainly of all the things women are suffering from a lack of male attention isnt one of them.
What you meant to say was. Attention from the top decile of men, who can dictate the terms. Yes attention from them will require you to race towards the bottom. But as the apex fallacy goes, CEOs and billionaires are not the only men in the world.
Ill actually make an effort post about this soon, with a radical solution that will never happen.
Attractive women wanting to sleep with attractive men is the natural order. Unattractive women also wanting it is natural (who doesn't want better?), but them wanting that and nothing else is what is causing the rip.
Its not as simple as that but correction.
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It's not that we need more of these kinds of posts, but you have to admit the phrasing was unfortunate. It's hard to square it with all the "don't even look in my general direction" complaints you see all over the internets.
I sympathize, and I appreciate you putting up with us.
For my part, I've had some ideas for a top level post bubbling in my head on this topic as well, and while they're still rather vague your recent posts inspired me to put some work into it. The short of it is: after years and years of various culture wars, I feel like there's a window of opportunity opening, where the two sides of the Sex Wars are kinda sorta ready to start listening to each other. We must take that opportunity. All the other culture war fronts can wait, or even continue in perpetuity, but we have to find some compromise on the Sex Wars or we'll ride them right to extinction ( / total takeover of the lizardmen elites)
This whole comment chain is dangerously close to becoming a hugfest, but I have to say the feeling is absolutely mutual.
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I did consider your point. My point is indepent of that.
In that, it doesn't really matter who started all this. The only ones who can fix it are women. Because they are the choosers and trend setters.
For some reason, they don't choose in the interest of their better judgements as you claim, AND they don't set the trend otherwise. What does this tell us? That they want it to be this way. And if they don't any individual woman can "defect" not at great cost but great gain. Do you think if A INDIVIDUAL woman actually approached men [1] and wasn't maximally hostile to mens existence in matters of transmitting and receiving, she would have a bad time? Do you really think most men are asking for blowjobs the first time they meet a woman? This is a non issue for the individual woman. And things that can be fixed individually are not cause for me to lose sleep. It's like yeah obesity is a societal problem, but it probably isn't for you, you can just go to the gym.
On the male end, there is little any individual man can do. I do lose sleep over those with cancer.
So yes obesity and cancer both kill a lot of people and sucks for both of them. But talking about obesity is a bit of a waste of time.
Once again, I'm not reading past any of the things that you said, I just don't think men have nearly enough control over this as you think they do.
[1] Yeah I know RADICAL IDEA. But nothing but society is actually preventing any woman from doing it. Also at the same time men get shat on more and more as they do it.
They don't need to do this, but most of the behavioral changes that will have to fall on the shoulders of women.
And yet men have bad experiences while approaching women all the time & have to learn how to not be perceived as awkward, pathetic, or desperate. Frankly, I think that the attitude that most women seem to have where they only want to do the things that are fairly easy and that feel good, at the expense of men who then have to pick up that slack, is exactly the kind of attitude that needs to change to fix things without having to curtail women.
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I might be being abrasive but I don't think anything I am saying is actually ill-reasoned. I believe the motte developed enough of a common epistemic culture (and everyone is high IQ enough) to speak to each other without wrapping everything in niceties and sugar. Might as well get straight to the point and save all of our precious time.
It's not at all hard for me to believe.
But my observation has been what you are speaking of either happens if you are shooting way way out of your league.. or if you are a teenage girl asking out teenage boys. I strongly doubt a level-headed down to earth adult woman would face this.
Nevertheless, I never said this was realistic. Just a wild idea as to how one individual woman can "defect" and get her cake. Maybe I don't think of women lowly enough to realize that they can't individually figure this out?
Data is strongly in my favor. Most young men are single, not women. But that's a dead horse.
Your whole point is "please concede that women have it bad too!"
My response is.. "yes but what can I do about that? if they themselves do otherwise?"
Not any more than what you've already spelled out. It's not like I am evil robot who won't concede that 16 year old girls having to look up blowjob tutorials is not optimal.
My response is.. they can simply.. not do that.
I'm just approaching womens plight with the same way all of men's plights get approached. Problem ? Fix it.
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This appears to be true under our current atomic individualist norms, but that is because men are acting as atomic individualists and women are not. Women organize as a class, and that organization is driving most of the problem, and of course individual men can't do anything about that through their independent effort.
The solution is to not be an atomic individualist. I have a church and a faith. These integrate me into a larger social structure that places considerable constraints on my behavior, and also largely solves the problem you're pointing to. Men and women both are fenced off from pursuing the greedy personal maxima that make them and everyone around them miserable. It works really, really well, reliably, without the usual wealth and IQ confounders.
And the best part is, since it's obviously based on simplistic, low-IQ superstitious nonsense, it can't be that hard to adapt the core social tech to your own ends, right?
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great post
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Absolutely loved Eighth Grade, and agree that it's a great opportunity to see the perspective of a modern young woman.
I think both genders collaborated on this group project. I don't want anyone to be punished, but we have the rock of consequences and the hard place of changing tastes. Brand was able to sleep with 1,000 women not despite his reputation but because of it.
How do we make his sexual personality repugnant to women instead of attractive? That seems insanely difficult. Very intelligent people - male or female - tend to pick potato chip partners over celery on a consistent basis.
My hope would be that at least some fraction of his partners derived some pleasure from this, but given the description of what he considered fun sex I'm not sure that's the case. I also struggle to find where a starfucker would cash in on their status beyond maybe getting lucky and being invited to various parties and stuff afterward. It's difficult to steelman.
Honestly I think like a lot of things socially shaming and thus lowering the status of bad actors would do a lot to fix things. If he was socially shamed as a cad, a bore, and so on, women wouldn’t want to be around him because that behavior would make him low status. And he wouldn’t be openly sleeping with thousands or even hundreds of women because he’d lose status not only with women but with other men.
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I mean the counterpoint is ‘yes, the sexual Revolution and porn culture is largely men’s fault, but it rests on convincing women to act against their own best interests. The only way anyone can see to fix it which has ever worked involves restricting the range of socially acceptable decisions for women to make, and that might not be fair, but life isn’t fair’.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s an oversimplification. Actually undoing the sexual Revolution entails things like making it harder for promiscuous men to find non-prostitute female companionship. But that, again, is the sort of thing that’s usually affected by restrictions on women’s freedom(her father has to approve before you can date or w/e). But the rat race can only be stopped by stigmatizing running it, and that means that yes, the restrictions are going to fall disproportionately on young women- just like they did historically.
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That’s because women try to take pills(which has a high failure rate) and men shoot themselves(which does not). For mental health suicide attempts(which are higher in women), not completed suicide, is the better metric to look at.
Suicide attempts that fail because of incompetence (a good metric for mental health) and suicide attempts that fail because they're not honest attempts (which are not) are impossible to disentangle.
Women realising that a failed suicide attempt is a great way to get a bunch of sympathy points/attention/clout would be upstream of the choice of method in this model.
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Usual QALY given for depression is something like 0.7 IIRC; suicide is generally considered a much worse outcome than "being depressed for a while".
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This assumes that all attempts are equally serious and reflect similar levels of mental anguish. It is also possible that some attempts are less serious and driven by different emotional states. For example, maybe some people are desperate for attention/support/accommodations from the people around them, and understand that an attempted suicide will give them those things. Obviously there are other reasons women might prefer softer options, while still being 'equally depressed', but its not a given that that is what is happening when looking at attempt numbers.
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Sure, but why is that? You imply it's something inherent to men that they happen to choose more dangerous suicide methods, but they could easily choose those methods simply because they're more serious about actually going through with it.
This is a very bold claim and seems intuitively wrong. Those who go through with suicide must on average be less mentally healthy than those who are less serious about it.
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