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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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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 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.

I was ignored, laughed off, or generally regarded as awkward, pathetic, or desperate. One man did assume that, since I approached him, obviously I was DTF on the first date. That was very uncomfortable and I walked away feeling bad about myself.

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.

I agree with you that there are women who would have a bad time, just like there are men for whom having to approach women means having a bad time. On the other hand, there is also the outside view, from which you can also judge how much nastiness happens to a person by standards that are independent of personal traits/feelings. For example, I think that it is reasonable to say that a WW I soldier in the trenches has a harder time than someone born into wealth and safety, like Richard Corey. Yet as the poem describes, the person of privilege can nevertheless be extremely unhappy. But that doesn't mean that they had to deal with tough circumstances.

It seems that the extent to which people are content depends heavily on what they expect of life or what people get who they consider to be peers. Yet when those expectations aren't met, it doesn't mean that they are truly hard done by. And the big issue that we are dealing with is that many people nowadays seem to have expectations that are unrealistic (in the sense of what behavior/effort on their part will have what result), with unmet expectations. And especially for women, some expectations get cut off due to age, due to infertility and a greater decline in attractiveness due to aging. And it seems that women often only seem to realize that their approach is bad once they get close to 'the cliff' and it is hard to salvage things this late in the game.

Anyway, I have noticed that women who complain about the result of approaching men pretty much always throw up red flags that suggest to me that they don't recognize that it is far harder to learn how to do this than how to wear makeup or dress up nice; and expect a level of success and a lack of bad experiences that is utterly unrealistic. Your story does indicate that you at least tried multiple times, but it is a red flag that you seem to attribute being "ignored, laughed off, or generally regarded as awkward, pathetic, or desperate" to being a woman who approaches men, rather than a lack of skill (and yes, the cold call is way harder than a warm call, so approaching people is way harder than reacting to an approach). It's another red flag that you even consider it worth mentioning as a bad outcome that one(!) man expected sex right away.

If a man would argue that approaching women doesn't work because he was "ignored, laughed off, or generally regarded as awkward, pathetic, or desperate," or would complain that he can't deal with having a single women get the wrong idea and want his baby right away, he would get raked over coals.

Now, an argument can be made that it's not realistic or fair to expect women to take on this task, for biological or cultural reasons. Perhaps women would even become less attractive to men if we increase their stoicism by the same methods that we use on men, so they can deal with even a fraction of the rejection rate that men commonly experience. It's quite likely that we can't even do that, as people appear to have an inbuilt biological drive to treat male children differently, since we apparently don't need a cultural mechanism for much of it. For example, research shows that parents ignore crying male babies much more, but I can't see a cultural mechanism that teaches parents this.

So perhaps only less liberalism would help, although the incredible stupidity of the people that currently are in a position to steer our culture doesn't exactly make it likely that they'll analyse the problem correctly, let alone come up with a working solution that is spread through the propaganda system.

people tend to assume on some level that if a woman approaches a man, she must be 1) joking 2) desperate or 3) looking for something casual. I found those were difficult assumptions to overcome.

You're forgetting in my opinion the most important one (that also often applies to men approaching women): she must be somehow trying to exploit me.