The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've decided to leave The Motte. Anybody who wants to know why can discern the shape of it if they want to. You can think poorly of me for it if you'd like. This isn't really a change from the present- I haven't been active since the switch. More I'd always thought I would reengage here at some point, and now I know I will not, so it's time to take the steps for someone who knows they're moving on.
Thank you, Motte, for helping me hone my rhetorical skills and become better at expressing myself. I will always have very fond memories of this community, even if the time has come for me to be done.
You’ll be missed. Good luck with everything.
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Ultimately a lot of the opinions of men here around misogyny, sexism, sex, and women in general are strongly motivated by a deep personal bitterness resulting from perceived or real sexual / romantic failure (either in their past or present) with women.
Thus the paranoid obsession with the idea that all women are secretly fucking “chad” while the nice guys (like them, or like them before they became redpilled) are left with the scraps or nothing at all. They’re not angry about male promiscuity, they’re (as I said to @raggedy_anthem last week) angry that they’re not Chad, that they’re not Russell Brand, that they don’t get to fuck around with many beautiful young women very easily. Or, in cases where they have worked to be more attractive to women, the fact that beauty is superficial has ‘blackpilled’ them in the same way. So, as ‘temporarily embarrassed chads’, they must defend bad male behavior.
If a few assumptions are true:
"Chads", as a group, are not only better looking but more conscientious/determined/virtuous than average Joes, and
Average Joes, without the opportunity for a wife and family, are NOT going to either stop contributing to society or attempt to violently reorganize it to get wives and families...
then why the hell is this a bad thing? Future generations will have more Chad genes and fewer genes of guys that just kind of sucked but were doing OK under agrarian patriarchy. Even if our civilization collapses and we wind up living like African peasants, germ theory was a big deal and means that infant and maternal mortality will likely never be as low as it was centuries ago. That has some implications for the structure of families and societies.
I say bring it on: why doesn't Chad deserve a literal harem, if the kids are doing OK?
Also: people are shallow. The experience of being very unattractive, or of having a large change in either direction of attractiveness, breeds cynicism. If you're friends with anyone that got surgery for a jaw so puny that their doctors recommended it...ask them how they were treated before and after surgery. I haven't had the experience and I don't know anyone who does, though.
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I'm not a Chad, but neither am I an incel, even though I am pretty black-pilled and speak like one. The reason I am blackpilled is more for CW reasons.
Do I want to be Chad? Yes. Very few honest men would say otherwise. As was the norm in the early 2000s before it became a CW battlefront and men were generally much more open about the fact that if they could of course they would bang all the hotties, quite literally all of them.
Do I really really really want to be Chad? No. Having an attractive enough partner is good enough. The fact that Chads exist, doesn't really rile me left or right too much.
What really does rile me is lies. If there was honest acknowledgment in the form of;
We can work towards a solution.
But we don't have that. Its ALWAYS the mans fault. Nothing to do with the fact that men are set up to fail, no solutions, nothing. Just that men suck.
And then the solutions given are plain terrible. No such solutions ever ever tell the individual men how to actually improve their chances. They tell them to be more empathetic or respectful some other gay shit. Why not tell them to hit the gym, talk to as many women as they can, and get a better car or something? You know things that would work?
I have yet to see a woman actually think like an invidiual about this. They always talk about it in a way where women as a class is prioritized even over individual men. Why such suffocating level of gynocentrism? You won't give men your honest advice to protect other women? (Because its impossible to be successful with women without making some of them uncomfortable, if your terminal goal is never making a woman uncomfortable ever, you will never get ANY woman)
Why is there so much talk of where is it appropriate to talk to women or not? So what? We can't speak to our fellow citizens in the public? Or school? Or work? Or the gym? Or the anywhere? Is that like the solution ??? Talking to women?? Shouldn't these articles be telling men to talk to women wherever they can??
It's the constant never ending othering of men. This dishonesty or tribalism makes me feel that no one actually talking about the issue has my best interest at heart, it's only their problem because they are paying a price now. My reaction to that is.. "okay fuck you too".
Thanks for your reply. From my perspective I don't think the vast majority of individual men or women are to blame - anyone under 75 came of age during or after the sexual revolution after all. Even Russell Brand was affected by it (and his father's degenerate sexual behavior) as a child, according to himself. But from my perspective I don't think a reckoning can come without facing the fact that powerful men did create or certainly forward the sexual revolution for their own gratification.
That young women want male attention, and that young men are interested in young women, was as true in 1923 or 1823 or 1023 as it is in 2023. What has changed is that young women are expected to put out for those men's sexual gratification in way they weren't historically. As @raggedy_anthem said last week, it's unclear how young women benefit from promiscuity - the young men in question probably aren't going to prioritize or care about their pleasure, they risk sexually transmitted diseases, sexual (or other) violence and social stigma. The only reason they do it is 'attention', but again, a pretty young woman got that from men long before the sexual revolution in every society on earth, so this hardly requires promiscuity. What happened was a race to the bottom, in which women were encouraged to trade their bodies to ever greater degrees to attempt to get the same thing (a stable relationship with a decent man) that they always wanted and which they had previously been able to get without debasing themselves to anywhere near the same extent.
There is no 'individual solution' to the sexual revolution. That's why my advice to individuals tends to be (as it is in dating advice threads here) to take chances, to be open about attraction, to not wallow in self-pity, to avoid promiscuity because it's bad for the soul, and to focus on finding a decent person from a good background of good temperament who you want to start a family with. And yes, to take care of your appearance (if anything, I'm one of the most honest people about 'face is everything' / superficiality here, and I'm open about being pretty vain myself).
But while you can live a good life in a rotten culture, as a society, this isn't really a solution. It's hard to predict how culture is going to develop, but I don't want many more generations of young women to grow up thinking they owe it to men to have sex with them for fleeting attention, and so one of my hopes from these movements (and associated tiktok movements for young women etc) is that they help the next generation of girls think more carefully about whether they give in to pressure from men and boys to sleep with them without really thinking about it. It's not likely, of course, liberalism flows in only one direction. But as @iprayiam3 said, and this I really do agree with,
Indeed they may be rebuilding it wrong, but then again, 'traditional' religion and the conservative movement utterly failed to prevent the sexual revolution, so it's hard to see that as the 'solution' either.
Yeah. The washing machine and things like it were a pretty big deal and were arguably inevitable once we got the electricity, running water, and affluence to afford them on a large scale. An underrated factor here is also penicillin; before penicillin, syphilis was basically the AIDS of its day. The cutting edge treatments of the time were giving people arsenic and hoping that that killed the syphilis before it killed the person.
Intentional malaria infection was also used.
Both of these won the Nobel Prize in their time.
We might converge on a sex negative chastity culture, but it would probably look like the most sociosexually restricted 10 percent of people's desires/ideals become the mean. Casual sex would be seen as...ungentlemanly, possibly low class, and risky.
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I don't really disagree with any of this.
Even though I contest the notion that the plural option a good woman has to be with a man is to debase herself. Because in my view it's like all the woman has to do to avoid that is say "I really like you and want to continue this, but let's take it slowly". If he is a "decent man" this ought to work.
But I wouldn't hold my breath on this.
I would say there is no solution to anything ever but individual solutions done a million times over.
More on this later.
I would go as far as to say there exists no solution at all.
My highest probability event is if something crazy like an AI-powered VR revolution AND mass cloning or something doesn't happen, then the problem solves itself in a few generations. High TFR groups outbreed low TFR groups and... problem solved! Some rotten cultures by definition won't last forever, survival is the terminal goal at the most microscopic level.
You are a lot more optimistic about these so-called movements than I am. And I think you are offering them an overly charitable reading.
The overwhelming majority of them are just repacked FDS shit. They don't say "you know putting out on the first date with a random isn't good for your soul", It's more like "don't put out for a broke nigga (the implication being it's ok to put out with "Chad")".
If you have any examples that are not terminally low IQ, feel free to share.
Bringing things back never works. New problems need new solutions.
Ideally, we would (I hate to use this word but..) "empower" men.
This means fixing the dating-related messaging given out everywhere. You might not realize how many lies are required to hold up this house of cards. That which can be destroyed by the truth must be! Be honest about women's K selectiveness and men's R selectiveness.
Stop the constant girls rule boys drool messaging. Why the society-wide campaign to lower the status of half the population? Societies with high TFR actually respect men!
Defeminize education.
.. You get the just.
But those will never happen so individual men self improoooooving it is for now.
I also vote for guys being chucked out into the Alaskan wilderness or some other life-and-death challenge, willingly undertaken. It'll harden the survivors up and we have what, 105 boys born per 100 girls? We can afford to lose a few of the biggest chumps.
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I actually know some men who have a shocking (and frankly unhealthy) number of sex partners. Thing is: They do take no for an answer. Except for one (who was ejected for being a creep), they don't try to say my contrary beliefs are insincere. I'm not privy to their Tinder accounts, but I assume they treat other women the same way. I might dislike these men's behavior for other reasons, but based on my limited experience, most "Chads" respect women.
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Goodbye. I liked some of our interactions, though it's been a while since I've seen anything from you. If you keep writing, I hope to see it again.
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Shame, but farewell.
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I really don't get why people are so prissy about downvotes when they mean fuck all here. We don't even have a karma system.
Sure it's unpleasant to find out people dislike your opinions, but anyone who can't take such minimal negative feedback probably isn't the best fit here. Either way, it's still a shame to see a regular leave, so farewell.
They may just be internet points, but it sucks being downvoted, here or elsewhere. Scott removed the option to vote on his blog ,and there is a good reason Facebook , Twitter and other social networks do not allow negative votes. Given the success of those sites, they probably know best about how to maximize engagement. People take this stuff personally because opinions are an extension of one's self, as they are conceived by a person. it's not just a rejection of the idea or opinion, but also the person who espoused it. i think that is how a lot of people see it.
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In Song's defense, did she mention anything about downvotes?
And hell I don't even check my scores unless I get replied 24 hours later. Then again I'm somehow pretty popular around here so... brushes imaginary dirt off shoulder
I did mention downvotes. But it was evidence for something I was unhappy with, not the terminal goal.
The end of it, really, is that I don't want to be somewhere where apologetics for sexually harassing women is really popular, my protest against it gets no good faith engagement at all, and my protest gets treated as though it were bad faith itself when it absolutely is not. I would have been able to tolerate apologetics for sexually harassing women, but people treating my protest with respect and replying in good faith. I can work with that. But that's not this place, so I'm out. There's no reason for me to be here if people are not going to treat my arguments or me with respect.
@self_made_human too, as this is in part a reply to you, too.
Look, I've spoken to another woman who used to be a member of the Motte, and she also left because of the misogyny. You might decide it's the cost of an open discussion forum, or it's "not really that bad". But it is that bad to us*, and the cost of letting bad faith misogyny run free is the women who otherwise would have enriched this place.
I think it's telling that I literally don't think I'm being treated like a psychological equal and rational agent, and the response from you guys is, "cost of doing business in any space where saying negative things about women isn't a Thought Crime." This has nothing to do with saying negative things about women, and everything about being treated as a person on equal terms with any of you men. This kind of treatment is dehumanizing.
@ZorbaTHut may as well tag you too since this is your place, and I think this is worth you knowing about.
I don't need any sort of reply or justification from any of you, and I certainly don't expect any action. Just wanted to make sure my position was absolutely clear.
*to be clear "that bad" is as much the bad faith nature of the misogyny as the misogyny itself. It's one thing to engage with a misogynistic man when he's really listening. It's another entirely when he tuned you out before you opened your mouth because you're a woman, therefore your beliefs are de-facto wrong. My impression here is absolutely the later, and has been for a LONG time. A woman cannot work with that. There's literally no way to engage with that man in a productive and mutual way. There's nothing to do except walk away.
Look Tyrian I really truly feel for you here, and trust me I wish this place was less misogynistic too. I regularly fight against the posters that shout "ALL WOMEN ARE EVIL" and try to provide more nuance. I do wish you would stay and present the feminine perspective.
But I have to say - what you're experiencing is what it's like to be a man trying to discuss anything in the mainstream discourse nowadays. It might be cliche to say it, but again the reason so much misogyny erupts in forums like this is that if you are a man trying to talk about your issues in the modern world, you get absolutely eviscerated by most folks. Other men call you weak if you try to talk about emotions or problems, women call you privileged and basically tell you to suck it up because women have it worse.
Things are moving in the right direction I think with more mens' issues becoming talked about, but growing up as a young man in the 90s and 2000s was absolutely brutal for a variety of reasons. I know women have issues too, but at least women can feel at home in their culture complaining about their problems and the other sex. Men do not have that luxury.
So when I respond with things like:
What I'm trying to get across is that yes, it's awful that there is misogyny in this place and women are treated as less than equal. Frankly in my personal opinion, I think users like you and @2rafa are some of the most quality contributors we have.
At the same time though, I can't help but empathize with the angry young men that come here and spew their venom. I was in their place a decade ago, and it's not a pretty place to be in. When you're suffering terribly, and you can't find any sort of comfort or even basic recognition that your suffering is valid, it makes sense that you lash out. Especially when the only groups that will give you the time of day espouse that type of rhetoric.
I get that you're leaving, but I hope that you can understand the type of vitriol you've been subjected to here isn't about you in particular. It's about young men dealing with massive emotional issues who haven't had the ability, compassion, or grace to overcome them. That's partly on them, but it's on our society too and especially the women that ridicule and demean young men.
Anyway, I know you don't particularly want or care for my justifications, but I hope any other women reading this and thinking about leaving see that there are at least some posters here that don't appreciate the misogyny either, and are trying to soften the harsh edges.
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The Motte is a poorer place without posters like yourself providing a measure of counterbalance to the not uncommon tendency around here towards doompilled paranoia.
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She did, you can check the previous comments on her profile. Her gripe was that what she considered a well-thought-out and nuanced effortpost lost out to one that, once again in her opinion, ignored her points and went on a misogynistic diatribe.
Ohhh I see, yeah. Eh at this point it's just the cost of doing business in any space where saying negative things about women isn't a Thought Crime. Of course we're gonna attract a lot of incels and women haters, but needs must when the devil drives.
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Sorry to see you go.
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