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.
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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.
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.
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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