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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I'm feeling rather insane right now so I'll post a screed.

Do you ever feel like there are just... too many men on this planet? Not humans. Just men, in particular.

Humans are like 1.05 males: females at birth, so there's a natural imbalance. I can only assume this was balanced in the past because males died more: from war, or hunting animals, or just generally taking more risks.

None of that happens now, in our ultra-safe modern feminized society. So we just have a bunch of surplus males sitting around.. doing nothing... simping for women. Taking up body building, or feminism, or prostitution, or onlyfans, or whatever else will give them a drop of female attention.

Everybody knows "Ender's Game," but did you ever read the sequels? It has one (Speaker for the Dead) where they find an alien race that can only reproduce through a chemical change caused by war. That's... how I feel. Like, our species basically requires war in order to sort out our psychology. Otherwise there will be this latent male aggression caused by intra-sexual competition, and it won't end until we have some stupid fucking war over nothing, just to reduce the surplus male population.

There's too many dicks on the dance floor

Do you ever feel like there are just... too many men on this planet? Not humans. Just men, in particular.

No.

None of that happens now, in our ultra-safe modern feminized society. So we just have a bunch of surplus males sitting around.. doing nothing... simping for women. Taking up body building, or feminism, or prostitution, or onlyfans, or whatever else will give them a drop of female attention.

Society is "feminized" because a lot fewer men die? Also these people aren't doing nothing. They presumably work, generating value for society. They probably have friends and family and other non-romantic relationships. They themselves very likely have hobbies they enjoy, that bring them happiness. The idea that because, in some theoretical 1:1 man:woman pairing, these guys mathematically wouldn't be able to be paired with a woman therefore they should just die is insane. So I guess you characterized your post correctly!

I encourage anyone interested in this topic to read this article about how gender ratios on college campuses impact the dating market. Spoiler: dating norms are controlled by whichever gender is in more demand. When there are more women than men dating norms tend towards men's preferences (lots of hookups, one night stands, few LTRs) while the opposite is true when there are more men than women.

Don't you think your second paragraph kind of contradicts your first? The gender ratio clearly has strong effects on society. It's not just an individual problem.

I don't see how. What is the logic chain from "different gender skews effect dating norms" to "society would be better off if a bunch of single men were dead." Especially if your preferred kind of relationship formation is long term monogamous! That happens when there are more men than women (so women have more power). A bunch of men dying should shift norms more towards casual hookups and short term relationships.

Right now, the marriage rate everywhere is plummeting. It seems that the preferred relationship model for women is "get lots of male attention online, but never actually settle down." My preference would be having a choice of either casual dating, parties/hookups, long term relationships, marriage, or even polygamy. But all of that seems to work better when there's more women than men. Just see the difference between a party with an equal split (or slightly more women), and one that's all dudes with just a few women.

I think it's mostly women being spoiled for choice and having no friggin' clue what a match on their same level would be. @raggedy_anthem downthread mentions younger women not knowing how attractive they are; this is in my experience true, but it seems like older single women tend to dramatically overestimate their own attractiveness at the same time younger single women underrate it. I think there's the other factor, as well, where women generally get that men like "curvy blonde teenager at a healthy weight" but have no idea what men are looking for in non-looks related departments and evaluate themselves the way women evaluate men- no, most men do not care about a potential romantic partner's educational or career accomplishments very much at all, and care a lot about her cooking ability.

That's a pretty big problem when there's functionally unlimited choices on offer through e-dating, which is the basically dominant method by which couples meet these days. You will never match the marriage rate of a village with five single people between 16 and 40, and the odd one out has to join a convent/the military, in an environment of massive paradox of choice, and you especially can't match it when, to be crude, a lot of 4's-6's think they're 9's(I know it's more complicated than that and there's lots of blame to go around, but I can't think of a clearer way to express the sentiment). And I don't think it's unreasonable for single women to have standards in a man, either, but there is a discussion to be had over whether those standards are unreasonably high, perhaps driven by specific features of online dating and the illusion of greater choice(eg the increase in minimum height and income sought by women seems well documented to be driven by men lying about it on dating apps). I think it's important to note here that very few women want to hook up; most also don't want to be nuns, but it's entirely unavoidable that there are simply a lot more men than women who get laid on the first date and don't set up a second one. That is not part of the solution.

But back to the paradox of choice, the communities with very high marriage rates in the modern west mostly have a restricted pool of potential partners for both men and women, sometimes intentionally(eg orthodox Jewish matchmaking) and sometimes just cause that's how it works out from endogamy or whatever. Lots of people see a pretty big decision with what seems like unlimited options and freeze up, and women are already passive when it comes to finding love.

There's some truth to this, but I also think online dating just sucks. It limits you to nothing but a picture and text, like an internet meme. Real life personal connection works a lot better when you can hear their voice, see how they carry themselves, get some social connection from friends, do an activity together, maybe dance, eat, drink, etc. Men maybe are OK with seeing a woman's photo and saying "yep she's hot!" but it's hard to really build a connection from that. I don't know if "a lot of 4's-6's think they're 9's," or if they're just being honest that they're not attracted to the photo of another average person they've never met.