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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Eh, this whole talk of 80% of men being sexually invisible is incel/PUA bullshit. Again, if you look at actual studies of this stuff, yeah, the top 20% are having a lot more sex, but it's with each other. Which hey, be jealous, but this hasn't really changed since the 60's when the Pill was invented. This idea of some random guy with a six-pack swiping right and banging a a homely girl with a low body count who'd be married to a normal nerdy guy if only society was framed differently, doesn't exist, except in very anecdotal evidence. 80% of people continue to have, I think, less than five partners lifetime and that's both sexes (so in that sense, 80% is invisible, but it's 80% of women too), and if we look at the kind of bad data set of the GSS, the percentage on younger people having sex is back to even between the genders after a few weird years probably caused in part by #MeToo backlash, younger single women being more COVID-averse, and frankly, probably some not great data.

I think what's happened in the middle is what has happened with both genders - there's easy access to entertainment that's better than dealing with a bad match. On the male side, why waste a night going out, buying women drinks, to end up with a girl who will be a dead fish in bed who you're not overly attracted too, than who will still either ghost you or be clingy, when you can play Baldur's Gate for 6 hours, then masturbate to high quality OnlyFans/amateur HD porn of any kink you have. On the female side, why waste going out, getting hit on by a bunch of weirdo and douchey guys, maybe end up going home with somebody who won't try for an orgasm or will only not last that long, and then either be really weirdo clingy or stalker-ish afterwards, when you can just watch six hours of Real Housewives, then pull up some Amazon Kindle smut and get off with a really high-quality sex toy?

As far as the CW goes, Second-tier network that was full of dramas full of pretty people - it was the home of Gossip Girl, Riverdale, all of the DC Comics superhero shows, Supernatural. If you were insanely good-looking but mediocre as an actor, it's where you ended up until recently when many of those shows ended due to a change in ownership. As another example, look at Hallmark Christmas movies - all very pretty people, many of whom are objectivally better looking than many celebrities were in the 70's and 80's, because they all do yoga, don't eat steak five times a week, don't smoke, et al, but they also aren't giant stars, the same way a relatively untalented, but very pretty person like say, Farrah Fawcett was in the 70's.

This idea of some random guy with a six-pack swiping right and banging a homely girl with a low body count who'd be married to a normal nerdy guy if only society was framed differently, doesn't exist, except in very anecdotal evidence.

Well, yes - if you add a total of 4 rather important qualifiers to a single sentence, it's easy for it to be true. But it's also sort of irrelevant.

Anyway, let's clarify what words exactly mean here, because it seems to be necessary. "Sexually invisible" means "not noticed as an object of lust/desire", "not perceived as a sexual being", basically that women do not grok your existence as a sexual being. As a consequence, whatever amount of sex you do end up having, will be sex that is, in effect, transactional. That's what it means.

And if you tell me with a straight face that 80% of all women are sexually invisible, I won't even know what to tell you, and I won't bother to respond, because such a statement is that absurd.

And I still don't get what a "CW drama" is supposed to be. Anyway, if your argument is that overall beauty/hotness standards for American TV actors have risen as a result of, I suppose, the Sexual Revolution, than that is something that merits further discussion, I think, but frankly I see no visual evidence of such a trend. Then again, I may have my biases.