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The issue of modern divorce was discussed here last week in the context of yet another round of wider discussion about the Sexual Revolution. (It's pretty much becoming tiresome at this point, but anyway.) Everyone who bothered to chime in seemed to agree with the notion that divorce is usually a net negative for the wife, both romantically and economically. It appeared to me that there's mostly a consensus about that here.
Fair enough. However, I've seen online data indicating that a) roughly 40% of all marriages end in divorce b) roughly 80% of divorces are initiated by the wives c) in cases where the wife is college-educated, that figure is 90%. In other words, in cases of marriages that fail, modern women are more likely than not to voluntarily put themselves in a disadvantageous life situation.
So...what gives? Are modern women just that impulsive when feeling unhappy in a marriage? Or misled? Do they have illusions about singlehood?
I don't think men really understand how women think, I certainly don't. I can create models to rationalize behaviours 'oh that handbag is a way of showing status and affirming one's position in the pecking order' but I don't weigh status so highly, so I can't appreciate why they'd spend so much money on them. Designer goods still don't make sense to me.
I suppose women wouldn't understand why I buy Steam games and then don't play them. Anyway, I think their mental state is hard to understand and we should be wary of trying to explain them, given fundamental differences. We're stuck with what they say (not usually too helpful, given incentives) and whatever models we make up. But our models may well be very wrong, since we don't understand their thought process and it's our thought processes that we try to insert on them, since we can't access theirs.
Consider the women on reddit who are like 'hey everyone here is really sex-positive and says it's no problem that I have an Onlyfans but when I bring it up on dates the men get the ick instantly, what's going on'. Their models of men are bad, why would they bring that up? Or the women who get that hideous plasticky Bogdanoff look, they're bad at modelling how men rate attractiveness. Or the highly accomplished 30/40-year old lawyer women who go 'I have this prestigious job and lots of money, why aren't equally prestigious men attracted to me'. Modelling the other sex is very difficult, people fail at it all the time and we should try to do it less.
I was with you up until the very last clause. Shouldn't the conclusion be the opposite? Modeling the other sex is very difficult, people fail at it all the time and we should practice it more. In fact, the number one issue seems to be that people aren't even attempting to model the other sex, they are simply typical-minding and assuming the other sex thinks how they think but with the opposite sexual orientation.
I don't think modeling the other sex is easy at all, I'm certainly no good at it (though I'm not good at modeling other people of any sort), but trying and failing and then updating your models iteratively is going to get you way closer than not trying at all.
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These three are simple cases of projection, I think.
How am I projecting? I assure you that I am not a highly accomplished or renumerated professional.
I could just as easily go for the 'hey I'm a nice guy with a stable job and I don't beat women why am I not attractive' angle. It's instant mental arithmetic for me to see why these sassy, solvent, sophisticated women struggle finding a partner but it's clearly much harder on their end: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4754914/Where-good-men-gone.html
I presumably have similar blind spots and am unaware of them, underweight them or just can't fully wrap my head around them consistently, like a student who's struggling through some complex, counterintuitive mathematics in class, will probably fail on the test.
I meant the women in these examples, not you.
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I think men and women are different. I do not think we are aliens to one another, incapable of deciphering how those strange opposite-sex brains work. That you don't personally value the status signified by a handbag doesn't mean you aren't capable of understanding why a name-brand purse is a status signifier. A woman is perfectly capable of understanding why you collect Steam games and don't play them. She might think it's stupid, just like you think caring about a purse is stupid, but these are not strange alien behaviors, they're just male/female-focused behaviors. The women who affect mystification at the fact that men are turned off that they have an OnlyFans are either in denial, or have genuinely lived in a cultural bubble where, essentially, the men in their lives are lying to them because it's not politic to admit "Yeah, I don't actually want to date a camwhore even if I say it's perfectly legitimate work." Men too fall prey to these fallacies from living in a bubble and then being unable to grasp that sometimes what people in their social circles claim to believe is not actually how most people feel.
You might as well argue that no one is truly capable of understanding a person from another culture. (Maybe you do believe that too, I don't know.)
It's easy to say this as an older gentleman. But the cloud of preposterous bullshit surrounding gender relations has only gotten thicker and thicker as I've gotten older. I fear the younger generation has no way back. When we were young bucks, "slut shaming" was an extremely online topic, and more or less every person in the real world knew that nobody loved a slut. Liked a slut sure. But nobody loves a slut. You can't make a ho into a housewife was common knowledge.
Now "slut shaming" discourse is practically part of middle school sex ed, and highschools will suspend you for having a private conversation with a buddy that a female classmate might overhear and find offensive. There was an article about just such a case, I believe in my state, but I can't seem to find it now. I'm guessing 2016-2018ish. Lying about how men regard sluts was fringe when we were growing up, now it's institutionalized.
You only see men being frank about why they wouldn't commit to a slut in stigmatized venues like Andrew Tate, the Whatever Podcast or Pearly Things. Places normies are told not to go, and told horror stories about how they are all evil, vile Nazi's that will try to seduce you into white supremacy. And frankly, it's such a marginalized view, these venues are scarcely the best advocates of it either.
You see young men talking, sheepishly, about being put off when the woman they are dating has fucked 10-20x as many partners as them, and being put off by it. They feel like it's immoral to preserve their own dignity and standards. They seek reassurance that they aren't crazy for being grossed out by it, they've been gaslit to such an extent on the topic.
And the biggest lie told about all of this is that slut shaming is something done by men, especially bitter single men, although this has never been the case anywhere in the world.
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