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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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But unlike my genes I do care about human happiness

Trust me, I do too. But nature doesn't. Our hopes and dreams have to be tempered by reality.

If feminine standards are telling them to be an unmarried cat owner looking for Mr. Right at age 35 then maybe we should examine why

Well, this sounds like a slightly different complaint than what we had at the start. This is less about women's standards/status being too high and more like women just opting out of the game altogether.

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

Yeah but for a male the process of going from the computer lifestyle to adequately interfacing with dating is likely going to equate to making a bunch of lifestyle changes and grinding away at social experience to be anywhere near competitive in the market. For a girl, you create a dating app profile and you can be awash in suitors within 3 hours unless you are like bottom 2 percentile attractive.

I spent about a year on the dating app grind recently enroute to finding a longterm partner, and to get to the point where I was getting consistent positive attention took about 6 month of self improvement between weight loss, social learnings etc and that's as a 6'4, high-earning white guy with low-moderate aspergers tendency. The NEET version of myself is likely still floundering around. I ended up going on about 70 first dates during that year (50~ of which came after I was 'reasonably attractive'), and it's pretty striking to me how many of the women I met who I didn't end up with seem to be still stuck in an endless singleton rut years after the event. Most of these women are attractive, intelligent, had good jobs, 25-30 years old, reasonable educations and ostensibly want kids/commitment yet I believe they are their own worst enemies in a lot of ways.

While filtering out "inadequate" suitors on the dating app (and I can bet there are many) might be easier than changing your lifestyle to adequately date, I don't believe it's no effort. Too many posters give off this "just get a good partner sis" message when they describe women's dating prospects, whereas "just clean up and be confident bro" doesn't work quite as well.

I've got close single female friends. They vigorously filter people who'd frankly be good enough for longterm partnership every week for all sorts of reasons. The majority of the women I met through the apps who I still have on social media are conspicuously single and/or making no progress towards their stated goal of settling down and having kids based on their stories and these aren't clubthots, majority are UMC, educated sensible women. Their main reasons for rejection all verge more around 'he was boring' or 'I did not feel he was my soulmate and my very being was electrified to be around him'. Admittedly feminine sexuality is a lot more 100-0 than male sexuality, but the current state of affairs is a vigorous own goal caused by that.

I agree on the advice criteria since, despite being significantly more difficult to achieve, 'just clean up and be confident bro' is way more actionable advice than 'stop looking for Mr. Perfect' but on the other hand I feel like the average male would be able to solve the dating woes of most women within a week if a freaky friday situation occurred.

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

This is a frequent subject of contention between me and a particular friend. He maintains that heightened rates of male romantic lonliness are almost entirely due to women refusing to date anyone who isn't in the top e.g. 20% of looks/status/earning power (take your pick), whereas it seems absurd to me to ignore the fact that so much more of people's free time is spent in isolation rather than in social settings where men and women are likely to meet and hit it off.

This is a frequent subject of contention between me and a particular friend. He maintains that heightened rates of male romantic lonliness are almost entirely due to women refusing to date anyone who isn't in the top e.g. 20% of looks/status/earning power (take your pick), whereas it seems absurd to me to ignore the fact that so much more of people's free time is spent in isolation rather than in social settings where men and women are likely to meet and hit it off.

Can you be more explicit about your point of contention with your friend? It seems to me like those things can both be true, and in fact reinforce each other. When people are meeting in person at social settings with a healthy gender ratio, two things happen. First, you just meet a lot more single people of the opposite gender. But also, the women are a lot more friendly and responsive. They'll talk to you, give you their number, maybe go on a date with you, just because "hey, why not, this guy seems nice." Whereas if you meet through something like online gaming, social media, or dating apps, they just get swamped with so much male attention from thirsty simps that they all have their guard up, and shut down any guy who they don't absolutely love.

They're absolutely not mutually exclusive - the point of contention is whether or not supposed female hypergamy accounts for the majority of the changes we're seeing in the dating landscape (my friend's POV is that it does).

And aren't men doing the same thing? How many men haven't even tried to go on a date in years, instead just retreating inside and living on the computer? I don't think you can pin the blame solely on women here.

Presumably, female standards are higher than male standards due to hypergamy. Also, men can marry later and still have a high chance of being fertile.

That said, I don't think women are to blame here. People are attracted to who they are attracted to. In fact, I think feminism hurts women more than men.