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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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I think there's a lot of work you're just leaving on the table on the part of both boys and girls and assuming they won't do it and just be "boys be boys and girls be girls". 16 is old enough for boys to try and put in more effort into connecting with the girl on a personal level (and getting good at sex), and for girls to be a bit more forgiving about initial unimpressiveness (while also learning that the more physically impressive the boy is, the less incentive there is for him to stick with her and learn her preferences).

You've provided examples of destructive rather than constructive "brutal honesty", but it doesn't have to be.

The problem is that that is the age most sensitive, and most under the cosh of brutal honesty. It may well be that you will have to wait four years to grow out of the awkward, shy, spotty stage (for both boys and girls) but that is cold comfort to be told that "jam tomorrow but not jam today" when you see (as you think you see) 'everyone else is dating and having sex but not me'.

Resentments do seed themselves at that time, and come to bloom in later years. There is no way around the realities of nature, but we try and wrap it up in cotton wool for good reasons. But some people will never find anyone, and it's not anybody's fault in particular. And state-mandated girlfriends are no solution there, neither are the AI waifus (though for some very bruised psyches, the perfect girlfriend or boyfriend you can tailor to your exact tastes who will never leave you and always love you will be an aid, the way spectacles or a wheelchair is a necessary aid for physical lack of abilities).

I don't and never cared, which saved me from the worst of it. But my God, had I wanted romance and love and sex in my teens and twenties, I'd probably genuinely have tried killing myself because of the need that could never be assuaged, because I'm too weird, too ugly, too wrong to get someone who loves me. Whatever flaw of nature means I don't feel the want of that really was a lucky one.