author:fivehourmarathon ricky bobby
Expand the Universe of Acceptable/Respectable Ways to be a Man or to be a Woman
I want to be clear on what I think "trans-ness" is: there may be some hard-core of people with a physical brain-illness/defect that causes them to feel born in the wrong body, but the majority of people tempted by transition are pathologizing the natural feeling present in most people of not living up to the Masculine/Feminine ideal. Most people who transition either dislike or feel incapable of living up to their gendered ideal, and flee it rather than fail at it. I've also spoken about how Ricky Bobby morality has poisoned our youth: the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you're the best at it means that most people are inevitably failures, and that they respond to failure by seeking out extremely obscure games and metrics to regain self-esteem (looks nervously at rock climbing wall).
I suspect that a big part of what causes men to consider transition is an over-intense idealization of what a man is. When transwomen talk about how they weren't men, how they felt that masculinity didn't fit them, they often aren't describing actual men I know, they are describing a cross between early-season Don Draper and peak-80s Stallone/Ah-nold, they're describing a being of infinite assertiveness and Nietzschean-Ubermensch privilege over the world. In these poor minds, there but for the grace of God after all, a man is Ron Jeremy in the bedroom and Gordon Gekko in the boardroom and Audie Murphy in a fight. That's a cool ideal, one I might strive towards at times, but it is one that no one meets.
If one considers that to be a man one must meet that standard, the only conclusion one can reach is that one is not a man, can never be a man, the project of being a man will always fail. What is trangenderism then? It is an alternative project for those who fail at the project of their birth gender. If being a man means if you ain't first you're last, means the world telling you that you are never good enough until you're a 10% bodyfat crossfit competitor who runs his own corporation; being trans means the supportive section of the world telling you that you are doing a great job, it's a project you can't fail at. It's a hobby that 100% of people who try are affirmed in how great they are at it, even in the early stages, and that hobby/project grows to consume the lives of those who feel they can't succeed at anything else.*
A man can earn 100k and squat 400lbs for reps; he'll be surrounded by people telling him he needs to work harder until he's Elon Musk and that 400lbs isn't bad for a noob but what's the record and anyway maybe you could drop a weightclass and keep the lifts up. When a man puts on a little bit of eyeliner and posts on a trans subreddit, he's surrounded by people telling him he is super valid and totally passing gorgeous.
So that's a lot of words on the problem, what do I think is the solution? We need to expand the universe of how you can be a man. Not just in terms of masculine/feminine interests, though I don't really buy into gendering most things anyway (I love a fruity cocktail on a Saturday night and a sweet iced coffee to chase the hangover away Sunday morning), but in terms of what success looks like. When the masculine ideal was having a steady job, getting married, raising kids as a good father, and maybe owning a home, a lot of men could feel like they fulfilled that ideal. How do we modernize that ideal for a world where women have entered the workforce and often in pair-matched cases out-earn men? Where violence is so proscribed that too many men die without any scars? Where delivering security to your family is impossible, even being secure that you have a family can be impossible?
I'm not sure how we do that, but rebuilding a complete masculinity that men can aspire to is how we solve gender issues, both the kind that end in surgery and the kind that end on incel forums. Hell, I consider the best project that feminism can undertake to help professional women achieve their ambitions to be building a better Himbo, in the Joe Rogan mold, who can support his brilliant lawyer/executive/politician wife without feeling less-than because he draws his self-worth from other sources. Everything else is downstream from there.**
*I don't believe this has much correlation with objective measures of success/failure/masculinity, rather with self-perception of success/failure/masculinity, which is only marginally related.
**I think most of this could be flipped to the feminine with more or less the same effect, but obviously I am somewhat less familiar with what it feels like to be a woman.
I hope nobody minds, but I'll be replying to @substantialfrivolity and @hanikrummihundursvin in this comment as well, it's all one big mass of the same questions. And coincidentally, between sets, the perfect theme music popped on my workout mix! "Although you can't see them, or hear their breathing sounds, someone in this world is having sex right now."
An analog being that someone is talking about food price inflation, and 2cim says "gruel is still cheap". Paying for gruel what you used to pay for steak kinda stings...What if I cut your and everyone else's salary in half? But everything costs the same. At which point do you raise the "wait this is getting kinda hard?". Not buying food and surviving hard, but sending your kids to college hard? After all we don't want a life, we want a good life, right?
I assumed you were American because you cited American statistics from the GSS in your original post. I'm just going to stick with the USA because, wisely, you haven't even told me where you are so I can't really talk about it.* Conveniently, the USA has tried this IRL, so we can look at the results and how people feel about it. Let's look at another, similar graph. And a third, here.** And the bipartisan response, across multiple presidential administrations from multiple parties, has been, not a whole hell of a lot. And the general opinion on the right has long been, Capitalism is competitive, if you aren't you need to become competitive. It's fuck or walk.
You are not the first to draw this comparison, SA did so in Radicalizing the Romanceless in 2014, long before you think things got hard for you.*** And he seemed to think, addressing Feminists who were presumably on the left, that "you wouldn't say this to anybody about work" was a bulletproof argument. But, what if I would say this to somebody about work? What if I'd tell a guy who couldn't get ahead to learn refrigerator repair? Because genuinely, for able bodied American white men, I think both are true: it's not hard to get a job or get laid.
But I'll ask, are you consistent on that analogy? Do you think housing costs are a crisis that should be addressed, or that people get the wage they deserve economically in a competitive market? My feeling is that we need to make sure that the disabled and the very weak can have a livable life, but that beyond that it's all competition, that's the best way to improve society.
So, we should do a little something to make sure they don't starve; but college, for example, is basically a positional good. There's not much personal economic value in having an education, there's value in having as much or more education than those you are competing with. If you can get into college, you try to get into a better college, you get a master's, you get a doctorate, it's all the same treadmill (really, watch that Enemy at the Gates clip, or the whole movie it's pretty good). Same with "hot" women, it's all a positional good, status games {verse 2}. If you can get an 8 you'll want a 9; if you can get a 9 you'll want a 10.
So let's get to the meat of the question:
In the simplest of words. I am trying to say that, the dating market for zoomer males is actually worse, this time they are not crying wolf, and there are some stats and a sea of anecdotes to back that claim up.
or to take the fun way
To phrase the question in terms that don't offend a person of such a grand social stature as yourself: Why are there more losers now?
Charles Murray (more famous in these parts for The Bell Curve) wrote this out so long ago I had to do a presentation on it in undergrad. Coming Apart's essential argument was that the divergence between upper and lower class Americans had to do with divergence in values, with upper class Americans showing little or no reduction in religiosity, industriousness, propensity to marry; and new lower class Americans showing marked reductions in all three and more. Part of his argument was that rich white liberals advocate for "freedoms" that work for rich white liberals, but don't actually adopt those freedoms themselves, instead leaving them to lower class Americans who can't hack it.
He has a decent point when it comes to economics and "big" life outcomes, but there's something missing, expanding inequality is all around us, even in fields that are totally unrelated to work or family, hobbies and interests. Look at Frank Sinatra's body in this scene in From Here to Eternity**** Or Steve McQueen literally lifting. Those were two sex symbols of the day, and their bodies would not be shown erotically on camera in a film today.
Or an extended hypothetical I brought up to make the point when I was arguing about it in the gym once. If you took the boys in a high school senior class, from 1960 and from 2022, and took them all to a rock climbing gym. I would bet that almost all the boys, the vast majority, in 1960 after a quick lesson could be coached up a juggy 5.8 or 5.9; a few athletes might be able to hit a 5.10. But basically no one in 1960 climbed, and those who did often couldn't climb 5.10 anyway. The 2022 boys, probably one or two of them would actually be climbers and zip up 5.11 or 5.12 no problem, and the freak athletes are more athletic than ever they'd get up the 5.10s, but a quarter of the class or more would be unable to climb 5.8, too fat or too weak or too cowardly. The numbers back this up too. Stronger and stronger athletes professional and amateur, weaker and weaker populace.*****
We're coming apart everywhere, in fitness, in sex, in income, in talent, in intelligence. Hell, I'd say there are more guys that can cook a beautiful chef quality meal in today's 25yo men, and fewer who can do basic cooking. More guys that can deadlift 500lbs than at any point in history, more men that can't deadlift 300lbs. More 25yos that have read >500 books, more 25yos that haven't read 50 books in their life. Solid mediocrity, in the positive sense, is disappearing in favor of min maxing. What do we blame this on?
It's the opposite of the participation trophy joke typically leveled at supposedly soft millenials/zoomers. It's Ricky Bobby ethics: if you ain't first you're last, second place is the first loser, do whatever you want but be the best at it. More and more men find that if they can't be really good at something, it isn't worth doing at all. And that tends towards more men simply giving up on romance, going herbivorous, retreating into video games and social media and bitter online subgroups. The substitutes are good enough to make the effort seem futile.
The flip side of all the min-maxers landing on "min" for things like fitness, appearance, and romantic skill is that it isn't hard to win over the median in those fields.
*We are really, almost uniquely, disgustingly fat. That is a big throw-off for the whole bit, unfortunately. Glad you live somewhere better.
**This one's from 2016 but amusingly enough while housing costs have kept climbing higher and higher, the federal minimum wage hasn't budged in that time, despite both parties separately taking unified control of both houses of congress and presidency with a stated agenda of helping the American worker. And as soon as lower-quintile incomes began to climb to any significant degree independent of the minimum wage, the Fed sought to induce a recession to prevent rising wages. Go figure.
***I actually did dig up /r/dating top posts from a random period in 2016 and from 2022. I wasn't determined enough to read them all, but just glancing at them and rating as positive or negative on "getting some" for January-May: 2016 14/25 negative/whiney; 2022 5/14 negative (however 11 were deleted in 2022). June to September: 5/25 in 2016, 5/25 in 2022. So I'm really not seeing an increase, though this isn't exactly scientific.
****Trivia: this is the Sinatra movie that inspired the plot in The Godfather with the actor, the producer, and the horse
***** @substantialfrivolity This is what I mean when I say it's easy. Basically everyone used to be decently fit, it's only in recent years that we're seeing obesity and inactivity be a norm. Fewer and fewer men can really help you move, or dig a ditch, or join a pickup football game. I'm not saying it's easy to get jacked, I'm saying it's easy to be mediocre, and mediocrity is all you need to be above median today.
Let's Make the Regular Season Great Again: Contra Freddie De Boer on Why the NBA Sucks Now
Freddie De Boer posts on why players demanding trades is making NBA fandom unsustainable. I was shocked to see how spectacularly Freddie missed the point, and bought into the very frame that is itself destroying the NBA. TLDR: Dame Lillard, star guard in Portland, demanded a trade from his hapless team to Miami. His team did ultimately trade him, but to noted metropolis Milwaukee instead. Freddie uses the occasion to talk about how it makes no sense for a fan to root for his home team if he's in a second tier city, because his team will probably never win a championship.
While Freddie does notice that Dame got traded to Milwaukee, he failed to notice that Brooklyn assembled three superstars who all demanded trades to: Philadelphia, Dallas, and Phoenix. And the Knicks over in Manhattan have been hopeless for decades. Player empowerment isn't about moving to big markets, it's about moving to superteams where players get the best chance to pad their resume with a championship.
Freddie buys entirely into the very frame that is destroying the NBA: that the championship is the only thing that matters. When we rate players' legacies entirely by their playoff success, and when fans only want to root for teams that have a "shot to win a championship." In a world of perfect parity, theoretically, each team would win a championship ever 32 years, reach the championship every 16, and the semifinals every 8. Of course, there will never be perfect parity, so every time a team wins a second championship in less than 32 years, another team gets shuffled back to the end of the line. If fans only want to root for teams that win championships, they won't root for most teams.
And of course that idea is clearly silly if you look abroad. In Europe, soccer teams buy players from each other all the time, and in most leagues there is a price at which teams are forced to sell against their will. Literally every European soccer team outside of maybe a dozen doesn't have a shot at ever winning a meaningful championship, yet so many of them have fans that will literally stab each other over team honor. Fans of rich teams win, fans of poor teams know they never will. Both still have fans. How do we explain that?
How do we make it worth rooting for the Pacers if the Pacers are as likely as not to never win a championship in your conscious lifetime as a fan? By creating things the Pacers can win. The NBA is already doing their best to make the regular season count more in the minds of fans, but it is already so far gone that I'm sure that won't be enough. Honestly, I don't even care enough about the NBA regular season to know how the regular season is structured, so my examples will be from the MLB or NFL.
So I have a proposal for all American leagues, not just the NBA, for how to astroturf some fan engagement in the regular season, even for teams that don't have a shot in hell: create public trophies for rivalries that are displayed in stadiums prominently after rivalry match wins, and the absence of which is displayed after losses. Basic idea runs like this. At a prominent area near the entrance to every stadium, each team would be required to erect a display area for trophies. Enormous, gaudy, awful trophies. Both the display and the trophy will be designed specifically for two things: so that fans will be tempted to take photos there for social media, and that fans entering the stadium will notice the presence and even moreso feel the absence of these trophies. You could have trophies for specific rivalries (Yankees would have the Red Sox and the Mets), or you could have trophies for division rivals (Eagles would have Dallas, the Giants, and the choke artists formerly known as the Redskins) or you could have both. The team that won the last match/series gets the trophy, publicly displayed in their stadium for fans to take photos with before games. The fans of the team that loses have to walk by the empty plinth before every game, the blank space reminding them that the trophy is in Boston/Dallas/New York, filling them with rage at the enemy having the trophy. Foment rivalry and hatred, force official channels and associated press for both teams to cover moving the trophy, make placing it at the winner's stadium a public event.
How will this help? Even in a down season, an otherwise mediocre team can sometimes sneak in a win against a hated division rival.. Now, rather than just playing spoiler, fans of down teams have pride to play for: we might not win the championship but if Any Given Sunday this game, we still get to keep the trophy, and more importantly keep the other guys from having it.
The other change, to discourage tanking, is to alter the draft order system. Sprinkling top talent among weaker teams is good, I like parity, but teams being as bad as possible is an awful spectacle. So I like the proposal I've seen before: at the 2/3 or 3/4 point of the season, the bottom 5-10 teams get the top 5-10 draft picks, but they are awarded in order of those teams finish to the season. Those bottom feeders are put into a new league table for the last 1/4-1/3 of the season, and the team with the best record gets one, second best gets two, etc. This would discourage teams from fielding anti-competitive teams after realizing their team is sunk, from selling at the deadline for future picks. Hell, teams in the bottom half might be buyers at the deadline to try to get that number one pick! Give teams that are out of the playoff race something to play for in the remainder of the season.
Proposals like that, rather than further complicating roster management or constraining players, will help make the Regular Season Great Again, and that will give fans of every team something to root for.
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