We’d kicked off a discussion earlier this month on why young men, in a sharp departure from their historical birthright of horniness and reasonable ability to gratify those urges, were not getting laid or even dating all that much. Since this conundrum is kinda-sort acknowledged in the mainstream press but not discussed in detail, reader observations, which sometimes included details of encounters and relationships, were extremely helpful.
The picture that emerged (and again, across all young men and women, there is bound to be a lot of variation) was of men often finding women more exacting about sex, as in desiring it more often than men do and being demanding about male performance and appearance, including very tightly circumscribed and difficult to discern ideas about what acceptable flirting v. gross come-ons amount to. Women (and men too, truth be told) still are attached to the old normal of women marrying/dating up, when with young women now outdoing men in educational attainment, means even more demand for a smaller pool of relative alphas. Yet most women also want fidelity.1
This dynamic seems to be so widespread that calling it “reverse Lysistrata” is not much of a stretch. Those who remember your classics will recall that in the Aristophanes comedy, Lysistrata organized a sex strike in Athens and Sparta to try to end the Peloponnesian War. Obviously, we don’t have anything so programmatic in play here.
But men dropping out to a meaningful degree from dating and marriage (and college) does have some similarity, in that men are withholding sex over they unhappiness with new gender norms and their enforcement not just by women but often institutions. One obvious illustration: for a man on campus to have sex with what in the stone ages of my youth was called a co-ed is now incredibly risky. What in the past might merely have been bad date/bad sex can be escalated by a woman into a rape accusation, even if the issue was poor communication, as opposed to the use of force.
It’s been nagging at me how to take this examination further. In our last post, we linked to an article in Cosmopolitan that confirmed that getting even good anecdata is hard; the author had great difficulty finding 30 men in relationships or actively dating to talk to her, and many were gay. So the reader input was actually significant relative to the very limited in-depth knowledge on this topic. Therefore, please forgive the musings below as what consultants call a forcing device: presenting preliminary information and theories for the client to react to and correct as needed.
In this post, we’re going to hone in on the decline in the social and relative economic status of men, since not only is it an issue for men in and of itself, but serves as a force multiplier for some of the other impediments. But we don’t want to diminish the notion that this is a tangled problem.
At a very high level, there’s great disconnect in gender role expectations, particularly as far as dating, sex, and marital duties are concerned. Readers described a number of proximate to the dating dearth: the difficulty of meeting people in casual settings (and workplace encounters are now fraught), the general horribleness of dating, the rise of mean girl behaviors freely directed at men, helicopter parenting producing emotionally immature adults, excess reliance on phone-mediated communication greatly eroding in-person skills, and ubiquitous screens also retarding the development of social skills. Other contributing factors extent of porn use among teens (by implication, it’s no longer all that bad a substitute for the real thing), high levels of erectile disfunction, due at least in part to taking SSRIs and other meds, and endocrine disruptors in water.
But the big overarching issue seems to be the diminished social status of young men and the demonization of manliness. For instance, there’s no “heroic masculinity” or “wholesome masculinity” as a counter to “toxic masculinity.” Although some cited #MeToo (with some disputing its importance in the bigger picture), publicly hating on men as an acceptable posture well predates that; #MeToo’s vehemence indicated that there were still levels of pent-up hostility that a not-trivial number of women felt the right to express.
And yes, dampened male libido and pursuit of relationships has political and economic implications.
Economists and policy-makers around the world are distressed about falling birth rates in advanced and even not-so-advanced economies. For instance, the birth rate in Thailand is 1.32 per woman, well below sustainment levels.
Mind you, given the fact that current population levels are above what the planet can carry on a sustained basis, in terms of resource demands and rising lifestyle expectations, fewer people ought to be a good thing. But nearly all societies are organized around the premise of economic growth, which in turn is a function of population and productivity growth. Even though Japan (which admittedly started from a high level of development and income) has managed a shrinking (and therefore also aging) population gracefully, most leaders and pundits reject the idea of learning from their example. Instead, there are calls and schemes for how to get women to have more babies, with not enough willingness to admit that the very sorry state of relations between young men and young women play a big, if not central, role.
And as an aside, it’s not as if this sort of thing is happening only in the US. Readers discussed how they see similar patterns in Europe, Japan (early to this tendency) and South Korea. Another Thailand data point: a female cab driver asked if I was single. When I said yes, she immediately started recounting (as a married woman with kids) why being married was lousy: she still had to perform household chores and child care when she was also working part time. She also said 80% of the young Thai women felt the way she did and were not interested in getting married.
In the US, young men have lower social status than men of a generation ago. And that’s being institutionalized with fewer men getting college degrees. In 2020, over 58% of college were female. And graduation rates are higher for women than men.
Some reader comments on young men’s status and aggressive female enforcement of what they perceive to be their rights:
Reed Richards
June 11, 2025 at 6:36 pm
I coach and referee youth basketball, mostly middle school and also live very close to a large middle/high school that I occasionally volunteer at for events. Im in the age range of most of the parents and many of them say their sons openly talk about how theyll never pursue a committed relationship because they find most of their female counterparts obnoxious and combative. Most cite the negativity against men and boys they see on social media, negative experiences in school and what they feel are impossibly high standards largely tied to money and looks. I personally do not spend much time on apps but some of the clips I have been shown are seriously disturbing, anti-hetero male rhetoric that I cant even understand what the source is. Presumably none of these boys are sexually active or ever have been so I would find it hard to believe a bad kiss or something would spark all of this. IMO social media and late stage capitalism are having the biggest negative effects, it simply costs too much for most young men to pay for the types of dates that have been traditionally expected. And with social media you have people of all ages interacting in ways they never did in the past, youve got men and boys of all ages essentially comparing notes and drawing the conclusion that a relationship with the average woman is a juice not worth the squeeze.
In other words, women want it both ways: they want men to pay for their company, consistent with traditional gender norms, while also seizing on an apparent new right to dictate male behavior, including in intimate settings.
Similarly:
XXYY
June 11, 2025 at 1:08 pm
Speaking for myself at least (male), I would suggest the #MeToo movement has done a lot to damage sexual relationships and relationships in general. Most of the media and personal discussions coming out of women over the last decade or so have been to the effect that men are terrible, they have no consideration for women, and the fewer men that women have to deal with or be around the better. I have heard comments about how terrible men are even when I am sitting right there! There is of course no upside to trying to dispute these remarks since you just end up sounding like you’re defending rapists and Harvey Weinstein.The upshot for me has been perpetual uncertainty about talking to women, asking them out, or doing much of anything for fear of crossing some hidden line, which can lead not only to ostracism but also HR interventions and even firing. I’ve occupied various supervisory roles at work, and now strongly prefer to only have men in my group for everyone’s peace of mind.
I have exactly zero history of any actual problems with women in the workplace or anywhere else; it’s all strictly in my head. But nevertheless, it’s still a thing, and I now see women as a source of unpleasantness and even danger. We have mandatory annual trainings where we are warned against doing a large variety of things that could be misinterpreted as harassment or worse.
I very much doubt that this is the entire explanation for the things talked about in this post, but it is something that has changed in many societies recently. The more one goes on and on about the opposite gender being a danger and an unwelcome presence, the more that gender will seek peace of mind by keeping a safe distance. I’m certainly not saying that women should put up with abusers for the sake of better relationships, but such relationships do require welcoming openness and the expectation of a good outcome in order to happen.
And:
George
June 11, 2025 at 6:47 pm
I believe the situation is far worse than what the surveys are picking up…I don’t pretend to be hip and with it, I never was, but by and large the STEM students I take classes with will generally warm up in conversation even though I’m twice their age. I’ve had a couple of heart-to-heart conversations with men who appreciate advice from a older stranger. Most of the student body comes from well-to-do middle class or higher families (I am white, grew up in the ghetto, raised mostly by a single mother and occasional drive-by parenting from a weak father. Not a recipe for success, but I do what I can). Of the men I talk with well enough to be nodding acquaintances, most are not in any kind of relationship, and do not expect any romantic success….They’re fit, smart or smart-ish, good-looking (as a straight man, I’d say these are 7.5-9.0s in most cases), and dress well…
The women? Good lord almighty. I struggle for words that do not immediately spiral into variations of prostitute. The girls are MEAN, all of the time. Resting bitch face does not even begin to encompass it. They are mean to the 5s, they are mean to the 8s, they are mean to the 9s. Maybe the 9.5s are cleaning up on social media and tinder-type apps, but there are damn few real-life interactions. I was here for a good 3 months before I observed a single display of public affection (a couple hugging on a bench between classes. It was a freshmen GE class, I think they may have been high school sweethearts). I have overheard one flirtation at the library. The campus is dead otherwise. Most of the campus are well-to-do. Most are fit. The women are dressed scandalously whenever the weather is above 70F. But they’re always mean and cold. “Frigid sluts” is the phrase that comes to mind, as paradoxical as that may sound. The women are begging to be approached, but are simultaneously threatening to end the life of any sub-10 male that dares speak in her presence. It is horrid to witness. I am terrified of being accused of stare rape by one of these thong-flaunting women, and I can’t be the only one.
Of the men, I can affirm there is no locker room banter of any kind anymore. Probably online, but never in person.
Even worse:
Michael Fiorillo
June 11, 2025 at 10:48 am
Every reason given in the comments makes sense, but to some degree I distill it down to, Who Needs Males?They’re increasingly not needed for work, or reproduction, so it stands to reason that there would be psycho-social-physio consequences.
And this behavior is producing what is sometimes called dickus shrinkus:
Corr(s,r)
June 11, 2025 at 7:46 am
Lower status males are supposed to have low libido. Ask a primatologistYves Smith
June 11, 2025 at 9:18 am
Is telling men generally that they engage in “toxic masculinity” lowering their status? That would seem to be the intent. Probably does not work on the intended targets but might affect the rest to some degree.Corr(s,r)
June 11, 2025 at 9:36 am
Trashtalking differentiates men efficiently – quite contrary to the literal or public intent indeed, but informatively for the mating purpose (?!)Adam1
I think this is the sweet spot!1) Socioeconomically men are being reduced/marginalized because they were the top wage earners 30 years ago. In our, now, Neoliberal order anyone making “top” wages who are not part of the chosen elite class are making too much money.
2) The “Liberal” paradigm is that “toxic masculinity” is everywhere and has broken men and men should be ashamed of themselves and should just go away if they can’t fix themselves.
Should we be surprised young men who have no control over #1 and are just broadly painted by #2 don’t start to internalize a “Low Status” and “Low Libido” reality.
And to IM Doc, these same men are so defeated and lost before they even get into bed with a partner it should be no surprise that some freak out. And I mean this from the perspective of how polarizing the world has become. #1 has been an ever-wrenching issues since at least the 1980’s, but #2 has become so intense.
A friend of mine’s wife has a running joke which seem fitting in most liberal circles… when she see’s a man with a “jacked-up”, mudded-up truck she wants to ask the guy, “how small is “it” really?”
I revisited a talk seven years ago, between Camille Paglia and Jordon Peterson and strongly urge readers to listen to it in full (the points made are so colorful that IMHO not much would be lost by consuming it in snippets). Even though Peterson has become even more controversial in recent years, the points he makes in this discussion are solid, even prescient.
Another reason for given this conversation a good listen is the way it covers the way the American embrace of a naive version of postmodernism have damaged historicism and connoisseurship with a fixation on power relations as the lens through which everything must be viewed, thus forcing everything into victimizer/victim storylines. But there are lots of juicy tidbits, in the form of Paglia rants and factoids, such as how the idea that there are leftists in academia is a fraud (they are all rank careerists who are very protective of their status and hate the working class); the rushed and poorly thought-ought creation of women’s studies programs; the way that faculties rolled over to the takeover by boards and administrators, with a successful revolt at Bennington the exception that proves the rule.
No doubt readers will find part of this discussion to quibble with. For instance, I’m generally leery of “men versus women” stereotypes, since in classes as big as “men” and “women”, the differences within a class will be bigger than the differences between class. For instance. Peterson goes on about how women are more agreeable than men. Yours truly is most decidedly not agreeable :-)
Nevertheless, he is on to something in his discussion of how men and women fight. He contend that with men, there is always the threat of escalation to blows if things get out of hand. Yet when men get into fisticuffs, they usually make up.
Yours truly has commented on the role of male physical dominance too, and how women are further conditioned not to fight back even when they can (a pet peeve is on crime shows, how all women save female ninjas simper and cower before a violent man, when in many cases, they have viable self-preservation moves, like kicking him in the groin or trying to gouge his eyes out. I can go on longer form but will spare you).
Unlike Peterson (if I read him correctly), I see the pose of female agreeableness as a function of nurture rather than nature. Most men can beat the shit of out most women. Thus women who are trying to get their way won’t get far with confrontation (the man has escalation dominance) but instead resort to manipulation. It also seems, from reader comments, that the sort of emotional bullying that was once a teen girl speciality is now being deployed on adult men.
Peterson points out that men have no way to “fight” with women or even stand up to them these days. Getting physical, particularly in a professional setting, is a complete loser. And he adds (and Paglia provides more support) that the new answer to this conundrum is to get men to conform to female modes of behavior, and that this ultimately is destructive to many men (as in per his a cause of more men turning their backs on educational advancement).
Paglia argues that men and women historically lived nearly entirely in very separate realms and women exercised power in their sphere. I think she wildly romanticizes women doing laundry and cooking together.
Surveys at the onset of Peak Feminism (as in during the 1960s; I think of Peak Feminism as the 1970s; for instance, it was then that gender stereotyping in toys was at its lowest) found that the happiest group in the population was married men. Next was single women. Below that was single men. Married women were the least happy. This festering discontent with a subordinate role was the big impetus for women’s liberation. The fact that women, having breached the citadel, have kept trying to increase their power beyond the point of maximum advantage has now created a new set of problems.
The fact that the professional women Paglia knows are unhappy does not mean that being in mixed-gender environments is the main or even a major cause. Neolibearlism produces social isolation and weakened community ties, and greater inequality. All of those make people mighty miserable, particularly those high up in status hierarchies, where a fall from your perch can be pretty far.
There’s a lot more meat in this discussion, including the detrimental role of nuclear families and how the denigration of motherhood has led to a loss of understanding that the mothers of boys develop, of the fragility of men. Again, I urge you to listen to it in full. Paglia is extremely energetic and entertaining. Even if you don’t agree with many of the things she and Peterson say, their opinions will help you sharpen your own.
____
1 It is perverse that with all this supposed women’s liberation, women are not (much) comfortable with, say, marrying someone smart from the working classes who is also a hunk, but having an affair with the pool boy or tennis pro is OK. I spent a bit of time with a family in Bali where the husband had three wives. They seemed to get on reasonably well because they each were running one of his businesses, and so had their own spheres of influence. European have, or at least had, a clear understanding of the role of the mistress versus the wife, which was another solution of how to have high-status male earning ability and protection shared among more women. There is the problem of what happens to the resulting number of unattached men. The military was one answer.
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‘with young women now outdoing men in educational attainment, means even more demand for a smaller pool of relative alphas. Yet most women also want fidelity.’
I ask you. What could possibly go wrong here. If more and more women are honing in on the alphas, then are the alphas likely to be faithful to one partner forever having chose one – if they do choose? Why would an alpha settle for just one? As the old saw goes, ‘Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?’ Will those women feel betrayed or will it be expected of them to accept it?
This reminds me of another dynamic. There was a bunch of us sitting at a table and all English speakers. So you had young guys from England, South Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, the US, myself from Oz and others. The subject turned to girls and all agreed with the consensus that far too often that girls would go for the ‘bad boy’ type only to have them cheat on those girls who would then proceed to take it out on all guys. It was like a bad joke and yet from nearly a dozen countries all saw the same.
The top men candidates not needing to choose is a real thing are results in the colorful term ‘situationship’. One of the partners is just waiting for a better to come along to ditch the current person.
From a lower comment Mentioned hoe_math. he’s got a great diagram showing the bad boy vs provider axes creating a serious if relationship types. From prince charming to situationships to creep zone and friend zone.
Par of the trouble seems to be a lack of recognition/discussion about the fact ‘bad boy’ is actually a desirable quality in mate selection for many woman. And often it’s at cross purposes to a provider desire. But the bad boy indicators/behaviours/qualifiers are often things that will be explicitly hated on by woman. I think it’s one of those ‘this is what we should like’ discussion. You’ll often have video clips of woman wondering why they keep falling for jerks/aholes.
Men just get frustrated and confused. When I do all those things they say they want I get friendzoned. And they go for the aholes anyway.
I’ve been aware of that debate for basically my entire adult life. The situation has not improved. If anything, it’s substantially worse now with apps.
I have not dated for decades. And am aging rapidly. But not so rapidly that I can’t remember my adolescence and complaining with and to my friends about exactly your comment: Essentially “Why don’t girls want to go out with nice guys like me? They always go out with the assholes” We thought we were nice guys – courteous, thoughtful, not sexually demanding and so on. Good looking? We thought so. Smart – ditto.
So what this leads me to is a belief that everyone – men and women – are simply immature, stuck in a bizarre adolescent dating Twilight Zone phase that does not pass. How did they get that way? Look at your phone.
I’m going to go anon on this. I identify as gay but that’s not specific enough…. you’d need at least a Kinsey scale, showing I predominantly prefer men but don’t run away from women’s bits.
I always asked how a partner liked things….. particularly the occasional woman (single or part of various MF couple) so I could find and do stuff with g spot (I have VERY long tongue).
Even this “hey I’m doing all the right things aren’t I? ” approach increasingly gets nowhere on social apps. So I have left them entirely, IRL is way forward, even allowing for the “anti single male bias” effect. It’s worse now.
this has been my experience for my entire post-puberty life, as well.
womyn say they want a nice, considerate guy, then run off lusting after the jerks who treat them like shit…relegating us nice,considerate…and even chivalrous…guys to “brother” status.
this was definintely a thing in the 80’s.
it looks…from the outside…to be considerably worse, today.
i am just glad that i had success for so long…and that both boys appear to be doing well in this regard(they’re both better looking than i ever was, and have social skills)
Long Live Duncan Idaho & His Fish Orgies!
Yeah for me the combination of alcohol and a little amount of aggression worked wonders.
But that was then, and I’m older now.
Looking for just the most sexy extreme political chick possible.
Even for older men looking for a partner when widowed, things are not simple.
“So you love me, you say. OK, then you’ll pay for all the jerks I’ve been with previously.”
Not exactly an appealing message…
I dated in my 30s, I had a higher degree, and an income that was above average, but not significantly so. At the time I was thin but not muscular, and slightly above average height. I did end up getting married and having children, after needing around 100 first dates of which less than 10 led to 2nd dates.
Some of my failings were my fault. I come from a sheltered environment, and I had some growing up to do. So sometimes I was awkward, I had women remark that I came off as very “rational”.
At the same time, I do think that many women were very picky and poor communicators. They were looking for an instant spark, when in reality I think it’s fair to try and get to know somebody and spend a few dates together to see how things go. Initial meetups can be very awkward for a lot of people. I remember one told me that she didn’t want to be with me because I lacked relationship experience. I did at the time, a few years later she’s bought a house on her own, and I’m married.
The pickiness of women is largely because men are not picky about 1st dates, they’re picky about what comes after. It’s been noted many times that many women on online dating apps easily have thousands of potential suitors. They’re not real suitors of couse, but they do have thousands of men who have messaged them at any given time, so I imagine that’s like shopping for sugary cereal at walmart, it comes off as an excess of choice that can be paralyzing. And in practice they’ll often go with the best looking one.
Others would flake, say by not showing up to a date, or agreeing to one and then ghosting. I found that very immature. I’m glad I’ve never ghosted anybody. But that might also be a generational thing. Generation Z doesn’t just ghost potential romantic partners, I’m told they ghost potential employers too, as in there are cases where they sign a contract to start a job, change their mind, never tell their employers and simply never show up for the job.
One thing I was not good at was recognizing the different kinds of mental diversity. I can spot things like autism/ADHD very well, but I couldn’t spot borderline personality disorder, for example. I didn’t know what that was. I remember this one women I was texting with for a few days, she was super into me for a day or two, but she’d get into long personal arguments with me prior to meeting me about her grievances. I dodged a bullet. But I was lucky in dodging, I didn’t know what was going on.
******
Finally, some pickiness is rational, and I feel the need to mention. The cost of living is going up and up and up. Is a 30 year-old woman looking for a man with whom she can raise three children, support them through school and college, have a couple weeks of vacation a year with, have a 3 or 4 bedroom home in a safe neighbourhood, eat meals that include vegetables and proteins, and then be able to retire one day? Well then yeah, even in middle-cost cities you might need a household income of 150,000+/year for that, along with a 750+ credit score, hopefully your car is already paid off, and you already have life insurance and a 401K/Roth IRA. Traditional sources of support such as grandparents and government are useless.
“I had women remark that I came off as very “rational”.”
I’ve heard that one too; it’s a red flag. Strike that, it’s a field full of red army soldiers waving red flags.
There is a weekly column in the Guardin called blind date. They set up two people whi are on their dating site and pay for a meal for them. In exchange they both answer a set if questions. One of these is would you go meet again. With the hetreosexual couples it is just about also “no, there was no spark” or “yes, but justas friends”. It seems silly to me to not go on a second date unless you really didn’t like someone. There is still this idea that two people meet, sparks fly, they fall instantly in love and live happily ever after. That really does not happen. At least the last part.
Interestingly the gay couples (both male and female) generally seem more interested in seeing the other person again to see how it goes.
Fascinating. I am a woman of a certain age, happily married for 20 years now, but after my starter marriage failed I had to go back to dating at the beginning of my 40s. (This was when we were being told that a woman over 40 had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married.)
I had number of dates that didn’t lead anywhere, but an uncanny number of them included my dining companion saying at some point, usually in a tone of mild wonder, “You’re so sane.”
As a lifelong depressive, I’ve worked hard on my sanity, and I think I put one of my psychiatrist’s daughters through Stanford. Still, I felt sorry for these guys and wondered what the rest of their dating life was like.
I trained as an engineer and economist, both fields that prioritize rationality, as I do. However, spending time with men in these fields gave me a fair amount of familiarity with a certain type who claimed to be entirely rational in all aspects of life but appeared to me to be driven entirely by emotions that they couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge having but were masters at rationalizing. Perhaps this is why “rational” in this context has become a slur? I do think that the comments on my sanity were meant as compliments.
I married a poet. He’s good at understanding and articulating emotions. He’s short and balding and smart. Best husband evah!
The casual acceptance of the concept of a “starter marriage” is partially why men don’t seem to be keen on getting married anymore, and why they have a hard time taking women seriously when it comes to that now fungible commitment.
My wife (we’ve been married 52 years), was bridesmaid at a friend’s wedding in 1970. The young woman indicated to her wedding party that it was a ‘starter marriage.’ They did not remain friends.
I was a typical nerd until my late 20’s, very difficult to talk to a woman even if we knew each other.
What helped me was my fascination for a card game, bridge. Every city has bridge clubs that provide a safe environment for both sexes to meet and slowly get to know the various players. (yes, this is an older group these days.)
I’m no alpha male, and certainly such males are attractive to many female bridge players, but many bridge playing females seem to value above average players more… and many alphas seem to be angry, and this may interfere with good play. Plus, anger is out of place at a bridge club – you can be kicked out – and, I assume, many mixed venues.
I met both my wives at bridge tournaments, very happy periods of my life (albeit the first was sadly cut short.)
About .05% of us pop play at bridge clubs, but I assume there are many other possibilities – archery, tennis, pickleball, hiking, church groups, charity drives, political support groups, anything attractive to both sexes. Males that are above avg in the given endeavor will imo attract interest, especially among those that , say 30+, who are old enough to have had unhappy experiences with alphas.
Hoe_math is a YouTuber that talks a lot about the dating and relationship dynamics. It’s fairly thoughtful and mostly lacks a lot of gotchas that you find a lot with this sort of fraught topic.
Many of the topics you noted are touched on in his model(s) of how it all works. He does good one page diagram/drawings that really enhance understanding the interlocking problem.
Unnoted in your coverage is there appears to be a two axis desirability (bad boy as well as good provider) for what woman want vs how men do selection. It’s not really talked about much so it confuses the shit out of men and helps make the ‘good’ ones more likely to throw in the towel.
One reason I did not mention it is that the model you posit is outside the focus of the post. It’s about the the effect of the fall of status of men on men’s and women’s mating behavior (or lack thereof).
Second, I don’t buy that model. None of the women I know were interested in “bad boys”. They wanted men who would be presentable to people in their circle. This includes not just the NYC professional women I knew but also women from a broader social mix I met via New Age groups. Oh sure, there are some women who like that type, but the fact that I have yet to encounter one in real life says their representation in the population is not that large.
Marriage brokers (there are such things) find that the relationships most likely to lead to durable marriages are between people from the same social background, so same religion, came from the same part of the US (better yet, same state/same city), went to the same college….
There is a joke, admittedly, but it’s not about bad boys per se as much as “men who are not conventional producers”:
I certainly met a lot of young women who dated the bad boys and friend-zoned the nice guys, but that was way back in the 80’s, and it was also when I was working as a fry-cook so the fact that I was a nice guy did not necessarily make me presentable.
Rarely mentioned is the second-order effect that the nice guys want to date the type of women who want to date bad boys, while they friend-zone the women who want to date nice guys.
Isn’t Joni’s “Carey” about Bad Boys?
[Verse 2]
Come on down to the Mermaid Café
And I will buy you a bottle of wine
And we’ll laugh and toast to nothing
And smash our empty glasses down
Let’s have a round for these freaks and these soldiers
A round for these friends of mine
Let’s have another round for the bright red devil
Who keeps me in this tourist town
See upcoming rock shows
[Chorus]
Come on, Carey, get out your cane
I’ll put on some silver
Oh, you’re a mean old Daddy
But I like you
I like you, I like you, I like you
And she also wrote a great song about being a “bad girl:” “River.”
She was a bit of a bad girl herself. There’s the famous story of the Isle of Wight concert where Joni tamed an angry crowd with a dulcimer (a bit of hyperbole). What goes unmentioned is that the crowd was ugly because the impressive list of performers was refusing to take the stage because their payment was to come partly in the form of quality drugs, and those drugs somehow didn’t make it to the concert site. The promoter just couldn’t understand what had happened.
Joni was on the plane with that promoter.
Out of scope for the discussion is reasonable, apologies for drifting wide.
In terms of the status effect…
Social status is about meeting the exemplars of what society values (success, wealth, good looks, charismatic, powerful, etc). I think the dysfunction and checking out of young men is related to the fact that it’s incredibly difficult/impossible to reach these goals through traditional means (the old ‘if you just abc then you’ll have your xyz). The social contract is broken, but the thought leaders and symbol manipulators aren’t allowing for change in the exemplars.
One of the topics we discussed in my nurse training was about identity, and lots of people meet their identity needs in terms of role (often job, but not always [could be head of the family, or provider, or as mother, etc]). Identity can also be about family (including friends). The current situation for young men is that they are struggling to craft their identity in a society that has changed rules but hasn’t changed it’s objectives…..and it’s largely impossible for many of them to create a meaningful role and even have meaningful social networks. It makes me think we may have the type of generational trauma brewing that we get when cultural erasure occurs in indigenous population.
There is a lack of understanding (willful or not) of the challenges by the older cohort and leaders. There is no useful guidance (hence the outrage about useless suggestions for meeting people or how to be economically viable). In this sort of milieu depression, substance abuse, and ‘checking out’ are obvious coping mechanism. It feels to me like there is a parallel between quiet quitting in the worksite and what is happening in the dating/relationship area. The same sort of outrage and panic heard from employers definitely has parallels in what we are starting to hear from woman about men disappearing.
Probably the most insightful comment here.
It’s hard to overstate how much the last 10 or 15 years have changed the rules between men and women (try watching a rom-com from the 1990s sometime. It’s usually unintentionally cringe now). These changes also preponderantly affect young people so there’s also a strong age component to this.
Profound changes in societal relationships take a long time to play out. Probably several generations. I don’t think one guy or one gal is going to make huge changes to how they think about the opposite sex within their own lifetime, and then everything will be fine. Young people alive right now unfortunately are situated at the bleeding edge of all this.
The best solution at the moment is to just help each other get through it the best way we can, and try not to make it worse for anyone. Easily said, hard to do.
I have certainly noticed that this is not the first time you highlighted somebody’s insightful comment and gave a straightforward compliment. This is something our online community needs more of. Your grasp of social mores and the ways it been shaped by political, social, and economic forces is quite good. I would suspect this leads you to skillfully anticipate any potential pitfalls in romantic things. We should contrast this with the typical comments I make that indirectly poke fun at myself. As such…
I read this post, Yves’s previous one about young men losing that lovin’ feeling, and most of the comments. Here’s an simple idea that nobody has floated. Please don’t flame me. What if being single is actually enjoyable? What if it is not about whatever differences exist between men, women, and the environment? I have been single for many years now, and I don’t seem to lament this fact. Of course, the primary reason why I am single is medical problems, which would unfairly constrict the activities of any potential girlfriend of mine.
Thanks so much for your kind words! I work in the engineering field where it’s incredibly rare for someone to compliment someone else. About 20 years ago as a young lead, I made the intentional decision to do what I could to change this, and it has apparently spread into other areas of my life as well. I appreciate you noticing.
It’s funny you should say what you did about “perhaps it’s fine to be single.” I was sitting in this spa this morning ruminating about this whole post, and the idea hit me that perhaps this notion that our species is “supposed to” pair off into male/female couplets and then reproduce is an idea whose time is passing.
It’s been pretty much an imperative for the entire existence of the human species that everyone continually focus on creating the next generation of the species. Until very recently, most human populations were hanging on by their fingernails in one way or another, and this was literally a matter of life and death. So it’s easy to imagine how deeply ingrained the idea is, how much our customs and conventions have been shaped by it, and how we now feel uncomfortable to see it changing. Throughout this post, for example, the subconscious tone has been that something is wrong and how can we fix it. Perhaps nothing is wrong!
The fem saying that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” may express one part of a more general notion: various conventional and coercive arrangements that used to encourage marriage and having kids are now dropping away due to other changes in society, whether we like it or not.
As Hunter Thompson might have said, we bought the ticket, now we’re going to take the ride.
THIS! If crypto bros flaunting grifted wealth on the apps is what’s appealing, or an “alpha”, then god help us all.
In the spirit of sharing, i’m so fascinated by all of this as my millenial ass had the great fortune to marry his college sweetheart, who’s courtship predated any and all apps (and even smartphones). I have routinely considered myself beyond grateful to never have been (or need to be) flung into the wilderness of dating apps, despite having watched countless friends meet and marry into thriving marriages.
one particular anecdote from a friend from a few years ago stands out: after some long term relationships failed he was on the apps. now he is a handsome man, smart, intelligent, curious, friendly, an overall catch. but he also comes from tremendous family money, the kind of old money that chairs countless foundations, owns multiple vacation homes and would be a lottery ticket to any future spouse. i doubt any of this was visible from his app profile, but some googling would reveal most. anyway, i was shocked to learn that for him the apps were essentially shooting fish in a barrel to such a degree that initial incoming texts from matches were nudes and more. wha?!? i’m so old fashioned i couldn’t quite wrap my head around it.
it seems there’s fine line between predatory creep/potential #metoo candidate and lusting after a catch. and that line is subjective hotness.
This paradox blinds my Gen X eyes. Me too and swipe this way nudies arose simultaneously from the tomb of traditional dating. Both are predatorial, comically to type. Violence and manipulation.
I had some friends who got into the top % of males on the apps and experienced the fish in a barrel phenomenon.
One is a very handsome, aggressive Black man over 6′ who is a semi-well known rock musician, spoken word performer and author and is also a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu (very very fit and muscular) who’s had multiple successful Silicon Valley jobs and has a house in Palo Alto and plenty of Apple stock oh he also is very happy to tell anyone about his massive endowment which has been confirmed by multiple women and anyone who’s shared a locker room with him.
He ended up getting Ozzy Osbourne disease (in which the rock star develops a profound aversion to sleeping with groupies in a sudden subjective gestalt switch, happened to R Crumb too) and getting off the apps after about 18 months. He was in his late 40s at the time.
The other dude was just high-earning, white, blonde, over 6′, handsome and thin, very physically active. He enjoyed himself with several women (who were more than happy to indulge his various S&M proclivities) and then found a 3rd wife, not via an app.
I imagine that men on the apps are trolled by OnlyFans types and have therefore their own dreck to shift through.
If you’re looking for a real, human connection, this no doubt drives cynicism towards women.
We love that joke, really we do. Also the one about the pizza being able, unlike a musician, to feed a family of four. I have a family of six (plus the occasional Stray human) and I have fed them four a quarter century. I have even made them pizzas. I have also changed their diapers (including for a bit, a mother-in-law’s), washed their clothes and done their dishes, et al.,taught them to read and attended all their school functions– all while being a musician. My wife travels around making money and leaves me the domestic sphere. Her co-workers (and fellow females) are allegedly jealous of out family arrangements. I am skeptical. But I paraphrase Clemenceau, that child-rearing is too important to be left to the mothers.
I found this piece fascinating.
It critiques the “too hot to work” phenomenon, in which attractive women attach themselves to (economically) powerful men in exchange for, au fond, sex. As a Russian, the author saw it earlier there, but discusses it in other contexts too.
At the age of 77 I am for the most part “no longer in the game”, but based on my observation I say the demise of the male/female relationship is due to the advent of the internet, smart phones, drive in banking etc.
In the past, both young male and females developed through their various activities’ social inter-personal skills. These skills developed in youth not only fostered common sense, but the ability to handle relationships between the sexes and the confidence to do so. This is no longer the case.
Technology advancement is great, but we are becoming transhuman and we don’t even realize it.
Shoe on head has put out a few videos talking about this topic-
https://www.youtube.com/@Shoe0nHead
Re: Paglia and Peterson–
I’ve only listened to the first 7 minutes of the video, but what a 7 minutes. I don’t agree with Paglia about a lot, but her rant against those (like Peterson) who call post-Modernism “Marxist” and trash the 60s with a “It’s the hippies’ fault” cliche like Thiel (and Peterson) was epic. I stood up and shouted, “Bravo!” Listen to the video for that if nothing else.
More broadly, we have been messing with the primal forces of Nature, not Mr. Jensen’s ecumenical college of corporations, but with the real primal forces. Unsatisfied with being two-legged animals on a stunningly beautiful and bountiful Earth, we set out to take and commodify and master whatever we could lay our hands on, beginning slowly with agriculture and accelerating exponentially with the arrival of Nate Hagens’s Carbon Pulse.
Our hubris has brought on the twin curses of capitalism and technology that in combination first destroyed our communities (think Enclosure), separated extended families into vulnerable nuclear families (think ‘burbs’), and now is interrupting our species’s very means of propagation.
Order will be restored. Those primal forces can sweep us aside the way we swat a gnat. If we could learn from the Japanese, who have entered degrowth without falling into immediate chaos, we still might avoid the worst, but I suspect things will need to get considerably worse before most of us are ready for that.
Yes, and the demise of the smaller community schools that promoted more inter-personal relationships to the busing and creating of the giant “consolidated” schools that basically destroyed what was American youth.
I first watched the video a few years ago when I was wondering what all the fuss about Peterson was about and wanted to find out if he had anything interesting to say. After watching Paglia bat him around like a half dead mouse, I realized he was mostly hot air and became and even bigger fan of Paglia’s. Definitely well worth the watch.
paglia is a force of nature. as has been said, if nothing else watch her eviscerate, emasculate peterson in the first, like, 7 minutes.
delicious manparts and viscera!
she’s had a standing invitation to my fire since ive had a fire.
i would love to argue with her,lol.
or, say something vague that pisses her off, and watch her go.
and Mods…and/or Yves…since i missed this 2nd installment of what i think is a very important discourse…and not just due to my current personal situation,lol…but also on an anthropological(and thus philosophcal/sociological/Frommian mass psychological/and so on) Level
(they call all that sort of thing “interdisciplinary”, these days, i hear…but its what Liberal Arts once was)
we’re witnessing History, in so many ways, these days…and i know this originated as an “economics blog”.
but dern, girl…haven’t you managed to re-unite Political Economics, after, like, an hundred years?
all of these social and psychological and interpersonal failures have a direct effect on spending, after all.
(idea for an experiment: have a bot army with a credit card, that looks for all the world like actual people, go out and buy 20 million pitchforks at hardware stores and walmarts all over the country, on the same day…then observe government/power elite response.)
and to whomever linked the ken wilber cult video…lol.
i watched the whole thing.
paused it many times so i could see the actual chart/graph he kept waving around…and i liked the cartoons and the pen as pointer.
and while he has a lot of good insights(ive read him), he is still the New Age Guru of neoliberalism.
(I’m apparently level 9)
human beins are more complex than even neoliberalism contemplates…and cannot be measured and systematised…for that is fascism.
and is, thereby, a violation of our inherent Right to be not what anyone expects or demands.
Camille was the first to receive my invitation.
Max Boot was the second.
Zizek was the third.
ive invited Lambert and Yves more times than i can remember
…being starved for high level, in person discourse, and all,lol.
Japan may be doing ok at the moment. But if the rest if the world goes into degrowth and screws up the export side of their economy, that may change.
On the positive side of cultural chauvinism Japan has an elite that actually likes Japan and its traditions.
No such luck here.
I’ve always enjoyed Paglia, but had never listened to or read anything by Peterson. Halfway through it’s apparent by his own admissions that he’s been in a great many physical fights with men he doesn’t agree with, and has little respect for men who wouldn’t. He’s an escalation ladder.
Greshamette’s Law*, or how college expense, ideology culture and job market dysfunction helped drive men away. Why go into debt for some sketch degree and office dronery when you can learn a trade requiring real skills that are hard to offshore, have a decent shot at a six-figure income, work around like-minded guys and retain some self-respect. Bonus, less caustic interactions, lower chance of cancel bulls**t and better qualify of life. More people want a trad or similar life than the media are willing to admit. Not for everyone, but not for nobody either.
Colleges are rethinking their missions, right-sizing or even closing, with ripple effects likely through high schools. Re-engineering academia, another unexpected oxymoronic aspect of modern life.
*Bad environmental factors drive out the good.
The ratio of male to female college degrees doesn’t tell the whole story. What about the dropouts?
There must now be millions of young men who were encouraged to borrow tens of thousand$, even though they had no marketable skills, and eventually left college without a degree and no hope of getting out of student debt – not even bankruptcy (thanks to Joe Biden). I probably wouldn’t date one of them either.
I vividly remember signing my first student loan application form in 1975: $1,300 for one trimester at Devry, at that time a trade school for electronics repair. I decided to risk it because even if I failed out after one or two trimesters it would not be too painful.
I got good grades and decided to quit after one session and go to a real college the next fall. The list price for tuition there was $4,000 per year, but since the federal student loan limit was $2,500, that is how much they charged me, and so I graduated after four years with $10,000 in debt plus the original $1,300. My point being, that even if I had not received a college degree, or had become disabled in early career, this debt was manageable and there was always bankruptcy.
What are young people supposed to do with unpayable, undischargeable student debt? It is social death.
It’s been pretty obvious for some time now that the college degrees offered at many institutions are remnants of an earlier time (the Middle ages?). Many degrees are for fields that don’t exist or exist in tiny numbers. Many of them include several years of irrelevant coursework driving the cost way up. Usually, the people teaching the courses have never worked in the field, so their advice and subject matter knowledge is suspect. In no case does the institution take any responsibility for finding you work after you drop six figures on them.
This arrangement may have been fine in say, the 1950s, when (any) “liberal arts degree” was the basis for a lot of employment in society which featured long-term employment and on-the-job training. Those days are pretty well gone. Walking into a employer with an English literature or history degree probably won’t get you very far now.
And yet a large number of liberal arts colleges continue to exist, with large departments stuffed with faculty that continues to teach bygone subjects.
liberal arts are not the problem.
bullshit degrees like associates of business (hell, I’d say all the way up to MBA’s), communications, journalism, marketing, economics, poli sci etc are much more likely to create chronic unemployment AND pass on no useful knowledge.
anyone who has actually learned a good literature, history, or philosophy curriculum has acquired a very marketable skill set (although LLM is crushing the value of writing skills).
Agree. A decent Liberal Arts education creates certain intangibles that are more and more necessary for today’s world, but the economy and society we’ve agreet to need something else entirely – a conveyor belt producing identical and easily replaced individuals whose skills rapidly become obsolete with the accelerating tempo of “innovation”. Meanwhile new graduates by and large lack the broad-based humanities background that create skills to observe and understand the societal processes, and potentially drive people to join to create effective resistance to these processes they deem undesirable.
Before someone throws a charge of elitism, let me point out that in the past the church was an institution that instilled those values of community in the populations as a whole. But that role was successfully hijacked and subverted by the rise of certain evangelical denominations.
Now we are at a point where most people know we are going in the wrong direction in just about every sphere of life, yet cannot exactly put their finger on how exactly, what needs to be done about it and how to go about doing it. The fetishization of “technocrats” and “meritocrats” has in the meantime stuffed the halls of corporations and government with “leaders” who themselves yell for more STEM and less LAS, amplified by a loud and big online ecosystem of “commentators” earning a living by shilling and ganging up on anyone who throws a grain of sand in the gears, like Mamdani.
So here we are.
With all due respect, this sounds like the kind of thing a classics professor would argue when the dean came in and announced that his department was being eliminated. I’m very familiar with it, having been told all my life very similar tales.
There is certainly a conception of University where the overall goal is drawn from the Enlightenment: create a well-rounded and highly educated population, and society will be better off. What I am calling liberal arts degrees fit this conception very well and I don’t mean to bag on them in any larger sense.
Of course this vision of university is at odds with what I think is the current one: job training. The only reason anyone drops five or six figures on a college degree at this point is because they think it will make it possible to get a higher paying job on graduation. The number of people who would spend that much to fulfill the enlightenment vision is probably close to zero. So I think at this juncture, the college system is vocational, not educational in the broader sense. I’m not saying this is good necessarily, but I think it’s true.
Givin this, I think it’s incumbent on universities to give their students honest value (a degree that will help them in the job market) instead of treating them like chumps and dopes and shoving them out the door after 4 years with a worthless sheepskin. I remember recently some initiatives that tacitly agreed with this. They would allow students to defer paying student loans until such time as they had good stable employment. I think these kinds of changes would help by forcing universities to have some skin in the game instead of just continuing to do what they have always done since Socrates.
agree with the cost/benefit analysis of the modern university. While some profs still deliver very enlightening lectures, the main thing is doing the reading and that certainly doesn’t require paying five figures in tuition per year to pay the salaries of multiple levels of administration
If AI develops as its hypesters suggests (a big if), and Moravec’s Paradox holds (AI is far better than humans at intellectual tasks, but finds manual tasks impossible), it’s going to lead to a collapse in white-collar employment and status, and those men will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Fantastic sum up Yves! Don´t know whether I agree with all of it but thought provoking and well laid out! Exactly the kind of thinking that is verboten nowadays. By the way: I am the father of two late teen / early adult boys and one girl and live in Germany. it is all very sad and also mysterious.
The exceptions among the friends of my kids that have normal relationships with the other sex are:
1. Ella. Also with two brothers, a very smart STEM girl, mostly woke but open to arguments. Has had several boyfriends.
2. Noa. A Christian, totally rejects Smart phones, abortion and the modern world. Sews and wants to be a school teacher. Has steady boyfriend. Got on well with Ella during an outdoors trip which I organised.
3. Felix. A rather cynical 20 year old from a broken family. Studies to be an official. Conservative. Rejects practically all precepts of society but smart enough not to show that too openly. Several girlfriends
4. Benedikt. Studies classical music. Plays bass. Brainy and no adonis. Rather cynical about girls but quite successful. Also from a broken family. Loves his troubled younger sister and tries to help her in life.
And then there are rather more ostensibly woke teenage girls who never had a boyfriend as they simply scare the opposite sex. The opposite are boys who go to the gym all the time as they seem to believe only a perfect body might entitle them to female companionship.
It is a total mess…
I know a therapist who ran group sessions with teenage boys. He tells me that when he went around the room asking the boys what they want most in life, they would invariably answer “six pack abs.”
I could not make up a sadder story if I tried.
aye…but you still need some kind of social situation,lol.
i have quite accidentally, due to all the exercise my daily chores afford, as well as eating what i grow at home almost exclusively, developed prolly the best body i have ever had(sans the skeleton, and the teeth)…six pack, svelt, thin…hard bodied(“lost” 30# in 3 years without even thinking about it)…but i’m also broke and almost 56…and cant afford to go anywhere.
i glean that my half naked self wandering across the road to check for eggs when the ups chick comes by is what got her to stop in the first place.
no more pot belly, like when we were doing the cancer adventure and eating whataburger all the time.
but in my county, and its one town…one needs nicer clothes than i usually wear, and at least some discretionary $ to go and hang out at what social places there are, here…and prolly a newer truck(a status symbol i never really understood)…and then there’s the added social marker of an older guy going into such places alone…and then seeing everybody else already with friends…and no other solo people, save a few drunk guys.
my by now inherent social awkwardness and strangeness just add to the problem.
and sadly, i am all but certain that if i went into any of these bars and slapped down a benjamin and bought rounds for the house, my luck would change immediately…and in spite of things like my bad teeth.
Interesting and timely topic. This link provides background information on the MGTOW movement. fyi
https://easysociology.com/sociology-of-social-movements/the-mgtow-movement-an-overview/
Back in the 90’s when I was in uni and the only male in the Women’s Studies class I made friends with some radical leftist militant feminists who were quite vicious, I would say toxic even, about men, even while being friendly towards me. We studied Paglia, Kristeva, Irigaray, etc. In my view, my experience was more difficult than what men typically encounter now – because I was dealing with many who agreed with Dworkin that all heterosexual intercourse was a form of rape and domination, male supremacy, even if or when consensual. More so, it was nearly universally agreed that we were living in a patriarchical society.
These days I don’t find that feminists or women believe these things to the extent they did when I was in uni.
The toxicity was confusing for me, yes, and super awkward, but didn’t affect my dating life – I went on to have a long term relationship with a radical leftist militant feminist. I would argue as a result of my learnings and experiences I went from anti-feminist to feminist.
I don’t think it impacted my libido? Or my sex life? And lefties even nowadays are known to be sexually free, even promiscuous, many in my circles were/are poly or in open relationships. If your belief is that society is patriarchical, the alternative to this would be relationship styles which tended away from the strictly scripted, predefined roles assigned by that same patriarchical society, such as men are heads of households, breadwinners, and women belong in the kitchen. In other words away from domination/subjugation or even status and tending toward consensual. Away from the typical model of institutionally or religiously endorsed marriage and your assigned role is to be fruitful and multiply.
Are we saying that men and boys these days are so utterly sensitive and vulnerable they go through the same experience but come out damaged and incapable? Eunuchs? Castrated (physically or psychologically)? I’m not sure I would agree with that.
Perhaps roles are being redefined away from the idea you must enter relationships, have sex and be fruitful and mutiply? Perhaps as a society we’re moving away from a framework where if you’re not in a relationship you’re a worthless human being?
Also, I’m going to throw in climate change as a possible factor. I have to say I find it impossible to have sex in a sauna, which is what the world is these days. And why would people want to bring children into this?
But I do also think I’m seeing a trend of young women misreading innocent situations. Over the years I’ve witnessed a shift in the kinds of work related incidents where I’ve seen men literally sexually harass women in very obvious and easily verifiable ways, e.g. video footage of a male worker trapping a woman in an elevator, or witnesses to sexual touching, hands on bums or boobs, or easily verified persistent unwanted behaviour, but nowadays the kinds of incidents I see are where men don’t do anything at all and are nevertheless said to be harassing or sexual. Simply standing in a different room facing the other direction, talking to someone else, is misread by a woman in a separate room as sexual harassment. There urgently needs to be more education around what is or isn’t sexual or harassment, there IS a disconnect between what actually is sexual or harassment.
I just don’t think that disconnect is the reason. I dated and had sex in a far more difficult dating environment.
In the sexual harassment trainings I’ve seen in corporate settings, the key understanding is intent is irrelevant, and whatever the aggrieved person feels is controlling. In such places, it makes sense to minimize interactions with anyone that might possibly get you into trouble. Leaving under a cloud can’t be good for future career prospects, either.
I believe you’re failing to notice the conceptual synthesis that has occurred since your college experience with some of the ideology you witnessed at its relative zenith, and flatly disagree that your environment was more challenging. Boys these days are not going through what you did – another way to describe your women’s studies class is that you were witnessing firsthand ideological fringe, or ideological vanguard, of an idea which was and had been (in attenuated form) seeping into the culture at large. Young people today live something of a domesticated version of hyperfeminism which is less extreme and absolute but not less malignant – indeed, it’s probably more malignant, because it no longer exists on the fringe. The domesticated form is ubiquitous and legitimized by its mainstreaming, and the sense of psychic peril that accrues is very different from experiencing fringers with odd ideas about the moral character of the ol’ in-out, love. This is essentially the difference in what constitutes sexual harassment today and sexual harassment of yesteryear – it’s not some “misunderstanding” on the parts of the parties involved. The entire environment of mating is saturated with expectations that would’ve been arcane and wonky 30ish years ago, you can’t educate your way out of that, it is a manifest zeitgeist.
Can I impose upon you to elaborate what you mean by psychic peril which accrues and is legitimized by mainstreaming?
For example, rape has always been morally repugnant in almost all societies and cultures, but we now come to a point where we seem to be effectively addressing it. Is this the psychic peril, that there are consquences deterring men from raping?
To take another, the idea that women aren’t property is a legal concept which evolved in the legal framework quite apart from and before feminism (in fact the legal framework evolved by men may have led to women demanding the right to vote). Is that the psychic peril (it is often cited by so-called libertarian and men’s rights groups who seem exclusively focused on alimony and child support, not realizing men created this, not women).
Conceptual synthesis is always happening, regardless, and describes all of human history. So again, I don’t really know what you might mean by that unless you perhaps say which concepts are synthesizing with which.
I’m struggling to pinpoint as well what might be different between dating now and 30 years ago apart from the digial platforms and the general change in attitude toward rape.
The psychic peril arises from the vague impersonal sense that in an interaction with a woman, anything one does could potentially be construed as misbehavior and in a sense socially prosecuted as such. You’ve described it exactly in the penultimate paragraph of your original post. It’s not women “misreading” innocent interactions, it is that theirs is the power to determine the character of an interaction, innocent or otherwise. The point Jason made about corporate harassment trainings is germane here, although I believe those are really reflections of the zeitgeist rather than trendsetters if you will. This is the conceptual synthesis I’m describing – the feminism you encountered in university was extreme and in my view could never have mainstreamed in toto (heterosexual intercourse as inherently malignant is never going to do numbers). The framework of omnipatriarchy, however, has realigned and really kind of depoliticized itself into the aforementioned pathologization of what you agree are normal social interactions. I must stress that there isn’t a clear ruleset for this which is why you see young men as damaged and incapable – and that is the idea I’m trying to refute. It’s not that the rules of the game have tilted towards women when previously they too heavily favored men; that’s fine. It’s that the rules are never clear.
Thank you for the clarification.
In the example I described the accuser lost her job, the accused never knew he was accused. Outside of the workplace, most cases involving sexual harassment do not succeed in court, suggesting most of these are unconvincing or that the bar of overcoming doubt or even probability is too high, so I wouldn’t say women (or men) have the power to determine the character of the interaction – especially around sexual impropriety.
Perhaps this is why you call it psychic? The word would seem to pass no judgement on the veracity of the thing described, attributes it to the psyche. Not a bad choice.
Right, I’m speaking strictly on the level of sub-legal consequences – social and psychological – which is why I use the word psychic, it’s a thing which is taking place overwhelmingly in the mind. I will say for my purposes I have no doubt whatsoever that the social environment I’m describing is real, as real as any definitionally immaterial thing can be.
yes.
late 80’s, in my first semester in college…i went to a frat rush party and ended up on the roof with the trashcan punch with 3 lesbians….part of a sapphic collective of 6 lesbians who had adjoining dorm rooms and were all photography students.
i ran around with them a lot…and several times, we all 7 ended up in my little travel trailer, drunk an high, and…on their initiative, mind you…had us what the pron industry calls a reverse g*ngb%ng,lol.
of course, i thought it was frelling awesome!
but i was an out intellectual, and in my outlaw(literally) phase…and could be caught reading Verlaine in the grass of the commons.
we talked and read together the whole time…notably, we all read paglia and judith butler together…and all but one of those young women sided with Camille and I,lol….agreed that Butler was a recipe for disaster, as I, myself, was living proof that not all men were rapists and domineering….would do dishes without prompting and have a care for a woman’s needs in the sack.(all 6 of them regarded dworkin as a fat cow and deranged)
i still occasionally hear from my fave of the lot…married to a guy for 30 years, kids, etc…a bit of swingin on the side.
when she calls….once in a blue moon…its usually to rant about exactly the sort of thing we’re talking about, here.
brings up those long ago discourses(and orgies…usually intertwined with each other).
i do think…having kept a keen eye on feminist discourse in all the intervening years…that the butler/dworkin mess has been a contributing factor in whats under our glass right now…and, like you say, its not fringe, any more.
its a sort of faux mainstream thought virus thats been shoehorned into our collective consciousness…by some kind of vanguardist cabal.
I think it’s pretty easy to make a case that some widespread water-borne endocrine disruptor or mimic of same is responsible for much of what we are seeing in the way of reduced reproductive rates. The fact that we are seeing this all over the world at virtually the same time argues against societal or cultural factors to me, as does the needed complexity and subtlety of competing explanations, as we are seeing in this thread. This problem like seems like something stemming from a simple and immediately understandable cause. Recall, for example, that lead in gasoline turned out to be the single explanation for an extended period of violent criminal behavior in the United States, blowing away tons of other tortured sociological and psychological possibilities. This seems like the same deal.
The only difficulty with this is that it hasn’t actually been shown to be true as far as I know. But maybe no one is looking.
spread of smart phones and social media correlates with declining marriage rates in numerous countries that haven’t experienced the improvements in women’s standard of living that has been blamed in the west.
I did not expect this website to become my first entry point into the manoshpere :-)
Thanks but I’ll stay outside on this one.
head in the sand, sad
On the contrary, this is a perfect opportunity to pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass, and let people tell you who they are.
Re; “The Manosphere”
On the Procedure for Carrying out the Deportation of Anti-Soviet Elements from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Regarding_the_Procedure_for_carrying_out_the_Deportation_of_Anti-Soviet_Elements_from_Lithuania,_Latvia,_and_Estonia
During the deportations from the Baltic Countries to the Gulags of the USSR in 1941, it was deemed to be very important to separate the heads of the family (men) from the women and children. They are called “The Serov Instructions”. The link above gives the full, chilling “instructions” for the NKVD. If you are interested, read it in full.
IMO, there is a dastardly scheme/logic, behind the destruction of the family as we used to know it………….
“……….5. Procedure for Separating a Deportee’s Family from the Head of the Family
In view of the fact that a large number of deportees must be arrested and distributed in special camps and that their families must proceed to special settlements in distant regions, it is essential that the operations of removal of both the members of the deportee’s family and its head shall be carried out simultaneously, without notifying them of the separation confronting them. After the domiciliary search has been carried out and the appropriate identification documents have been drawn up in the deportee’s home, the operative worker shall complete the documents for the head of the family and deposit them in the latter’s personal file, but the documents drawn up for members of his family shall be deposited in the personal file of the deportee’s family. The convoy of the entire family to the station shall, however, be effected in one vehicle and only at the station of departure shall the head of the family be placed separately from his family in a car specially intended for heads of families.
During the assembling (of the family) in the home of the deportee the head of the family shall be warned that personal male effects must be packed in a separate suitcase, as a sanitary inspection of the deported men will be made separately from the women and children.
At the stations of entrainment heads of families subject to arrest shall be loaded into cars specially allotted to them, which shall be indicated by operative workers appointed for that purpose. …………”
I think this gets close to the issue: “But men dropping out to a meaningful degree from dating and marriage (and college) does have some similarity, in that men are withholding sex over they unhappiness with new gender norms and their enforcement not just by women but often institutions.. . . . And yes, dampened male libido and pursuit of relationships has . . . economic implications”
Much has been written about men dropping out of the workforce (and civil society in general), and I think this is largely related to gender dynamics. There is a meme that a man’s ideal house is a two car garage with a car on one side and futon, kitchennete and computer desk on the other side. There may be some truth to that, and I suspect many men’s drive for accomplishment and extravagant houses, cars, etc. is largely to impress women. Take away any interest in attracting women and there goes a large percentage of men striving for achievement. Obviously there are men with a strong work ethic and who work to provide give their lives meaning regardless of what women want, but they could be a minority.
Recently purchased a Sprinter camper van. Meticulously thought and planned out interior build. The technological and space-saving innovations in the field are amazing. I now have a version of the garage you described, only the vehicle and living space are one and mobile. I spend nearly as much time in the van at home in the back acre as I do in the house. A house full of people I love who also happen to be women. They love me too, but also consider me an odd duck. Men ~ odd duck?
Seems like a rampant microaggression, you being forced to live out in the backyard in a truck while the women take over the house. ;-)
take it from me…one of the secrets to a long and mostly happy marriage is to give each other ample room.
i also advocate having separate beds/rooms…we did that because of my skeleton/tossing and flailing all night…but it worked out well for us(as well as all my grandparents,notably.).
one of us would “sneak” into the others’ room when the mood struck…which was also rather cool…
This sounds right to me. You could probably answer this question positively by looking at the marketing materials of the housing industry over the years. It’s pretty easy to see which person in the household the house was aimed at.
Heh
I’ve seen this played out on Apps with womens’ profiles saying something akin to being in therapy is sexy or don’t talk to me unless you’re in therapy.
Fun times!
I visit many web sites that review new books, since I have been a big reader all my life. For at least the last decade now I have seen more and more books reviewed set in imaginary societies that are horribly oppressive of women, a la The Handmaid’s Tale, or past societies where women are sub-third class citizens. More women than men are regular readers, so I imagine they are a large part of the readership for these books. But why in a place and time (1st world, 21st century) when women have more freedom, power, and wealth than they have probably ever had in recorded history, are they focused in on exaggerated stories of past (or fantasized) oppression? And, in a related trend, why are some novels mentioned approvingly as illustrating “female rage”, as if rage was good when felt by the right sort of person? I thought rage (like pride, ironically) was one of the seven deadly sins, not something to be celebrated. If the rest of the world of cultural/media influences (which I am out of touch with) mirrors the literary world, young men certainly must feel very wary in encounters with women, and they have to feel like they’re typecast as the default villains in most narratives that are promoted by the publishing industry. Not to say there aren’t pockets of the opposite kind of unrealistic male-female interactions, where hyper-masculinity and violence are portrayed as heroic (Special Forces military porn, basically). But those are small in publicity and readership compared to the stories of angry women fighting oppressive males.
abortion rights is one guess. certainly not trending in a direction of more freedom/power.
and loss of abortion rights quickly turns basic ob/gyn needs into potential nightmares, including planned and desired pregnancies. the GOP ghouls in Texas have certainly put many a woman who wanted to bear a child into life threatening (and worse) situations.
in between our 1st and 2nd child, wife had an ectopic pregnancy…where the fertilised egg lodges in the fallopian tube. she needed emergency surgery, lest it kill her.
and that egg was never, ever gonna be a baby.
but Rick Perry’s Texas marked that surgery down as “an Abortion”.
I shudder at what my future daughter in laws will hafta go through, these days.
to her credit, my mom saw this coming, and has maintained a stand of things like Rue and Pennyroyal….even a Chaste Tree, or 3.
she could never find Slippery Elm.
(all dangerous stuff, of course…but we’re back to the bad old days)
>>>(all dangerous stuff, of course…but we’re back to the bad old days)
And to think that many of the supporters of abortion rights back before Roe v. Wade were emergency room doctors and nurses, people who had to deal with all the horrific results of self inflicted or back ally abortions.
I think that after a while we will have enough of the new bad old days and revert the to the good old days, but how long will that take?
People should read more Plato and Aristophanes speech in Symposium:
Zeus discovered a way. He said: ‘Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers [—] He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair [—] each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. [—] And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.
https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/myths/androgyne.htm
A guilty pleasure of mine is to watch a reality series (one of the very few I watch) Love Is Blind on Netflix. I realize some of it is scripted and editing is done, but the grief and frustration on the part of the males comes through. The guys seem to be in almost physical pain when they try to talk about feelings. Yet, this is what the women seem to want the most. During the series they “date” several people by only talking through a “wall” that prevents seeing the other person. Falling in love with the person’s mind/personality without being distracted by the visual is the premise of the show. When one person proposes marriage through the wall and the proposal is accepted they get to finally see each other in person. Their reaction to how the person looks and subsequent interactions on their “honeymoon” and trial marriage creates the drama of the series. Very few maintain their relationship to the day of legally getting married. The focus on what each person expects and what they are able to contribute is interesting even in this contrived atmosphere. There is a big mismatch in most cases. Often the males just can’t tolerate having to talk about feelings so often.
It perhaps isn’t that they can’t tolerate it. But they just don’t have an opinion on many things that they are asked about.
I’ve been single and dating before and after the pandemic started, and things post-pandemic seem to have completely fallen apart. (I met my last serious relationship a couple months before COVID-19 hit, and we were together through early 2024)
In my own appraisal, it seems like:
1) women’s expectations are now way WAY off what most men can provide (and as an aside, yeah, a lot of guys are bums, but it’s not like some of these women complaining about men are any great prizes themselves!*); and
2) the dating apps themselves make meeting and interacting with someone much more dysfunctional, rather than making it easier and streamlining the process like you’d think.
Regarding women’s dating expectations, they seem entranced by Instagram models; that’s a lifestyle – particularly for expensive travel – that is just unrealistic to me, and given the incomes of the average American male. And also of course, way out of line with what the planet can bear, if the stats about CO2 emissions due to increased air travel are to be believed…
“Don’t swipe right unless you have TSA-precheck”
“Pick our first trip: Paris, Bali, or Maui”
“I’m gone every weekend. you better be able to keep up.”
…I’d see comments like these on A LOT of profiles. And these are like nurses, mid-level corporate managers, marketers, dental hygienists, etc. Are they going on these trips by themselves? Do that many Gen X and Millenial women have trust funds? Where are they finding the money? I’m a corporate attorney and I don’t travel as frequently or as expensively as they do when I DO take vacations. This is nuts.
It’s so bad that a couple months ago, I deleted the last dating app I was on, and I don’t expect to use any again.
And speaking of dating apps, I suspect the apps themselves make meeting people more challenging. Seems to me the programmers are tweeking the algorithms to squeeze more $$$ out of men. When I used Bumble pre-pandemic, I don’t remember the pressure to pay for a half-dozen different features being so intense. The wording they use around the need to pay $5-$10 a pop to boost your profile for a 1/2 hour to get views and likes is extremely coercive. And you can’t even use some of the common filters (like religious beliefs) without paying for premium. Hinge and Tinder are similar.
Maybe this is all not such a bad thing… the planet could do with fewer Americans.
(I already have kids and am not having more)
*of the five (5) dates I’ve had post-pandemic, 4 showed up significantly heavier and older than their pictures showed. I felt lied to, though I was still polite and we otherwise had an okay night out. The 5th one was relatively fit, but confided that if she didn’t smoke marijuana regularly she had anger and anxiety issues. Glad she let me know that on the 1st date! I used to enjoy the period of time before a date started… the expectations, the anticipation, etc. Now I dread it. So I deleted the apps and am not going to make meeting someone a focus in my life at all. If it happens, okay. If not, no big deal.
Basically all the Apps, except Bumble, are owned by Match Group. And they have a minority stake in Bumble I believe. And thus every app follows the Tinder model of extracting more and more money out of people.
Being on the apps is a kind of psychological abuse. I spend much of my time wondering if anyone would ever match with me, and when that happened, often I never got a reply, and if I did, an attempt to setup a date often failed, and if one was setup, the cancellation rate was very high if she was attractive.
Apps are a great way for average looking guys to feel worthless.
Thankfully with the Pandemic, all these are completely useless. Few people acknowledge the ongoing Pandemic. And being single in this environment is actually a great risk reducer.
10-15 years ago I spoke with a man who was dating in a top ten-sized city in Sweden. The lady was working in a bank – upper or mid-level, if I remember it correctly. In any case, it was a career lady, that much was obvious and fully stuffed with Sex and the City imaginations.
On one of their first dates she put forward a few demands that he should meet in order to even be a candidate for further relationship. I don’t remember the specifics but at the time my reaction would have been just leave her there waiting for the menopause to beat some humility into her soul. But he said OK to all those demands but then added the question “so, if I meet all these demands, what will you do for me?”. Crickets…
At the time I was so happy to live in a country where both men and women want to love each other and put the family forward as a fundamental value.
$5 says she had no answer because her attitude was “men have had it too good too long and you have to make up for it.”
Of course this reasoning makes no sense within the context of a relationship. but I have met other (usually white but not always) women in corporate America that had this attitude. It’s very self-serving and shallow.
At my prior corporate job (I left in 2020) I had the misfortune of working for someone like that and her pet in our dept. Both white females, went to good schools their entire lives, parents who paid all their tuition costs (up til law school) and the amount of shit they’d talk about “entitled white men” in the office was irritating. Neither of them had ever been denied a thing in their lives, yet they had internalized this language of victimhood.
And of course I watched my boss go around the office starting whisper campaigns against women she didn’t like, and had gotten two fired and was working on a third (our longtime paralegal) when the company went bankrupt and she bailed for greener pastures.
It is very clear in hindsight that this “women owe men” language is too easily corrupted into “men owe ME personally even though I’ve lived my entire professional life after 1990”
I deleted the apps two years ago. I met a few great women on them but the overall experience was appalling. I met my current partner the old-fashioned way – in real live through pursuing my civil activism. No need to explain to some status-obsessed spinster between 38-50 why I do what I do instead of investing my energies climbing the status ladder. What’s not to like about that?
Regarding some of the comments in the article, I don’t know that fear of being accused of rape is to blame. I’ve never been in that position or even felt like it could happen. But I’m not an a******.
Like if you’re not dating because you’re worried about being accused of rape… are you telling on yourself?
Regarding my prior post, I’m not sure where women’s insane expectations of men come from, whether that’s feminism or capitalism, but I lean toward the latter. Women were often more concerned with social appearances than men, and in my opinion the need to “keep up with the Joneses,” and that’s just been turbocharged by social media, and social media is capitalism on steroids after 3 margaritas.
It’s gross. But it’s not because of 1970’s feminism (whatever wave)
Have had two hookups where the woman started yelling “No! stop!” In the midst of it. Both apparently got off on r*** roleplay. Would have been courteous of them to tell me this before scaring the hell out of me.
Had another who in the midst of our first hookup want me to punch (not slap or whatever but punch) her in the face and call her awful things I won’t type here.
The numbers of hookups with women who want to be choked is off the charts.
As someone who abhors violence and has no sexual attraction to it in any form these have been traumatizing experiences. But there’s also the added fear that if I’d followed through on the actions requested of me and an accusation would surface it’s hard to imagine a “But she said she wanted it, your Honor” would work in court. Definitely wouldn’t work in the court of public opinion. See: Armie Hammer.
That said, the one that still haunts me was the time I was out with a female friend and things seemed to have taken a romantic turn. Went in for a kiss and she recoiled with horror in her eyes. Seeing that look and knowing I’d caused it with my advance was heartbreaking. I apologized and took her home. Over time we rekindled our friendship but that moment still lingers in my brain. I’d never had someone look at me in fear before and never want that to happen again.
The compassionate side of me wants to (and have on a few occasions) delved into how these women had been hurt that this is what they seek out. Tragic abuse seems to have been the root. The reality of violence and abuse toward women is not something I take lightly. It is not something I would ever take part in even in a roleplaying scenario. But, the fear of an accusation is still there. Especially when it seems many (at least ones drawn to me) like to push the boundaries.
I don’t know how common my experiences are. Maybe something about me attracts emotionally wounded women. And these experiences haven’t stopped me from dating so on that point I agree with you. But it has made me timid and much less “alpha” then I once was in how I court potential partners. Basically I leave it to the women to make first moves now days.
That’s wild. I’ve dated women who liked being submissive or wanted me to pull their hair and stuff like that, but never actually get punched (ouch!).
I could do those things without worrying about consequences, because we were in a relationship and there was trust there. You still have to assume some basic human levels of understanding and decency, and even if she were to turn out to be a complete psychopath and lie and wholly fabricate the context of our interaction, I have more hope than not that I would be exonerated, even if I was actually charged with a crime.
I don’t understand where this fear comes from in guys; there are more stories than not out there of police departments just wholly disregarding rape kits, and cops doing nothing when presented with credible evidence of rape.
Harvey Weinstein made an entire career out of coercive sex; it took multiple women testifying against him to convict him, and he still had more than his fair share of days in court to contest all of it.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, and women can be as manipulative and abusive in relationships as man can, but it’s not common. I don’t understand the thinking that this fear of being accused of rape is what’s causing a declining birthrate and turning men off from dating.
I’ve been out there and it sucks, but for very different reasons.
Pre-internet and pre(free)porn, I never had any female friends nor male sweeties ask for, attempt, or even wonder about choking, slapping or hitting a person. And I went through many long and short term relationships from the late 60s on. Tech and porn in particular have taken off since the mid/late 90s. What a coincidence??
Yeah, like I said it may just be a certain type that are drawn to me. Don’t know why I give off that vibe?! And if it was an actual relationship exploring those avenues would be fine but when it’s within the first evening of knowing them it’s a bit startling.
The fear for me is less about some legal or professional consequence (though the fears for that are there as while I’m not famous I do have a public facing career) it is more about my own personal revulsion to violence and abuse, along with a fear of being seen as a toxic type. In my industry (film & fashion) there is a lot of that and I’ve tried to avoid being seen that way. Main thing is I’ve never dated or had any intimate relations with actresses or models – with one exception which I don’t regret (we’re still friends) but won’t repeat again.
The tricky part to navigate is the pendulum swing of the social norms. For far too long women had little to no voice or power in this realm and only very recently have they been able to assert real power and agency in this area. So, while there is arguably some over-correction (much of it discussed in the article above and other comments) there’s still many ways in which it seems us men are being far too delicate and even hysterical in our reactions (myself included).
Maybe this sort of rapid social evolution is too much for our primate brains to process and adapt to? :) Either way I prefer a society where women can speak up for themselves even if it does instill a bit of paranoia in men. Hopefully we’ll all adapt and find some kind of balance.
Sorry but if you think being afraid of being accused of rape is rare or, disgustingly self reporting, then you are living in a fantasy.
No one has any idea what the prevalence of false accusations are, FBI show actual reported to authorities numbers at anywhere between 8 and 15 percent, but that’s only officially reported and investigated numbers. Given the number of simple social accusations that never rise to being officially reported that number could be massively larger.
And even the official number is more then likely skewed low. Go have a look at the innocence project, over 80 percent of the men freed are freed from false convictions of sexual abuse and assault crimes. That’s the reason those rape kits go unprocessed, the potential to overturn 1000’s of convictions and the resulting destruction of prosecutor’s careers and hundreds of millions in restitution pay outs.
Re: the innocence project how many of those are date rape accusations made against men in the context of a relationship? Because that’s what we’re talking about here.
Cops have been pinning rapes on innocent men (often black) for decades, but that wasn’t suppressing birthrates…
Re: “Went in for a kiss and she recoiled…”
There is a better way. When the time is right lean in half-way, then wait for her to close the gap and kiss you. If she does then consent has been given. If she does not, just straighten up and continue the conversation, and after a decent interval, take your leave. No hurt feelings.
I discovered this method by accident on my first kiss. It was at the public library. A girl I liked was there with a friend whom I had never met, and who was not my type. While my friend was sitting at the microfiche machine looking at old newspapers, I and her friend stood behind the chair. I turned to say something to the friend, and before I could say anything she kissed me. This set a lifelong pattern and has saved me from embarassament twice. And when she responds the effect is quite remarkable. I still recall my heart rate rising to the red line one time.
aye. my manwhore womanizing cousin(who merely has to leave his hotel room to find a willing woman, it seems) is forever frustrated that i learned long ago to let the woman in question make the overt moves.
even when i was a guitar slinging outlaw, i never made the first move…and thus, mostly, avoided accusations and whatnot(i was also by that time rather paranoid about such accusations. the evil and powerful dad of the girl i rescued had me up on statutory rape and kidnapping charges before his ex wife intervened…neither charge was true, even according to the girl, but it didnt matter)
(and this last anecdote is perhaps adjacent to this topic: chivalrous behavior is too often punished…ive had women in austin cast the evil eye at me simply holding the door open. happens a lot less way out here)
Maybe there should be a corollary to the rule for outlaw country musicians:
if you are an outlaw country musician, going from county to county and sleeping with sheriff’s daughters and what not, you absolutely SHOULD be worried about false rape accusations.
i shouldnt hav to say this, in a civilised country…
i have never had sex except with an obviously willing woman(or man).(or many of both!)
and that goes back almost 40 years.
not all males are crazed rapist bastards….made insane by the sight of a woman’s ankle.
fikken to smoke a hogleg o’ colorado with my youngest and introduce him to all this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7K72X4eo_s
Rape is one of those very few crimes where the exact same actions can either be either criminal or innocent, and furthermore those actions are commonplace in almost every relationship. The condition of a rape having taken place is just a state of mind of one of the participants, real, imagined, or made up.
To me, that makes the whole subject kind of sketchy and scary.
Something about the conundrums faced by young men now reminds me of Otto Reutter’s famous song “In fünfzig Jahren ist alles vorbei” written in the 1920s, (link to recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcHGE-VVweY ), but very very popular in the 1930s and early 1940s in Germany. Yes, this will pass. But as you wait, life passes you by.
Who is surprised that in the West, social relations are increasingly ugly. Snowden, talking of social media, says this in his introduction to Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother”: “We are coming to see all too clearly that the construction of these systems was less about connection than it was about control: the proliferation of mass surveillance has tracked precisely with the destruction of public power.” There was considerable power, for ordinary people, in cultural forms that made things like romance, marriage, and some social solidarity with other peoples life goals possible. But that culture is NOT to be sustained. What a lovely wedding we have just seen in Venice, a media wrapping on a money porn spectacle.
Surveillance can in a sense be a substitute for the conditioning effects and social stabilization and security created by the forms of institutions. We can abandon the goals that institutions sustain, because we don’t need to spend to socialize or condition people, we can orphan them from our society, or from any society at all, and henceforth use surveillance and fear to control them outside the bounds of our elite thing.
The thing that has happened to young women to make them unattractive to young men is cultural deracination. That’s what social media is “for.” Young men’s alienation in turn drives their separation from contemporary culture. The invention of the idea of “toxic masculinity” can be seen as the first step in creating a surveillance ideology that can be used to track young men as we no longer bother to socialize and condition them, because we have abandoned cultural goals we want to defund.
It is interesting that young men, turning away, are abandoning “liberal education” to pursue more hands on and concrete work, when they do work. Young women, always more likely to follow the talk, to “drink the Kool-Aid,” continue to pursue professions that are fragile in the face of defunding and AI. This will not end well.
A large pool of unattached young men is a harbinger of war, and asceticism–always watch asceticism because the ability to do without is a prelude to revolution. Shia Islam is the most complex thing out there that might have a place for such young men. As Mercouris says, “Just saying…” But surely, young American men would not turn that way.
Finally, I want to say that the most serious attempt to understand the topic of Yves’ post is the writer Rollo Tomassi, in his book “The Rational Male,” and other books in that series. Tomassi is perhaps a rather repulsive Youtube personality, but his books are well informed and the best and most serious attempt to address what Europeans call the “philosophical anthropology” of mating in the liberal world.
“always watch asceticism because the ability to do without is a prelude to revolution”
How true this is. There are no revolutionaries pursuing the “middle class dream.”
But the big overarching issue seems to be the diminished social status of young men and the demonization of manliness. For instance, there’s no “heroic masculinity” or “wholesome masculinity” as a counter to “toxic masculinity.” Although some cited #MeToo (with some disputing its importance in the bigger picture), publicly hating on men as an acceptable posture well predates that; #MeToo’s vehemence indicated that there were still levels of pent-up hostility that a not-trivial number of women felt the right to express.
This an informative discussion of matters outside of my field. A few thoughts that come to mind: Our “post-modern” society has become so divorced and incompatible with our evolutionary biology, that these problems are now a big issue. I would say that for the vast bulk of human evolution, humans were concerned about propagation of the species, life was short, so humans had to reproduce quickly and often. Traditional gender roles were largely dictated by necessity and evolutionary logic.
The “mean girl” issue: this might have arisen out of “divide-and-rule” identity politics, worship of oligarchs and celebrities, soc. media, and the general lack of social cohesion in over-populated, mass “post-modern” society. As George Carlin would have said: “no one gives a fuck about anyone else”. This attitude appears ubiquitous in our society, from the top down.
The “identity politics” program (gender, sexual preference, abortion, immigrants, guns, and other social/cultural issues) appears to be deliberate distraction and diversion from serious discussion/debate about economic justice, institutional corruption, societal breakdown. It is a perfect way to divide the public and mask the common interests of the vast majority.
For example, on Democracy Now (an outlet of the so-called left), we have almost constant discussion of LGBTQ, race, immigrants, women’s issues, “toxic masculinity”, “pregnant people”, gender pronouns etc. As Paglia mentions, there is no traditional “left” anymore. Peterson’s use of “neo-Marxist” is laughable. I wonder if he ever actually read Capital vol. 1.?
I wonder if declining fertility is a function of some sort of collective genetic consciousness, as propagation of the species is no longer crucial. Yet our instinctive drives and need for social status remain.
Maybe the girls are just getting back at the guys for the awful ways we behaved toward them back in “the good ol’ days.” Treading on thin ice here (I never said this, Yves), but a common trope when I was in college was, “What’s the difference between a bag of trash and a Radcliffe girl? The trash gets taken out once a week.”
When I think back about how we boys treated women who were less attractive or overweight, I’m ashamed of my gender. And remember the pressure on girls in those days to get married.
Maybe the cultural practice of arranged marriages isn’t so bad.
I sometimes get the sense that boomer men really do feel guilty for how they behaved – and are quite happy for younger generations to pay the price. I wouldn’t know what sins they committed. I am gen-X. No-one I knew ever behaved like that or said anything remotely like that.
“the awful ways” are weighty words. Should all humanity across cultures and the history be ashamed? There is ever room for still better treatment of each other, but we could be pound foolish about growing edginess of overall social relationships. Arranged marriages could be a good way out, agree.
The female attitude to less than impressive men may not have changed in 2017 at all. Just their freedom of expression and the number of lowly men changed.
Queer people aren’t having these problems dating — this is a straight people problem. Don’t try to put this on LGBTQ folks. Plenty of them with kids too.
Marriage is nothing more than a man owning a woman as an unpaid housekeeper, prostitute, and trophy wife. Men raised with modern, progressive values may avoid sex and marriage because they oppose these inhumane practices.
Is this sarcasm or likely the silliest comment on this entire thread?
This is partly the toxic masculinity that women are educated enough to avoid in the modern age. Toxic masculinity isn’t a rejection of masculinity as a whole, it’s a rejection of traits like emotional immaturity, controling attitudes, traditional expectations of house chores, etc. From my experience men who recognize this have way less issues finding a woman partner.
While that is a cynical take on marriage, it is noteworthy that when women get cancer they are warned by medical personnel that the chances of their husband leaving them are statistically high.
It has been mentioned that married men are the happiest and married women are the unhappiest. Also if a man’s wife dies he does not do well as he doesn’t usually have a group of friends to interact with. If a woman is a widow she generally does well possibly because she has a group of friends to fall back on.
It’s not true in every case, but it seems that some men do view marriage as giving them services to make their life easier. When they don’t get those amenities they are not happy. It seems rather a selfish attitude of what can I get rather than what can I give, share, or work together towards shared goals. I know there are good men out there, but older ways of thinking have had consequences over time.
Google “medical divorce” and educate yourself about healthcare economics in the US.
re: cancer, that is indeed the expectation.
when Tam was diagnosed…everybody in town, including her whole familia, fully expected me o run off with a waitress.
indeed, many of them went out of their way to warn her of this.
when i failed to live up to such expectations(which didnt surprise Tam, at all), everyone was shocked.
and, weirdly, many of the women(aunts, her friends, etc) were almost angry that i hadn’t run off(per Tam’s reports)…likely because, if they found themselves in Tam’s place, they expected their own mates to very quickly find someone else.
Rubber meets the road, and all…cant really predict what one will do in such extremis. I know of a handful of men who stuck by their dying wives like i did…and prolly double that number who ran off.
I can directly relate, brother.
When my wife of thirty years received a catastrophic cancer diagnosis, my response was to repeat to myself, “Time to be a mensch, Mikey Boy,” and do my best to live up to it.
There’s some consolation in that.
by the end of the first week in hospital, i’d convinced her that our motto, henceforward, should be “Usque ad Finem”.
and i did just that.
In my opinion Erich Fromm nailed it decades ago:
We’ve been conditioned to value everything in life as a commodity including our relationships. Our online culture curates everything to our tastes but real life doesn’t do this and people struggle with an uncurated experience. They find “flaws” to be defects instead of seeing them as the unique qualities that give us each our own distinct personalities. If we all had no “flaws” we’d all be the same.
As a guy on teetering on the verge of “old age” yet still living solo I’ve taken a hiatus from dating for a number of years. It’s been both an incredibly productive and mentally healthy stretch of time. My time/energy has been spent on creating both artistically and socially. And I don’t spend my evenings listening to someone tell me all the ways I don’t live up to their standards.
Oddly, I’m often asked by female friends why I don’t have a girlfriend and my response is usually a self-depreciating line like “If I like someone I’d never subject them to that misfortune” but when I’ve given sincere responses I’ll tell them how I don’t trust my choices in partners. Have had enough toxic relationships that left me both emotionally and socially wrecked that I have serious trust issues with my brain’s attractions. But, having read through this article it may not just be my bad choices but potentially a wider social dynamic that hinders finding a partner who values their partner as a person instead of a commodity.
Fromm again: “Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’”
I had the good fortune of having an English teacher in high school who had us read The Sane Society in high school in the late 60s along with Malcolm’s autobiography, Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action even Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. He had already done a pretty good job of educating me before I even went to college.
That’s wonderful! I’m a bit jealous. Didn’t have any introductions to this stuff in my schooling. Took years of my own exploration to stumble across those levels of insight and thought. Instead got introduced to paranoid screeds like “Go Ask Alice” by teachers who would offer insights like “inflation is caused by workers being paid too much” and “hippies are why we lost in Vietnam.”
A good friend since those days (and truly brilliant person) and I often joke about how crap our schooling was and how dumb we were when we left for the big city. Great childhoods growing up in our corner of rural America but education was not ideal! Spent most of my adult life trying to catch up but even reading the comments here often reminds me I’m still far behind.
This is really good.
When was the big transition, from a time and place where men were commonly very brave and wise, to a time when these traits were not so common among men?
This article is about the recent fall in men’s status in many societies, and I agree that’s real and has real effects. But many women have complained about men going back centuries in countries around the world, and many of their complaints are similar. What happened?
The biggest transition has been from living in free societies to living in unfree societies, which most of us live in now. In free societies, everyone is expected to stand for what’s right as a normal way of life. Bravery and wisdom are commonly cultivated in men in these cultures (women also cultivate these qualities, but this comment focuses on men), whereas bravery and wisdom are much more rare in unfree societies where people are expected to obey the law, but not uphold it. In unfree societies that expect obedience and punish people for standing up for what’s right, people are actually trained for cowardice rather than bravery, and this has dramatic effects on the quality of the men.
The stories that most impacted me were what I call “transition stories” — essentially stories of free people being conquered and forced into an unfree society where cowardly obedience rather than bravery was expected.
Pretty Shield was a Crow woman who grew up when the buffalo were plentiful in central North America in the 1800s, and she described how the US intentionally wiped them out to subjugate her people. She said:
“Our men had fought hard against our enemies, holding them back from our beautiful country by their bravery; but now, with everything else going wrong, we began to be whipped by weak foolishness. Our men, our leaders, began to drink the white man’s whisky, letting it do their thinking. Because we were used to listening to our chiefs in the buffalo days, the days of war and excitement, we listened to them now; and we got whipped. Our wise-ones became fools, and drank the white man’s whisky. But what else was there for us to do? We knew no other way than to listen to our chiefs and head men. Our old men used to be different; even our children were different when the buffalo were here.”
Many people describe a similar transition in men. When they had no choice but submission or death, there was no longer room for deep masculine bravery and wisdom. One Sioux man named Rain-in-the-Face described how his soul died when he submitted, and only his body lived on (referring to himself in the 3rd person): “I have lived peaceably ever since we came upon the reservation… I fought for my people and my country… Rain-In-The-Face was killed when he put down his weapons before the Great Father [US president]. His spirit was gone then; only his poor body lived on, but now it is almost ready to lie down for the last time.”
The degree of selflessness and bravery in free societies absolutely astounded me, and showed me how low our standards are for each other.
Apache man Geronimo described how the minimal requirement for young men was to prove “beyond question that he can bear hardships without complaint, and that he is a stranger to fear.” Sioux man Ohiyesa hinted at his deep training for bravery and service when he said he was “trained to be a warrior and a hunter, and not to care for money or possessions, but to be in the broadest sense a public servant.” How many boys do you know that were raised with such deep attitudes of selflessness and bravery?
Can you imagine if deep wisdom and bravery were simply the norm for all the men around you?
This bravery supports people in being generous too. In all free societies I’ve studied, men are consistently trained to give up all their possessions, whereas unfree societies train men (and women) to take as much as they can, either to avoid poverty or to get rich. Ohiyesa wrote about the Sioux: “It was our belief that the love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome. Its appeal is to the material part, and if allowed its way it will in time disturb the spiritual balance of the man. Therefore the child must early learn the beauty of generosity. He is taught to give what he prizes most…”
In free societies, generosity and bravery among neighbors are simply normal ways of life – I see this in every free society I’ve ever studied, including the Apache, Cherokee, Sioux, Nootka, and dozens more. In fact, this is the only way humans lived for millions of years, up to recent times. Only in unfree societies are greed and cowardice encouraged, as ruling classes train people for obedience and maximum productivity. Tragically, few people in unfree societies recognize the depth of this conditioning. I only discovered it after intensive study of many free cultures. And I believe this hurtful training gets to the heart of why many men struggle, each man in his own way as he faces the challenges of growing up in an unfree society that doesn’t welcome everything he has to offer.
References for these quotes and many other beautiful stories are here in a book that explores what it would take to live in a healthy culture again.
It is soooo hard to even find appropriate underwear for men that are not holding you by the balls!
I can loudly claim that I am a free man, at least in that respect.
What a fascinating comment. Is it coincidence that like daveb above you refer to the experience of colonized peoples? He writes:
I am a Canadian man in my 50s with a wonderful wife and a son (surrounded by girls) who seems to have no difficult floating above it all. I have no bitterness from my youthful relationships with women. Until MeToo I considered myself a feminist.
I used to think our society was building something together. I am fortunate in life. I didn’t particularly want more. What good is a gated community cut off from the people around you? I wanted better transit more than a fancy car, beautiful streets and parks more than a big house.
But society? It doesn’t include me. It does not include my son. It reminds me of that every day. It is the message of every rainbow flag. Diversity means not you. Inclusion: not you. Equity: not you. Every interaction with an woman I do not know (and many I do) is under a shadow: be careful what you say. Do not be honest, do not be direct. Be “kind.” (I have seen that look in the eyes when I dared express discomfort about the denigration of men: I thought you were a human, now I see you are a monster.)
They speak of the residential schools, idealistically intended to “raise up” the “savage” by taking “the Indian out of the Indian.” Now they try to take the male out of the man. They pass laws against conversion therapy – but what is school but conversion therapy to turn boys into girls? I collect old movies on disc to preserve the memory of what men and women could be: 12 Angry Men, All About Eve, The Big Country.
What man with self respect would contribute to a society that hates him and forces him to go against his nature? What man who did would be able to maintain his courage to stand for what he thought was right? To be a good person it is not enough to be “kind”: one must have courage. Every time I am silent it indicates assent. It tears my insides out. Our institutions are failing. Our leaders are neither honest nor courageous. No wonder: anyone with those qualities must suppress them or opt out.
“They hate us and they want us dead.” I have seen men express this repeatedly online. It is the second law of neoliberalism: “Go die.” This is frequently accompanied by men saying that they are checking out from society altogether – resetting their goals, often to some combination of peace and solitude.
The impulse of the system will be to buy men off as clients with the likes of affirmative action. It won’t work. Nature, nurture, it doesn’t matter: there are differences between the sexes. Self-respect cannot be given. When men end their silence, they will not beg. They will act. Or, perhaps more likely, they will not act. The article is about a sex strike. What about a real strike? Can society continue to run when men work to rule?
I wanted to build something together. Now I see that I can only rely on myself. I put my family and my friends first. If society does not include me, then there is no such thing as society. Neoliberalism wins.
I’m wary of the free/unfree distinction because of the way “free” and “freedom” are used in our society as an assertion that one has a right to do as one pleases, especially if you’re rich.
Those aboriginal people were not “free” in that sense. They saw themselves as having a place in an ordered cosmos where virtues were clearly defined and the role of each tribal member–young, old, male, female–was known intuitively. There was order in the tribe, and that order reflected the order they found in the natural world where they could depend on the bounty of Nature to supply all their needs. When the colonialists arrived, among them the buffalo hunters, that worldview fell apart, and when that happens to a people, Durkheim’s societal maladies come pouring out of Pandora’s box.
I would identify the difference as one between our modernist nihilism and what Edward Goldsmith calls chthonic religion that understood that we humans are part of a much greater cosmic order which must be obeyed lest the “disturbance in the Force” destroys harmony and brings calamity on the people.
great comment! thanks for sharing
There is a short scene in the movie Sin City where Brad Pitt and an actress enter an elevator together. It is implied that this chance encounter escalates into an amorous adventure. Let’s contrast this with my reality.
One late Saturday night, I went to exercise at a gym that was still open at that hour. I parked on the rooftop of a parking garage and waited for the elevator. The doors opened up, and I saw one young woman inside the elevator. She was presumably just finishing her nightlife activities considering the way she was dressed, and she was also petrified, paralyzed with fear. I waited for her to exit the elevator and said, “This is the top floor. Is this your stop?” No reply. As I proceeded to enter the elevator, she then abruptly runs out into the parking lot. I wondered what she was running away from. Then it suddenly hit me. She was running away from me! Hey, no, no. Come back. I don’t have any history of violence. Or rape. Or violent rape. I continued watching the absurdity of a stick thin woman worthlessly running away in high heels as if she was about to trip and break a leg. I thought, “Who does she think she is. I can effortlessly chase her down in a second.”
Much later, while I was exercising, I realized that this woman had placed me in a compromised situation, which I had completely overlooked. She could have sprayed me with some pepper spray for no good reason. She could have called the cops, who would probably proceed to beat the stuffing out of me. All of this could have been easily avoided had she nonchalantly walked out of the elevator. It is plausible that my presence was intimidating. She saw a muscular man curiously wearing sunglasses and a beanie on the top floor of a parking garage. It is not at all clear that I wear the beanie because I dislike the air conditioning blowing at my head when I am running on the treadmill and I wear the sunglasses because the bright lights in the gym cause me insomnia.
Completely aside, but in that scene the guy (I think it’s not Brad Pitt but different actor) is assassin who is going to kill her and she knows it (and he knows she knows).
You are correct. My memory was slightly off.
That elevator scene is on Youtube (in Hungarian, strangely). The actors in that scene are Josh Hartnett and Alexis Bledel. It is implied that Hartnett’s character kills her but not before doing something she likes, maybe even romance. The most awesome sounding fetish is autossassinophilia—the derivation of sexual pleasure by the thought of or risk of being killed.
When watching another Sin City clip with actress Devon Aoki, I am reminded of Yves’s observation that Asian actresses are curiously and frequently cast as ninja assassins.
The situation reminds me of the next-to-the-last scene in Three Days of the Condor when Joubert explains to Condor how they will come for him. What is striking is how the Joubert’s nihilistic professionalism now seems to affect far more than contract killers these days. “He will smile, a becoming smile…”
I should have mentioned that Jordan Peterson, to his credit, discusses alcohol as both disinhibiting and increasing aggression, and describes a scenario where a woman makes a charge because she really does not remember what happened well (and she might have a thin basis for believing something was amiss). From my distant watchings of the TV show SVU, my recollection is that having sex with someone who is passed out from being drunk is rape (they can’t consent) but this was not the scenario Peterson used, it was of genuine confusion + the current predisposition to see men as aggressors.
About ten years ago, I attended a NC “meet & greet”, I wanted to flirt with Yves but didn’t want the one time I met her to be uncomfortable for her.
I’ve had more marriages than I’ve had dates. I put myself in social situations where I was having a great time and found other people having a great time doing the same thing. Sometimes things happened.
Those opportunities don’t seem so available no more. Predates covid. The community where I met Janet fractured during Hillary’s 2016 campaign, which played out online (Fcbk the main platform at the time). Some/the alpha female(s) were being triumphantly misandronistic and got bit back on hard. Things were said that never would’ve been said face-to-face at the fire circle, and afterwards people didn’t look at each other without wondering about sides.
The youngers I know (mid-teens to pushing thirty) are far more concerned about mental health than we were. They all know suicides. Not all are medicated, some like their job, but their circles are smaller.
As I think on it, a marraige did just come out of the theater group, and people are meeting and enjoying each other there, so that’s functioning as it was. I don’t have the answer, but the glowing variable seems to be electronic media intermediating.
was this the community that banned discussing Sanders DURING the 2016 primary?
It self-described as pagan. Materially, 100+ acres were bought & split into nature sanctuary and homesteads. The sanctuary has camping & holds festivals, and there is a community of people with a festival circuit. Worship was eclectic rather than organized, peak experiences were drumming and dancing around the fire all night. Hive-offs including drumming, permaculture, and polyamory. Internal politics were way more important than external, aligned self-expressive and non-traditional on the World Values Survey scale. It may have been the violation of pulling in external politics that caused the rift, as much as the content of the arguments themselves.
I was asking about the “which played out online (Fcbk the main platform at the time)” part
Having a crush on Yves is a testament to your good taste and character as is your commendable reserve.
Aaaw!
hard headed smart women are, indeed, a fetish.
even i they bite, sometimes.
I went to a meet & greet in ~2017 in Philadelphia and can confirm that, in addition to her superior mental characteristics, Yves is quite charming in person.
While I was working full-time, one answer to “extractive feminism” was “mail-order brides” from nations where traditional roles still held sway. A few technicians and machinists did get married this way, and most seemed to have OK lives a decade hence; kids, house, car, truck, mortgage, etc. The young women in the front office hated these guys and their brides, and let us know this. I have no idea what the current situation is, but voting with one’s feet seems like a good way to get away from trouble.
So my daughter is 14 and as any 14 year old she has gone through so called boyfriends like candy. After reading through this post, I can reflect on her comments and say that whenever I asked her why she stopped “seeing” XYZ she always had a response that included some kind of unflattering or bordering on vile comment about the boy. She never once said she just lost interest in him or realized that she really didn’t like him, she always could describe something that she REALLY didn’t like about him. I strongly suspect when she ended these relationships, she told the boy exactly what she thought, even if those thoughts were 14 year old dramatized thoughts.
Now contrast that with my 17 year old son who went to his prom about a month ago…
I knew my son was going to the prom with a group of friends. I had even told him that I had gone similarly when I was his age. When I went to my promo, I asked a FEMALE friend of mine to be my date and we went with another friend couple (Male-Female). What transpired for my son was that in this group of attending friends, there was only 1 girl! Out of at least 15 boys. Presumably there were about as many single women in their own groups who went to the prom. What I truly wonder today is did any of these kids actually interact with each other? I mean they obviously hadn’t before the prom, so why during the prom?
My kid also went to the prom recently with an actual date. I think she stayed for the whole thing, which is somewhat unusual for her. This is the first time she had a date for a school dance. In the past she went to dances with her female friends and the weird (to me) thing is they would all get a brand new dress and shoes, get together ahead of time for a lengthy photo shoot, and then go to the dance (where they would immediately take off the generally uncomfortable shoes) and stay for about a half hour before leaving due to ‘boredom’, and go somewhere else to ‘hang out’. They went, but they were clearly not enthused about it.
I find this all very strange – we either went to the dance or we didn’t. Maybe it’s something like what NotThe Pilot mentions below – in some inchoate manner they sense these behaviors as some sort of ‘black hole’?
Your child and her friends probably had no fundamental interest in the dances in question but felt as though they’d a social obligation to be there, to be seen there, to have documented that they were there – social media’s a pretty big contributor to this I think. It matters less when the things you do in high school disappear like tears in rain. I was in high school rather earlier in the internet era and those pressures were less noticeable (me and the boys didn’t use facebook for much of anything but playing silly browser games, no instagram and so on) but I can imagine it being unbearable to scroll through one of your many feeds and see people you know and maybe don’t much like performing their social status at an event like a school dance without you; it’s surely a diminishing feeling.
As a white enthusiastically heterosexual American male, dare I say it? I do: Paglia is my kind o’ gal. She reminds me of my working class take no sh*t from no one mom, and also in the 60s, when coming of age, of my female friends, lovers and comrade activist, who liked being with men but would brook no bull from them.
Reflecting on my own history, and looking at my working class son, his wife, and their two kids, the problems herein discussed seem quite alien to me—probably, thank heavens, above my pay grade. We’re more focused on things like the price of groceries, medical care, and having a bit of fun now and then.
I saw the last post and thought it was brave of you to bring it up, Yves. The state of play between the sexes is a mess throughout the West and liberal circles, for sure. That said, I was honestly a bit disappointed in a lot of the comments; I don’t want to make it a generational thing, plus I’ve always been an outsider even within my own age-group.
But as a 30-something, I felt like most everyone was assuming “what’s wrong with young men / women that they’ve changed from my youth?” instead of considering that this generation is simply expressing the death of a society, even in basic terms of mating….
1. I’m surprised between all the vignettes in both the posts and comments, nobody sees how much it aligns with what John Bumpass Calhoun described as the “second death” and “behavioral sinks” in mouse world 25. Now the usual counter-argument as I understand it is that “well, those are rats so clearly we’re more complex than that”.
2. But I’d argue that’s looking at things reductively, which ignores what always made Calhoun’s experiment so fascinating: its always seemed to have a light whiff of vitalism about. It’s not about how stupid or smart the mice were, but rather that they seemed to lose the collective will to live without even attempting to learn or adapt.
3. What if young people today are failing to maintain the old behaviors, not because something’s inherently wrong with the kids, but because the behaviors themselves have become a kind of black-hole? Materially, American-style dating is a product of the wildly exceptional consumer society (“This show and global warming brought to you by …!” ) It’s literally less time-tested than my grandma. Or in terms of family structure, my understanding is that there are stable societies as sexually open as the contemporary West, but they’re (universally?) matrilocal without extensive organization (states, tall hierarchies, significant specialization or surplus production, etc.)
4. In short, I’m sure all the things people mentioned (stress, social media, chemicals in the environment, etc.) hurt on the margin. If you’re willing to consider there’s a spiritual side of life (or even just an “energetic” one) though, that can’t be reduced to stimulus-response and biochemistry, I don’t think it’s wrong at all to say this is ultimately a spiritual problem.
“this generation is simply expressing the death of a society” — nailed it!
Even the mice hate males on welfare?
Doh, I guess when you put it that way, all of the mice were kind of on welfare.
More seriously, if I remember right, Calhoun thought the main issue was how the feeding schedule (everyone at once in a giant central plaza) had altered their habits. In a way, it’s like they became socially overstimulated, or turned into a destructive version of Schopenhauer’s hedgehogs. I guess you could argue it was similar to social media too, in that a network effect had started pulling them into an unstructured free-for-all whenever they had the urge to interact with other mice.
They all eventually died out, but the ones that managed to hold on longest managed to secure space as a mating group (1 male for up to a few females), then limit but not entirely avoid visits to the central plaza. If you ever read about it though, the sort of behaviors Calhoun started describing towards the end feel weirdly relevant.
Did Calhoun pay attention to gender differentiation? Were the “beautiful ones” both genders?
It can be imagined that females “on welfare” had no need of males, which turned hyperaggressive out of desperation (or as the only kind of competition that made reproductive sense?), female distaste grew, etc. Repugnant but feasible theory…
I love the reference to Calhoun’s experiments. Leaving the validity of his science aside I find them enormously useful and illustrative as metaphor. It is clear to me that a tremendous number of people I know, particularly but not only young men, exhibit “beautiful ones” behavior that essentially amounts to an aesthetic and lifestyle solipsism – and for many this is not out of any ideological objection to contemporary sex relations or disdain for the other sex per se, at least not explicitly. It’s just autonomic. A narcissistic solipsism may be the inevitable output of a spiritually dead society – if the spirit fades from the world perhaps one can still feel it animated in themselves.
Oh yeah, the “beautiful ones” were definitely one example I had in mind. The hyper-aggressive males who spent all their time just biting each other (I think they finally moved onto eating each other at the end) also feel weirdly familiar when you think of a certain kind of guy today.
The one other thing I remember him describing was mother mice spontaneously “giving up” and abandoning pups in mid-transport.
Why are mice so often used as experimental models for humans? Why not grizzly bears? Perhaps cost constraints are a determinative variable producing inadequately informative results. One could say the same for ethical constraints limiting experimentation on actual humans. We proceed onward through the fog.
Cost and lifespan.
I would be curious to find impressions from other locales and cultural millieus.
Watching South Korean TV series that includes romance at times is something else, I tell you.
In my young daughter’s class, she has at least four collegues (girls) that are transmen now. Another one, from the homeschool years was a boy for a while but is kind of turning back …
My wife, who has been studying this nonsense for years has thoroghly “indoctrinated” the girl, which now has to keep her mouth shut all the time because would be an outrage. Feels better in the company of boys.
Reading over this fascinating discussion, no mention yet of the 4B movement in South Korea, so I’ll just leave this here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4B_movement
I am cognizant that what they show on TV is not quite real and that the society is quite misoginistic. But what they are trying to push forward seems something… healthier.
Great piece. My wife and I have discussed this a great deal as we’ve got a 17 year old son and a 12 year old daughter.
Well, my 44th wedding anniversary is this week so no personal experience, but it doesn’t sound like I’ve missed anything. I guess maybe there’s something to be said for Catholicism after all.
I was on the board of a family law reform nonprofit several years ago. Most women are in denial of their tremendous legal and financial privileges when it comes to marriage. They can do pretty much anything to the people in their household and be rewarded for it. Some examples:
– Woman gets in argument with husband, blinding him, he ends up filing for divorce. She eventually gets majority custody of the kids, citing his blindness as a liability when parenting the children.
– Woman’s husband divorces wife after discovering she has been molesting her daughter’s male friend for years. She files for divorce, immediately gets half his property (and becomes a multimillionaire in the process), and files for and gets temporary alimony while in prison until the case gets resolved, citing her inability to work do to being in prison.
– Woman’s husband divorces is a caregiver to a bedridden older man, and she is a Filipino national. She sexually assaults him in bed, bears his child and immediately gets citizenship and child support from him.
Men are just lifting the veil to see what marriage really is, and the third party in every marriage, the government, hates you if you are male.
W/Corrections:
I was on the board of a family law reform nonprofit several years ago. Most women are in denial of their tremendous legal and financial privileges when it comes to marriage. They can do pretty much anything to the people in their household and be rewarded for it. Some examples:
– Woman gets in argument with husband, blinding him, he ends up filing for divorce. She eventually gets majority custody of the kids, citing his blindness as a liability when parenting the children.
– Woman’s husband divorces her after discovering she has been molesting her daughter’s male friend for years. She files for divorce, immediately gets half his property (and becomes a multimillionaire in the process), and files for and gets temporary alimony while in prison until the case gets resolved, citing her inability to work do to being in prison.
– Woman is a caregiver to a bedridden older man, and she is a Filipino national. She sexually assaults him in bed, bears his child and immediately gets citizenship and child support from him.
Men are just lifting the veil to see what marriage really is, and the third party in every marriage, the government, hates you if you are male.
I question whether a judge would have made such a ruling as it would have entailed discrminating on the basis of disability and would have been an incredible test case and precedent, if true. Courts across the US have tended to do the opposite, reaffirming the rights of a disabled parent to be a parent.
You seem surprised that marriage means joint ownership of all property, all property is held in common to the marriage. It’s not “his” property, it’s “their” property. 50/50 split is standard, has been for a very long time now.
And having committed a crime does not limit any other rights you might have.
Bedridden and disabled people have sex too, doesn’t mean it’s sexual assault. He was aroused and ejaculated, right? It made a baby. Also, what does her or anyones nationality have to do with anything? It’s not relevant.
You clearly have no knowledge about how family court works. Constitutional protections are regularly flouted by family court judge rulings in family (civil) court judgements.
A famous case: https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=8101209&page=1
And if you think an invalid man consents to sex because he ejaculated, that is the same as believing a woman who gets wet during a sexual assault means she wasn’t raped. Moronic.
Men who wish to marry or live with a woman need to be very careful about how they go about that legal arrangement. Having children with a woman increases risk.
Example: https://abcnews.go.com/US/drill-sergeant-reunited-baby-mom-gave-adoption/story?id=18329713
in some jurisdictions that same caution even applies to dating without cohabitation.
Women are significant financial liabilities in many relationship arrangements with men. Men are right to be cautious.
Example: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/no-home-or-kids-together-but-couple-still-spouses-appeal-court-rules
Your links don’t appear to have anything to do with your statements, arguments or claims?
Having said that, you say women are liabilities and you point to legal remedies as proof, but those very remedies were created by the various justice systems long before women even fought for the right to vote, before feminism or women’s rights were even a thing, and in particular – they were created by men, even in patriarchical societies, since biblical times if not earlier.
In Talmud and mishnah, for example, even before Christ, Jewish law required that if a man took another wife he was to continue to support his previous wife. If he did not, she would be granted the right and the option to leave him, and if she opted out of the marriage would be given a certificate saying she was free. So in ancient Mosaic law material support was marital duty and neglect was a breach of the marriage covenant. This evolved to also require that a divorced woman be given financial settlement. And our system of law is based on Judeo-Christian law.
And there’s also Proverbs 13:22: “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children.”
So this is almost as old as the hills. And most societies and religions across history have addressed it in similar ways – fathers have responsibilities, traditionally women were at a disadvantage if those fathers shirked those responsibilities, so systems were created to address this.
And if you’re Christian, there’s 1 Timothy 5:8: “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
Thank you for the religious gobbledygook.
Whether you believe in religion or not, this is the source of our current systems of justice and law. This belief that men have a moral obligation to provide material support for their wives and children is very deeply rooted in ancient traditions, comes from the same place which says murder is wrong, or that one has a right to self-defense, or to have and hold property, it’s in the category of natural law – in other words, moral truths considered inherent to human nature regardless of culture or norms.
Well then, time to stone slatternly unfaithful wives for adultery and look to incest if there is no wife to issue forth the next generation.
Makes perfect sense.
Can’t collect royalties from a book about your crime, am I right?
So – I’ve got a early-20s son, just graduated from a good though not top-tier college, tall and I think handsome (though completely uninterested in fashion), funny and pretty outgoing, straight. He has yet to have a serious girlfriend, but I know he isn’t an incel, either.
One thing I’ve observed is that he has close relationships with several female friends (and has several close male friends as well). This was something that wasn’t nearly as common when I grew up – generally, your close friends were same sex. I view this as a good thing; however, when you think of someone as a friend, you don’t necessarily think of them as a romantic partner. I would say in general his generation – at least, among my son and his friends – seems to have a strong sense of ‘looking out for one another.’ My son has gone to several political protests, less because he has a particular view on whatever is being protested and more because his friends are going and he views his role as being a protector (he is 6’4″ and spars).
Gen Z definitely has a very different world view than even millenials. I think they realize that a lot of things are really broken and the future is uncertain. That isn’t necessarily a recipe for ‘settle down and have kids’.
I tend to not find a lot of the explanations above that persuasive. I do think that young people are placing a lot more importance on ‘enthusiastic consent’ before sex but really that’s a good thing. It may dampen spontaneity a bit, but it’s better than erring in the other direction.
Bottom line, I haven’t seen any yawning chasm between young men and young women due to one side or the other having a terrible attitude or significant fear or whatever. I just think their priorities are different. Maybe they look at their elders and see a bunch of fucking narcissists and think ‘well, what they’re doing, I’m going to do the other thing.’ Not an unreasonable response.
I can’t really speak to dating, but I am familiar with a number of young men who have the cognitive abilities to complete college work and who 30-years ago would be enrolled in college who are not in college and show no interest. I don’t see a lot of females hanging around but the cohort tends LGBT+, so of the females its about 2/3rd “female” as classically understood. This too is a major change from prior generations, not that there weren’t any LGBT people, and not that they were being oppressed socially, but not basically a large informal fraternity of them.
Which leads me to another thought, IMHO people are relatively flexible and there seems to be a fair amount of lady boys about, many of whom take better care of themselves than the so-called “ladies”-so maybe its not just porn. Plus they are probably more likely to play Dungeons & Dragons with you the next day.
I don’t know if its microplastics or soy milk or something else but this generation of young men seems to be missing some kind of chemical emulsifier necessary for the existence of a Captain Kirk or a Captain Cooke or a Count of Monte Cristo or a Cortez, or even a Richard Feynman. There all like blades of grass trying to grow tall through the cracks in a busy parking lot.
I do think the Peterson/Paglia discussion is an interesting one for the reasons you mention. I think there was a time that both of them brought thought provoking ideas and discussion to this topic, but as of late both of them have gone off the rails IMHO. I’m not even sure how to describe where Paglia has gone (I don’t want to say unhinged as I think that is unfair, but I struggle to find the right word).
And Peterson may be a victim of taking too many mind-altering substances. He now makes me think of an intelligent Andrew Tate. His latest debate “1 Christian versus Twenty Atheists” was a train wreck. I’m not really into debate bro culture, and even I could tell he seemed more intent on playing word games and doing the classic “answer a question with a question” dodge.
Unfortunate on both accounts. Or maybe it is further proof that something is going very wrong.
I am a young man in my 20s and hope to provide a fresh perspective compared to the older readership:
My biggest problem for years was me-too related anxieties. I never wanted to make a woman “uncomfortable” which led to truly absurd situations and missed opportunities up until my senior year of college. It took a lot of trying and failing, but I am now able to be reasonably sexually successful (whatever that means) as a young professional in a liberal urban costal environment. I have exes now, hook up at reasonable rates and am looking for a heterosexual long-term monogamous relationship.
Location is everything. Dating in suburbs was a disaster for me, especially while I was unlearning all my bad habits. I did not have enough chances meaning learning was slow and more tenuous (this is my only shot!), plus once I exited college every good prospect moved to a city. Moving to a city is any young man’s best option to learn how the playing field works, because you need to try and fail many times to see if what you believe is true is correct or incorrect, and it self-selects class-wise for people rich or dedicated enough to make it there in the first place.
Dating apps are harsh but can work. Stats today show 60% of young people get their long term relationships from dating apps. This is anecdotally very common among my cohort. The monetization of romance is concerning and depressing, but with a properly designed profile you can select quite effectively and faster than other methods. This creates different problems “there’s always someone better just one swipe away” but I dont think it is all bad. A lot of information about how the apps function with statistics can be found here.
Both feminism and the “Manosphere” go to radical extremes after identifying core truths. Feminism was correct in its analysis of the misery of the “housewife” and lack of freedoms given to women, as well as the inherent danger men pose to women due to biological differences. It is a world I will never fully understand. Simultaneously, when women now have a 3:2 ratio over men in college and now obtain more entry-level white-collar jobs that denote a higher-class position, it becomes hard to take historical victimization-based arguments seriously.
The “Manosphere” is based within extreme sexual frustration/pathology that manifests in negative ways. IMO the main idea is that men and women are both looking to maximize their own economic and social capital through the way they mate long term. For me, it was a call to take agency and change myself for the better rather than waiting for something to change, and “become someone I would want my daughter to date”. Ideas within these circles were far more helpful to my eventual success than “just be yourself!” and “it will find you when you least expect it” ever were. However, sects within these beliefs can reduce to extreme male victimhood, absurd misogyny, and different forms of abdication of agency that only make things worse, mainly related to genetic determinism.
Both of these lead into the economic component of relationships and marriage. Many relationships for men in a post-college urban professional setting come off as very bad deals economically and mentally if you are comfortable enough with being alone. Encouragement of unhealthy physical and mental habits like valorization of victimhood, obesity, marijuana, and internet addiction decimate the dating pool of both genders.
Social media is a gigantic problem. The proliferation of TikTok “short-form content” is a disaster for critical thought. The combination of dopamine triggers including softcore porn, popular music drops, and encouragement of “rage-bait” content combines the most toxic parts of all media into the most addicting form of “content” available. Sexually frustrated people will be identified easily by the algorithms and pandered to with the most toxic forms of “dating” content possible, encouraging unproductive views of the opposite gender. Recent examples of this include “ihatemybf” “ihatemygf” accounts that primarily post content designed to enrage and inflame insecurities within their audiences, masking the sentiment as jokes while further decreasing trust within the other gender. Additionally, if everyone is just watching this all day, when are you supposed to find time to go on dates in the first place?
As long as humanity exists the search for companionship and love will be a driving force for many, so it will never be “over”. But so much has changed in so little time, and the future looks grim, meaning who you choose to share your life with could make or break your financial future very easily. Better hit a bullseye!!!
I appreciate and welcome any pushback or discussion.
Amen brother, I’m in my 40s and now married but was dating actively using apps from 2012-2018. Most of that was in a major metropolitan area and as a short guy, kinda slim, not rich by any stretch, probably a 5-6 looks wise, introverted, yet I still got laid often enough. Now, mind you, I went on dozens of dates, mostly bad ones, and viewed God knows how many profiles but I was still able to score with some decent looking chicks until 2016. Then I moved to a small city in an empty state and dating was MUCH harder. I kept meeting one mentally unstable woman after another and some actual psychos whose phone numbers I had to block. After getting fed up with that nonsense I set the apps back to where I came from. Soon after that I met a wonderful woman (we actually both flew in and met half way for a first date weekend in Las Vegas of all places) whom I am now happily married to and have a child with. The key is persistence, don’t be afraid to date out of your area, and keep trying. Over time it gets easier to filter the lame ones out. Oh, and don’t move to rural America unless you have a backup plan or just want to stay solo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXc7pjDYMTY
You sound a bit like me in my early twenties. When I was about twenty-five, I decided that serial monogamy, as in one- or two-year love affairs leading to a breakup, was just too slow and might never work to resolve the female question. So, I started “interviewing” women mostly via 10- to 20-minute conversations. When this lead to a real date, there would be no second date unless I really saw myself wanting to marry her, and no sex for at least five dates and if marriage is being considered.
This no-sex rule is key, first because you can’t think straight if sex is involved for at least six months, and second because you should still be “interviewing,” but if you are in a sexual relationship at the same time that would just be cheating.
This method really worked for me. I was dating a young woman for about one month when I met someone who seemed perfect after we spoke for about 30 minutes. Then I ran into a friend and told him that I had just met the woman I was going to marry. He expressed no doubt, just stuck out his hand and said congratulations. Sixteen months later he was best man at the wedding.
So how are we supposed you know who to marry? There are two things to look for (beside good looking which never hurts). She must be deeply good, and deeply not-boring. I had seven or eight girlfriends before marriage and they were all deeply good (well maybe not all), but the problem was the not-boring requirement. I don’t mean “interesting,” I mean being happy in each other’s company even when there is nothing much to talk about.
This is interesting to me and admirable. When I was that age I had a variation of the same, sex but with non-attachment, because I was going through a bit of a Buddhist phase and thought attachment was the source of all suffering. I do agree sex muddles things even when aiming for non-attachment, for the reason you outlined – unless you’re in a poly or open relationship you’re trying to be respectful of your partner and so continuing to play the field would be effectively cheating, which leads one to prematurely commit even if not really an ideal match. Interesting to think about – one doesn’t even need Christianity to propose chastity until marriage.
I would say rather chastity until the engagement, but also that this method is not for very young adults, who usually don’t know enough about relationships or sex yet. It’s like selecting a musical instrument. You don’t start out with a Stradivarius.
Another practical reason for the no-sex rule for me was that it took a lot of energy to interview five to ten women per week for several months. The day I met my wife I had spoken to two other women and got one phone number, which I never used of course.
I love what I would call the realism of Paglia:
She seems to grasp that the modern male tends to be structurally criminalized and the modern female structurally privileged.
Paglia sees this not as liberation but as a serious imbalance.
Paglia argues that by making man primarily a radical culprit and women primarily a sanctified status only leads to greater social instability.
At a deeper level she sees sexual difference not as a social construct but as a biological and mythological force and a primary engine of creativity.
Her work is also totally indifferent to political correctness which in itself is refreshing.
Homo sapiens, as a species, is a hairless primate that has over-populated its environmental niche. Human history for the next several centuries will be a reprise of lemmings over the cliff. Homos‘ brains are no match for their gonads.
I think it comes down to relationship education as well. The half-assed subversion of traditional gender roles seems to have resulted in new difficult gender dynamics. It’s really unavoidable to some extent, imo.
For example, in discourse about Maoist China there was certainly a great emancipation from traditional gender roles, but as a liberal critique rightly points out: they were replaced by “revolutionary” gender roles, a man and a woman, whose value came from their revolutionary qualities. While liberals believe this is oppressive they really miss the point that it is to some extent inevitable: while in a neoliberal economy and individualist society it is propagated that we are “free” to shape our selves, including our gender (still mainly in “male” “female” dichotomy), in fact, “we” are just as much spoon-fed the social logic of the times: whatever gender we have, there are “rules” guiding it — as a “woman” you have to show your “freedom” from oppressive toxic masculinity; as a “man” you have to perform on various levels. You have to choose and choose correctly all aspects of life (I would highly recommend a book by Renata Salecl: The Tyranny of Choice).
Regarding ED and men: if you look at the no-fap community, it has a lot to do with performance anxiety, which isn’t simply sexual, but much more holistically, it is seen by the community as performing the “successful” individual with diet, exercise, sleep, and lifestyle changes included. While the community frames it around being a successful “male,” it seems to me, that behind it is really the neoliberal paradigm that each individual should shape themselves and curate their social circle so as to best optimize their imagined “value” in the contemporary capitalist world.
Instead of looking at relationships purely through the lens of dating/pursuing in either “men” or “women” or other genders, perhaps, we should look at it through the lens of forming emotional, authentic relationships. Perhaps, the real question we should be asking is whether we have forgotten how to make friends (not simply potential sexual partners)? By making friends, I mean, making friends without thinking about individuals’ social value or how they might serve “us” in curating ourselves as the product that we had become.
Dead Internet Theory… about 2015 I was posting on Medium, when I began to get replies from people who were very persistent, erudite, and shockingly evil. Threaded trolls, whom I surrendered to when I realized I could not compete as ‘they’ were clearly making a living from their activity, while I was merely passionate. The arguments approached the absurd and I eventually accused one of being ‘a computer’, and another ‘a cartoon’ for having such a grotesque collection of biases.
Fast forward to 2025 and it is the norm to encounter very convincing bots in comment sections, implemented to drive ‘engagement’.
Fallacy machines, which misinterpret every word you say, to bait you into an argument.
I bring this up to say, that these bots are pervasive (on eg. Instagram), and have truly dangerous and obnoxious messaging that routinely surpass the extreme. It is never readily apparent these are not real people, but with ‘11,782 hearts’ on their comment, it’s easy to assess what they say as beneficial.
Man vs Woman is a prime target for this engagement, and I fear for anyone who has been learning anything about love, sex, or relationships from Instagram comment sections. This is actually a massive problem.
Douglas Murray has written books on this topic. I prefer the audio versions where he’s the reader.
Well, there’s always the Screwfly Solution…
I don’t have any direct life experiences to share in this regard. I met my wife when we were practically kids (both 18), dated her throughout college, married her after we both graduated from undergrad, spent several blissful years together in grad school, started having kids young, and all that was 30 years ago. On her side of the family, an astonishing number married their high school sweethearts. My children have a very different view of relationships and accommodating flaws in their partners because of their exposure to what I understand is an oddity in today’s culture. Especially because no one in their direct or extended families is divorced.
Now, for my friends, many of them dear to me, I’m seeing far too many divorces. It’s sad because in several cases I’m friends with both the husband and the wife and their kids. I agree with others who said things went even more sideways because of the pandemic. A lot of people who were holding it together had to survive through situations that were a little too bad for a little too long and it all fell apart.
I hope the people sharing their stories here find a partner they like and who likes them. Life is too hard to be alone.
As a male, 42, with autistic traits, such debates seem odd. From where I stand, all that is happening is that younger males are becoming more like me.
It takes some good social and interpersonal skills to flirt, or to realize that an attempt at flirting has some chance of being successful. It takes a lot of self-knowledge to understand that you might be attracted by someone else. For autistic people, that is not always possible.
And autism diagnoses are exploding (https://www.cdc.gov/autism/data-research/index.html). And as more people get the diagnoses, there are even more who, like me, do not quite make the cut, yet still have many of the same issues.
No, I am not saying this is due to vaccines.
Sure, all the other factors mentioned are making things worse: smartphones, the internet, dating sites, #METoo, obnoxious feminism. In countries that industrialized too quickly, like Japan, Italy, China, or South Korea, societal norms also failed to keep up.
But my guess is that more and more people simply have problems managing their feelings, or even feeling anything at all (alexithymia). It is not so much that they do not know how to, or are too intimidated to try. They probably do not know that they are supposed to try at all, and would not know what it is exactly that they should be trying to do, and why.
> historical birthright of horniness and reasonable ability to gratify those urges
Well, in someone else’s world, maybe.
I posted a comment which was apparently refused.
My point was relatively neutral – the rise in autism and alexithymia precludes relationships for many people. If you found it unacceptable or unrelated to the topic, that is ok.
However, I used the word “va***ne” just to point out that I do not believe that there is a relationship between autism and va***ne uptake.
So, if some automatic filter took down the comment, please consider restoring it.
dating takes time i dont have so i mostly mainline gay hookups (easier than straight hookups somehow). maybe once i graduate college ill start taking dating seriously but no way can i balance school/work/research/church/friends/dating. later problem!
Well, speaking of soap operas,Turkish media has an endless supply of them. They call them dizileri. They’re on Youtube. Most of them have an auto translate option, so I can get English subtitles.
Turkish society is organized along some of the lines Paglia characterized approvingly. Generations live together in the same household, if possible. Basically its an extended family as practiced in a different culture. It sounds like it has the upsides/downsides a person would expect – the frictions among people sharing habitat on the downside, and the benefits of having extended family at hand on the upside.
Also, this is probably just me, but I think Jordan Peterson and Steven Miller were separated at birth.
It would take me two or three hours to read all the comments so I only read a few. My own take as a gay man in a very loving and close relationship of 21 years with my husband (and we spend pretty much 24/7 together) is that gender roles need to flexible and where toxic eschewed, and face to face communication, compassion, and kindness are essential to deal with any and all traumas and challenges in whatever arena. This is what I advise to young people and adults alike. Fear of intimacy is what gets in the way and needs to be dealt with. It is deep and pervasive and the way I see it, it’s the dominant obstacle to intimate relating, also today. Read the brilliant Robert W. Firestone’s book appropriately named Fear of Intimacy, if you are brave enough.
I think before there’s any discussion of gender roles in modern relationships there needs to be a discussion about being an adult. In my experience, far too few of my peers and contemporaries have any foundation to call themselves adults. They may be physically mature. The may even have graduated from college. But they are, all of them, not agreement capable as we like to say on NC. You see this in how they form relationships, how they parent, how they treat contracts they sign, etc. I think our society needs to do a lot of rebuilding of basic human concepts. I don’t even think gender roles figure highly in the list of what needs to be improved. They’ll develop as needed once we have functioning adults who are capable of making decisions and keeping their commitments.
“The apps” – the dating apps and other social media hyperconnection points (e.g. Instagram) – are the atomic bomb of the modern dating scene. They have birthed a new world, and there is no going back to the old one.
Their effect CANNOT be overstated. Women used to rely on their social circle or the randomness of in-person meetings to find a mate. They might plausibly encounter a few dozen or a few hundred potential suitors throughout their entire lives.
Today, they can swipe through an infinite supply. Studies published by the apps themselves reveal virtually all of their attention goes to the top 1-2% of the most attractive men, and they view the overwhelming majority of men as unattractive in the extreme (whereas men rate women on a near perfect bell-curve).