I find myself thinking that all of your experiential anecdotes and musings are reasonable but that your ultimate take is hopelessly myopic. We can agree that these young men have a problem due to natural societal and biological factors that happen to come together in a confluence which puts them in a weak position in the sexual marketpla…
I find myself thinking that all of your experiential anecdotes and musings are reasonable but that your ultimate take is hopelessly myopic. We can agree that these young men have a problem due to natural societal and biological factors that happen to come together in a confluence which puts them in a weak position in the sexual marketplace. We can agree that of course no one owes these young men a lay (or a living). None of that is a rebuttal to the call to action in the post. Why does this natural, predictable problem preclude those suffering from it from getting sympathy? It's not clear to me that it should. I think most readers will find your struggles as a young woman sympathetic. I think almost all of us sympathize with (and often dread) the struggles of the elderly, as well. There's a problem when a societal group is treated as being unworthy of sympathy, and so your unwillingness to extend it to these suffering young men is a rather glaring flaw.
*thoughtful* These young men will never be my priority; my past experience guarantees it. That same experience also suggests that "some animals are more equal than others"; i.e. while no one would (now) come out and say "women deserve to be treated worse than men by default", many (a majority) would still prioritize a problem higher if it affected primarily men, and lower if it affected primarily women.
The real bottom line though, is that presuming these young men want heterosexual relationships, the only way for them to get those relationships is for some woman _who currently doesn't chose to do so_ to choose to get involved with them.
There are various types of market failure. But I think that's entirely the wrong term here. This is more like elderly people rejecting smart phones in droves, because the user interfaces are designed in a way that results in them being next to impenetrable for an older user, and then changed regularly lest the younger user become bored.
Arguably it is a market failure that AFAICT no one has so far produced a good product for old people (and if you know otherwise, please let me know; I'd happily use my extensive software skills to support such a project) even though the demand is there. But romantic partners aren't produced by enterpreneurs that somehow can't be arsed to tap a particular market niche. and they also aren't a public good, like parks or highways. Instead, they are human beings with their own preferences and rights, which don't match up.
Statistically speaking, one side or other will have to change. I'm not in favour of young women being encouraged to change their preferences (go out with someone they like less) for the good of young men.
But if you take that off the table, what's left? Either the young men have to find ways to become more attractive, individually, one by one - or they need to suck it up unless/until they grow into the attractive range.
No one is guaranteed romantic success. It's a tough market, and tougher now, for men, than in my youth when women had a much stronger economic incentive to pair up, as well as whatever romantic incentive they may have had.
Now think about the elephant in the room - ever-longer periods of dependent childhood, followed by unstable employment (if any) and massive debt (if college educated). Boys don't marry. A man who at 30 is intermittently employed, if that, and living with his parents, is socially (and romantically?) more boy than man. (No insult to the youth in question - it's the cultural milieu, not the individual, that's the problem here. A 30 year old woman is hit with some of the same thing, except that we have a cultural history of girls becoming women by marrying.
I don't see an answer, except for some of the individual cases.
Meanwhile, how do any of you propose to get these young men what they want, without somehow inducing their sisters to accept something they've made pretty clear they don't want? And why is the male problem such a priority?
Your comments are just a perfect example of something I mentioned elsewhere: A rather tonally-neutral discussion with diagrams of imbalanced dating/mating markets that somehow triggers an extremely angry, defensive post by a woman whose only contribution to the conversation is basically "tough luck, buttercup".
This post and whole conversation are our thoughts about what about modern technology and society has amplified already present imbalance, and the large scale consequences its having on all of us. There is a lot that's insightful and worth mulling over - and it affects all of us - whether we are beautiful women, overweight old women, short men without good jobs, or 6'2" white guys with millions of dollars - or anyone in between.
Sorry about the deleted comment - this UI doesn't allow editing, and I'd produced a garbled mess by falling into a UI glitch.
--
My reaction to tonally neutral and (especially) abstract is often to add lived experience, and see what the result looks like. This sub-thread discusses what it looked like given my lived experience.
Elsewhere in the thread we have responses from people whose experience includes the problem discussed.
I also look at implementation details, and cost-benefit ratios.
What I don't do, not being wired that way, is join in saying "oh those poor things; something ought to be done" while either consciously or unconsciously aware that this is all I'll ever do, since there's no actual acceptable solution.
If the call is to throw a pity party for all the poor young men, well sure. I could even write a program to scrape publicly available data to identify most of them and send them sympathy e-cards on their birthdays. (Sarcasm alert - I cannot imagine any real human being appreciating getting such a card - but OTOH I've long known I can't predict the emotional responses of normal people. Maybe this would actually help some of them.)
I don't see how a pity party is going to help anyone. But if that's what you folks - and especially the OP - believe would be helpful, well, have at it.
I feel like I need to repeat to you, verbatim, what I said above: This post and whole conversation are our thoughts about how modern technology and society has amplified already present imbalance, and the large scale consequences its having on all of us.
If you think it's just poor young men who are having a problem, and think this is just a "pity party", you're really just having a pity party for yourself and not connecting to this conversation.
Everyone is harmed by what's discussed in the OP here. A lot of young men are incel, but that does not mean attractive young women are sitting in their girl circles with flutes of champagne, making toasts to how they really beat the guys. I think it would be very, very hard to find any woman who thinks they have it great because of all this. Sure, they get tons of attention from men, but it's overwhelming, off-putting, and leads a lot of women to withdrawal and be chronically defensive and suspicious. Men likewise chronically are stone-walled and rejected, and themselves either give up or step up on the soul-crushing seeking-a-partner grind. Perhaps the only ones that really feel like they got it are the 6' white guys with job making a million bucks. People - men and women - are depressed, checked out, resentful, angry about the mating process and for good reason. We're all harmed, it's showing, and really getting a good grasp of the dynamics of whats going on may be the first step to repair it.
Look, if you want to taunt them and just go tell them to go fuck themselves, fine, though I suspect (or mistakenly hope) you are probably not the type to tell poor people in developing countries to fuck themselves, and might hopefully see the irony.
DinoNerd has been around my corner of the internet for a long time, and while I disagree with her tone and her perspective here, she usually brings a lot of value to the discussion. In this case I think its worth it to try to look past the pain and trauma she is displaying here to dig down a little deeper to understand her perspective.
> In this case I think its worth it to try to look past the pain and trauma she is displaying here to dig down a little deeper to understand her perspective.
You mean, that thing she positively, absolutely refuses to do for any man?
"Pity party" is an incredibly condescending way to frame the request here. Even if we grant that there is no ethical way to change their situation, the basic level of empathy we grant to everyone else in unfortunate-but-unfixable situations would be a massive improvement over the status quo. And of course you personally don't have to do any of the sympathizing if you don't care to, but other women are willing to do so and it would be useful to elevate those voices in the discourse. Currently the voices that dominate popular discourse on this topic loudly condemn incels as pathetic, women-hating lunatics. And just maybe if that stopped, it would help lonely virgins avoid diving headfirst into misogyny- stereotype threat is a well-studied sociological phenomenon and seems quite applicable here.
I find myself thinking that all of your experiential anecdotes and musings are reasonable but that your ultimate take is hopelessly myopic. We can agree that these young men have a problem due to natural societal and biological factors that happen to come together in a confluence which puts them in a weak position in the sexual marketplace. We can agree that of course no one owes these young men a lay (or a living). None of that is a rebuttal to the call to action in the post. Why does this natural, predictable problem preclude those suffering from it from getting sympathy? It's not clear to me that it should. I think most readers will find your struggles as a young woman sympathetic. I think almost all of us sympathize with (and often dread) the struggles of the elderly, as well. There's a problem when a societal group is treated as being unworthy of sympathy, and so your unwillingness to extend it to these suffering young men is a rather glaring flaw.
*thoughtful* These young men will never be my priority; my past experience guarantees it. That same experience also suggests that "some animals are more equal than others"; i.e. while no one would (now) come out and say "women deserve to be treated worse than men by default", many (a majority) would still prioritize a problem higher if it affected primarily men, and lower if it affected primarily women.
The real bottom line though, is that presuming these young men want heterosexual relationships, the only way for them to get those relationships is for some woman _who currently doesn't chose to do so_ to choose to get involved with them.
There are various types of market failure. But I think that's entirely the wrong term here. This is more like elderly people rejecting smart phones in droves, because the user interfaces are designed in a way that results in them being next to impenetrable for an older user, and then changed regularly lest the younger user become bored.
Arguably it is a market failure that AFAICT no one has so far produced a good product for old people (and if you know otherwise, please let me know; I'd happily use my extensive software skills to support such a project) even though the demand is there. But romantic partners aren't produced by enterpreneurs that somehow can't be arsed to tap a particular market niche. and they also aren't a public good, like parks or highways. Instead, they are human beings with their own preferences and rights, which don't match up.
Statistically speaking, one side or other will have to change. I'm not in favour of young women being encouraged to change their preferences (go out with someone they like less) for the good of young men.
But if you take that off the table, what's left? Either the young men have to find ways to become more attractive, individually, one by one - or they need to suck it up unless/until they grow into the attractive range.
No one is guaranteed romantic success. It's a tough market, and tougher now, for men, than in my youth when women had a much stronger economic incentive to pair up, as well as whatever romantic incentive they may have had.
Now think about the elephant in the room - ever-longer periods of dependent childhood, followed by unstable employment (if any) and massive debt (if college educated). Boys don't marry. A man who at 30 is intermittently employed, if that, and living with his parents, is socially (and romantically?) more boy than man. (No insult to the youth in question - it's the cultural milieu, not the individual, that's the problem here. A 30 year old woman is hit with some of the same thing, except that we have a cultural history of girls becoming women by marrying.
I don't see an answer, except for some of the individual cases.
Meanwhile, how do any of you propose to get these young men what they want, without somehow inducing their sisters to accept something they've made pretty clear they don't want? And why is the male problem such a priority?
Your comments are just a perfect example of something I mentioned elsewhere: A rather tonally-neutral discussion with diagrams of imbalanced dating/mating markets that somehow triggers an extremely angry, defensive post by a woman whose only contribution to the conversation is basically "tough luck, buttercup".
This post and whole conversation are our thoughts about what about modern technology and society has amplified already present imbalance, and the large scale consequences its having on all of us. There is a lot that's insightful and worth mulling over - and it affects all of us - whether we are beautiful women, overweight old women, short men without good jobs, or 6'2" white guys with millions of dollars - or anyone in between.
Sorry about the deleted comment - this UI doesn't allow editing, and I'd produced a garbled mess by falling into a UI glitch.
--
My reaction to tonally neutral and (especially) abstract is often to add lived experience, and see what the result looks like. This sub-thread discusses what it looked like given my lived experience.
Elsewhere in the thread we have responses from people whose experience includes the problem discussed.
I also look at implementation details, and cost-benefit ratios.
What I don't do, not being wired that way, is join in saying "oh those poor things; something ought to be done" while either consciously or unconsciously aware that this is all I'll ever do, since there's no actual acceptable solution.
If the call is to throw a pity party for all the poor young men, well sure. I could even write a program to scrape publicly available data to identify most of them and send them sympathy e-cards on their birthdays. (Sarcasm alert - I cannot imagine any real human being appreciating getting such a card - but OTOH I've long known I can't predict the emotional responses of normal people. Maybe this would actually help some of them.)
I don't see how a pity party is going to help anyone. But if that's what you folks - and especially the OP - believe would be helpful, well, have at it.
I feel like I need to repeat to you, verbatim, what I said above: This post and whole conversation are our thoughts about how modern technology and society has amplified already present imbalance, and the large scale consequences its having on all of us.
If you think it's just poor young men who are having a problem, and think this is just a "pity party", you're really just having a pity party for yourself and not connecting to this conversation.
Everyone is harmed by what's discussed in the OP here. A lot of young men are incel, but that does not mean attractive young women are sitting in their girl circles with flutes of champagne, making toasts to how they really beat the guys. I think it would be very, very hard to find any woman who thinks they have it great because of all this. Sure, they get tons of attention from men, but it's overwhelming, off-putting, and leads a lot of women to withdrawal and be chronically defensive and suspicious. Men likewise chronically are stone-walled and rejected, and themselves either give up or step up on the soul-crushing seeking-a-partner grind. Perhaps the only ones that really feel like they got it are the 6' white guys with job making a million bucks. People - men and women - are depressed, checked out, resentful, angry about the mating process and for good reason. We're all harmed, it's showing, and really getting a good grasp of the dynamics of whats going on may be the first step to repair it.
Look, if you want to taunt them and just go tell them to go fuck themselves, fine, though I suspect (or mistakenly hope) you are probably not the type to tell poor people in developing countries to fuck themselves, and might hopefully see the irony.
DinoNerd has been around my corner of the internet for a long time, and while I disagree with her tone and her perspective here, she usually brings a lot of value to the discussion. In this case I think its worth it to try to look past the pain and trauma she is displaying here to dig down a little deeper to understand her perspective.
> In this case I think its worth it to try to look past the pain and trauma she is displaying here to dig down a little deeper to understand her perspective.
You mean, that thing she positively, absolutely refuses to do for any man?
"Pity party" is an incredibly condescending way to frame the request here. Even if we grant that there is no ethical way to change their situation, the basic level of empathy we grant to everyone else in unfortunate-but-unfixable situations would be a massive improvement over the status quo. And of course you personally don't have to do any of the sympathizing if you don't care to, but other women are willing to do so and it would be useful to elevate those voices in the discourse. Currently the voices that dominate popular discourse on this topic loudly condemn incels as pathetic, women-hating lunatics. And just maybe if that stopped, it would help lonely virgins avoid diving headfirst into misogyny- stereotype threat is a well-studied sociological phenomenon and seems quite applicable here.