Obviously I'm very late to this discussion - just catching up on several months of backlog reading now. But this discussion by chance falls into my area of interest and academic background: human sexuality/behavioral science. So I've thought about this kind of behavior a lot.
It's interesting that it seems so hard for people to empathize. I'm a woman, fairly liberal, and grew up in a household where "feminist" was a badge of honor, but I can't imagine not empathizing with anyone who is clearly in psychological pain, even if their actions are abhorrent. Even people who say hateful things - or even act on them - are clearly locked in a prison that they themselves perpetuate, and although a hateful ideology might provide some psychological relief in the short run, in the long run it only pushes them even further from actually getting what they want - to be loved physically and emotionally by a woman. You can hate the actions and yet feel incredibly sad.
What I would offer, though, is that most of the frustration here with proposed solutions (or lack thereof) seems to me to be misguided. Suggesting that men somehow figure out how to improve themselves, or learn to cope better with the inevitable, or that women need to find it in their hearts to put out for these men, or any other such solution seems to me to miss the point. Those are all individual level solutions for what is not an individual problem. They are only superficial, individual-level adjustments to a system that isn't working well as a whole.
Take a step back and consider: yes, there are many larger social currents that play into creating a pool of unpartnered (and perhaps un-partnerable) men. Some have been mentioned: economic forces that increase the gap between haves and have-nots, giving some men more economic status (or at least ability-to-provide status) and some less, internet culture that allows more prospective partners to reach a greater variety of choices, mass media that re-sets people's expectations of "average" looks and and "average" social skills (We can think about a scenario in which men and women living in a small village of 100 people in an undeveloped society will never have seen a super-model looking person in their lives. Their mental model of what "attractiveness" is will be based on the average looking people they know, and the curve will be bent much further downward than someone who has grown up watching television. They may still have an internal dividing line that delineates "potential partners who are not attractive enough to accept" but their line is likely to be quite a bit lower. )
But all these play against a background of assumption that human desire for partnership, and the meaning assigned to partnership, is a constant in all times and places, and I don't think that's true. In other words, we assume that any conditions which generate a significant pool of men who can't find partners will naturally cause hurt and hostility. I'm not convinced by that, at least not entirely. I would argue that for starters, there are cultural models in which the needs that incels in American/western culture feel are unmet (sex, companionship, status, identity) are met in other ways. In some cultures, there are respected identities for unpartnered men to step into that meet some of those needs in other ways. For example, many cultures have had traditions where young men would spend years or decades as warriors/soldiers or priests, and would only be available to compete for mates later in life. The intervening years, depending on the culture, would be either celibate, or there would be access to paid sex, or same-sex erotic pairings were acceptable. There have been cultures where life-long "bachelor" status granted status or other privilege. There are lots of ways that humans have found to do this. Men in these situations may been missing sex to a greater or lesser degree, but they weren't hating their lives and everyone around them to boot.
The difference is that in such cultures, there are usually ample ways for men to meet multiple needs, even if they aren't having sex. There is a lot of social connection. There are strong male bonds of friendship. There are clear and respected roles and identities to adopt. People often live in large kinship groups. Men in these groups may not be having sex, but they are valued, relied on, needed, and may be playing other identity roles such as son, uncle, brother, cousin in a way that fills the need for human contact, relationship, companionship. They may be interacting with and helping protect and teach other children in their extended family or community. Their lifetime "bachelor" status is accepted, understood, and seen as having a valuable social role. Is the lack of sex still an issue? I'm sure it is but it doesn't seem to brew these poisoned pools of hurting and hurtful people who feel abandoned and unable to be "seen".
So if I were looking for solutions, I think it's a bit of a red herring to spend time splitting hairs over whether it's reasonable or acceptable to tell men to work out, get a better wardrobe and come out of the basement once in a while. It is very, very difficult for humans to implement individual level solutions to society-level problems. Instead let's look at how we got to a place where there are fewer and fewer opportunities for social connection of any kind, where people who are unpartnered tend to live alone, where their need for companionship and touch is only acceptably met via a sexual partner (no hugging or holding platonic male friends allowed), where women are assigned the work of "emotional labor" in most relationships, leaving men who are unpartnered with fewer emotional skills or outlets and left to their own devices - no one they can comfortably cry on the shoulder of without being demeaned. Let's consider why so many men feel that having a female partner is their only possible avenue to access these social goods.
Even though western society tries to tell us that sex is a primary human drive, maybe THE primary human drive, there are many other societies who would argue that isn't so, that it's just one need among many that are equally primary. And if we solved some of these other problems, you'd still have lonely men, you'd still have sexually frustrated men, but you wouldn't have incel culture.
This is a great comment that I really appreciate - thank you.
I think we agree a lot on the fundamentals here. I think the incels wouldn't exist if it wasn't for a "perfect storm" of a lot of things - lack of sex/acceptance in the romance field, obviously, but also jobs not being as fulfilling, other kinds of relationships being weaker as you note, and an internet culture that gets into a cycle of negative reinforcement (as Cassander notes below).
Like Cassander, I'm unsure how much we'd need to destroy that cycle now that it's going. I think everything you noted helps - like would the incel problem be better if families were more healthy? Almost for sure. Ditto jobs being better. Even ditto heterosexual skinmanship, as you note - seems to work well for the South Koreans, even though I'm trained enough to be revulsed by it anyway.
I *think* that stuff like this probably works on a spectrum of sorts. You said "In other words, we assume that any conditions which generate a significant pool of men who can't find partners will naturally cause hurt and hostility", and went on to say that isn't how it works. I think it probably does work that way, but not as a default "this creates incels" effect, but more one that moves people in a hurt, bitter direction. The easiest cure would be to wave a magic wand and make perfect spouses for everyone, but that doesn't mean other effects wouldn't be expected to counteract it somewhat.
The good news is that none of our solutions contradict each other anyway - sympathy, improved relationships and roles that increase meaning being pretty close to abstract goods in this case. And some of those are attainable, even - like, you could at least see them happening in non terrible ways.
Saying men can be uncles is a lot like saying "sure women make 90 cents on the dollar, but they can be mothers!" Which is to say, it's not exactly wrong, but it's also not really addressing the problem.
And I don't think solving the non-sex side of things fixes incel culture. that culture is clearly trying to fill that hole, coming up with alterative ways to get the emotional needs met that you're talking about. It comes out toxic because everyone has the same gripe, so the negativity is amplified.
This was an incredibly heartwarming reading experience. I've been blessed with a vibrant romantic life but I've always been bothered by the lack of sympathy for those less interpersonally fortunate. I remember when "nice guy" started being used as a synonym for "entitled misogynistic douchebag", similar to how most people outside the namesake community use "incel" now. I think perhaps this becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ultimately, I see very few counterexamples to the idea that people's instinctive reaction to obviously low-status men ranges from "condescending pity" to "you're breathing a lot of oxygen that probably is better used elsewhere". This is one of those counterexamples, and it's a breath of fresh air to see genuine understanding for a group so thoroughly dehumanized.
Thanks for that. It's a bit hard, because the capital I Incels are often really genuinely bad - like they've responded to the stimulus in an unimaginably bad way. I want to be better at separating out the stimulus and the reaction, though.
I had a friend for a while, call him Dave. Dave was very overweight and kind of socially unskilled; he was a nice guy, I liked him, he was insanely smart and good at a specific thing that would go on to make him a lot of money. But realistically Dave wasn't in a place where he would be able to muster what it took to even try to find someone, much less actually find someone. Call it unhealthy risk aversion, if you want to call it anything.
Anyway, Dave went another direction with it - his reaction to something like incel-creating stimulus (loneliness and lack of self worth, here) was to actually go hyper Woke; he was the wokiest. Super online, Twitter 24/7 mega Woke. I'm not particularly like that, which I think most people can tell; I'm revulsed by the more performative parts of it, which Dave was definitely doing.
I'm trying to revisit things like Dave in my mind and sort of go, hey, I get it, you have this massive hole you are trying to fill with other things. And I don't necessarily have to like things like what you are doing to want to have some sympathy for the kind of things that tend to make people flail around trying to find solutions to the way they hurt.
Yeah, the "woke" memeplex is actually quite isomorphic to the incel one. Universalizing narrative, identity essentialism, and (probably the most load-bearing meme) an enemy. Hell even "woke" and "redpilled" are basically saying the same thing if you strip the ideological identifiers- unintuitive explanations of existing social structures in (race/gender) relations which expose the (white surpremacy/slutty hypergamous gold-digging) that normies don't understand. Admittedly the woke memeplex is orders of magnitude more advanced, but there's no academics producing works in "critical slut studies".
As a father of two boys in the 18-29 age bracket, I've been constantly worrying about this trend. As a society, we have made tremendous strides towards empowering women. Unfortunately, in that same time period we've seen a lot of horrible examples of male behavior deserving condemnation. What we *haven't* had is healthy conversations on how men *should* behave now. "Don't be an asshole" doesn't really cover it. It's quite a catch-22 when in many situations unwanted advances are a ticket to at least social, and potentially legal, trouble, but at the same time young men are still *expected* to initiate romantic interest. I still haven't figured out what advice to give my sons, but I'm *extremely* thankful that I'm still quite happily married and don't have to try dating in this environment.
Incels seem to be more invested in complaining about their problem than in making a plan to fix it. They don't seem to be trying to be attractive or personable or fun to talk to. They aren't willing to wait a few years until they're, you know, not 22. They reject any suggestion that they might see a sex worker or go into therapy. (Yes, I know neither of those things is as satisfying as a mutually committed, loving relationship, but sometimes you need to start on easy mode when you're learning something.)
Whining while rejecting any solution someone offers always kills my sense of sympathy.
I want to have a dialogue about this, because I think it's important in a couple ways. To start, I agree in sort of generic terms that a lot of the Incels must be whining without doing anything to fix it; that's just necessary.
But your scenario here for them, parsed, seems to be making a lot of assumptions I'm not sure are true. One thing I get told a lot when I talk about dieting/obesity is that everyone WANTS to be thin; if it were possible/doable/easy then we'd expect to see a bunch of obese people losing weight, and we don't, so it would be wrong to treat all obese people as lazy fat slobs. Basically that they deserve sympathy and the assumption should be that even if they aren't trying real hard at the moment, that what they would have to try is real hard, and it's more complex than just writing them off as voluntarily broken.
In this case I'm not sure what you are doing is the same, but it feels similar. It's something like "Yes, there's a problem - why don't they just change their personality, looks, and conversational abilities?". If that's easy, great; if that's even something someone can do, fine. But I'm not sure it's that simple; I don't know that many people who have drastically upgraded their personality successfully (read: I don't know any people who have done this) and I don't know many people who have ever made themselves more than marginally better looking (read: I've known some people who have done this, but not many). There's probably some dudes out there who are romance-marketable if they just start showering more, dress a little better and make some token effort at not being rancid assholes, but it's relevant that we think about whether those guys are the norm, or outliers.
I say this because, like, the solutions you propose besides that are A. Something that's expensive, stands a good chance of getting them sent to jail and only solves a small part of the problem most of them have B. Something that's expensive, slow and that we'd only expect to fix the underlying problem if the underlying problem is entirely them - i.e. if the stats I posted above are completely the un-loved faults, with no "market" problems they are getting screwed by.
If you are a guy who isn't a capital-I Incel seeing those suggestions, I'm suspicious that it's not that unlike seeing someone complain about their obesity and how society treats the obese and saying "Well, stop whining, bucko - it's hard to have any sympathy for you when "eat less, exercise more" is an option - do you even have a gym membership?".
If it's anything like that, it gets really easy to imagine this lower-case-i not-yet-toxic incel turning to some community somewhere that will give him some level of sympathy. What I'm saying is, we have an option to have sympathy for the generic condition without having sympathy for the bad behavior, something like "Hey, I get that it's hard out there and that this might not feel like or even be something that you can just 'fix' in that way. I feel for you, that's terrible" so they have some other option at all besides "listen, man, I'm going to explain 100 ways women are whores and this isn't your fault at all".
And the normal stuff with escalating problems applies - this is a problem that got almost twice as bad over the last couple decades. Right now, nobody is paying any real attention to it; some people acknowledge that those stats above exist, but nobody is seriously looking into why or what societal trends are pushing it. If we get down the road another 20 years and suddenly 50% of everybody in a certain high-energy-high-rage age range is relationship-less and the only people who have been sympathetic to them at all are terrible people, we can't act surprised when there's suddenly a much larger terrible-person cohort on the ground instead of the much larger sad-but-not-ruined group we might have had.
I notice sometimes women get *extremely* defensive about all this (in fact, it appears there's one in the comments for this post - and a perfect example at that). The defensiveness often includes something along the lines of "no one owes you anything, buttercup".
I think the defensiveness is an attempt to avoid the *actual* reality, which is reflected in those graphs you posted: It's an extremely asymmetric market. Incels are a problem because they might be dangerous. But taking them out of the picture for a moment it's clear there's also a *real life problem* of the consequences of this extremely unbalanced modern situation we've found ourselves in.
The dominant experience vis-a-vis women for me, let's say a standard-issue man, is and has basically always been rejection (this is the default for straight men). It takes an immense amount of time and effort to become intimate with a woman. When I was on the dating apps, my response rate was in the single digits, which was par for the course.
The dominant experience for women, let's say standard-issue women -- neither drop-dead gorgeous nor entirely unattractive -- is the opposite: Overwhelming attention (at least on the dating sites), and default posture of suspicion and annoyance... leading to cynicism and withdrawal from the whole thing.
I would be lying if I didn't bring this up in therapy a lot. My therapist, a woman, had to tell me, basically "Look, [for me] going out and having a man be interested in me is like going out to buy milk.. of course it's going to happen". This does not mean women "have it easy", have better sex lives necessarily, or any of that. We are all harmed by this, and having everyone become more aware of it without jumping to snarkiness or blaming of the victims.
Incels are invested in complaining because their problems are unfixable, so there's not much else left to do.
Incels are, by and large, correct about many inconvenient facts: Female attraction comes down mostly to immutable traits. Female hypergamy is real. Females are biologically driven to deception and dishonesty when they are physically weaker.
The biological imperative of the female is to *select the best male*. In every sexual market place, there is a set of males for which no female will develop attraction. These males would naturally be discarded from the gene pool, improving the survival rate of the species.
Human societies have recognized this as an issue in regards to social cohesion. This is why many cultures - including our own - forced marriage upon its females. In modern times, as the females get "liberated" from these pressures, that selection pressure comes out in full force. As a result, a bigger share of males end up in the "discard" pile, and they're understandably resentful about it.
Given that marriage is a near-universal in contemporary human societies, one might speculate that it is necessary for long-term survival of a population.
In other words, societies that spontaneously abolished marriage may have existed well before "modern enlightenment", but have disappeared with no one left to tell the tale.
I always fail to see what exactly marriage brings to the table besides legal ramifications. My view is that marriage is a constraint which is a net loss for the majority of couples where the relationship is usually either one of them or both just settling for the other. And if you are in the other corner where couples honestly bond which each because it feels right in almost any situation, then this silly procedure doesn't really matter.
Consider the survival aspect of it: When rejecting a male, it is unwise to tell the truth, because broken hearts can lead to broken skulls. Many females who exhibited such "honesty" would have been removed from the gene pool early on.
A quick Google Scholar search shows *actual* scientific evidence to the contrary [1, 2] or even supporting the reverse hypothesis of men lying more [3, 4].
Your empirical evidence is a 2000 person poll done by an insurance company. That is not the scientific rigor one would expect for such a definitive conclusion.
Your hypothesis is also...just a hypothesis that sounds true to you I guess...?
You make all these absurd absolute statements about how women behave as if they are a monolithic group. I know plenty of married men and they aren't all "the best male".
Almost all of what you are saying is only trueish at best, and really has a lot more to do with casual hookups than real relationships.
If you don't want to accept the hypothesis, ask for data. If it's data you don't agree with, attack the method. If the method is rigorous, point to outliers. If you don't *want* to believe something, you don't have to.
I don't need you to believe that the hypothesis is true. I can't prove it to be true. However, I'd like you to consider that all the things you believe by default, the things you *want* to believe - do they all have double-blind placebo controlled randomized trial to support them?
Of course I'm making a generalization. Any statement about anything is, at some level, a generalization. True-ish is often as good as it gets.
Your observations don't necessarily contradict what I'm saying. The "best male you can get" isn't necessarily "the best male". Getting married also isn't necessarily about mutual attraction.
Your data was terrible. I don't even think you could ever adequately prove such a vague thesis as "women are more deceptive than men". It honestly sounds more like a religious belief than some kind of scientific fact. "Deception" itself is such a vague concept. What does "more deceptive" even really mean? Are polite "white lies" even truly deception to begin with? Do they rank the same as more important lies? This idea is just nonsense and is so vague that it is in the eye of the beholder.
Saying such a nebulous and negative thing about women is just thinly veiled misogyny.
Interesting. This tracks with my experience. I can only think of one time when I received a straightforward "I am not interested" rejection from a woman, and that was from an online match. I eventually came to expect this dishonest behavior, but I never attributed it to survival. It is logical, though.
Also, thank you for explaining hypergamy for everyone. Online dating demonstrates this very well (and it's why I no longer participate), like the famous OkCupid study that showed that women rated 80% of men as unattractive.
There is much that a guy can do to improve himself, but like you said, women are most attracted to immutable traits. For exampe: I'm 5'7"; I can't just go to the gym regularly and grow five inches so that I'm in the highly-prized 6' class.
Whether or not it's biological this is historically accurate. Throughout time and different cultures deception is a tool typically assigned to the arsenal of women. Women fought mostly with deception and manipulation. Most of the anthropomorphic animals in stories that are depicted as cunning or deceptive are usually female. Most of the trickster deities are usually female etc. However I don't believe that applies to dishonesty. This is a trait equally portrayed by members of both genders.
Of course you have to account for modernization and historical accuracy. However what would you call makeup, high heels, plastic operations etc. if not deception.
The dead bedrooms people, on the other hand, have all my sympathy. There are a lot of reasons why someone might stop being able or wanting to have sex—and you can't always figure that out before marriage, although getting to know the person you're going to marry for at least 2 years helps to mitigate that risk.
But it blows my mind that the rejecting spouse would still insist on monogamy. "I'm not going to meet your sexual needs, AND I won't let you go elsewhere." It's like saying "I don't feel like cooking dinner, therefore, you're not allowed to eat." That's abuse. And some of these people not only refuse sex, but won't even touch their partners, or express any affection. It's a nightmare.
I think the disconnect here between you and me is that I do actually put a lot of value on monogamy/commitment/etc., which might not be something we could come to terms with each other on, because it's a pretty fundamental value to change.
But I also think there's some complexity for the non-putting-out spouse when it's involuntary. Like, OK, you have some hormonal disorder or whatever. There's one aspect where the "abandon monogamy" thing is essentially saying "You are sick - let your husband cheat on you" to a lot of them; not everybody can deprogram decades of 'relationships are monogamous' programming on a dime, even if they want to/should. But there's also an aspect of, like, you are asking them to enter into an open relationship/poly thing in a situation where their spouse is already maximally unsatisfied/resentful/angry or whatever - that's a pretty good recipe for maximizing one's chances of getting left entirely. It's not going to happen that way every time, but I think that fear is valid and I'm not sure we can ignore it.
I'm on your side where monogamy is concerned, RC, but Kayla's point is still valid. If a partner is refusing any physical intimacy while the other wants it, it is a deep failure of consideration, and if there is some physical issue preventing it and they are both still committed to monogamy, she'd better make absolutely sure he knows she understands the sacrifice.
Oh, I definitely agree that it's a horror story for one or both partners, depending on cause. I'm all for acknowledging the "this marriage is not easy but I'm sticking with it" aspects, as well.
And let's say, in a given case, it is a hormonal or other bodily issue (which is not always or necessarily an easy/possible fix). Okay, so the "withholding" person is sick. Why is this different than if the person got in an accident that somehow left them unable to have/enjoy sex? In that scenario, I don't suspect most people's reaction would be, "You have a duty to let your spouse cheat on you."
I am a bit more sympathetic to incels than that, because I was technically one of them for (I suspect) longer than the average person. I say "technically" because the term didn't exist at the time. In any case, the message that is usually given to incels is that finding a romantic/sexual partner is almost trivially easy: all you have to do is change your physique, wardrobe, habits, hobbies, media preferences, and personality, and maybe stop being such a creep all the time. Once you do that, boom, women instantly show interest in you.
This is a very hard message for a physically unattractive and socially geeky young man to hear, because it amounts to making a permanent, irreversible choice: stop being who you are and become a completely different person, or spend your entire life alone. Some people might be willing and able to take that bargain -- as they perceive it -- but many others might not.
I feel the exact same way about people who complain about economic inequality, and yet telling poor people to work harder and be more proactive in creating economic opportunity is considered abhorrent. And I would say that companionship is a hell of a lot more of a fundamental need than having money in excess of what is needed to get by.
is it fair to expect one gender to have to go through all that though? it doesn't make complaining without doing anything right, and it especially doesn't make any of the misogyny right, but if 50% of the population is starting at a disadvantage for something as important to happiness as interpersonal relationships i'm not sure if just saying "why don't you get therapy?" is very helpful
Throw out everything you believe and start fresh. Women are not forced to learn or deal with anything other than preconceived impressions about them. So don't ever start any potential courtship with any preconceptions thereof. There is just as much "expected behavior" in a male as a female and it varies so much that the worst thing you can do is prescribe it as defacto truth.
That woman is a person, a person of her own mind/right/body. If you want to court that person, then be vulnerable, not virtuous. Sex and relationships aren't a reward, they're something you work for and express a desire for but in a way that's healthy and empathetic to the signals you give and receive.
You're gonna make mistakes. You're going to lose some and win some but as long as you are yourself and you are doing what you love - then those moments you may describe as virtuous and helping others should be flipped around and turned into the vulnerability of how they're helping you. If you can do that, people will want to be with you - as friends, as lovers, as partners.
As for "first moves" - perhaps you're just missing all the signals because you seem entirely idealistic in how you view them... I meet most of my lovers through music - and I don't mean we meet at a music store or music class or at a concert - but that we "connected" through music. If your potential partner says "man i really love that band" that may be a signal that you need to clue in. If all they say is "ok" "sure" then move on if music is your thing and keep on looking. The "signal" can be just that. (inversely, if that's all you do, you're not being vulnerable and signaling either)...
replace music with food/art/movies/culture/science/whatever...
but damn, while being virtuous, be yourself. When I volunteered at camp, it was amazingly hard and easy to find people to build relationships with - hard because some didn't work and some I didn't want to end - but the experience of building that bond made me a better person and I find that experience to be infinitely easier when I recognize that people are there to experience those experiences with other people who want to share those experiences... if you don't like what you do and don't connect that to the human experiences, no one but your momma is gonna reward you for it.
You might try, like, explicitly explaining this to someone. If you are a nice, skilled attractive person this does count for something. I'm not sure "Hi, girl-I-know, I'm incredibly inexperienced dating to the point I don't really know how it works. But I'd like to spend some time with you anyway, if you'd like to give it a shot" will work, but I'm also not at all sure it wouldn't work. And for most people, trying to get romantic success is a numbers game at the best of times so I'm not sure you are at that big of a disadvantage.
The hard part of this is they might say no; not hard because it's that bad (it's embarrassing/disappointing but you will live) but because there's almost a physiological bitterness-building response you might get that you want to keep an eye on. The trick for you, though, is probably just making some effort - it's not something anyone is really all that good at to start with. You just gotta do, I think.
my own experience, which I will say include some success in dating, presently engaged, is just about the exact opposite of Byron's. I see why this is hard to learn.
I thought about Aaronson a lot while writing this, and it made me feel terrible because I did have an article not that long ago just, like, ripping into him for an unrelated thing.
I do worry about the stats above, because there's some super-worst-case scenarios it implies. Like the really worst case isn't that the young guys are losing out to older guys, because that means they can just wait for things to get better, as much as that sucks. The worst-case is that this is because of a general change is mores that allows more individual men to fill sex-and-relationship needs for more women. To the extent that's the case, you are now going to the market-failure guy and telling him "well, this is never going to get better for you - just be sad and frustrated forever". And people don't by-and-large have the capacity to be sad and frustrated forever in non-destructive ways, especially 20-something men.
Oh hey! I haven't seen you in a while... are you still at DSL? Are you still working on your chinese?
If you use discord at all a bunch of us (20 regulars but less than 100 total users) are using it as a chatroom. You always had really thoughtful perspectives, and I can send you a link if you think you'd be interested.
The sad thing is that you have to put in so many disclaimers and "yes, I know this" items to have any chance of not getting toasted.
For the record, the following also deserve some sympathy, some consideration: Nazis, thieves, murderers, pedophiles (including active ones), people who want everybody else's life run according to some weird fucked up delusional system that should only matter to them, parasites, torturers, slavers, and everybody else.
Even people who spend all their time searching a reason to look down on somebody, a reason to punish somebody, a reason to disdain somebody less pure than themselves. Even they deserve some sympathy.
Even if one HAS TO oppose somebody in some way, even if one HAS to thwart somebody or do sombody harm, that is still harm, and it is still a bad thing. Ignoring that fact is evil, not admirable. If I say "I have no sympathy to spare for those scum", that makes ME a worse person... regardless of who the scum may be. I should care about that.
You catch me in a rather cranky state. You also catch me inhabiting a female body, unmarried, and old enough to have experienced all the usual female interactions with people I'll refer to sarcastically as "Penises Who Talk", Dicks for short.
I am old enough that in my childhood the best career prospect seemingly available for my future, was "wife and mother". I'd have a male boss (no question of equality here; men were, by virtue of their masculinity, smarter than me, far more virtuous, and the only humans capable of rationality, among the many ways in which they deserved to each have a personal servant). It wasn't OK if they were to beat me, of keep other women, or trade me in for a younger, prettier model - but of course less desirable men did all those things, and if I picked a poor husband, or wasn't attractive enough to attract a good husband, then I'd simply have to cope with the results. (A great grandmother, pre-availability of divorce to lower classes, had abandoned her wife-beater and moved with her children to a large and distant city, where she claimed to be a widow.)
If I didn't marry, either by choice or necessity, my options would be worse than if I did. I'd still have a male boss, but I'd be paid less than men doing similar work - or than men in general, at least of roughly the same class - excused by women not needing to support families, even those who were widows-with-children, abandoned-wives, etc. etc. And the jobs available all involved being some kind of servant, whether to children (teacher, governess), customers in general (waitress), the sick (nurse), God (nun), or (only whispered) the horny (whore).
Fortunately, feminism became noticeable to me while I was still in high school, before I had to commit to a career. I ran screaming from everything on this list, and for that matter from all the preening and behavioural ego stroking I was being taught as means for attracting the all important male boss, preferably in the form of a husband. The result was a young engineer whose butch appearance and mannerisms were only limited by the need to remain hire-able.
I wound up concluding that in my particular case, a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle. I didn't enjoy sex with them, and the remedy of "keep on trying" and "it'll be different with 'me'" didn't work. I never found one who would do an equal share of relationship management etc. - they were all emotionally set up to be breadwinners with an emotional support partner - and my inclinations and skills ran the same way. I eventually settled down with a nice woman, even though we had no sexual interest in each other.
Add to this all the usual experiences with Dick. The supposedly complimentary cat-calling. The flattering, friendly, flirtatious ass-pinching. The insistence that my refusal to spread my legs for them was offensive and unfair. The accusations that I was a race traitor for not bearing their babies. The repeated attempts to take advantage of my autism, by pretending to be a friend, lying about their sexual desire/attention when asked, and then dumping me when I never did put out. The insistence that I should audition each and every one of them on my back, searching for a "good lover" who would "cure" my "frigidity." (One tip off in recognizing Dick was that I was always "broken"; they were either perfect, or deserving objects of my charity and pity.)
OK, two points here: (1) when a husband isn't going to provide a better economic experience than no husband, rational shoppers require them to provide something else. Women like me haven't found that "something else" on offer. It's unclear to me whether younger men have improved enough to change this calculus, if e.g. my 15 year old self were miraculously transported to a modern high school or college. My guess is she'd try a few, and give it up for a waste of time, just as I did, but with rather less self doubt.
(2) With regard to the statistics you cite, with more young women in relationships than young men, that's neither historically nor pre-historically unusual. The stereotype of grooms being older than brides is based on reality, at least an average reality. Young women are very attractive, for lots of good evolutionary reasons; in general, they are more attractive, at least to the little brain, then they will ever be again. That's not true for males, because women appear to be less motivated by "looks hunky" and more motivated by long term personality traits. Even the sexual plumbing supports this disparity - simple intercourse is far more likely to be satisfying for males than females, leaving the young man with the initial task of learning how to be an adequate lover.
(2b) In fact, getting established enough (etc) to attract a wife is one of the goals that helps young men develop from callow youth to productive members of society.
At any rate, the relative unattractiveness of young men, compared to young women, is not a market failure; it's been a reality in many societies. My maternal grandparents were unusual in both being born in the same year; my father was 14 years older than my mother. And I can't think of any couple in my family tree, or among my acquaintances, where the wife was more than a year older than the husband.
I suspect young men are traditionally kept on the "right" social path by a mix of seeing it as a path to establishing themselves as attractive (when older), availability of paid outlets, and possibilities for rape and wife steeling. (E.g. raiding the neighbour tribe, joining the army, etc.)
My sarcastic advice to Dick has always been to hire a professional, and in particular to stop demanding charity. They aren't getting a "pity fuck" from me - not that they'd want one from the old lady I now am - and I'm all in favor of younger women taking the same stand. Maybe there are some women who really like sex - or really want "service" roles - you might want to take on the mission of servicing callow youths, and perhaps teaching a few of them how to become competent lovers of females, or otherwise improve their attractiveness. (I can't imagine taking that role, but human variety amazes me.) Meanwhile, though, biology has placed young men in a hard place, and they just have to thole it - just as I would have had to thole being abandoned or beaten by a poorly selected husband, if I'd followed the cultural roles I was born into. Young women have their own common problems. So do older men, and older women, and every other demographic you care to name.
Sorry folks, no one owes you a living, let alone a lay.
And as for the bad actors - well, I'm all in favour of giving their behaviour the response it deserves, from social snub up to and including execution, depending on specifics.
I was going to respond to the whole thing, but I got to the end and I think you missed my whole point because of this bit:
"Sorry folks, no one owes you a living, let alone a lay."
I mean, I explicitly say nobody owes anybody anything dozens of times. I get it; nobody is advocating for sex slavery here. It's weird that I can't even avoid a strawman by explicitly mentioning the incoming strawman and explaining that's not what I mean. At no point did I blame women for all this, right?
In terms of the rest of it, very briefly: I do have sympathy for you about the things you went through, both those caused by specific people and just because of how the world is built. That sympathy costs me nothing - I just have to genuinely care about some level of the pain you feel or felt and agree I wish it didn't happen. Sympathy for other groups would cost you a similar amount, but here you had to do a lot of work to not give it. I'm not sure I can approve of that - not just because of the bad outcomes I think it causes, but also because "I refuse to acknowledge things are bad if they are happening to a group I hate" doesn't seem like a good thing to encourage.
I acknowledge and validate the OPs experiences while also agreeing with you that she isn't really addressing the substance of what you wrote. I also really appreciate your approach to the topic - I think empathy is a major factor that is the key to bridging the gap
with many uncomfortable and contentious realities.
I however disagree with your implication that sympathy/empathy essentially costs everyone nothing. For those that have experienced trauma and are dealing with responses such as CPTSD, depending on where they are in their healing process, engaging with certain topics/hypotheticals can actually re-traumatize and use up what little emotional bandwidth they have available. It's a non-zero amount of energy for a rape survivor for example to learn to empathize with misogynist perspectives.
I still agree that ultimately it is the approach we should all strive to engage in, but I think it's important to keep in mind that the ease at which each person can do so at any one time can vary widely depending on their own lived experience and circumstance.
I'm sure there are some people with severe trauma of some sort that would find it hard to sympathize with certain groups or at all - mental illness being a pretty wide range of things, it has to happen somewhere.
With that said, I didn't imply that for everyone, everywhere this would be costless. I said that it would have cost Dinonerd nothing or nearly nothing; it's possible I'm wrong there, but I was judging off of the fact that she wrote a ten chapter book to basically say "men, particularly young men, are trash as a class and deserve what they get". If somebody does that, I'm going to take them at their word that they are in fighting shape, usually.
Honestly, even if I thought Dinonerd was traumatized to a huge degree I would have still contradicted her in much the same way here, because her thesis is that it's OK to hate certain kinds of people in a way that I think is harmful, that pain is good so long as it's aimed at a group she thinks is inherently inferior and without worth. She came here of her own accord to say it.
So I can be gentle with her, but I'm not going to not point out she's participating in behavior I think is negative in the comments section of the article where I'm positing her behavior is negative. Understand this is of a different kind of thing that breaking down doors in women's shelters and demanding they forgive all men - I understand there's limits to what I can reasonably demand of people in special circumstances.
I think there's some misunderstanding of my position here which is probably worth clarifying. There seems to be an implication here that you believe I want people to support the incel movement (such as it is) or that I don't think a lot of what they say/do isn't bad gross. I don't want them supported in terms of their goals (to the extent the internet stereotype is accurate and it's basically legalized rape) or think that calling all women sluts or whatever is good.
What I'm saying (or trying to say) is that you can, while still thinking they suck/are dangerous/have behavior that should be discouraged, acknowledge that there's an actual problem here; something that doesn't justify being an asshole or misogynism but that exists. That's why I brought up my Grandpa - he didn't have to let a lifetime of pain and abuse based on his disability turn him into an asshole. It did turn him into an asshole; that was wrong. But it doesn't erase the pain.
This isn't about rationalsphere, as much as I keep getting dismissed that way. I'm not saying you should feel happy about this or think it's less of a threat - I'm saying you should be able to separate out bad behavior and bad things that happened to people who behave badly and at least acknowledge the bad things that happened to them were bad.
What I worry about here is that if the pattern we are seeing holds and we eventually have, say, 40-60% of young men as perpetually and sorrowfully single, that leaves a lot of really unhappy kids running around. And I think it's pretty likely that if they find out that the average person won't acknowledge anything happened to them and gets mad at them for even bringing it up, they are going to go "Well, fuck those people" and find somebody that does.
The super-short summary of all this is I'm not and haven't discounted that these guys behave badly, or even that they might be a threat to you. I'm not saying that there isn't a group who wouldn't have you in chains. I'm saying that by ignoring the effect they are (some in the worst possible way) complaining about refusing to sympathize with anybody that has it, you are optimizing for them finding sympathy in the first group that seems to give it and giving them over to that group for indoctrination. Right now, that's the incels.
I wanted to throw something else out there: you seem to think there's some vile stuff in the comments here. If you want, email me at residentcontrarian@substack.com; I'd be glad to take a look at it. Some stuff I haven't commented on because it was already opposed, and some stuff I haven't seen, but the comments are pretty substantially deep now and I've probably missed some stuff I should have replied to.
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.
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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.
"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.
You're not entitled to particular level of wealth by virtue of being a woman, you are not entitled to a particular level of career advancement, you are not entitled to anything you want. This works both ways - you start of by essentially listing things for which you think it is an injustice that you cannot or could not get, and you then go on to proclaim that men aren't entitled to anything. Well, neither are you.
The data is clear, women's happiness has plummeted since the 1960s, and it seems almost certainly a large part of it is due to sad, single old women like you who were so sure than men are bad and serving a corporation is the ultimate goal in life. I hope one day the world will become feminist for you to find fulfilment, or something.
I'm always impressed with people who somehow discern the truth of other people's personality and feelings. It's so good of you to inform me that I am "sad"; I never would have guessed otherwise.
I just found this blog, and just wrote a fairly hostile comment on the David French post. And I do think that at least one part of that was poorly argued to the point of borderline dishonesty.
But I immediately feel bad because this is brilliant. This is everything I've been saying, and wanted to say, 10x better than I ever could. People are too emotionally invested in this to change their minds much, I suspect, but if anything could do it it might be this.
Hostile comments are fine! The way I feel about that is that sometimes I'm going to actually need to be corrected, and if I'm *very wrong* hostility isn't necessarily the wrong tactic. The only caveat there is that I'm going to defend myself (I left a response), so as long as you are cool with that we are cool in general.
Thanks for the kind words about this one. I agree a lot of people aren't going to change their minds much, but I think it's worth it to talk about anyway - there's always a few people you can get around the margins.
I'm an 35 year old incel and it looks definitive now. Since I'm done with school I have tried relentless to change myself. I did a 10 days intensive meditation course, I have tried theater, dance and sport. I have travelled. Having a romantic story looks as much unreal as being Ryan Gosling or David Beckham.
35 is not that old and many people find love after that. Even if you think "it's over", keep improving yourself for its own sake and I think you may yet be surprised.
This is the only unjustified claim and I think (also) the unstated assumption at the crux of differences in how people treat "incels" and other groups like them:
"Being sympathetic or nice might have an outside chance (however small) of reforming a few bad actors; we wouldn’t expect the same results from a stony lack of empathy."
I think it's justified, but that's mostly because I looked at the situation and went "yup, it looks a lot like that's why incels exist in the first place". I do think it's a hard thing to prove one way or the other - it may seem like incels are bad because they only place they can go is bad, but it might be worse if the sympathy encouraged them or something.
I know I'm only a couple of years late to this discussion, but I just wanted to note that if you haven't read Scott Alexander's "Radicalizing the Romanceless" on Slate Star Codex, you should. It's required reading for anyone who really wants to understand this topic rather than just traffic in platitudes.
Congratulations on a brave and valuable post. I think there's a subtle but incredibly important distinction between believing yourself to be entitled to sex, and recognising that it's a fundamental, primal desire and that when it can't be met, that can't help but damage you in some way.
Naturally, it all comes down to sex involving the consent of another person. When it comes to food or shelter, we're happy to say that people have a right to them, because their having them doesn't infringe on other people's liberties. Whereas in the case of sex, declaring you have a right to it implies that someone else has an obligation to give it to you, which obviously isn't true. But that doesn't stop it being a tragedy when decent people who want eros and intimacy are doomed to never get them.
"Don’t get me wrong; there’s plenty of people of both genders talking about this problem, though I do think it is a bit surprising how many women there are."
There's some interesting data on this in "Everybody Lies",
"Google searches suggest a surprising culprit for many of these sexless relationships. There are twice as many complaints that a boyfriend won’t have sex than that a girlfriend won’t have sex. By far, the number one search complaint about a boyfriend is “My boyfriend won’t have sex with me.” (Google searches are not broken down by gender, but, since the previous analysis said that 95 percent of men are straight, we can guess that not too many “boyfriend” searches are coming from men.)"
Goes on to counterbalance this with the observation that men may be more comfortable talking about this issue in other settings w/o resorting to google search so 2:1 ratio is probably not accurate. Still, a lot more common than people think.
The whole "how do different groups talk" thing has been increasingly interesting to me. If you tell me someone has a >50x chance of committing suicide, I can tell you with near certainty it's an old man. But you can also tell me the same thing by saying they have the lowest chance of warning you about it.
It's this weird thing where your answers on a survey are often more indicative of what group you feel you belong to than anything else. Which works great for some things (how will you vote) and terrible for other things (how do you feel about divorce).
Not exactly on point to what you are talking about, but it keeps popping up in a bunch of stuff I'm looking at.
I found this Substack via Scott Alexander's link to the Sadly, Porn review, and was quickly attracted to this post. Just want to say thanks for the sympathy. As best I can tell scanning through the comments I'm the first commenter so far who would qualify as a current incel, although certainly the 'lowercase i' or 'quasi' variety depending on how you want to describe it. And I think I would definitely qualify. I am late 30's, have never had sex in my life, and have only been on maybe a half dozen dates in the past 20 years.
I get amused by a lot of the articles and comments and Jobian friends that assume my state must be due to some deep moral failing. By most measures of society I'm a pretty successful, upstanding guy. I'm tall and slender with gym muscles and a decent looking face, a six figure salary and a nice urban apartment, a decent number of friends (not easy when you reach late 30's and your peers are stuck at home with families), good social skills and the ability to make crack jokes and make other people feel invested in a conversation (and the self-awareness to not intellectualize when trying to flirt), a wide variety of social hobbies, and while I'm not an absolute 10 on the social courage scale, I do open conversations with strangers and ask women out occasionally. I could go on but you get the point; there are plenty of guys other there who are not as close to 'finding themselves' who nonetheless have a passable dating history and often a long-term partner to the point where I start to ask, well, if they can pull it off, what's my problem?
In spite of everything I have a very positive attitude and stay focused on trying to solve the problem with my own actions as best I can and otherwise enjoying all other aspects of life, so it is weird that they received message I get in most public forums is that it isn't a real problem and I probably deserve it. I certainly don't take this attitude when it comes to adversity I hear about other people dealing with. So thanks once again, and great blog overall as well. You have a unique background but the posts are interesting and your writing is really strong. I'm about to hit subscribe after this comment.
For a very long time I struggled to find a good job. And it wasn't for lack of applying for jobs. I like to think of myself as reasonably bright, and at the time I think I had a pretty good handle on why I couldn't find work, but in the end there's a pretty good chance I was just unlucky. None of that matters so much; the important bit is that I wasn't getting something that most people think is an import part of life (Acheivement, success, perception that you are the kind of person who *should* acheive.)
And within that i had some of those same Jobian friends, although luckily pretty few, who I think just assumed I was "built like a loser" in that respect - either I didn't work, or I was lying about the effort I was putting out to find better work, or something. But it must have been something.
I feel lucky in retrospect that my "failure", so to speak, had to do with money-poverty as opposed to sex-romance. Because people assign some amount of nobility to poverty, just because they've been trained to respect that struggle.
If I'm being honest I'm not sure if I deserve the success I'm having now, or that I didn't deserve the lack of success then. Stick with me for this next part: I know you even less. You could have three eyes and greet people by spitting in their faces and that logical "it must be his fault" explanation might exist, for all I know.
But where I wish people were on the incel issue was at least acknowledging that the math is fucked - some people are going to end up losers on this, and it's not going to be a clean sort. Some of the people who lose out will "deserve" more than some of those who win. Be better people, have more going for them. Same as the job thing.
And then the wish would be that they'd take the minute it takes to realize that, hey, say this guy does have three eyes or something that makes him less "marketable" in a romance sense. That's still a real problem that he has; it's still potentially a real source of unhappiness, something that deserves sympathy the same way poverty does.
I actually believe you when you say you are a decent and social person, or that you look OK. To the extent you can pick up stuff through typing, I get the sense all that is actually true. But I wish that even if it wasn't, and even if we can't fix the problems that make this hard on you, that at least that same poverty-sympathy was extended in the the same way.
Sorry if this is rambling; it's pretty late here. Just wanted to let you know I understand, to the extent I can from the outside, and I sympathize.
Late to the party, but after doing a snoop around deadbedrooms and focussing solely on the dead bedroom marriages…and speaking as a woman who has stopped having sex with their past partner, for a lot of women, it’s resentment that kills their libido. For whatever reason they have started to resent their partner. Communication has massively broken down and it’s getting worse day by day.
Now, for me, the resentment stemmed from being with a partner who was an overgrown child. I literally had to mother this dolt. He was incapable of adulting on any level and he had about as much emotional maturity as a wet sock. And boy, lemme tell ya, it is really hard to be aroused by a man you have to mother. Compound all of this with his inability to openly communicate and take what I was saying onboard and you have yourself a recipe for disaster. I can’t help but think this might be a common cause for a lot of these peoples dead bedrooms. Their partners don’t have a generally low libido or any sexual dysfunction. They just have a low libido for their current partner and for whatever reason they’re not talking about it. No one is at fault the same as they’re both at fault. As with everything, it takes two to tango, and a relationship cannot thrive without any input from both sides.
Obviously I'm very late to this discussion - just catching up on several months of backlog reading now. But this discussion by chance falls into my area of interest and academic background: human sexuality/behavioral science. So I've thought about this kind of behavior a lot.
It's interesting that it seems so hard for people to empathize. I'm a woman, fairly liberal, and grew up in a household where "feminist" was a badge of honor, but I can't imagine not empathizing with anyone who is clearly in psychological pain, even if their actions are abhorrent. Even people who say hateful things - or even act on them - are clearly locked in a prison that they themselves perpetuate, and although a hateful ideology might provide some psychological relief in the short run, in the long run it only pushes them even further from actually getting what they want - to be loved physically and emotionally by a woman. You can hate the actions and yet feel incredibly sad.
What I would offer, though, is that most of the frustration here with proposed solutions (or lack thereof) seems to me to be misguided. Suggesting that men somehow figure out how to improve themselves, or learn to cope better with the inevitable, or that women need to find it in their hearts to put out for these men, or any other such solution seems to me to miss the point. Those are all individual level solutions for what is not an individual problem. They are only superficial, individual-level adjustments to a system that isn't working well as a whole.
Take a step back and consider: yes, there are many larger social currents that play into creating a pool of unpartnered (and perhaps un-partnerable) men. Some have been mentioned: economic forces that increase the gap between haves and have-nots, giving some men more economic status (or at least ability-to-provide status) and some less, internet culture that allows more prospective partners to reach a greater variety of choices, mass media that re-sets people's expectations of "average" looks and and "average" social skills (We can think about a scenario in which men and women living in a small village of 100 people in an undeveloped society will never have seen a super-model looking person in their lives. Their mental model of what "attractiveness" is will be based on the average looking people they know, and the curve will be bent much further downward than someone who has grown up watching television. They may still have an internal dividing line that delineates "potential partners who are not attractive enough to accept" but their line is likely to be quite a bit lower. )
But all these play against a background of assumption that human desire for partnership, and the meaning assigned to partnership, is a constant in all times and places, and I don't think that's true. In other words, we assume that any conditions which generate a significant pool of men who can't find partners will naturally cause hurt and hostility. I'm not convinced by that, at least not entirely. I would argue that for starters, there are cultural models in which the needs that incels in American/western culture feel are unmet (sex, companionship, status, identity) are met in other ways. In some cultures, there are respected identities for unpartnered men to step into that meet some of those needs in other ways. For example, many cultures have had traditions where young men would spend years or decades as warriors/soldiers or priests, and would only be available to compete for mates later in life. The intervening years, depending on the culture, would be either celibate, or there would be access to paid sex, or same-sex erotic pairings were acceptable. There have been cultures where life-long "bachelor" status granted status or other privilege. There are lots of ways that humans have found to do this. Men in these situations may been missing sex to a greater or lesser degree, but they weren't hating their lives and everyone around them to boot.
The difference is that in such cultures, there are usually ample ways for men to meet multiple needs, even if they aren't having sex. There is a lot of social connection. There are strong male bonds of friendship. There are clear and respected roles and identities to adopt. People often live in large kinship groups. Men in these groups may not be having sex, but they are valued, relied on, needed, and may be playing other identity roles such as son, uncle, brother, cousin in a way that fills the need for human contact, relationship, companionship. They may be interacting with and helping protect and teach other children in their extended family or community. Their lifetime "bachelor" status is accepted, understood, and seen as having a valuable social role. Is the lack of sex still an issue? I'm sure it is but it doesn't seem to brew these poisoned pools of hurting and hurtful people who feel abandoned and unable to be "seen".
So if I were looking for solutions, I think it's a bit of a red herring to spend time splitting hairs over whether it's reasonable or acceptable to tell men to work out, get a better wardrobe and come out of the basement once in a while. It is very, very difficult for humans to implement individual level solutions to society-level problems. Instead let's look at how we got to a place where there are fewer and fewer opportunities for social connection of any kind, where people who are unpartnered tend to live alone, where their need for companionship and touch is only acceptably met via a sexual partner (no hugging or holding platonic male friends allowed), where women are assigned the work of "emotional labor" in most relationships, leaving men who are unpartnered with fewer emotional skills or outlets and left to their own devices - no one they can comfortably cry on the shoulder of without being demeaned. Let's consider why so many men feel that having a female partner is their only possible avenue to access these social goods.
Even though western society tries to tell us that sex is a primary human drive, maybe THE primary human drive, there are many other societies who would argue that isn't so, that it's just one need among many that are equally primary. And if we solved some of these other problems, you'd still have lonely men, you'd still have sexually frustrated men, but you wouldn't have incel culture.
This is a great comment that I really appreciate - thank you.
I think we agree a lot on the fundamentals here. I think the incels wouldn't exist if it wasn't for a "perfect storm" of a lot of things - lack of sex/acceptance in the romance field, obviously, but also jobs not being as fulfilling, other kinds of relationships being weaker as you note, and an internet culture that gets into a cycle of negative reinforcement (as Cassander notes below).
Like Cassander, I'm unsure how much we'd need to destroy that cycle now that it's going. I think everything you noted helps - like would the incel problem be better if families were more healthy? Almost for sure. Ditto jobs being better. Even ditto heterosexual skinmanship, as you note - seems to work well for the South Koreans, even though I'm trained enough to be revulsed by it anyway.
I *think* that stuff like this probably works on a spectrum of sorts. You said "In other words, we assume that any conditions which generate a significant pool of men who can't find partners will naturally cause hurt and hostility", and went on to say that isn't how it works. I think it probably does work that way, but not as a default "this creates incels" effect, but more one that moves people in a hurt, bitter direction. The easiest cure would be to wave a magic wand and make perfect spouses for everyone, but that doesn't mean other effects wouldn't be expected to counteract it somewhat.
The good news is that none of our solutions contradict each other anyway - sympathy, improved relationships and roles that increase meaning being pretty close to abstract goods in this case. And some of those are attainable, even - like, you could at least see them happening in non terrible ways.
Saying men can be uncles is a lot like saying "sure women make 90 cents on the dollar, but they can be mothers!" Which is to say, it's not exactly wrong, but it's also not really addressing the problem.
And I don't think solving the non-sex side of things fixes incel culture. that culture is clearly trying to fill that hole, coming up with alterative ways to get the emotional needs met that you're talking about. It comes out toxic because everyone has the same gripe, so the negativity is amplified.
This was an incredibly heartwarming reading experience. I've been blessed with a vibrant romantic life but I've always been bothered by the lack of sympathy for those less interpersonally fortunate. I remember when "nice guy" started being used as a synonym for "entitled misogynistic douchebag", similar to how most people outside the namesake community use "incel" now. I think perhaps this becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ultimately, I see very few counterexamples to the idea that people's instinctive reaction to obviously low-status men ranges from "condescending pity" to "you're breathing a lot of oxygen that probably is better used elsewhere". This is one of those counterexamples, and it's a breath of fresh air to see genuine understanding for a group so thoroughly dehumanized.
Thanks for that. It's a bit hard, because the capital I Incels are often really genuinely bad - like they've responded to the stimulus in an unimaginably bad way. I want to be better at separating out the stimulus and the reaction, though.
I had a friend for a while, call him Dave. Dave was very overweight and kind of socially unskilled; he was a nice guy, I liked him, he was insanely smart and good at a specific thing that would go on to make him a lot of money. But realistically Dave wasn't in a place where he would be able to muster what it took to even try to find someone, much less actually find someone. Call it unhealthy risk aversion, if you want to call it anything.
Anyway, Dave went another direction with it - his reaction to something like incel-creating stimulus (loneliness and lack of self worth, here) was to actually go hyper Woke; he was the wokiest. Super online, Twitter 24/7 mega Woke. I'm not particularly like that, which I think most people can tell; I'm revulsed by the more performative parts of it, which Dave was definitely doing.
I'm trying to revisit things like Dave in my mind and sort of go, hey, I get it, you have this massive hole you are trying to fill with other things. And I don't necessarily have to like things like what you are doing to want to have some sympathy for the kind of things that tend to make people flail around trying to find solutions to the way they hurt.
Yeah, the "woke" memeplex is actually quite isomorphic to the incel one. Universalizing narrative, identity essentialism, and (probably the most load-bearing meme) an enemy. Hell even "woke" and "redpilled" are basically saying the same thing if you strip the ideological identifiers- unintuitive explanations of existing social structures in (race/gender) relations which expose the (white surpremacy/slutty hypergamous gold-digging) that normies don't understand. Admittedly the woke memeplex is orders of magnitude more advanced, but there's no academics producing works in "critical slut studies".
As a father of two boys in the 18-29 age bracket, I've been constantly worrying about this trend. As a society, we have made tremendous strides towards empowering women. Unfortunately, in that same time period we've seen a lot of horrible examples of male behavior deserving condemnation. What we *haven't* had is healthy conversations on how men *should* behave now. "Don't be an asshole" doesn't really cover it. It's quite a catch-22 when in many situations unwanted advances are a ticket to at least social, and potentially legal, trouble, but at the same time young men are still *expected* to initiate romantic interest. I still haven't figured out what advice to give my sons, but I'm *extremely* thankful that I'm still quite happily married and don't have to try dating in this environment.
Incels seem to be more invested in complaining about their problem than in making a plan to fix it. They don't seem to be trying to be attractive or personable or fun to talk to. They aren't willing to wait a few years until they're, you know, not 22. They reject any suggestion that they might see a sex worker or go into therapy. (Yes, I know neither of those things is as satisfying as a mutually committed, loving relationship, but sometimes you need to start on easy mode when you're learning something.)
Whining while rejecting any solution someone offers always kills my sense of sympathy.
I want to have a dialogue about this, because I think it's important in a couple ways. To start, I agree in sort of generic terms that a lot of the Incels must be whining without doing anything to fix it; that's just necessary.
But your scenario here for them, parsed, seems to be making a lot of assumptions I'm not sure are true. One thing I get told a lot when I talk about dieting/obesity is that everyone WANTS to be thin; if it were possible/doable/easy then we'd expect to see a bunch of obese people losing weight, and we don't, so it would be wrong to treat all obese people as lazy fat slobs. Basically that they deserve sympathy and the assumption should be that even if they aren't trying real hard at the moment, that what they would have to try is real hard, and it's more complex than just writing them off as voluntarily broken.
In this case I'm not sure what you are doing is the same, but it feels similar. It's something like "Yes, there's a problem - why don't they just change their personality, looks, and conversational abilities?". If that's easy, great; if that's even something someone can do, fine. But I'm not sure it's that simple; I don't know that many people who have drastically upgraded their personality successfully (read: I don't know any people who have done this) and I don't know many people who have ever made themselves more than marginally better looking (read: I've known some people who have done this, but not many). There's probably some dudes out there who are romance-marketable if they just start showering more, dress a little better and make some token effort at not being rancid assholes, but it's relevant that we think about whether those guys are the norm, or outliers.
I say this because, like, the solutions you propose besides that are A. Something that's expensive, stands a good chance of getting them sent to jail and only solves a small part of the problem most of them have B. Something that's expensive, slow and that we'd only expect to fix the underlying problem if the underlying problem is entirely them - i.e. if the stats I posted above are completely the un-loved faults, with no "market" problems they are getting screwed by.
If you are a guy who isn't a capital-I Incel seeing those suggestions, I'm suspicious that it's not that unlike seeing someone complain about their obesity and how society treats the obese and saying "Well, stop whining, bucko - it's hard to have any sympathy for you when "eat less, exercise more" is an option - do you even have a gym membership?".
If it's anything like that, it gets really easy to imagine this lower-case-i not-yet-toxic incel turning to some community somewhere that will give him some level of sympathy. What I'm saying is, we have an option to have sympathy for the generic condition without having sympathy for the bad behavior, something like "Hey, I get that it's hard out there and that this might not feel like or even be something that you can just 'fix' in that way. I feel for you, that's terrible" so they have some other option at all besides "listen, man, I'm going to explain 100 ways women are whores and this isn't your fault at all".
And the normal stuff with escalating problems applies - this is a problem that got almost twice as bad over the last couple decades. Right now, nobody is paying any real attention to it; some people acknowledge that those stats above exist, but nobody is seriously looking into why or what societal trends are pushing it. If we get down the road another 20 years and suddenly 50% of everybody in a certain high-energy-high-rage age range is relationship-less and the only people who have been sympathetic to them at all are terrible people, we can't act surprised when there's suddenly a much larger terrible-person cohort on the ground instead of the much larger sad-but-not-ruined group we might have had.
I notice sometimes women get *extremely* defensive about all this (in fact, it appears there's one in the comments for this post - and a perfect example at that). The defensiveness often includes something along the lines of "no one owes you anything, buttercup".
I think the defensiveness is an attempt to avoid the *actual* reality, which is reflected in those graphs you posted: It's an extremely asymmetric market. Incels are a problem because they might be dangerous. But taking them out of the picture for a moment it's clear there's also a *real life problem* of the consequences of this extremely unbalanced modern situation we've found ourselves in.
The dominant experience vis-a-vis women for me, let's say a standard-issue man, is and has basically always been rejection (this is the default for straight men). It takes an immense amount of time and effort to become intimate with a woman. When I was on the dating apps, my response rate was in the single digits, which was par for the course.
The dominant experience for women, let's say standard-issue women -- neither drop-dead gorgeous nor entirely unattractive -- is the opposite: Overwhelming attention (at least on the dating sites), and default posture of suspicion and annoyance... leading to cynicism and withdrawal from the whole thing.
I would be lying if I didn't bring this up in therapy a lot. My therapist, a woman, had to tell me, basically "Look, [for me] going out and having a man be interested in me is like going out to buy milk.. of course it's going to happen". This does not mean women "have it easy", have better sex lives necessarily, or any of that. We are all harmed by this, and having everyone become more aware of it without jumping to snarkiness or blaming of the victims.
Incels have already memed the "no one owes you anything, buttercup." line because it comes up as a thinly veiled, low-effort retort so often.
Incels are invested in complaining because their problems are unfixable, so there's not much else left to do.
Incels are, by and large, correct about many inconvenient facts: Female attraction comes down mostly to immutable traits. Female hypergamy is real. Females are biologically driven to deception and dishonesty when they are physically weaker.
The biological imperative of the female is to *select the best male*. In every sexual market place, there is a set of males for which no female will develop attraction. These males would naturally be discarded from the gene pool, improving the survival rate of the species.
Human societies have recognized this as an issue in regards to social cohesion. This is why many cultures - including our own - forced marriage upon its females. In modern times, as the females get "liberated" from these pressures, that selection pressure comes out in full force. As a result, a bigger share of males end up in the "discard" pile, and they're understandably resentful about it.
I think we have a cultural myth that marriage is something women do to men. So if women don't want marriage any more, great, now everyone's happy.
But marriage is valuable social technology to achieve sexual equity, and neither sex benefits from its decline.
Given that marriage is a near-universal in contemporary human societies, one might speculate that it is necessary for long-term survival of a population.
In other words, societies that spontaneously abolished marriage may have existed well before "modern enlightenment", but have disappeared with no one left to tell the tale.
I always fail to see what exactly marriage brings to the table besides legal ramifications. My view is that marriage is a constraint which is a net loss for the majority of couples where the relationship is usually either one of them or both just settling for the other. And if you are in the other corner where couples honestly bond which each because it feels right in almost any situation, then this silly procedure doesn't really matter.
Constraints can allow for trust. And settling is what much of the populace will probably need to do on some level.
"Females are biologically driven to deception and dishonesty when they are physically weaker."
This is when you lost all credibility for me.
Perhaps that's because you don't *want* to believe something that's a logical and obvious hypothesis, but goes against your preferred world view?
There is, of course, empirical evidence:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/05/women-lie-untruths-human
Consider the survival aspect of it: When rejecting a male, it is unwise to tell the truth, because broken hearts can lead to broken skulls. Many females who exhibited such "honesty" would have been removed from the gene pool early on.
A quick Google Scholar search shows *actual* scientific evidence to the contrary [1, 2] or even supporting the reverse hypothesis of men lying more [3, 4].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176511003843
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176513000463
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176507002534
[4] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/145758/1/VfS_2016_pid_6781.pdf
Your empirical evidence is a 2000 person poll done by an insurance company. That is not the scientific rigor one would expect for such a definitive conclusion.
Your hypothesis is also...just a hypothesis that sounds true to you I guess...?
You make all these absurd absolute statements about how women behave as if they are a monolithic group. I know plenty of married men and they aren't all "the best male".
Almost all of what you are saying is only trueish at best, and really has a lot more to do with casual hookups than real relationships.
If you don't want to accept the hypothesis, ask for data. If it's data you don't agree with, attack the method. If the method is rigorous, point to outliers. If you don't *want* to believe something, you don't have to.
I don't need you to believe that the hypothesis is true. I can't prove it to be true. However, I'd like you to consider that all the things you believe by default, the things you *want* to believe - do they all have double-blind placebo controlled randomized trial to support them?
Of course I'm making a generalization. Any statement about anything is, at some level, a generalization. True-ish is often as good as it gets.
Your observations don't necessarily contradict what I'm saying. The "best male you can get" isn't necessarily "the best male". Getting married also isn't necessarily about mutual attraction.
Your data was terrible. I don't even think you could ever adequately prove such a vague thesis as "women are more deceptive than men". It honestly sounds more like a religious belief than some kind of scientific fact. "Deception" itself is such a vague concept. What does "more deceptive" even really mean? Are polite "white lies" even truly deception to begin with? Do they rank the same as more important lies? This idea is just nonsense and is so vague that it is in the eye of the beholder.
Saying such a nebulous and negative thing about women is just thinly veiled misogyny.
Interesting. This tracks with my experience. I can only think of one time when I received a straightforward "I am not interested" rejection from a woman, and that was from an online match. I eventually came to expect this dishonest behavior, but I never attributed it to survival. It is logical, though.
Also, thank you for explaining hypergamy for everyone. Online dating demonstrates this very well (and it's why I no longer participate), like the famous OkCupid study that showed that women rated 80% of men as unattractive.
There is much that a guy can do to improve himself, but like you said, women are most attracted to immutable traits. For exampe: I'm 5'7"; I can't just go to the gym regularly and grow five inches so that I'm in the highly-prized 6' class.
Whether or not it's biological this is historically accurate. Throughout time and different cultures deception is a tool typically assigned to the arsenal of women. Women fought mostly with deception and manipulation. Most of the anthropomorphic animals in stories that are depicted as cunning or deceptive are usually female. Most of the trickster deities are usually female etc. However I don't believe that applies to dishonesty. This is a trait equally portrayed by members of both genders.
Of course you have to account for modernization and historical accuracy. However what would you call makeup, high heels, plastic operations etc. if not deception.
The dead bedrooms people, on the other hand, have all my sympathy. There are a lot of reasons why someone might stop being able or wanting to have sex—and you can't always figure that out before marriage, although getting to know the person you're going to marry for at least 2 years helps to mitigate that risk.
But it blows my mind that the rejecting spouse would still insist on monogamy. "I'm not going to meet your sexual needs, AND I won't let you go elsewhere." It's like saying "I don't feel like cooking dinner, therefore, you're not allowed to eat." That's abuse. And some of these people not only refuse sex, but won't even touch their partners, or express any affection. It's a nightmare.
I think the disconnect here between you and me is that I do actually put a lot of value on monogamy/commitment/etc., which might not be something we could come to terms with each other on, because it's a pretty fundamental value to change.
But I also think there's some complexity for the non-putting-out spouse when it's involuntary. Like, OK, you have some hormonal disorder or whatever. There's one aspect where the "abandon monogamy" thing is essentially saying "You are sick - let your husband cheat on you" to a lot of them; not everybody can deprogram decades of 'relationships are monogamous' programming on a dime, even if they want to/should. But there's also an aspect of, like, you are asking them to enter into an open relationship/poly thing in a situation where their spouse is already maximally unsatisfied/resentful/angry or whatever - that's a pretty good recipe for maximizing one's chances of getting left entirely. It's not going to happen that way every time, but I think that fear is valid and I'm not sure we can ignore it.
I'm on your side where monogamy is concerned, RC, but Kayla's point is still valid. If a partner is refusing any physical intimacy while the other wants it, it is a deep failure of consideration, and if there is some physical issue preventing it and they are both still committed to monogamy, she'd better make absolutely sure he knows she understands the sacrifice.
Oh, I definitely agree that it's a horror story for one or both partners, depending on cause. I'm all for acknowledging the "this marriage is not easy but I'm sticking with it" aspects, as well.
And let's say, in a given case, it is a hormonal or other bodily issue (which is not always or necessarily an easy/possible fix). Okay, so the "withholding" person is sick. Why is this different than if the person got in an accident that somehow left them unable to have/enjoy sex? In that scenario, I don't suspect most people's reaction would be, "You have a duty to let your spouse cheat on you."
I am a bit more sympathetic to incels than that, because I was technically one of them for (I suspect) longer than the average person. I say "technically" because the term didn't exist at the time. In any case, the message that is usually given to incels is that finding a romantic/sexual partner is almost trivially easy: all you have to do is change your physique, wardrobe, habits, hobbies, media preferences, and personality, and maybe stop being such a creep all the time. Once you do that, boom, women instantly show interest in you.
This is a very hard message for a physically unattractive and socially geeky young man to hear, because it amounts to making a permanent, irreversible choice: stop being who you are and become a completely different person, or spend your entire life alone. Some people might be willing and able to take that bargain -- as they perceive it -- but many others might not.
I feel the exact same way about people who complain about economic inequality, and yet telling poor people to work harder and be more proactive in creating economic opportunity is considered abhorrent. And I would say that companionship is a hell of a lot more of a fundamental need than having money in excess of what is needed to get by.
is it fair to expect one gender to have to go through all that though? it doesn't make complaining without doing anything right, and it especially doesn't make any of the misogyny right, but if 50% of the population is starting at a disadvantage for something as important to happiness as interpersonal relationships i'm not sure if just saying "why don't you get therapy?" is very helpful
Throw out everything you believe and start fresh. Women are not forced to learn or deal with anything other than preconceived impressions about them. So don't ever start any potential courtship with any preconceptions thereof. There is just as much "expected behavior" in a male as a female and it varies so much that the worst thing you can do is prescribe it as defacto truth.
That woman is a person, a person of her own mind/right/body. If you want to court that person, then be vulnerable, not virtuous. Sex and relationships aren't a reward, they're something you work for and express a desire for but in a way that's healthy and empathetic to the signals you give and receive.
You're gonna make mistakes. You're going to lose some and win some but as long as you are yourself and you are doing what you love - then those moments you may describe as virtuous and helping others should be flipped around and turned into the vulnerability of how they're helping you. If you can do that, people will want to be with you - as friends, as lovers, as partners.
As for "first moves" - perhaps you're just missing all the signals because you seem entirely idealistic in how you view them... I meet most of my lovers through music - and I don't mean we meet at a music store or music class or at a concert - but that we "connected" through music. If your potential partner says "man i really love that band" that may be a signal that you need to clue in. If all they say is "ok" "sure" then move on if music is your thing and keep on looking. The "signal" can be just that. (inversely, if that's all you do, you're not being vulnerable and signaling either)...
replace music with food/art/movies/culture/science/whatever...
but damn, while being virtuous, be yourself. When I volunteered at camp, it was amazingly hard and easy to find people to build relationships with - hard because some didn't work and some I didn't want to end - but the experience of building that bond made me a better person and I find that experience to be infinitely easier when I recognize that people are there to experience those experiences with other people who want to share those experiences... if you don't like what you do and don't connect that to the human experiences, no one but your momma is gonna reward you for it.
You might try, like, explicitly explaining this to someone. If you are a nice, skilled attractive person this does count for something. I'm not sure "Hi, girl-I-know, I'm incredibly inexperienced dating to the point I don't really know how it works. But I'd like to spend some time with you anyway, if you'd like to give it a shot" will work, but I'm also not at all sure it wouldn't work. And for most people, trying to get romantic success is a numbers game at the best of times so I'm not sure you are at that big of a disadvantage.
The hard part of this is they might say no; not hard because it's that bad (it's embarrassing/disappointing but you will live) but because there's almost a physiological bitterness-building response you might get that you want to keep an eye on. The trick for you, though, is probably just making some effort - it's not something anyone is really all that good at to start with. You just gotta do, I think.
my own experience, which I will say include some success in dating, presently engaged, is just about the exact opposite of Byron's. I see why this is hard to learn.
Go to church.
Great post! And troubling stats.
It reads like a 7-year-later sequel to SlateStarCodex's "Untitled."
I thought about Aaronson a lot while writing this, and it made me feel terrible because I did have an article not that long ago just, like, ripping into him for an unrelated thing.
I do worry about the stats above, because there's some super-worst-case scenarios it implies. Like the really worst case isn't that the young guys are losing out to older guys, because that means they can just wait for things to get better, as much as that sucks. The worst-case is that this is because of a general change is mores that allows more individual men to fill sex-and-relationship needs for more women. To the extent that's the case, you are now going to the market-failure guy and telling him "well, this is never going to get better for you - just be sad and frustrated forever". And people don't by-and-large have the capacity to be sad and frustrated forever in non-destructive ways, especially 20-something men.
Alexander, not Aaronson ;-)
Scott Aaronson is the topic of Untitled, which was written by SSC's Scott Alexander.
Oh hey! I haven't seen you in a while... are you still at DSL? Are you still working on your chinese?
If you use discord at all a bunch of us (20 regulars but less than 100 total users) are using it as a chatroom. You always had really thoughtful perspectives, and I can send you a link if you think you'd be interested.
You mean you expect a version of socially accepted polygamy to be the final outcome?
No, not really; I'd expect polygamy to amplify this problem, if anything, unless it moved in a historically unique direction.
i can cut my penis for the cause
The sad thing is that you have to put in so many disclaimers and "yes, I know this" items to have any chance of not getting toasted.
For the record, the following also deserve some sympathy, some consideration: Nazis, thieves, murderers, pedophiles (including active ones), people who want everybody else's life run according to some weird fucked up delusional system that should only matter to them, parasites, torturers, slavers, and everybody else.
Even people who spend all their time searching a reason to look down on somebody, a reason to punish somebody, a reason to disdain somebody less pure than themselves. Even they deserve some sympathy.
Even if one HAS TO oppose somebody in some way, even if one HAS to thwart somebody or do sombody harm, that is still harm, and it is still a bad thing. Ignoring that fact is evil, not admirable. If I say "I have no sympathy to spare for those scum", that makes ME a worse person... regardless of who the scum may be. I should care about that.
You catch me in a rather cranky state. You also catch me inhabiting a female body, unmarried, and old enough to have experienced all the usual female interactions with people I'll refer to sarcastically as "Penises Who Talk", Dicks for short.
I am old enough that in my childhood the best career prospect seemingly available for my future, was "wife and mother". I'd have a male boss (no question of equality here; men were, by virtue of their masculinity, smarter than me, far more virtuous, and the only humans capable of rationality, among the many ways in which they deserved to each have a personal servant). It wasn't OK if they were to beat me, of keep other women, or trade me in for a younger, prettier model - but of course less desirable men did all those things, and if I picked a poor husband, or wasn't attractive enough to attract a good husband, then I'd simply have to cope with the results. (A great grandmother, pre-availability of divorce to lower classes, had abandoned her wife-beater and moved with her children to a large and distant city, where she claimed to be a widow.)
If I didn't marry, either by choice or necessity, my options would be worse than if I did. I'd still have a male boss, but I'd be paid less than men doing similar work - or than men in general, at least of roughly the same class - excused by women not needing to support families, even those who were widows-with-children, abandoned-wives, etc. etc. And the jobs available all involved being some kind of servant, whether to children (teacher, governess), customers in general (waitress), the sick (nurse), God (nun), or (only whispered) the horny (whore).
Fortunately, feminism became noticeable to me while I was still in high school, before I had to commit to a career. I ran screaming from everything on this list, and for that matter from all the preening and behavioural ego stroking I was being taught as means for attracting the all important male boss, preferably in the form of a husband. The result was a young engineer whose butch appearance and mannerisms were only limited by the need to remain hire-able.
I wound up concluding that in my particular case, a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle. I didn't enjoy sex with them, and the remedy of "keep on trying" and "it'll be different with 'me'" didn't work. I never found one who would do an equal share of relationship management etc. - they were all emotionally set up to be breadwinners with an emotional support partner - and my inclinations and skills ran the same way. I eventually settled down with a nice woman, even though we had no sexual interest in each other.
Add to this all the usual experiences with Dick. The supposedly complimentary cat-calling. The flattering, friendly, flirtatious ass-pinching. The insistence that my refusal to spread my legs for them was offensive and unfair. The accusations that I was a race traitor for not bearing their babies. The repeated attempts to take advantage of my autism, by pretending to be a friend, lying about their sexual desire/attention when asked, and then dumping me when I never did put out. The insistence that I should audition each and every one of them on my back, searching for a "good lover" who would "cure" my "frigidity." (One tip off in recognizing Dick was that I was always "broken"; they were either perfect, or deserving objects of my charity and pity.)
OK, two points here: (1) when a husband isn't going to provide a better economic experience than no husband, rational shoppers require them to provide something else. Women like me haven't found that "something else" on offer. It's unclear to me whether younger men have improved enough to change this calculus, if e.g. my 15 year old self were miraculously transported to a modern high school or college. My guess is she'd try a few, and give it up for a waste of time, just as I did, but with rather less self doubt.
(2) With regard to the statistics you cite, with more young women in relationships than young men, that's neither historically nor pre-historically unusual. The stereotype of grooms being older than brides is based on reality, at least an average reality. Young women are very attractive, for lots of good evolutionary reasons; in general, they are more attractive, at least to the little brain, then they will ever be again. That's not true for males, because women appear to be less motivated by "looks hunky" and more motivated by long term personality traits. Even the sexual plumbing supports this disparity - simple intercourse is far more likely to be satisfying for males than females, leaving the young man with the initial task of learning how to be an adequate lover.
(2b) In fact, getting established enough (etc) to attract a wife is one of the goals that helps young men develop from callow youth to productive members of society.
At any rate, the relative unattractiveness of young men, compared to young women, is not a market failure; it's been a reality in many societies. My maternal grandparents were unusual in both being born in the same year; my father was 14 years older than my mother. And I can't think of any couple in my family tree, or among my acquaintances, where the wife was more than a year older than the husband.
I suspect young men are traditionally kept on the "right" social path by a mix of seeing it as a path to establishing themselves as attractive (when older), availability of paid outlets, and possibilities for rape and wife steeling. (E.g. raiding the neighbour tribe, joining the army, etc.)
My sarcastic advice to Dick has always been to hire a professional, and in particular to stop demanding charity. They aren't getting a "pity fuck" from me - not that they'd want one from the old lady I now am - and I'm all in favor of younger women taking the same stand. Maybe there are some women who really like sex - or really want "service" roles - you might want to take on the mission of servicing callow youths, and perhaps teaching a few of them how to become competent lovers of females, or otherwise improve their attractiveness. (I can't imagine taking that role, but human variety amazes me.) Meanwhile, though, biology has placed young men in a hard place, and they just have to thole it - just as I would have had to thole being abandoned or beaten by a poorly selected husband, if I'd followed the cultural roles I was born into. Young women have their own common problems. So do older men, and older women, and every other demographic you care to name.
Sorry folks, no one owes you a living, let alone a lay.
And as for the bad actors - well, I'm all in favour of giving their behaviour the response it deserves, from social snub up to and including execution, depending on specifics.
I was going to respond to the whole thing, but I got to the end and I think you missed my whole point because of this bit:
"Sorry folks, no one owes you a living, let alone a lay."
I mean, I explicitly say nobody owes anybody anything dozens of times. I get it; nobody is advocating for sex slavery here. It's weird that I can't even avoid a strawman by explicitly mentioning the incoming strawman and explaining that's not what I mean. At no point did I blame women for all this, right?
In terms of the rest of it, very briefly: I do have sympathy for you about the things you went through, both those caused by specific people and just because of how the world is built. That sympathy costs me nothing - I just have to genuinely care about some level of the pain you feel or felt and agree I wish it didn't happen. Sympathy for other groups would cost you a similar amount, but here you had to do a lot of work to not give it. I'm not sure I can approve of that - not just because of the bad outcomes I think it causes, but also because "I refuse to acknowledge things are bad if they are happening to a group I hate" doesn't seem like a good thing to encourage.
I acknowledge and validate the OPs experiences while also agreeing with you that she isn't really addressing the substance of what you wrote. I also really appreciate your approach to the topic - I think empathy is a major factor that is the key to bridging the gap
with many uncomfortable and contentious realities.
I however disagree with your implication that sympathy/empathy essentially costs everyone nothing. For those that have experienced trauma and are dealing with responses such as CPTSD, depending on where they are in their healing process, engaging with certain topics/hypotheticals can actually re-traumatize and use up what little emotional bandwidth they have available. It's a non-zero amount of energy for a rape survivor for example to learn to empathize with misogynist perspectives.
I still agree that ultimately it is the approach we should all strive to engage in, but I think it's important to keep in mind that the ease at which each person can do so at any one time can vary widely depending on their own lived experience and circumstance.
I'm sure there are some people with severe trauma of some sort that would find it hard to sympathize with certain groups or at all - mental illness being a pretty wide range of things, it has to happen somewhere.
With that said, I didn't imply that for everyone, everywhere this would be costless. I said that it would have cost Dinonerd nothing or nearly nothing; it's possible I'm wrong there, but I was judging off of the fact that she wrote a ten chapter book to basically say "men, particularly young men, are trash as a class and deserve what they get". If somebody does that, I'm going to take them at their word that they are in fighting shape, usually.
Honestly, even if I thought Dinonerd was traumatized to a huge degree I would have still contradicted her in much the same way here, because her thesis is that it's OK to hate certain kinds of people in a way that I think is harmful, that pain is good so long as it's aimed at a group she thinks is inherently inferior and without worth. She came here of her own accord to say it.
So I can be gentle with her, but I'm not going to not point out she's participating in behavior I think is negative in the comments section of the article where I'm positing her behavior is negative. Understand this is of a different kind of thing that breaking down doors in women's shelters and demanding they forgive all men - I understand there's limits to what I can reasonably demand of people in special circumstances.
I think there's some misunderstanding of my position here which is probably worth clarifying. There seems to be an implication here that you believe I want people to support the incel movement (such as it is) or that I don't think a lot of what they say/do isn't bad gross. I don't want them supported in terms of their goals (to the extent the internet stereotype is accurate and it's basically legalized rape) or think that calling all women sluts or whatever is good.
What I'm saying (or trying to say) is that you can, while still thinking they suck/are dangerous/have behavior that should be discouraged, acknowledge that there's an actual problem here; something that doesn't justify being an asshole or misogynism but that exists. That's why I brought up my Grandpa - he didn't have to let a lifetime of pain and abuse based on his disability turn him into an asshole. It did turn him into an asshole; that was wrong. But it doesn't erase the pain.
This isn't about rationalsphere, as much as I keep getting dismissed that way. I'm not saying you should feel happy about this or think it's less of a threat - I'm saying you should be able to separate out bad behavior and bad things that happened to people who behave badly and at least acknowledge the bad things that happened to them were bad.
What I worry about here is that if the pattern we are seeing holds and we eventually have, say, 40-60% of young men as perpetually and sorrowfully single, that leaves a lot of really unhappy kids running around. And I think it's pretty likely that if they find out that the average person won't acknowledge anything happened to them and gets mad at them for even bringing it up, they are going to go "Well, fuck those people" and find somebody that does.
The super-short summary of all this is I'm not and haven't discounted that these guys behave badly, or even that they might be a threat to you. I'm not saying that there isn't a group who wouldn't have you in chains. I'm saying that by ignoring the effect they are (some in the worst possible way) complaining about refusing to sympathize with anybody that has it, you are optimizing for them finding sympathy in the first group that seems to give it and giving them over to that group for indoctrination. Right now, that's the incels.
I wanted to throw something else out there: you seem to think there's some vile stuff in the comments here. If you want, email me at residentcontrarian@substack.com; I'd be glad to take a look at it. Some stuff I haven't commented on because it was already opposed, and some stuff I haven't seen, but the comments are pretty substantially deep now and I've probably missed some stuff I should have replied to.
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.
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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.
"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.
You're not entitled to particular level of wealth by virtue of being a woman, you are not entitled to a particular level of career advancement, you are not entitled to anything you want. This works both ways - you start of by essentially listing things for which you think it is an injustice that you cannot or could not get, and you then go on to proclaim that men aren't entitled to anything. Well, neither are you.
The data is clear, women's happiness has plummeted since the 1960s, and it seems almost certainly a large part of it is due to sad, single old women like you who were so sure than men are bad and serving a corporation is the ultimate goal in life. I hope one day the world will become feminist for you to find fulfilment, or something.
I'm always impressed with people who somehow discern the truth of other people's personality and feelings. It's so good of you to inform me that I am "sad"; I never would have guessed otherwise.
no one is gonna read that
I just found this blog, and just wrote a fairly hostile comment on the David French post. And I do think that at least one part of that was poorly argued to the point of borderline dishonesty.
But I immediately feel bad because this is brilliant. This is everything I've been saying, and wanted to say, 10x better than I ever could. People are too emotionally invested in this to change their minds much, I suspect, but if anything could do it it might be this.
Hostile comments are fine! The way I feel about that is that sometimes I'm going to actually need to be corrected, and if I'm *very wrong* hostility isn't necessarily the wrong tactic. The only caveat there is that I'm going to defend myself (I left a response), so as long as you are cool with that we are cool in general.
Thanks for the kind words about this one. I agree a lot of people aren't going to change their minds much, but I think it's worth it to talk about anyway - there's always a few people you can get around the margins.
Thanks for your nice words and your sympathy.
I'm an 35 year old incel and it looks definitive now. Since I'm done with school I have tried relentless to change myself. I did a 10 days intensive meditation course, I have tried theater, dance and sport. I have travelled. Having a romantic story looks as much unreal as being Ryan Gosling or David Beckham.
35 is not that old and many people find love after that. Even if you think "it's over", keep improving yourself for its own sake and I think you may yet be surprised.
Did you succedd in dance, sport or travel? If not find something resonating with you enough that you succeed. That's when you can say you tried enough
People, and especially women, are attracted to complete and confident men. Women are super attracted to status.
Anyhow if you just want sex - use whores, preferably not in US. Would break the urgency and make you freer to focus on what you really want
Thanks for writing such a thoughtful post!
This is the only unjustified claim and I think (also) the unstated assumption at the crux of differences in how people treat "incels" and other groups like them:
"Being sympathetic or nice might have an outside chance (however small) of reforming a few bad actors; we wouldn’t expect the same results from a stony lack of empathy."
I think it's justified, but that's mostly because I looked at the situation and went "yup, it looks a lot like that's why incels exist in the first place". I do think it's a hard thing to prove one way or the other - it may seem like incels are bad because they only place they can go is bad, but it might be worse if the sympathy encouraged them or something.
I know I'm only a couple of years late to this discussion, but I just wanted to note that if you haven't read Scott Alexander's "Radicalizing the Romanceless" on Slate Star Codex, you should. It's required reading for anyone who really wants to understand this topic rather than just traffic in platitudes.
Agreed. I think Scott's commentary on Incel stuff is part of what put them on the map for me in the first place.
Do you mind me asking how you found this? I'm always curious how evergreen articles ended up circulating.
Actually through Scott Alexander's new web site. Your site is one that he links to, so I decided to check it out.
Congratulations on a brave and valuable post. I think there's a subtle but incredibly important distinction between believing yourself to be entitled to sex, and recognising that it's a fundamental, primal desire and that when it can't be met, that can't help but damage you in some way.
Naturally, it all comes down to sex involving the consent of another person. When it comes to food or shelter, we're happy to say that people have a right to them, because their having them doesn't infringe on other people's liberties. Whereas in the case of sex, declaring you have a right to it implies that someone else has an obligation to give it to you, which obviously isn't true. But that doesn't stop it being a tragedy when decent people who want eros and intimacy are doomed to never get them.
"Don’t get me wrong; there’s plenty of people of both genders talking about this problem, though I do think it is a bit surprising how many women there are."
There's some interesting data on this in "Everybody Lies",
"Google searches suggest a surprising culprit for many of these sexless relationships. There are twice as many complaints that a boyfriend won’t have sex than that a girlfriend won’t have sex. By far, the number one search complaint about a boyfriend is “My boyfriend won’t have sex with me.” (Google searches are not broken down by gender, but, since the previous analysis said that 95 percent of men are straight, we can guess that not too many “boyfriend” searches are coming from men.)"
Goes on to counterbalance this with the observation that men may be more comfortable talking about this issue in other settings w/o resorting to google search so 2:1 ratio is probably not accurate. Still, a lot more common than people think.
The whole "how do different groups talk" thing has been increasingly interesting to me. If you tell me someone has a >50x chance of committing suicide, I can tell you with near certainty it's an old man. But you can also tell me the same thing by saying they have the lowest chance of warning you about it.
It's this weird thing where your answers on a survey are often more indicative of what group you feel you belong to than anything else. Which works great for some things (how will you vote) and terrible for other things (how do you feel about divorce).
Not exactly on point to what you are talking about, but it keeps popping up in a bunch of stuff I'm looking at.
A reminder that to refute the incel ideology, one must understand their stance on the matter. They claim that:
1. Even when discounting lookism and aestheticism, women naturally prefer men with dominant antisocial traits
2. Natural aestheticism beats exercise by a long shot, and that attraction to muscularity depends on bone structures
3. There are significant health risk for being lonely, and socio-economic status does not help with not being lonely
https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill_(Supplemental)
And how *would* you refute the above?
I found this Substack via Scott Alexander's link to the Sadly, Porn review, and was quickly attracted to this post. Just want to say thanks for the sympathy. As best I can tell scanning through the comments I'm the first commenter so far who would qualify as a current incel, although certainly the 'lowercase i' or 'quasi' variety depending on how you want to describe it. And I think I would definitely qualify. I am late 30's, have never had sex in my life, and have only been on maybe a half dozen dates in the past 20 years.
I get amused by a lot of the articles and comments and Jobian friends that assume my state must be due to some deep moral failing. By most measures of society I'm a pretty successful, upstanding guy. I'm tall and slender with gym muscles and a decent looking face, a six figure salary and a nice urban apartment, a decent number of friends (not easy when you reach late 30's and your peers are stuck at home with families), good social skills and the ability to make crack jokes and make other people feel invested in a conversation (and the self-awareness to not intellectualize when trying to flirt), a wide variety of social hobbies, and while I'm not an absolute 10 on the social courage scale, I do open conversations with strangers and ask women out occasionally. I could go on but you get the point; there are plenty of guys other there who are not as close to 'finding themselves' who nonetheless have a passable dating history and often a long-term partner to the point where I start to ask, well, if they can pull it off, what's my problem?
In spite of everything I have a very positive attitude and stay focused on trying to solve the problem with my own actions as best I can and otherwise enjoying all other aspects of life, so it is weird that they received message I get in most public forums is that it isn't a real problem and I probably deserve it. I certainly don't take this attitude when it comes to adversity I hear about other people dealing with. So thanks once again, and great blog overall as well. You have a unique background but the posts are interesting and your writing is really strong. I'm about to hit subscribe after this comment.
For a very long time I struggled to find a good job. And it wasn't for lack of applying for jobs. I like to think of myself as reasonably bright, and at the time I think I had a pretty good handle on why I couldn't find work, but in the end there's a pretty good chance I was just unlucky. None of that matters so much; the important bit is that I wasn't getting something that most people think is an import part of life (Acheivement, success, perception that you are the kind of person who *should* acheive.)
And within that i had some of those same Jobian friends, although luckily pretty few, who I think just assumed I was "built like a loser" in that respect - either I didn't work, or I was lying about the effort I was putting out to find better work, or something. But it must have been something.
I feel lucky in retrospect that my "failure", so to speak, had to do with money-poverty as opposed to sex-romance. Because people assign some amount of nobility to poverty, just because they've been trained to respect that struggle.
If I'm being honest I'm not sure if I deserve the success I'm having now, or that I didn't deserve the lack of success then. Stick with me for this next part: I know you even less. You could have three eyes and greet people by spitting in their faces and that logical "it must be his fault" explanation might exist, for all I know.
But where I wish people were on the incel issue was at least acknowledging that the math is fucked - some people are going to end up losers on this, and it's not going to be a clean sort. Some of the people who lose out will "deserve" more than some of those who win. Be better people, have more going for them. Same as the job thing.
And then the wish would be that they'd take the minute it takes to realize that, hey, say this guy does have three eyes or something that makes him less "marketable" in a romance sense. That's still a real problem that he has; it's still potentially a real source of unhappiness, something that deserves sympathy the same way poverty does.
I actually believe you when you say you are a decent and social person, or that you look OK. To the extent you can pick up stuff through typing, I get the sense all that is actually true. But I wish that even if it wasn't, and even if we can't fix the problems that make this hard on you, that at least that same poverty-sympathy was extended in the the same way.
Sorry if this is rambling; it's pretty late here. Just wanted to let you know I understand, to the extent I can from the outside, and I sympathize.
Late to the party, but after doing a snoop around deadbedrooms and focussing solely on the dead bedroom marriages…and speaking as a woman who has stopped having sex with their past partner, for a lot of women, it’s resentment that kills their libido. For whatever reason they have started to resent their partner. Communication has massively broken down and it’s getting worse day by day.
Now, for me, the resentment stemmed from being with a partner who was an overgrown child. I literally had to mother this dolt. He was incapable of adulting on any level and he had about as much emotional maturity as a wet sock. And boy, lemme tell ya, it is really hard to be aroused by a man you have to mother. Compound all of this with his inability to openly communicate and take what I was saying onboard and you have yourself a recipe for disaster. I can’t help but think this might be a common cause for a lot of these peoples dead bedrooms. Their partners don’t have a generally low libido or any sexual dysfunction. They just have a low libido for their current partner and for whatever reason they’re not talking about it. No one is at fault the same as they’re both at fault. As with everything, it takes two to tango, and a relationship cannot thrive without any input from both sides.
I don't know how this kind of thing isn't obvious much earlier on in the relationship