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Is anyone else having problems with the page jumping up and down by a line or two? It seems to happen the most when I use the chronological list of articles, but not only then.
I think this occurs when you have an edited post, and it is counting down the time until the edit window closes, but the length of the text in the countdown vacillates between one and two lines at various second counts, pushing the text up and down, depending on the width of your browser window.
That’s plausible, but I have no idea why it seems to be a new phenomenon.
It’s not new to me, so perhaps you are noticing something different.
Randy’s right about what causes it. (I suppose something else could cause the same thing, but I don’t know what.) Possible changes if it’s only happening recently: you used to reply to threads bottom up, but now you do top down; you used to wait a while before posting again, so the countdown timer was gone by then; you didn’t post much or at all in the most nested level of the comment hierarchy, since in the wider comments the counter is always one line.
…or used to use a font where all digits are the same width and now uses a font where some digits are narrower.
Re: what DrBeat said about “did you know 20% of field reporters killed are women/oh but nobody cares about the men killed” – I don’t know if that is meant to be war correspondents only or all reporters who are out on the job, so let’s take a look at some figures.
I’m going to take “full-time journalists not newsroom leaders” as equivalent to field reporters (i.e. out gathering the information, not back in the newsroom as an editor) and, using the figures from this 2017 American survey, we get:
All Other FT Journalists
Men 60.79%
Women 39.21%
So roughly a 60/40 split of men/women as journalists. If 20% of the women are getting killed, that sounds to my ignorant ears as if more women than men, proportionately, are being killed (if my estimations are wrong, correct me) and this would seem to be a matter of concern: if I send Jane rather than John to cover a story and Jane is more likely to be killed, why is this and can I do anything about it (other than not sending Jane, Sally or Latisha but only sending Mike, Jake and DeVon)?
If Jane is more likely to be raped/attacked than John, I don’t think “Oh so you only care if a woman is raped, men mean nothing!” is a good reply when no, really, in the same situation Jane is more at risk than John of being raped; I could send John on fifty of these assignments and he would not be in the same peril. The same way that it would not be seen as helpful to say “Oh, you only care if a black guy is shot, white guys mean nothing!” where if I send DeVon rather than Mike on the same assignment, DeVon is much more likely to end up dead.
Field reporters are only really at risk if they go to battle zones or dangerous regions, which most full-time journalists who are not newsroom leaders do not do. So your statistics don’t really reflect who is at risk.
No, given a 60/40 split (which as I said, is a bad figure), you’d expect that 40% of the killed reporters are women. If they actually are 20% of deaths, then female reporters are half as likely to die as they ‘ought’ to.
There are various possible explanations for this, including that the male reporters act more dangerously, that the male reporters are sent into more dangerous situations and/or that others are more likely to become violent against male reporters in equally dangerous situations.
No, given a 60/40 split (which as I said, is a bad figure), you’d expect that 40% of the killed reporters are women. If they actually are 20% of deaths, then female reporters are half as likely to die as they ‘ought’ to.
I was trying to work out “if 40% of field reporters are women, and [unknown number] of journalists are killed, is 20% of [unknown number] in proportion, low, or high?” Since DrBeat didn’t give a number, I have no idea.
Let’s say 10% of reporters are killed. Is 20% of 10% for 40% sub-population high, low or what? You see why I am confused!
As best I can tell, the 20% and 40% numbers are directly comparable. 40% of field reporters are women. 20% of dead field reporters are women. Women are statistically a lot safer than men as field journalists. (The obvious question is if particularly dangerous types of field journalism are disproportionately male. I suspect that this is very much the case.)
I’m not sure where the “20%” number comes from, but I decided dig up some numbers.
There is an organization called Committee to Protect Journalists that publishes numbers of journalists who die on-the-job.
Their database has both “Journalists” and “Media Workers”, but it is impossible to sort/filter “Media Workers” subset by Gender/YearOfDeath/Job/Location. It is also impossible to sort/filter the “Motive Unconfirmed” data by any of these categories. Among the “Motive Confirmed” listing are deaths by “Dangerous Assignment”, “Crossfire”, and “Murder”.
The most common European country that reported such deaths is France. The most common North American country that reported such deaths is Mexico. Other parts of the world that show up regularly: India, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Israel & Palestinian Territories, South Africa, Turkey, etc. Not all have internal or external wars, but those with wars had much higher Journalist deaths than those without.
Interestingly, their “Gender” column has “Male/Female/Nonbinary”, but the “Nonbinary” option is so small (numerically) that I’ll ignore it for the moment.
This table was gathered by hand, for each year from 2008 to 2017.
Deaths listed in CPJ statistics : Journalists, Motive Confirmed
Year, Deaths of Male Journalists, Deaths of Female Journalists
2008, 41, 1
2009, 66, 9
2010, 44, 0
2011, 48, 1
2012, 70, 4
2013, 68, 5
2014, 56, 5
2015, 66, 7
2016, 47, 1
2017, 38, 8
These numbers are small and subject to lots of spikes of noise. The percentages of Females in CPJ statistics varies from zero to twenty. Over the decade shown above, the value is about 7%.
However, we have no good baseline of the M-to-F ratio of journalists in the parts of the world that see most such deaths. Nor do we have a good grasp on how well or poorly female journalists are treated, relative to male journalists, in environments where journalism is a dangerous job.
Right lads, a genuine question and a chance for ye to put me in my box.
For those claiming it is a gynocentric world and men are disregarded and discarded, let’s have a thought experiment. How would your life be improved in the following situation?
We wake up tomorrow and there are no women in the world (I should say, you wake up tomorrow as I’ll be one of the vanished women – already an improvement!) The world is no longer gynocentric but properly androcentric as nature and God intended 🙂
No women, no girls, no female humans of any description (I’ll ignore trans women and gay men to keep from going off on a tangent and getting bogged down there). Men and boys are left. So for all the fathers seeking custody of their kids, congratulations, you’ve got it by default.
Any man applying for a job or a promotion need not worry about “no white guys wanted” as there are no affirmative -action women to take it away from the better-qualified male candidate (but does affirmative action on race still exist, or is that a relic of gynocentric thinking which has been discarded in our rational, sensible, decent man’s world?)
All men, even the least skilled, have a chance of a job because now all those women are gone so the jobs they took in male-dominated areas are now open, and all those jobs in female-majority areas are there to be filled. Maybe you still can’t get that white-collar office job but now you can be a care home assistant or contract cleaner or work as waitstaff in Hooters (possibly some rebranding required there).
Best of all, there is no status competition based on female attention. Women cannot award and deny status becasue they are no longer there to be the status-setters. Chad Thundercock and Joe Loser are equals because Chad can’t get sixteen baby-mommas to Joe’s ‘I have a pin-up of a pop singer on my bedroom wall since I was fifteen’. This is going to be great since there won’t be any kind of replacement status competing to still bring Chad out on top and Joe at the bottom, right?
So how would your life be better, even in the smallest way, in the new Man’s World? I don’t care if you say “Come on, I never said I want to do away with women, this is a misrepresentation!” If you can’t back up your claims that you, as a man, are suffering through gynocentrism then I submit your problem is not “Women are the problem” but “Society as currently constituted is the problem” and that if you are still likely to be lonely, low-status and not fitting in in the new androcentric dispensation, women are a scapegoat and not the root cause.
So prove me wrong! Tell me how you will thrive and flourish in a world where your friend Tom can spend all his time with you now instead of wasting it having to go home to the old ball and chain! Where a world of ‘all everyone cares about is sports, car racing, and lifting big heavy weights’ is one where you are right at home!
We now have a truly vast societal incentive to invent the uterine replicator, within the next 50 years or so, so there will continue to be a human race. (See _Ethan of Athos_)
I’ll run with your premise a bit, but lets make it clear that this doesn’t mean that I advocate gynocide.
I am also not claiming that women are the root cause.
I will also only look at some possible advantages, not make a cost/benefit analysis.
Men seem to work more hours than they want, in part so they can transfer money to women. Also, government taxation is more on men + spending more on women, suggesting that men need/ask less from government than they currently spend in taxes.
So a likely outcome would be that men would work fewer hours + pay less in tax, so they would enjoy more free time, while possibly not having that much less money to spend.
—
Unmasculine/gay behavior would likely lose most if not all of the stigma. So men would likely become far more intimate and gays would become safer. Given that disparities between men and women exist, that obviously don’t exist between men, it is likely that fewer men would be excluded from this kind of intimacy.
—
Nerds would likely gain status, since they make the nice things that men tend to like. It now has no sexual advantage to be less nerdy or to prove yourself less nerdy (like by beating up and ostracizing nerds).
So a likely outcome would be that men would work fewer hours + pay less in tax, so they would enjoy more free time, while possibly not having that much less money to spend.
How does this square with the argument over the so-called gender pay gap, that the real reason women earn less is that they work fewer hours and don’t ‘lean into’ their careers as men do, for reasons varying from lack of ambition to being primarily responsible for child-care?
A man who wants to advance in his career has to work the long hours, I’ve seen it said on here. In the all-male world, would that not still apply? Ben who works sixty hours a week gets the promotion, Joe who works the bare forty doesn’t?
Unmasculine/gay behavior would likely lose most if not all of the stigma. So men would likely become far more intimate and gays would become safer. Given that disparities between men and women exist, that obviously don’t exist between men, it is likely that fewer men would be excluded from this kind of intimacy.
I wonder. I deliberately left gay men out, because if one of the causes of disgruntlement is “lack of access to sex/intimate companionship”, then gay men will have an advantage over straight men here. And they will then be seen as the privileged class with sexual marketplace value and status-conferral and all the rest of the sexual gate-keeping that women are charged with upholding. I can see straight men who are sexually frustrated being very resentful of that gay couple holding hands and kissing in the restaurant. I imagine sexbots will be a technology that becomes very urgent for development to meet the needs of straight men for sex/companionship but that difference will still remain. If Joe Loser resents Chad Thundercock for being able to get as much company as he wants, that resentment will still be there if it’s Chad getting fifteen boyfriends not girlfriends and rubbing in Joe’s lack of companionship.
On the other hand, society may revert to the erastes/eromenos model of yore, and I would like the model of intimate, close friendships that are acknowledged as another love to be restored (even without sexual connotations). I don’t know how successful the ‘older man/youth as lovers’ model would be, though, without the progression on to “and then you get married and stop fucking cute twinks*” expectations of the past, because there aren’t women to marry; de facto everyone is now gay perforce? It’s going to be very tough on the guys who can’t hack their sexuality to find their own gender attractive, and if they think trying to live up to women’s standards of attractiveness is tough, let them try the standards for gay guys!
There’s also Cordwainer Smith’s take on it in The Crime and The Glory of Commander Suzdal, but I really don’t think this is a possibility 🙂
*From Catullus’ Poem 61:
122 Let not the merry Fescennine
123 jesting be silent,
124 let the favourite boy give away nuts to the sla ves
125 when he hears how his lord
126 has left his love.
127 Give nuts to the slaves,
128 favourite: your time is past,
129 you have played with nuts long enough:
130 you must now be the servant of Talassius.
131 Give nuts, beloved slave.
132 Today and yesterday
133 you disdained the country wives,
134 now the barber shaves
135 your cheeks. Wretched, ah! wretched
136 lover, throw the nuts!
137 They will say that you,
138 perfumed bridegroom, are unwilling
139 to give up your old pleasures; but abstain
140 Io Hymen Hymenaeus io,
141 io Hymen Hymenaeus!
142 We know that you are acquainted
143 with no unlawful joys: but a husband
144 has not the same liberty.
The traditional labor distribution is that men work more to earn the money needed for the family, while the women work less, to instead spend their time on child-care and other unpaid labor.
If you were to shoot all men, women would have to do more paid work. If you get rid of women, men have to start doing more of the unpaid labor and they will then surely react by spending less time on work.
There is far less need for the promotion when a guy doesn’t have to impress women or pay for what women ask for. Men will also quickly stop having to raise children without women around.
Why have a huge career if you can pay for your mancave & Xbox? 😛
Of course, you will have some workaholic men who just live to work, but many men will seek a different work/life-balance.
That makes no sense to me.
Either a man wants to have sex with other men, in which case he can just have sex with other men and there is no need to be angry at gays. Or he doesn’t want to have sex with men, in which case the gay men are irrelevant, since they offer something that the ‘non-gay sex desiring’ man doesn’t want.
The resentment at women is specifically because women:
– have features that men want to play with, but lack themselves
– have different standards from men, so there is a mismatch
If you’d only have men, you’d still have a beauty hierarchy, where ugly gays may be pissed that few want to have sex with them. However, you wouldn’t have a libido gap between groups with different sexual equipment. Everyone who wanted to have gay sex could then have gay sex, if they lowered their standards far enough & probably quite easily too (given the current behavior of gay people).
That does make sense, although beating up gay men has no benefit in this scenario, aside from hurting the privileged and dragging them down.
Almost done, if you don’t mind having sex with something closer to a dead person than a living one.
It’s funny, because the wage gap is typically cited as evidence that society favors men, when the reality is that the wage gap is due to society’s oppression of men.
“Women are the problem” is a strawman. “Gynocentrism” is akin to “patriarchy” in that both assert that “Society as currently constituted is the problem”.
You have to stop lying, Deiseach. You have to stop. You need to stop lying.
The thing that you are doing is lying. You can’t stop being an awful person if you can’t stop lying. If any time someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, you say “Oh, obviously this person hates women, wants women to be removed, and thinks the world should be “properly androcentric as nature and God intended”, I should tell everyone this is what they want and address them as such,” then the word for the thing you are doing is lying.
You have to stop lying, Deiseach.
I cannot correct the mistakes you have made in your fundamental premises that make the entire question absurd and utterly valueless. Because you have not made mistakes. What you have done is lied. And when corrected, you ignore the corrections, and you tell more lies.
You have to stop lying, Deiseach.
If it makes you feel any better, Deiseach has been pulling the same thing with me. Repeatedly and aggressively misrepresenting the positions of me and other people.
But ironically she is doing a good job of demonstrating gynocentrism in action.
Earlier, I posted the following statement:
She apparently interpreted this statement to mean that “there have never been spinsters or women who were deemed unmarriageable”
Logically, the two statements are very different. But to a gynocentrist, they are equivalent. Because both statements are perceived as putting women in a negative light. To the likes of Deiseach, any statement that is perceived as putting women in a negative light is offensive and therefore wrong.
And that’s a big issue with the incel problem. If we acknowledge that there is a special problem which affect primarily men and needs attention, we are going against the principle that everything should be about women’s wants and needs and well-being. And if we acknowledge that many or most incels are decent guys who are unsuccessful with women because they lack the looks/money/status that women crave, that’s strike 2 and 3. Because it makes it seem that women might be shallow and we all know that Women are Wonderful.
You don’t see this level of anticharity with racists or literal anti-Semites. But when someone starts talking about men being harmed, everyone becomes a compulsive liar in order to make those words go away. Because feminism and sexism are the same thing, and sexism has infinite dominion. It cannot ever possibly be defeated. It will simply assert away its own defeat, and this will become true.
Women can do anything a man can do. They are exactly as cruel, as selfish, as sadistic, as petty, as pointlessly destructive, as narcissistic, as intoxicated by the power of punishing someone simply because they are too weak to make you stop punishing them. But unlike men, all of their cruelties will be excused, ignored, or explained away as being men’s fault. Women Are Wonderful — life is irredeemable.
I don’t think she’s lying.
What I’m seeing is guys who can’t put up “were there no women in the world, this is how my life would be improved” so I’m forced to conclude that they have real problems but they are using “gynocentrism” as the easy way out: if only the world were not tilted in favour of [something I can never be], then my life would be better!
Whereas if you are suffering from disadvantages of mental health problems, lack of qualifications for the new knowledge economy, low socio-economic status, other health problems or the like, even in an all-male world you would still be at a disadvantage, and this time there is no ‘easy’ fix like “roll back the decades to when it was men at work, women in the home”.
Sure, maybe structural racism and The Man are keeping you down, and in a world where white people didn’t exist you’d be an executive with a big office and a fancy lifestyle. Or maybe you’d still be picking rubbish off a trash heap in Manila. As in the couplet by Yeats:
You have to stop lying, Deiseach. You have to stop lying.
You have to stop lying.
So stop lying.
When someone explains their position, and you think you understand it, and you say their position is something totally different, that is a misunderstanding.
When they repeatedly tell you that you have misunderstood them, and you never at any point acknowledge they have said this, and you continually accuse them of having the position that is totally different from what they are saying, that ALSO makes them low-status and makes you higher-status and able to contemptuously dismiss them
Then there is a word for what you are doing. The word for what you are doing is “lying”.
You have to stop lying, Deiseach.
Actually, she doesn’t. First, she has established enough status and credibility here that she could get away with an awful lot in the way of lying if she were of a mind to. And second, the only people who seem to think she is lying in any noteworthy sense, are foolishly resorting to grade-school rebuttals.
“You have to stop lying, so stop lying”, convinces no one that isn’t already on your side. It persuades no one to investigate the facts on their own. It can be effective when used by a high-status individual against one of lower status, but that’s not you, not here. When used against an adversary with higher local status than your own, it causes more people to rally to her defense than yours.
If in fact you are the victim of a persistent high-status liar, and aren’t willing to settle for having a handful of low-status losers commiserate with you, the defense that actually works is to respond to the lies, every time, with “That isn’t actually true, because [reasoned rebuttal with evidence]”. Yes, it’s more work and less fun than the elementary-school version, but it’s all you’ve got.
We now return you to your impotent grievances, which I for one wish you would take elsewhere if you don’t have any better way to express them.
I agree that she doesn’t have to stop lying, but her status or reputations doesn’t change anything. She’s a liar, just like you are.
But it’s nice to see how CONCERNED you are.
Stop digging.
Lol, thanks for your CONCERN. I’m grateful that such a high-status and well-respected poster such as yourself is showing such CONCERN.
The entire scenario is ridiculous. The world would be unrecognizably different if there were no women in it. The biggest change would be that such a world would not have a next generation of humans; there is no long term. And I’m not going to call you a liar, but I’m pretty sure you realize the scenario is ridiculous and you’re deliberately working up our green-gravatared posters.
(Also I second John’s remarks)
Not all green gravatars!
For an entertaining picture of such a world, one with a long term to it, see Ethan of Athos by Bujold.
Fortaleza and DrBeat are banned for three months for insulting a commenter and malicious, content-free responses.
Deiseach is banned for one month for a comment which lowers the quality of discourse and is so uncharitable that it borders on trolling, after receiving warnings.
fortaleza84 asked me:
Here is my reply to his request for point no. 3 – that a guy who isn’t a 10 has no chance at all, winnowed from his comments on this thread (and I haven’t gone through every single one):
I leave it up to the rest of you as to whether or not I have demonstrated that fortaleza84 harps on about women only wanting the cream of the crop when it comes to men. As for points 1 and 2, I couldn’t address them because he never considers women as incels, save to contrast unfavourably female incels with males:
So there, at least, he does not acknowledge that there are women who have never had a chance at a relationship in the same way as there are men who have never had a chance. I may be mistaken, but baked into that does seem to be the assumption “even so-called female incels can get a man if they wish, while male incels never can get a woman”.
Though I’ll grant him this: he does say some women are alone (but by choice, not by necessity):
Hi, SSC!
I don’t have much of anything to say (as usual :D) but I wanted to share that my life seems to be improving at the moment, despite the summer time (I am one of those weirdos that do worse in summer months than winter months).
I think I may have grossly underestimated how important it is to get good sleep – which is quite a statement, since fixing my previous sleep problems was my absolute highest priority the past half year. And I was still underestimating how much better good sleep would make me feel.
As of about two days, I now have a room to my own, have taped over the windows, no longer am right next to drainage pipes (sound source) and my snoring boyfriend (love him, but that shit is maddening), and I caught myself actually kind of happy about the cloudless, bright sky outside today, even thought I have an intense dislike of sunlight (very light sensitive eyes).
It’s surreal. I hope it lasts.
Just wanted to give this community an update! (Even if I’ve never really gotten into the topic before, and so no one was waiting for one. I just feel good news ought to be shared. <3)
Stay awesome, slatestarcodex!
Glad to hear things are going better for you, and +1 on the importance of sleep.
Dear Facebook,
Re: Your Friend Suggestions and “People you may know”
I can say with absolute certainty I do not know anyone involved with or working for “UK Sexological Bodywork Professional Training”.
Yours faithfully,
O_o
P.S. Neither do I know anyone going to or who has gone to Harvard, but at least that was flattering to the vanity. Though presumably some people’s vanity would be flattered by the suggestion they know a sex therapist, so horses for courses.
You have more exciting friend suggestions than I do. Mine is basically just a list of people I’ve seen at parties but don’t really know.
Beats three or four years ago, though, when it was just a list of people I hate.
I wish my life were as exciting as Facebook seems to think it is, but I honestly have no idea where they’re pulling these suggestions from (friends of friends of friends who lived in the same town?)
Scott, the 34-year-old poster above me seems worth frowning at. Now, I am not suggesting that his behavior is a bannable offense, but I also don’t think he’s contributing anything of quality to the comment section. He has followed Deiseach around this open thread, making needlessly petty remarks to her, and attempting to gaslight her about her own experience.
Far upthread, Deiseach posted:
34-year-old poster directly replied:
When Deiseach felt the need to express her frustration with the continued denial of the existence of ‘incel’ women and posted:
The 34-year-old who denied (with no supporting data) the validity of the existence of most ‘incel’ women in his previous response to Deiseach then said:
He also says “gynocentric” far too often.
Arguing that someone is a statistical corner case is not the same thing as gaslighting. The key quoted material is not arguing that the class doesn’t exist, it’s arguing that it is much smaller than another class.
Also, this poster is glossing over the distinctions between (1) present and past; and (2) marriage and more casual relationships.
In the past, there have been places and times where there were shortages of men, sometimes big shortages. Also, today as in the past it is generally easier for a woman to get into a more casual relationship than to find a man who is willing to marry her.
The upshot of this is that the claim “Most female incels (in the modern world) have had sexual/romantic relationships in the past” does NOT in any way imply that “There have never been women who were considered unmarriageable.” In fact, the two statements are so obviously different that it makes me question the good faith of anyone who tries to claim they are equivalent.
Which is actually why it’s important to keep harping on gynocentrism. Why do so many peoples’ brains click off when confronted with information that puts women in a negative light?
Which is actually why it’s important to keep harping on gynocentrism.
We have to give in and admit that fortaleza84 is, in fact, correct: it is a woman’s world today, ruled by the iron fist of the matriarchy, and men are only second-class citizens permitted to exist on sufferance.
So dance, monkey-boy, dance!
EDIT: I don’t feel that I’m being stalked or harassed or the like and fortaleza84 has every right to express his opinions on the state of the world, but his attitude does remind me of the opposite one of those feminists who claim The Patriarchy has always and everywhere been oppressing and repressing noble, innocent, suffering women and that even today women are under constant attack and never, ever have they ever had anything nice for themselves that evil men did not come and take away.
I think Margaret Atwood is full of it in The Handmaid’s Tale, no matter how much she may purr under the current praise and attention she is getting for being prophetic or whatever, and I think fortaleza84 is as blinkered about “women today have it all their own way and men can only cower in silence lest they provoke destruction rained down on them through no fault of their own”.
I do acknowledge that it’s hard for men who are “I’m an average guy, I’m not ugly or poor or stupid or bad, why can’t I get any kind of chance with a girl the way that this other guy who isn’t any better than me can?” but that will not be remedied by “women should be taught to redirect their desires from ‘hypergamy’ to ‘someone on their own level’, and women who marry outside their level are disrupting the chain of supply”. I don’t believe that there are soulmates or destined couples or indeed “for every old sock there’s an old shoe”, I think that the history of the world shows that both men and women have gone unmarried and unloved, and that life is not fair, you can’t always get what you want, “I want doesn’t get”, and trying to figure out what you ‘deserve’ is a lot trickier than you think. “Treat every man according to his deserts, and who should ‘scape whipping?”
Some of this reminds me of nothing so much as the sub-set of argument between some lesbians and some trans women about “the cotton ceiling” where it’s “I’m not sexually attracted to dicks” versus “that’s transphobia!”
Yes, it would be great if that hot butch or femme you were attracted to would sleep with you, but no, you can’t make people who don’t find dicks a turn-on have sex with you even if it’s a woman’s dick not a man’s dick.
Isn’t there a whole line of ethical dispute over “you cannot derive an ought from a should“? Women should give ordinary lower-status incel guys a chance, but you can’t make this that women ought to.
I wouldn’t go that far, but men in the West are definitely second-class citizens.
Can we please not with the “insert totally unsupported things obviously wrong things into opponent’s argument, then dismiss it because of the things you inserted into it?”
The world is gynocentric. That’s very hard to argue without making things up. The world is focused on women and the lives of women and the well-being of women as the only things that are relevant. Men do not matter, will never matter, and are utterly invisible if a woman might be distressed anywhere near them. Did you know that 20% of reporters killed in the field are women? What a horrible plight to befall women, says everybody, what proof it is that women have it so hard and are in so much danger, they say without ever noticing the insanity. Because they are gynocentric. They only ever look at women.
This gynocentrism does not give you, personally, the thing that you want one hundred percent of the time. But even if it was driven by hostility, you wouldn’t argue that modern activists, who only look at America, only focus on America, only think of things in relation to America, can only envision the state of America, only know what things are like in America, can only talk about America, and actively avoid learning about the situation in any country that isn’t America… that they can’t possibly be Americentric because they don’t like America, would you?
The world is gynocentric. That’s very hard to argue without making things up.
In some places, in some ways, and in a swing of the pendulum from how it used to be. When dowry attacks are still a real thing, saying the entire world is gynocentric and men are the discarded sex doesn’t hold.
“If I were a woman I’d have things so much easier” – maybe. And maybe not. Unless we switch not alone genders but situations, we won’t know if any particular man has it better/worse than any particular woman.
I’ve had times in my life from the age of eleven on where I’ve gone “If I were a boy/man, I’d have it so much easier”. And maybe I would have had in that particular situation, and maybe I wouldn’t. The grass is always greener on the other side.
No, I didn’t, and I haven’t heard or read anything about it that I could see in my usual news perusal. If you’re on the qui vive for such examples and searching them out every day, then you’ll live in a world where “oh no, they’re complaining about the 20% of women and ignoring the 80% of men, this proves nobody cares about men!” But so does the person searching for murders of trans people, NIMBYism as the cause of the housing shortage, and the decrease in the size of the Curly-Wurly. You find what you’re looking for.
Did you know that there’s been a very recent murder in my country where a man killed his wife and first tried to pawn it off on “some mysterious person came to our house and killed her and I only found her dead body”? This plainly proves that men are so dangerous they should be forbidden from marriage!
Well, except there’s also been a case where a woman killed her husband. So if I wanted to prove men were natural predators, I could pick out all the murders and assaults with a male perpetrator. And vice versa for women are predators. But all that would prove is that both men and women are murderers.
You are being deliberately obtuse and you know it. Please stop doing that.
“A man killed his wife” does not prove men are threatening and “a woman killed her husband” does not prove women are threatening. However, if a man kills his wife around the same time a woman killed her husband, under similar circumstances, and the whole nation is transfixed by what a horrific threatening brute the male killer was while making excuses for the poor victimized threatened female killer, that says something about who people care about and who they do not care about.
Then again, you’ve already conclusively proven my point. You point to a dowry attack as proof women are threatened and endangered and we do not care enough about men’s well being. A dowry attack is when a woman is murdered, maimed, or assaulted in order for someone to get a valuable dowry, or avoid paying a valuable dowry.
Men are murdered, maimed and assualted in order to get money all of the time. It’s an entire genre of entertainment, and a prestigious one. It’s something that is such a fundamental part of how you see the world you don’t even notice it. Men are murdered for inheritances, they are murdered for businesses, they are murdered for promotions, they are murdered for houses, they are murdered for what is in their pockets. Not a single one of those things surprises you. They are perfectly within your view of the world.
But the moment a woman is murdered, or maimed, or assaulted, in order for someone to get money, you forget all those things. You can only see women. You can only look at women. You look at women, you do not look at men, and then you make very confident proclamations about where women stand relative to men. Because women’s lives are so much more inherently precious than men’s.
Because you are in the thrall of gynocentrism.
Dear DrBeat:
The husband-murder case I have in mind was certainly not one where people were all “oh the poor innocent lamb, she was driven to it!” It was a very nasty case where the public reaction was the opposite.
Please don’t assume I mean ‘some people deserve to be murdered’. Please also note that I was trying to make the point that no, it would be ridiculous to say that men should be barred from marriage on the grounds that men murder their wives (since wives murder husbands, parents murder children, children murder parents, and all kinds of family members murder other family members).
Oh, you mean like crime novels, action movies and the rest? Where women also are murdered, raped and tortured for money as an entire genre of entertainment? Unless you’re trying to say that The Running Man is a real game show?
Note: apparently it really is, but the Korean version doesn’t seem to have ‘you can kill a man for real’ as part of its format.
Because women’s lives are so much more inherently precious than men’s.
Would it make you happy for me to say “Yes, this is true, this is what women really think”? Because I know some neo-pagan idiocy has some kind of thing along that lines, but I do think it’s stupid. However, if you find it personally consolatory to think that every woman that passes in the street is inwardly sneering about “look at the inferior disposable specimen who dares to breathe the same air as I”, then you do you. God knows, I’ve resorted to fucking awful self-remedying means of dealing with being depressed, so I can’t look down on anyone else’s unrealistic fucking awful coping mechanism from a higher moral ground.
According to Wikipedia, 77% of murder victims in the US are men. However, so are 90% of murderers. Also, the male skew comes to some extent from the skew in gang-related murders; women are a majority (64%) of domestic homicides.
I’d be interested to know how much homicide patterns reflect evolved brain adaptations.
I don’t know how domestic homicide would go down in Paleolithic forage bands, but gangs do seem like a pathological reflection of hunting parties.
@DrBeat
I think that of everybody here, you’re the one who’s most thoroughly blue-pilled. By that I mean that you’ve completely bought in to the defective feminist/SJW analysis of the world. I think even the most SJW-aligned person on here will at least allow some problems with it, but you’ve just gulped that down whole.
The most corrosive aspect of this is the one that Scott decried here, where there is exactly one axis of oppression and we’re all just fighting about where we are on it. This isn’t true in any meaningful sense, and it’s deeply destructive to the soul to model the world in this way, but the reason that it took hold in the feminism and SJW spheres is because it’s the one where they can win.
I mean, women really, truly, did (and do) have some awful shit to deal with. That doesn’t detract from the fact that there are different ways that men have it awful, some of which you’ve articulated.
The other one that hasn’t come up as much in this thread is family courts. Back about 10 years ago me and one of my NCOs had to try to talk a Soldier through a divorce, and the NCO had to lay out the truth for him: “Look, she’s got the vagina, and that matters in divorce court.”
But both you and feminists are playing the Oppression Olympics, and guess what dude, they’re going to win. That’s the reason they try to make everything a contest in the Oppression Olympics. Because they can point to real, black letter law that used to hold–I mean, women didn’t used to be allowed to vote!–where the problems that men face today tend to only show up in some rather dry statistics. It’s worth noting that many of the problems women face today also only show up in some rather dry statistics, but men also don’t have the full historical weight to add heft to their accusations.
Please, stop with the black-and-white thinking. By buying in to this narrative, you’re only increasing their power. Only by acknowledging the (often orthogonal) problems that men and women face can we actually solve both.
Gangs are one of those phenomena that pops up cross-culturally when you meet the criteria for it. The main ingredients seem to be weak rule of law plus an external threat plus young men (teenage to mid-twenties) with time on their hands; you don’t need a big threat if you have enough idle men and boys, but a big enough one can substitute. So they pop up regularly in conflict zones (esp. among deserters and refugees, who don’t have their regular jobs to keep them busy), or in cultural contexts where a lot of money (enough to invite robbery) is changing hands but there’s no effective policing.
Tribal war bands are probably the earliest manifestation of the impulse. I’d be willing to bet that your average lord’s retainers in a feudal society bore more than a passing resemblance to a modern street gang, too.
It would be very nice if you were to stop lying, and subsequently stop mocking and dismissing me for the things you lied about. So any time you could get on top of that “not lying” thing would be swell.
The phrase “victim-blaming” never even crossed your mind, did it? Not anyone else. Because men cannot be victims. Men must have deserved it. Men’s lives have no worth and are disposable.
You cannot notice and will never notice.
One: those “rather dry statistics” are “a mountain of human corpses that none of you motherfuckers can even notice because men’s lives hold so little value to you”. Women’s lives and livelihoods were protected in black letter law. Women didn’t used to want to vote because they didn’t want to die in a ditch in the fucking Ardennes Forest. Women couldn’t open bank accounts, because it was legally forbidden to hold women responsible for their debts. And over here, we have the TOWER OF ROTTING HUMAN BODIES, THOUSANDS OF MEN THROWN AWAY THAT YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF EVER CARING ABOUT. Dry statistics. That’s all it is. Men die and it doesn’t matter. Dry statistics. Beaten to death, shot by police, stabbed, choked to death in miserable grinding poverty, freezing to death on benches because there are no battered men’s shelters to open their doors to them because of the deliberate and concerted actions of feminists, you will never have the capacity to care about dead men. Somewhere, a woman might be upset.
2: You are the one pushing feminism and blaming me for it. I did not play Oppression Olympics. Sexism is not a scale with two ends. Calling attention to sexism does not “take away” from the precious and wonderful women. Sexism is a single, unified, invincible thing that has infinite dominion over every one of your souls. There is not sexism and reverse sexism. There is sexism. And it rules you. It always has, and it always will. Gynocentrism is how sexism works. It is how sexism works when gynocentrism creates a result that a female feminist observer would want, and it is how sexism works when gynocentrism creates a result that a female feminist observer would not want.
Men are threatening and degrading and capable and powerful agents who act upon others and are never acted upon. Women are precious and wonderful and incapable and useless victims who never act upon others and are only acted upon. This is sexism. It is also feminism. They have absolute continuity. Neither one can ever be deafeated and they will never diminish in power. You will stomp on our throats while shrieking their song to a deaf universe, grinding away everything that made life tolerable in the name of Making The World A Better Place.
@DrBeat
You should probably take a few breaths into a paper bag, there, sport. Because a lot of the “gynocentric” things you’re blaming there are violence perpetrated on men, by men, under the direction of other men.
I’m not sure how you square “WWI was a sacrifice of male bodies to women” with the fact that the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against the declaration of war on Germany was the only female member, who was instrumental in passing the 19th amendment after the war.
Now, if you want to argue against war in general as being one of the greatest killers of men, that’s fair. But that’s separate discussion from how the forces that fight a war should be composed. Mixing sexes in a fighting force is stupid and counterproductive, because the officers have better things to do than try to keep them from porking each other. (And a fair number of the officers will of course be guilty of this as well) Since you’re not going to field an army with the few women who are capable of doing the job, that means you’re going to end up with a force composed of men. However, the fact remains that the decisions to go to war were made by men. You can’t whine that women didn’t have or want the vote and then simultaneously blame the process they didn’t have input into for sacrificing men at their behest.
As far as the murder rate, if I can even understand what you’re complaining about, the fact that noting that 77% of the victims and 90% of the perpetrators are male forms some sort of “victim blaming” is horseshit. For the most part, drugs and gang activity are at least a plurality of the motive behind murders, and the notion that these guys are innocent little lambs being mind-controlled into slaughtering each other by the malign influence of feminism is so laughable that I’m starting to question if this whole “DrBeat” thing is a really impressive long-term troll. They’re killing each other because they want to control drug territory and settle scores from previous killings about drug territory–and just like WWI, women have very little input into the decisionmaking.
@rlms & Catcube
Patriarchy is men going out on the hunt, risking their lives, while women do the safer house/cave work.
Patriarchy is men interacting with the dangerous world through their jobs, taking risks, while women do the safer house work.
Patriarchy is men going to war when the community is threatened, often specifically seeking to kill the men of the other tribe, while leaving their own women in safety.
Self-reported domestic violence statistics suggest that men are not inherently more eager to use violence. Men do more damage, but use violence against women less than vice versa. I suspect that men and women naturally are about equally violent, but that the (modern) social pressure on men to not hit women results in less violence by men against women than vice versa.
So why are men more prone to use violence in gangs or such, but not domestically? For the former, they are playing their gender role. Gangs are a mixture of a dangerous job and war, so of course men put themselves into these situations.
This is not because of feminism, but by demanding benevolent sexism, most feminism fights to keep pressure on men to perform their male gender role to provide benefits of women. Of course, they simultaneously decry the downsides that these same behaviors have for women.
This is the hypocrisy of most feminism that puts men into a situation where they cannot ever succeed.
I basically agree with DrBeat on this, but I think it’s worth keeping mind that the critical defenders of gynocentrism are men. If it were just a straight up political contest between men and women, kind of like Republicans versus Democrats, then of course men would win hands down.
But that’s not how it works, of course. Women are biased in favor of women and men are also biased in favor of women. So it doesn’t really matter that leadership roles in society are occupied by men, society has always been gynocentric (although feminism has exacerbated the problem).
And children still can’t vote, even though society values children significantly more than adults.
That sounds a little high to me, I would guess it’s more like 50/50. Of course a woman who murders her husband has a much better chance of getting away with it by claiming victimhood.
But what’s more interesting is the amount of societal resources and concern directed towards male on female domestic violence. There’s a Violence Against Women Act; almost all domestic violence shelters are for women; a woman can easily pick up the phone and have her husband or boyfriend thrown in jail or kicked out of the house with very little in the way of repercussions if she just made the whole thing up.
In short, society is very much concerned about the well-being, desires, and needs of women. To the point where expressing concern over predominantly male issues can get you labeled a misogynist.
Which brings me back to the point I made earlier: There is a real problem with incels. But unfortunately, since it’s a male problem, it won’t get much attention, except of course for derision and scorn.
Do me a favor? Please stop lying about what I said and making up a completely different thing for me to have said, so you can dismiss me based on the lie that you told. It’s rude. If you could stop lying, that would be great.
As I noted elsewhere, men are the critical defenders of gynocentrism. If it were just a straight up battle of the sexes, women would obviously lose. Gynocentrism is driven by men putting women ahead of other men.
(From a moral perspective, I don’t see why this should matter. Consider age discrimination in the workplace. As often as not, the discriminators are older people who prefer to hire young people for whatever reason.)
But in any event, the morality of the situation is beside the point, which is that there is a problem with a significant chunk of men who are really suffering, in large part due to gynocentrism, and paying attention to the problem is difficult, again due to gynocentrism.
While fortaleza84 has been kind of a dick* to Deiseach, making a new account to make a long post complaining about him is obnoxious. Especially with that obnoxious username. Use the report button, or (especially in the likely event it’s not working), try calling him out in the offending thread itself, with a post that addressing only the point in question. And use your existing username. Unless of course you’re a banned user just trying to stir up trouble.
* the wonders of not being politically correct, I can use gendered insults without guilt.
While fortaleza84 has been kind of a dick to Deiseach
Ah, not really. And I’ve probably been as much of a dick back, so it all cancels out. They have a particular interpretation of the current situation in the Sex Wars and I have an opposite one, so it’s no more than if they liked chocolate and I liked vanilla ice cream and we were disputing the question of superior deliciousness* – it’s going to be “so you say, but can you back that up?”
*Vanilla all the way, all the chocolate ice-creams I’ve had have tended to be chalky and/or too rich and not really suited to the medium
Since I have been informed by fortaleza84 that this is a gynocentric world now, here’s some advice from the 30s for women that can now usefully be re-jigged for you men trying to showcase your wares in the sexual market where women are the purchasers with the power!
Remember boys, if you want to be loved, it’s your duty to be beautiful! And since this can’t at all be taken as an attitude that women might find objectionable, neither is it objectifying or offensive to tell men that they have to sell themselves to potential mates on looks!
And now the data
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yygEfqEETrhNZAfXw/why-humans-suck-ratings-of-personality-conditioned-on-looks
I really really want to see this broken down by subpopulations.
The sentiment is in the right place but I’m afraid the specific advice is mostly inapplicable. Also, while women are the ones with the better position now, this doesn’t mean they’ve changed position from sellers to buyers or vice versa; it means the market has changed from a sellers market to a buyers one or vice versa.
It shouldn’t be that controversial that if a specific man wants to attract women (or vice versa) then he (or she) should work on improving his (or her) physical appearance. I think what feminists object to is that for women, looks are relatively more important than they are for men.
I think what happens is that feminists see the small minority of physically unattractive men who are still able to attract women based on these men’s wealth and status. And this excites envy. (Physically unattractive men of low wealth and status are invisible to these same feminists).
I think what happens is that feminists see the small minority of physically unattractive men who are still able to attract women based on these men’s wealth and status. And this excites envy.
In the same way that incels see “physically unattractive men who are still able to attract women based on these men’s wealth and status. And this excites envy”, or have you not been arguing all this time that women who try to attract and/or marry mates ‘above their station’ are being unfair? That the younger second wife of a rich older man has a knock-on effect all down the chain that leads to Joe at the bottom not being able to get a date or a mate? That women are shallow for judging men’s worth by their status?
That certainly sounds like envy to me: “he’s ugly, I’m ugly, but because he has money he got the hot young blonde and I didn’t!”
Never mind all the stuff about “guys who treat women badly still get a lot of women while the nice guys suffer” – that’s also reeking of envy and unintentionally sounds like “I wish I could be abusive to women and get away with it”, even if that’s not meant.
I’d be glad to meet you half-way on “people can be horrible, people can be shallow, and life is unfair”, but when it’s all “men judge women on looks and this has a solid evo-pysch basis and is perfectly reasonable” but “women judge men on wealth and status and this is evidence of their shallowness”, I don’t know where we can go. If it’s Evolution Makes men from twenty to sixty preferentially choose to pursue women of twenty for mate selection and successful reproduction reasons, then it’s also Evolution Makes women want men with resources – lack of resources means incapacity to support offspring means dead offspring, which is reproductive failure (see the story of “Hansel and Gretel” where the father cannot provide to feed his children).
If you want to impose a law that “no man can have a second wife, no matter if he’s divorced or a widower; no man can have a string of relationships with women; it has to be life-long ‘one man one woman and that woman has to be your first choice’ or else it’s unfair because it disrupts the chain of supply and Joe can’t get Sue that he otherwise could get because she traded up to Philip”, then go right ahead and try. I think you’ll face a lot of opposition, and it won’t be exclusively from women, even the envious feminists.
If you want to blame someone for the shocking state of the modern world, then try blaming Caroline Norton. This is from the Daily Mail (not generally regarded as a left-wing progressive paper) of 2008 and written by a male author, but even setting aside the tone of “ain’t progress wonderful?”, there is evidence that the world has not always been gynocentric:
A husband could beat a wife without interference from the law? Surely not! Well, fiction is indicative of the attitudes of the past, and here’s a quote from a Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, set in 1897, published in 1904, and plainly acceptable as realistic to the reading public that a man could beat his wife without fear of interference from outside forces:
The woman has “over one eye … a hideous, plum coloured swelling” which is assumed to be the result of the attack of the (fictitious) burglars, but which we find out happened when her husband “rushed like a madman into the room, called her the vilest name that a man could use to a woman, and welted her across the face with the stick he had in his hand”.
Even at the very beginning, we learn how things stood in the marriage (and this is where Doyle uses the story to press for the reform of the divorce laws which he personally was interested in):
Her maid later testifies that this wasn’t a once-off occurrence:
And nobody in the story – not Holmes, not Watson – ever says “but why didn’t she just walk out and leave him?” because they know all the reasons this would be practically impossible.
But it’s a gynocentric world and always has been, right?
I think you’re misunderstanding what MRA-types mean when they say “gynocentrism.” It’s completely orthogonal to what you’re talking about. It’s not about women having power, it’s about society being focused on the problems and value of women – and that’s often not going to be any good for the women themselves.
Like, the fact that women were essentially bought and sold like human cattle in the 1800s falls under the heading of gynocentrism being a problem, if that makes any sense. Just because society is organized around keeping you safe, for a given value of safe, and around to produce babies absolutely does not mean the things people do to ensure that are going to be good for you as a person.
That may or may not be true, but it’s not relevant to the issue at hand, i.e. it’s just feminist deflection. Anyway, you are ignoring an earlier question:
Please quote me where I stated or implied (or presumed)
(1) there have never been spinsters or women who were deemed unmarriageable,
(2) there have never been women who wanted to marry and have families but couldn’t find or attract a husband; and
(3) that any woman can have any man and as many men as she wants but a guy who isn’t a 10 in looks, wealth and what passes for status in his particular social circle has no chance at all.
Failing that, please admit that I stated or implied no such thing and apologize for misrepresenting my position.
As noted above, this is the last time I will ask.
toastengineer, your example seems to show that anything and everything can be gynocentrism – so a society where the rights in law of men were deemed superior to those of women was in actuality gynocentric, a society where the reaction has swung to the other side is gynocentric.
A divorced woman being denied custody of her children is gynocentric. A divorced man being denied custody of his children is gynocentric. Women being confined to the domestic sphere is gynocentric. Women getting preferential treatment in the world of work is gynocentric. Women not being drafted for the army is gynocentric, women being shoehorned into elite army regiments is gynocentric.
Blue is gynocentric and so is pink?
In other words, “gynocentrism” is almost a perfect reflection of “patriarchy” — a useful description of some social phenomena that is overused a lot.
It might be used as a word-for-Satan by some people but certainly not by me and not by most of the people who I overhear talking about it.
> A divorced woman being denied custody of her children is gynocentric.
Don’t see how.
> Women being confined to the domestic sphere is gynocentric. Women getting preferential treatment in the world of work is gynocentric.
Yes, both boil down to over-protectiveness. You could similarly argue that forcing women to be housewives is “patriarchal” and demanding that women be propped up by the men around them in their career is also “patriarchal,” and in that case I’d say you’re kinda right.
> Women not being drafted for the army is gynocentric, women being shoehorned into elite army regiments is gynocentric.
First yes, second no, unless the justification is that them being in elite army regiments would actually protect them by teaching them combat skills or something.
Imagine you have a large stationary magnet and a steel bearing in a sealed tube that’s nailed to the floor at its center. The bearing will sit at one end of the tube, attracted by the magnet. If you rotate the tube so that that it can’t be close to the magnet there, the bearing will fly over to the other end. Just because the magnet is equally capable of pulling the bearing to a different extreme if the one it was at is suddenly made unacceptable, does not mean the magnet is non-existent or somehow badly specified.
Do you disagree with the specific statement that, in general, all else being equal, in Western cultures (and probably all of humanity, but I don’t need to prove that much) the vast majority of people are much more upset by a bad thing happening to a woman than to a man?
I actually disagree with this a bit. Right now, women don’t have to register for conscription if they don’t want to. Those who do volunteer to serve will enjoy relaxed standards if they wish to try out for an elite unit. And if an all out shooting war develops such that such women are in significant danger, they can simply get pregnant and will be excused from service with no negative repercussions.
Gynocentrism means that society is primarily concerned with the well-being, desires, and needs of women over those of men. And the military is a good example of this. A woman can decide she wants nothing to do with the military; she can decide that she wants to play soldier; she can decide that she wants to change her mind. In all cases, the military will bend over backwards to accommodate her desires.
By contrast, men must register for conscription under penalty of losing student loan eligibility; those who wish to serve in elite units must pass the most rigorous tests; and if a war breaks out they will get in serious trouble if they flake on their obligations.
That’s gynocentrism folks.
It makes me think of that one Star Trek episode where they’re like “there’s no way that woman could live a normal fulfilling life in the outside world! she’s UGLY! keep her on the Lotus Eater planet.”
I think that episode wasn’t merely “she’s ugly” (they addressed that in the episode “Mudd’s Women”, including ‘gold digging for a rich husband’ versus ‘guys want hot looking chicks and value appearance over substance’) but that she couldn’t live off-world anymore; the Talosians who healed her had put her back together not quite correctly, and it was about her health as much as her looks:
Indeed, Pike after his debilitating accident is permitted to go back to the Lotus Eater planet so he can have the illusory life of good health, the same as Vina. So it’s not simply “an ugly woman cannot have a fulfilling life”.
In “What the hell is this” of the day, Trump to appoint Dr. Oz to health council.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-to-appoint-dr-oz-bill-belichick-to-health-council
Aye aye aye
Sounds about right.
The real question is whether Oprah will keep him on when she wins.
Are there any *free* livestreaming solutions out there? Preferably ones that don’t require you to verify your phone number and real identity (I’m looking at you, YouTube).
I’ve sort of been using appear.in as a substitute, but it annoys the recipients, having to accept mic/cam enablement.
Twitch? I don’t remember having to provide any details except a username and password. You probably need to give them a W2 or something to get partnered but just to stream…
I know another small organization that hosts their own streaming solution based on uStream that they have 100% control over (they most definitely do not use it to broadcast copyrighted content, never ever) but I don’t know how they made that happen.
He’s ten, and desperate to be cool and fit in, and fighting hard to achieve and retain the cool status he manages to get. Very normal, very natural, very typical of a kid that age.
He also needs a good kick in the pants.
You are not the little prince of your own kingdom around whom the world revolves. This is a natural mindset for a ten year old, it’s much less suitable for a twenty-two year old, and for someone older still it’s verging on the pathological to be “why aren’t women paying me the kind of attention I deserve?”
This is probably the genuinely saddest part of this whole messy production:
Yes, because your stepmother made you do things outside your comfort zone and when circumstances forced changes on you that you couldn’t pick and choose, you adapted and began to grow out of the constant gazing in the mirror of your own mind. If this could have continued, who knows what would have been the result? And again, despite all his doom-saying, this shows he was not condemned to loneliness and derision during that decade between the ages of ten and twenty. There were ways out, if he could have taken them.
But Elliot can’t, because he’s still mired in his own preferences. His class goes on a camping trip and he does the usual “ugh I’m not sleeping in a tent, I want to go in a cabin!” and gets his way, but he won’t like it:
No scintilla of awareness that some of the other boys could also have been pretending so as not to seem uncool. Automatic and immediate assumption that everyone else effortlessly achieved what was denied him. No recognition that you have to put work into relationships. No, he is Special because he is Condemned And Set Apart to be Forever Alone And Miserable.
Except by his own showing, this is not the whole truth. He’s just told us about two years’ worth of him deciding who were and were not the cool kids in his class (all boys) and competing with them and trying to be one of the cool kids and rejecting and refusing to play or interact with kids he did not deem cool. This had nothing to do with girls and already he was sorting out himself and his peers and others not on the basis of equality but status. Yes, puberty and competing for female attention is going to complicate this, but it’s already in his life. His envy and jealousy is already in his life. His desire to have blond hair (and getting his own hair bleached) is already in his life. He was not living in some paradise until the wicked girls threw him out.
I do feel like I’m kicking a lame dog here, but since Rodger is being hailed as some kind of harbinger of inceldom (both by those lauding his example and those using him as a bogeyman), I think it’s important to examine the mindset on display and try and open up a window to let light in, to show that what someone thinks is the truth of their situation – no matter how they may really be suffering real pain by it – is not necessarily so from the outside, and that an outside view can be what is needed to let some air in to the stifling closed room of self-regard and self-condemnation and let. you. breathe.
So again, his jealousy and extremity of reaction – over valuation of his own skills, over valuation of others, immediate ‘if I can’t be perfect at this, forget it’ and not enjoying it for its own sake – is on show. He’ll apply this same valuation to interactions with women, and be as flawed in his analysis.
And here we get to the meat of it:
This is an eleven year old’s thinking, so you expect it to be full of shit. Still holding to it when you’re twenty-two is immature. For one thing, his father had no problem getting a new wife, Elliot mentioned how surprised he was by how fast after the divorce his father re-married, so which is it: his father is not a gentleman but is really an obnoxious jerk, or Elliot is wrong in jumping to the conclusion that only obnoxious jerks get girls?
And I sincerely doubt eleven year old, tantrum-throwing to get his own way, I wanna be cool and popular, I think you’re a jerk but I’ll still suck up to you Elliot was coming across as a “polite, kind gentleman” at that age, no matter how he may think he showed off. We’ve already seen status competition among boys in his story so far, does he not realise that there’s status competition amongst girls too? That an eleven year old girl who’s developing breasts and having her first period is not going to hang around with a boy who is still shorter than his peers and has not started puberty yet? That there is pressure on girls about the kind of boys they should seek to attract?
Being this unaware and self-involved when you’re eleven is normal. Still believing it when you’re nearly a grown man is retardation of emotional development.
And then he undercuts his whole tale of Woe, Woe, No Woman Has Ever Smiled At Me by saying that some girls were nice to him and even hugged him and that middle school was quite pleasant, actually.
He remains extremely thin-skinned and over-sensitive; he’s eleven and still stewing over something that happened when he was nine and his stepmother scolded him (indeed, writing this manifesto, he’s twenty-two and still stewing over it) and he’s still obsessed with status; his father reduces child support which affects his mother’s income and they have to move down a rung on the property ladder:
I don’t know whether it’s pathetic or hilarious that an eleven year old is worrying about property values and sounding like a mini-Hyacinth Bouquet talking about her sister Violet’s house with “room for a pony”.
I can’t wade through the rest of this, it’s too depressing. But I think it’s plain that Rodger had a lot more issues going on to make him do what he did than simply “girls are horrible and don’t pay attention to non-alpha guys”. It wasn’t girls who made him a snob, socially anxious, immature, and obsessed with status that he could not achieve of his own efforts. If he’d had the patience to wait to physically and emotionally and chronologically grow up, things could have gotten better for him. Every time he was forced out of his comfort zone as a kid, things did get better. The real tragedy is that he invented a narrative for himself where it was someone else’s fault he didn’t get the things he deserved to get and that all others got with no effort, and he refused to be willing to work with people who wanted to get him to change that scenario to something more realistic.
A government-mandated girlfriend would not have helped, as the only girlfriend that would be satisfactory for him would have been one to confirm him in his scenario and not challenge it, and challenging it was the only way out.
I think he needed a job. In High School, he basically never interacted with anyone outside of video games. After High School, he would drop out of college at the mere sight of couples in his class. When living with roommates, he went out of his way to never interact with them. His parents still payed for his apartment anyways. If they hadn’t done that, he might have been forced to get a job and then learn how to socialize with other people.
Or would he just have stewed, that a gentleman such as he should be forced to interact with buffoons and the like, in order to earn a bit of money?
Pretty much everyone who works in fast food/retail has those thoughts. Complaining about customers is how coworkers bond. And learning how to do small talk is a necessary part of learning how to socialize, even if it’s with people you hate. Maybe it wouldn’t have helped, but I don’t think Rodger was destined to be a mass murderer.
Yeah, that’s a good point. He might have made the leap from “I must deal with these buffoons! The outrage!” to “hey guys, sucks we gotta deal with these buffoons, anyway, it’s a Friday, anyone wanna grab beers” – any number of things could have slapped him out of his headspace. Then again, things that happened could have slapped him out of there, and didn’t. He wasn’t destined to be a mass murderer – he chose to be a mass murderer – but how many things in his life that could have snapped him out of that didn’t?
“Pretty much everyone who works in fast food/retail has those thoughts. Complaining about customers is how coworkers bond. And learning how to do small talk is a necessary part of learning how to socialize, even if it’s with people you hate. Maybe it wouldn’t have helped, but I don’t think Rodger was destined to be a mass murderer.”
Actually, workplace shootings happen.
It’s quite possible that a habit of extreme resentment isn’t necessarily solved by making someone’s life moderately worse.
Has anyone suggested that a government-mandated girlfriend would’ve helped? (I skimmed the discussion above, so if they have please link so I can have a laugh).
No, but some people have said other things which have been exaggerated/misinterpreted as suggesting that.
Yeah, I’m not saying anyone (well… this being humanity, you never know) is seriously agitating for government-provided girlfriends, but what the solution to “some people want love and can’t get it” is, I don’t think anyone knows.
Would it be nice if everyone who wanted love had a romantic partner (even better, one who really loved them)? Yes, it would.
It would also be nice if everyone was given five million dollars into their bank account, a McMansion and a Porsche. Or even that every job, from burger-flipper on up, paid thirty dollars an hour plus perks, but we’ve been told that this is not doable for very good reasons (sorry, burgeoning middle-class developing nations, you can’t have the Western lifestyle, it is unsustainable and climate change is the result).
I don’t see that an ideal plan of sexual redistribution is going to be any more workable than an ideal plan of wealth distribution. If some people are going to be in jobs that pay the minimum wage (even the highest minimum wage) and are not going to get anything better, and there are good arguments why they can’t get the same cushy unionised job with high pay and benefits as the good old days, then the same with the sexual marketplace; maybe in the good old days a man was guaranteed a woman, just as he was guaranteed the job for life and a pension at the end of it with regular pay rises and promotions simply for serving his time with the company/sweet union-protected manufacturing job with great pay and benefits, but that was then and today is very different.
No one knows the solution, but every single time someone raises the problem as something that might be worth trying to solve, the clockwork response is “How dare you propose the government reduce women to sexual slavery for the sake of creepy nerds! You’re a wannabe rapist, you are – you should feel bad and you should be driven from polite society, hey everybody, come here and help me drive this guy from polite society!”
Unless someone actually has proposed government-issued girlfriends, that’s arguing in exceedingly bad faith and should have no place here. Also, it’s not going to work nearly as well as you think it will.
Thank you for wading through all that.
The sheer hatefulness of that worldview and the fact that it’s (seen as) representative of the “incel community”, of which I’ve never been a part, is why I find it so offensive to see people use “incel” as a blanket term for the romanceless, whether sympathetically or hostilely. Because speaking as an unloved, maybe unlovable person, I have absolutely no sympathy for that hatefulness and I refuse to be lumped in with it.
Maybe I’m being unfair, but I know what I am, and I’m not that.
Well, it’s mostly sad. Rodger plainly had a lot of issues, and focused on romantic failure as the one simple easy identifiable problem that if only he could fix that, everything else would be miraculously better. And it was the fault of women, not his fault, that he was unsuccessful.
A lot of it was immaturity and being unable to recognise that, for instance, he simply wasn’t ready at the age of ten or eleven to start being interested in girls. That he was seeking status – he writes about “all the cool boys in middle school have girls, I want to be one of the cool boys, therefore I have to get a girl” even though developmentally he was behind the other boys – and again, that’s normal: some people will go into puberty faster than others, some will go in slower.
But that set the tone for the rest of his youth: getting a girl was all about showing off his equal status with the cool kids. And he was very young – twenty-two is no age at all! Deciding that his life was a complete mess and it was all the fault of the girls he found attractive and high-status who wouldn’t go out with him (so he could have the status-by-association he so craved) is exactly the kind of immature, mentally troubled reaction you would expect.
That he’s been seen as some kind of hero is probably only ironic “poking the normies”. But there probably are some equally immature, equally troubled young men who think “hey yeah, he’s right, it’s not my fault my life sucks, it’s women who are to blame with their unrealistic expectations! A man is supposed to get a woman, I’m a man, I’m supposed to get a woman, and if I don’t it’s the woman’s fault for not keeping her side of the bargain!”
BBA:
What I do wonder is when “incel” actually acquired this meaning. Because back 15 years ago or so, I was reading and posting on the involuntary celibacy mailing list where I believe the word “incel” actually originated (as well as some other lingo such as “marcel” for married celibate people). And while there were some bitter men there (and also bitter women; it was a mixed gender community), there were also very interesting, intelligent and supportive people of both genders, some gay people, some asexual people, some kinky people, people who’d lived through periods of involuntary celibacy and had constructive advice about mental health and so on. It makes me a little sad that the word “incel”, which to me brings back good memories, now has such a terrible meaning.
Which is faintly ridiculous, given the meaning of “celibate”.
It meant married people who no longer had any sexual intimacy with their partner. Which certainly isn’t a rare thing.
@Obelix
I gather, but consider that the dictionary definition of “celibacy” is “not being married”. Sexlessness is only there by implication, given that one does not licitly have sex outside of marriage. And the modern state of affairs not recognizing marital debt is just another perversion to add to the pile.
Pretty much nobody who isn’t a Catholic theologian or priest (or VERY persnickety lay person) uses celibacy to mean “refraining from marriage” as opposed to “refraining from sex”. Nor is “chastity” used to mean refraining from extramarital sex; instead, it’s just a more positive word for refraining from sex. Nor is “continence” used to refer to sex at all.
@The Nybbler
Thank you! 😉
@Nybbler: Yeah, “she’s incontinenf” sounds gross. Even “slut” is nicer. 😛
I’m skipping ahead again, but I want to pull out something that is probably really important in the whole affair of Elliot Rodger and the final action he took.
He’s nine, he’s beginning to notice that there’s a hierarchy at school and some kids are cool and some kids are not, and he decides that he’s not one of the cool kids (and blames his parents for not making him one by making him dress better, have a good haircut, etc. but again, this is a natural description of a child at that stage).
But I think the real seed of the problem is here, and it’s not about girls as such (though this is how he eventually chooses to define it) – it’s about being mixed-race and having severe envy of the white kids he lives amongst and goes to school with and has as friends. Again, if he constantly is testing girls as to whether they think he’s really cool and as good as a white boy, even if he’s not aware he’s doing it, this is going to alienate them.
If his explanation for rejection is “girls won’t go out with me because I’m not white”, then the cure or mitigation for that is not “give him a government-assigned girlfriend”, it’s “do a lot of hard work on his self-image, perception of whiteness and Asianness, internalised dislike, and so forth”.
Again, Elliot is pretty spoiled. He describes how he throws tantrums to get his own way and how he dislikes his father making him do things whereas he gets his own way with his mother. Once again, very natural, and this is the job of parents: yes, you may hate having to go to Aunt Mary’s house and all those boring adults, but being shoved out of your comfort zone teaches you a lot of things and opens up new opportunities for you:
Honestly, reading this makes me think that what Elliot (and a good portion of other incels) really needed was a good spanking or two when he was a kid (sorry, ‘don’t hit children that’s child abuse!’ people, but he needed more discipline than he was getting to stop him being a spoiled brat).
Elliot is ten here and talking to a man at one of his father’s parties, and the man does the usual “oh ho ho, you have a great time ahead of you and you’ll know what I mean when you get older”:
I remind you, this is a 22 year old kid writing this about how his life is ruined and blasted and destroyed. All this grandiose Sorrows Of Young Werther stuff is natural for the self-involved mindset of the young not yet fully-adult, but it’s also immature and self-regarding and really does need the help of time to grow up and grow out of being that much of a prat.
fortaleza84 has driven me to something I never thought I’d do – reading Elliot Rodger’s manifesto. If Rodger is the symbol of inceldom and a type of hero to some in the – what do I call it? community? classification? – then presumably his complaints and analysis of how he came to be the way he was can give understanding into what the claims of inceldom are.
So I’m holding my nose and diving in, and I’m going to comment (probably extensively) on this.
First, some preliminary remarks. For all the talk about the perception of incels feeling entitled to sex and women’s emotional labour, I think it’s true to say that why they are aggrieved has not so much to do with sex as it is with intimacy, and not so much with intimacy for its own sake (some of the outbursts I’ve read have left me feeling “but what would you do with a girlfriend if you got one? you seem to have no idea that a relationship is about two people and there’s nothing there about what you could contribute to the relationship as a source of support and encouragement”), as that we’re butting heads with the societal imperative about stages of adulthood and crossing thresholds. Becoming part of a couple is one of these rites of passage, and there’s probably an evolutionary reason why there’s such pressure over “congratulations, you have now formed a breeding pair and will pass on your genes to a new generation”.
For teenagers/young twenties, this isn’t such a big deal (though it feels really big) since they’re not really ready for adulthood yet, but it’s also true that this is one of the steps towards forming a household and family of your own – the breeding pair – like moving out of your parents’ home and getting a job that marks you as successfully navigating the transition from childhood/adolescence to adulthood/full membership in the tribe. And seeing your peers achieving this while you’re stranded on the hither shore is a genuine grievance, where maybe not consciously but it happens all the same, you will be perceived as not an adult in the same way as they are (regardless of chronological age), as being stuck in the childhood stage, of having failed to pass a crucial step on the path of how life is supposed to go.
That’s a different perceived immaturity to the actual immaturity of many teenage/early twenties young men (and women), and it only gets worse as you get older and your being out of step with the rest of your cohort sticks out even more. So a genuine grievance there and one that is going to be very difficult to address because you’re fighting what is damn near a biological imperative hardwired into our psyches about “grow up, find a mate, have children yourself, the circle of life”. Even the fact that marriage and child-bearing is delayed for reasons of getting an education, establishing a career, and having more choices that are socially acceptable about obtaining sex and companionship today than “get married at sixteen” is only addressing the top layer of this iceberg floating in the collective unconscious that ‘real’ adulthood happens when you’re old enough to reproduce and find a mate to do that with (those are some mangled metaphors, but do you get what I’m driving at?)
Okay, that being said, let’s start off with Rodger was only 22 when he finally flipped and killed those people and himself. That’s still very young and I think indicative of the gross immaturity of youth (distinct from the ‘you have not traversed this stage of initiation into adulthood so are still regarded as immature’ biological imperative above). Too impatient to wait longer, convinced that it was all over for him at that early stage of his life, despair and vengefulness driving him to aggressive and useless violence.
He starts off his manifesto with his birth and background, and this is an example of that adolescent immaturity. He’s staking a claim through his parents to unearned status that he does not possess of his own achievement, which is natural enough – he’s too young to have achieved anything himself as yet. If he wants status and can’t get it by being ‘athletic hero’ or whatever, then he has to fall back on ‘do you know who I am?’
The trouble is, NOBODY CARES ABOUT THAT. Put yourself in the shoes of an eighteen or nineteen year old girl being approached by Rodger at the same age, and all he does when you agree to have coffee with him is talk like this about how his family were really important back in the day. He was living in Los Angeles, who cares if your father’s family were gentry once upon a time? Status is measured differently there, and he acknowledges this by “my mom dated George Lucas, you know”. Yes, and? Do you hang out with the Lucas family? Have you any pull or influence in the world of movies? No? Then DON’T TALK ABOUT IT BECAUSE EVERYONE IN LA PROBABLY CLAIMS THEY KNOW BIG MOVIE STARS AND PRODUCERS.
That’s one piece of badly needed advice on ‘how to talk to girls’ that I’m betting he never got or discarded. If feeling low-status and rejected, it’s natural to console yourself by “my blood is blue”, but alas that also comes across as you being self-absorbed, narcissistic, thinking you’re better than everyone else, and even a bit weird/creepy if you keep bragging about some photographer nobody under the age of fifty ever heard of.
He rambles on about his life going back to when he was three and talking about a birthday party and yeah, okay, this is his apologia pro vita sua but once again NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR BIRTHDAY PARTY WHEN YOU WERE THREE EXCEPT YOU. And then he slips back into boasting – “already a world traveller” at such a young age – yeah, no. Your family moving from the US to England and taking you on holiday to Malaysia and Spain by the age of five is not really “seasoned world traveller”. It’s hard to tell how much of this is part of the elaborate consolatory fantasy he spun about his secret specialness that was part of “the value in me” that “the females of the human species were incapable of seeing” and how much is a deliberately mannered and affected style artificially adopted for effect.
A mix of both, perhaps.
“At the age of 4, I, Elliot Rodger, had already been to six different countries. Who can claim that, eh? The United Kingdom, France, Spain, Greece, Malaysia, and the United States.”
Probably a lot more kids than you imagine, Elliot, and once again this does not make you special and if you boasted about this to girls it would turn them off (“This guy thought that his parents taking him to America when he was four made him, like, James Bond or something! Can you imagine?”)
He then moves on to the ages of 5-9 and once again indulges in overwrought scene-setting. Again, all very natural for someone who has made fanfiction of their own life as compensation and salve to a bruised ego for perceived injustices and unfairnesses, but if you cultivate and indulge in an attitude of “I’m so much better than the rest of you”, people will pick up on it and it will turn them against you. A girl might go on a first date with a fairly attractive young guy but if all he did was brag about himself all the time, it’s not likely she’ll agree to a second – unless there is an element of gold-digging, and since he was only 22 with no established career, not independently wealthy and probably dependent on his mother’s income, there seems to be little to no chance of expensive presents in exchange for smiling and nodding along and going “Oh Elliot, you’re so fascinating!”
Even when talking about six year old himself, he can’t help boasting about the famous father of his first real friend. This constant snobbery is wearing, and I’m only a few pages in. I’m going to skip ahead through his description of age seven, his parents’ divorce, dad getting a new girlfriend/wife fast, again the mention of how his stepmother’s family are A REALLY BIG DEAL back in her home country and so on. We get to age nine and some real meat beneath all the “this shows how sweet and innocent I was back then and how I had no idea the cruel fate that lay in store for me because women are bitches”:
This tiny rare shoot of self-awareness does give us some help; unfortunately, it’s going to be true that kids who deviate from the norm (be that too tall/too short/too thin/too fat/glasses/not sporty/too brainy/too rich/too poor/you name it) are going to be picked on, and are going to perceive themselves as not fitting the norm, and kids are desperately anxious not to stick out and to be ‘just like everyone else’. No matter what helpful adults or well-meaning teachers may say, a kid who can tell that he’s not ‘fitting in’ is going to judge himself as harshly as other kids judge him – or even if they’re not judging him at all.
Is womankind to blame for Elliot being short? Well, if we blame his mother for being Asian and therefore short, of course! But at least he doesn’t indulge in any of that kind of specious thinking (at least not yet). And there’s another sprig of self-awareness poking through:
And again, how to deal with jealousy and envy is not DECIDE WOMEN ARE FIENDS AND START KILLING PEOPLE.
Though to be fair to Rodger, he seems to have decided everyone was horrible, not just women, and killed men as well as women. The kid had issues upon issues, and plainly perceived mockery and deliberate insult at times when there was none because of his brooding upon what he felt were personal inadequacies. He refused mental health treatment for whatever reason, probably because he wasn’t yet ready or willing to do the work needed to change including acknowledging that some of his problems were of his own making, and then he just went off.
To make a hero out of him, in no matter how ironic a way, is a bad idea. And forcing some kind of “if sexual marketplace really was fair, give him a girlfriend” would probably not have helped, unless he did eventually become truly mature, self-aware, and changed his attitude and behaviour. It’s more likely that he would have become emotionally and verbally abusive, maybe even physically abusive, and blamed her for not being the kind of supportive and unconditionally loving and loyal girlfriend she should have been.
Giving a miser gold does not cure him.
I have a lot of sympathy for this, because it’s basically where I’m at right now. In most other regards, I’m doing adulthood very well. I have a good job, my own place, pay all my own bills, have friends, etc. But my attempts to ask girls out go hilariously wrong, usually for reasons totally out of my control (I’m not going to share details, and none have been “get away, you monster”, but it’s not been a great experience), and I do sometimes find myself resenting those who’ve made it past that step. As a Christian, I trust that God has good plans for me, and those may or may not involve a wife at some point in the future, but that it’s his best plan either way. It’s still hard to deal with, and I imagine it’s much harder still when you don’t have that comfort, and have spent years letting it warp you.
If God doesn’t want you to find a wife, maybe His plan involves naval warrior monk’s. 🙂
But yeah, Rodgers was existing in a worldview where the only definition of success is mating and making babies. There’s no such thing as transcendent joy, just the pleasure of having a stable sexual relationship. He was crazy on multiple levels, but the modern worldview was definitely not helping.
That’s an interesting way to avoid responsibility.
Anyway, I don’t think that Elliot Rodger’s situation gives much insight into that of the typical incel. Elliot Rodger was not just socially awkward or Aspergy — he was batsh*t crazy even ignoring his spree killing. He was also sufficiently attractive and wealthy that he could have gotten a girlfriend no problem.
A more typical incel is a buddy of mine — a 35 year old attorney, moderately successful but short and slight of build and with an unattractive face. He’s not afraid to hit on girls but it never gets him anywhere. It’s a competitive dating market and he always seems to come up short.
*insert obvious sexist joke* 😉
EDIT: Damn, that sharp brace stripper is overzealous. I don’t think that was even remotely valid XML!
The sharp brace stripper frowns on your sexism, she does.
Rodger didn’t mention being teased for being short– just that he resented taller kids getting more respect.
I don’t think anyone regards Rodgers as a hero. “Supreme Gentleman” is an ironic meme.
A news story that sounds too good to be true – but if it really is developed and replaces bariatric surgery as the last-ditch recommendation, that can only be an improvement.
What the story never says and what I’d really like to know, is what happened once the treatment stopped: did people regain the weight? Were the changes lasting?
Eh, I think a combination of spicy soups and intelligently applied stimulants(Adderall, nicotine) works well. Its what the rich celebrities do!
Does anyone know of works of fiction that combine hard SF with the supernatural? I was just thinking of how the superhero genre is soft SF set in the present, except there are also gods and wizards. Has anyone tried combining the supernatural with hard SF, or is that type of fiction inherently committed to materialism?
Too Like The Lightning, kind of.
Well, Lovecraft’s the first author that comes to mind, and William Hope Hodgson is the second, but genre boundaries weren’t that well defined when they were writing. I can think of plenty of more modern works that mix psychic powers with hard-ish SF (the Mass Effect franchise, for example), but they generally include at least a half-assed materialistic motivation for those powers.
Gene Wolfe’s New Sun cycle, maybe? Looks like low fantasy with an Abrahamic flavor, turns out to be fairly hard SF on a second or third reading. (I also adore it.)
There’s also “hard fantasy“, the fantasy subgenre that tries to bring hard SF-like rigor to its fantastic elements. Tough to do well, though.
“Hard fantasy” or psionics probably aren’t what I’m looking for… HP Lovecraft and Hodgson definitely fit, so it doesn’t have to be recent. Of course recent novels are more likely to be hard SF because Science Marches On, but late Lovecraft holds up pretty well except for a couple of howlers like the Mi-Go’ s wings pushing the ether.
Definitely gotta read the New Sun.
Stross’s the Laundry Files, which takes many Lovecraftian (and also normal) supernatural tropes and tries to interpret them in a hard setting (with a lot of impossible tech.)
One book has elves about which he says “They understand enough science to build a turbojet engine, but would never chose to do so; it would seem simpler to them to open a portal to a hell dimension full of fire.” That’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with.
Interesting. Again it comes back to Lovecraft.
The Mageworld books have wizards and starships at the same time, with complementary powers/uses.
ETA: Vinge’s _The Witling_ has an SFish universe with a species who can teleport people or things via some power.
And the usual way for some categories of personal magic to get introduced into hard SF is to call it “psi”.
Macworld sounds like what I’m looking for. Not sure about the Vinge.
Basically I think it would be philosophically interesting to see a setting where believable futuristic technology exists and materialism is false. Have plot elements like brain uploading where the original person and the AI with their memories meet in the afterlife, or engineers only being able to build slow STL ships, but Apollo can turn devotees into light and remake their bodies at the destination. 🙂
Ra by Sam Hughes. Magic is real, it’s in everyday use, and by speaking the right words with an appropriate wand or ring, you can break the laws of physics.
The catch is that “Magic isn’t.” It’s not convenient, it’s more like programming or engineering. It takes days or weeks to design a new spell, and generally some complicated metalworking as well. When one character uses her spells for combat, it’s described as the equivalent of attacking someone with a cordless drill – it works in a pinch, but it’s really not what it’s designed for.
Later on, the story delves into the origins and inner workings of magic – where did it come from, what rules does it follow, and why isn’t it a convenient Do What I Mean system? – and it becomes less hard sci-fi and more Sufficiently Advanced Technology, and the ending is a bit of a curveball, but it’s still an interesting system.
All the final fantasy games.
Ditto the entire Warhammer 40k universe.
There is a lThere is a lesser known cult film known as “Star Wars” that seems to fit this too.esser known cult film known as “Star Wars” that seems to fit this too.
There is nothing hard about that SF.
Echopraxia is the the sequel to Blindsight and while I don’t think it’s as good, it is very hard sci fi and does try to wrestle with some of those ideas in a grounded, hard sci-fi way, but not in the manner of the marvel universe.
That said, I don’t think you can have magic and hard sci-fi combine marvel style in a serious way. If Mjolnir exists, it has to have a power source, a mechanism for its powers, some reason why only the worthy can lift it, and so on. You can call those things magic spells if you like, but if they behave predictably, then they just become another set of fundamental forces that can be analyzed, described, and manipulated by another set of technology.
And, to sell my headcannon, that’s basically what the Asgardians are. They might have an easier time understanding or manipulating those forces, but they aren’t fundamentally different. They’re Noldor or Numenoreans, the mightiest and fairest of the children of the world.
Sure, the tools that gods use can be just another set of fundamental forces analyzed, described and manipulated by another set of technology, but I think it’s be philosophically interesting to see that exist alongside science as we know it. The difference between that and superheroes is that superhero scientists aren’t limited to known science, but can do things like change human size and mass if they feel like it.
Have you read any Alfred Bester? I think that both The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination could fit your criterion: the first involves telepathy, the second self-teleportation. Plus, they’re really interesting and good.
Yes, and they are. 🙂
Five Twelfths of Heaven and its sequels– space flight powered by alchemy, or at least something like alchemy.
Celestial Matters. What if ancient Greek ideas about the elements were true? A major part of the story is an expedition to the sun to get some elemental fire. China is the other superpower because feng shui is also true, but that part isn’t worked out as well as the Greek side.
The causality here is two-way: people don’t just vote for a party because the party represents what they believe, they substantially also take a position on some issue because that’s what their party’s for, or at least because they’ve been exposed to the arguments for it (and not for the other side) through their social circle or their pastor or Jon Stewart. Because of that it’s very hard to say how many of the things those polls are measuring actually reflect an innate predisposition to belief.
Both parties try to swing demographic groups all the time, and pulling this off is largely a matter of figuring out things that a group cares about strongly but which aren’t well served by their traditional representation. The GOP tried to do it with non-Cuban Hispanics during the Bush years by softening their stance on immigration, but that was largely a failure; lately they’ve had more luck appealing to white union members (a traditional Democratic constituency) by emphasizing economic nativism.
I just want to say I love the phrase “their pastor or Jon Stewart”, because it captures so much about how voting works.
This is my take as well. When you vote for a party, you tend to take on that party’s views. Since the party of “Protecting the 2nd Amnendment” is also perceived (rightly or wrongly) as the party of hating minorities, you will tend to see minorities adopting policy positions opposed to them, even on unrelated issues.
And the same goes on lots of other seemingly unrelated characteristics. Why does being an evangelical Christian make you more likely to oppose gun control? Why does being transgender make you more likely to believe in global warming? Etc.
But it is perceived as such almost entirely from outside the party, which I think shouldn’t matter for the process you are describing.
I agree that the increasing segmentation of American society and the rise of identity politics poses challenges for American democracy. But I do think it’s overstating the matter to suggest that preferences are unchangeable to a meaningful degree. I think what the evidence shows is that the timescale of change tends to be relatively slow in comparison to electoral cycles, but change does happen, usually at a cultural level, and often in conjunction with or reaction to other cultural changes. For an obvious example, there was a time when African-American voters were as strongly Republican as they now are Democratic, and the big fights in early 20th century Republican politics were over control of the A-A delegates’ support. Obviously that changed in the 1930’s-1960’s. Theoretically, it could change again. Whites did not used to be nearly so conservative (or at least not so Republican). There are plausible arguments that the Emerging Democratic Majority thesis foundered in part on the delayed reaction of lower-class whites to the Democrats’ embrace of pro-minority identity politics, producing a slow pro-Republican shift. You started seeing it with the Reagan Democrats, for example, and the phenomenon of Obama voters shifting to Trump suggests it is ongoing. Politics tends to be a pendulum, and coalitions (even unlikely ones) tend to form to offset permanent majorities. Not in time for an election cycle, but over a generation or two.
I’ve been somewhat seriously lifting weights for about a dozen years, on and off with my longest “on” stretches lasting about 6-8 months and my longest “off” stretches lasting a year or two. There are a couple things I still am not sure about. Maybe someone more experienced here can offer advice:
– When I do lat pulldowns, whether wide-grip or supinated close-grip, I rarely feel the burn in my lats afterwards, even though I’m careful to exercise proper form (esp. keeping my back in the right posture and not pulling with my forearms). Occasionally I feel a bit of a burn up nearer my shoulder blades. Sometimes I wonder if I’m leaning back too far or not far enough. Is this normal?
– There’s a lot of conflicting information on how to do a proper shrug, especially around the issue of whether to pinch the shoulder blades the whole time and just go up and down, or whether to go from down and front to up and back in a straight line. I’ve taken to just doing each, on alternate days. Which is right, or are they both right and simply emphasize different muscles? Also, even though I try to mentally isolate my traps, I seem to inevitably engage my neck muscles a lot. Is that normal?
– I have a naturally long slender neck, so I do neck exercises (“nexercises” of course). I do them safely, following what I judge to be the best advice available online. I mainly do this to strengthen my neck so as to prevent injury and contribute to my general health (as I’ve heard these exercises can do), but I’m also interested in building mass. Should I really expect that to happen? Should I only expect it if I start using weight?
– I’ve heard that when working out you should start with exercises that focus on the largest/longest muscles and over the course of the workout move to the ones that hit the smallest/shortest muscles. But a lot of the prefab “recommended workouts” on fitness sites don’t do this, and when I’ve followed them I feel great and see results. Is there a general guideline for what order to do exercises in?
Within a muscle group, with the biggest motions and move to smaller ones. The biggest lifts — squats, deadlifts, presses — involve whole chains of muscles, and you will only be able to lift as much weight with them as the weakest links can. If you tire out one particular muscle in the chain, every other muscle isn’t being exercised as much as it could be.
If you’re exercising different muscle groups it doesn’t matter what order you do them in. Also, for the first few months you’ll probably be limited more by neurology than by muscle fatigue, which is why a lot of beginner programs (Starting Strength, etc.) prescribe full-body exercises in a more or less arbitrary order.
Ah, that makes sense.
There’s a few things going on here. The ‘Big 3’ lifts (or 4 if you include OHP) are generally geared toward achieving a higher 1 rep max or 3 RM, in terms of progression goals. It’s easier to achieve these goals earlier in the workout than at the end, in part due to the preferential use of your phosphate (ATP) energy sources. Another thing is that stronglifts get you lifting across a larger range of motion and often require you to engage your core and focus on form, which sets you up nicely for targetting smaller groups later. Lastly, magazines and articles may want you to do 5 sets of bicep curls to ‘get massive arms’ because the pump you get shows instant results. But if you’re training back and you start the workout with biceps, you’re going to have a real hard time. So ignore the prefab workouts on this one.
Focus on achieving a really strong mind-muscle connection before starting the exercise. One good way to do this is to find a pull up bar and tie a stretchy band around it so a loop hangs down. Put your right hand/wrist through the loop and walk backwards until there’s plenty of tension. Rotate your stance so your right leg is stepped back, and gently twist your torso to the right to get a really good stretch all the way down your right lat. Once you can feel the lat engaging you can try retracting your right shoulder blade to get some contraction. Repeat and do same for the left side. After doing this you should be able to flex your lats unassisted. Now when you do your lat pulldowns you’re just flexing them but with weight in your hands.
If none of the above works, try doing isolateral pulldowns with one side at a time, rather than with the solid bar. If your gym doesn’t have this machine you can set up a bench under/next to a cable column.
Buy Arnolds encyclopedia of bodybuilding. Know that after getting experience, the greats tended to just go into the gym, feel their body out, and work out what felt like could be hit hard that day.
The greats also had the qualities that set them up for success, both physically and psychologically. The chances are that the average Joe or Jane doesn’t have these. Additionally, the average Joe or Jane is not trying to win the Olympia in the 60s or 70s, let alone today. Doing what worked for the guys from the golden age of bodybuilding won’t work for a random person.
Sure it will. Just like, not as much.
It will be suboptimal for their average-person needs, given the time available, compared to relatively short workouts. Arnold’s approach is great for someone with good genetics who can build their life around bodybuilding and related activities.
That’s more or less what I do most of the time. One of the reasons is I like to keep my body guessing as to what muscle groups will be worked out.
Double-blind workouts?
I remember hearing that if you routinize your workouts (e.g. Monday legs and shoulders, Tuesday arms and core, etc.) your body adapts and you don’t break down (or whatever is supposed to happen) muscle tissue as well so it doesn’t grow as strong/big.
I’m pretty sure that’s broscience.
I thought the whole point was to get the body to adapt, because the way it adapts is by making the muscle bigger?
The body repairs the damaged muscle, but then keeps going to make the muscles stronger than before. The latter is called supercompensation.
I think people really really overdo that “body guessing” thing. Its more important to make yourself tired at the end of the workout after hitting a bunch of big exercises, and doing some filling in and fine tuning with minor exercises vs obsessing with switching things up.
Really, I think that’s more of a motivational line to get people to experiment then something clearly valid.
This is probably correct. A good workout is one where you feel strong as anything in the gym, and then when you’re in the changeroom you suddenly feel wiped out.
The American scientists one hears interviewed on TV and radio seem much more enthusiastic and animated than British ones, who seem quiet and reserved. The “In Our Time” BBC podcast provides evidence of this, for example in the episode n feathered dinosaurs in which there is an American scientist interviewed among the British ones, and it’s easy to picture, from their voices alone, the American scientist barely able to resist jumping out of his chair and waving his hands around while his British counterparts sit pensively at the table gripping their mugs of tea.
I am curious whether y’all think this pattern really exists and if so if it is due to general cultural differences between Americans and Brits — in particular differences in the respective subcultures of each that are most likely to produce scientists — or whether the actual science cultures in America and Great Britain are different. Or is it a selection thing?
This phenomenon has also been observed when it comes to letters of reference.
I think television producers in the two countries, and their perception on what their viewers expect credible scientists to sound/behave like, and possibly those producers wish to differentiate themselves from the stuffy/sensationalist counterparts across the pond, play into it more than actual differences among scientists.
Good point.
On the other hand, this pattern holds regardless whether the program is British or American.
That’s because American producers making programs about British scientists direct it in such a way as to emulate the British programs about British scientists in order to… uh…. seem more authentic. Convincing, or should I add more epicycles?
Sounds about right.
I’ve often heard that Americans gesture (and speak) “louder” than Europeans, so it seems like it could be just a general cultural difference.
Than all Europeans, or just German/British/Nordic types? mediterranean peoples are well known for gesticulating.
The former; I suppose I’ve mostly just heard this from British people. Don’t know how much it compares to French, German, or Scandinavian tendencies.
Obviously genetic selection. Probably selection pressures in the last couple hundred years. We’re going to need to do a GWAS.
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Just to head off confusion at the pass here: in case it’s not totally clear, I’m joking.
It’s not anything about science in particular, it’s just the general cultural trait of Americans being more directly expressive of their emotions than British people.
I would like to know who these scientists are who don’t show childlike glee at the prospect of feathered dinosaurs, so I can find them and learn what the hell’s wrong with them.
What you guys think about a site that tries to reconcile feminism and the manosphere by emphasising how misaligned goals (rather than one sex being the baddies) often trip us up in the dating world?
I think this article does a good job of arguing that our frustrations are often less to do with men or women being terrible and more about men and women chasing different things at different times in their lives (and then blaming the other sex when they don’t get what they want).
Is there anything important missing? What do you think of the site in general?
https://modernsexmag.com/
I don’t think that feminist organizations, feminist academics or feminist activists can be reconciled with the ‘manosphere’ in the near future, but it may be possible for a subset of more casual feminists. However, I think that there is a fundamental disinterest in society to recognize how some behaviors by women impact men negatively, and huge frustration about dating on both sides, so I don’t see this as a fertile place for reconciliation. The pain/anger/etc on both sides is just too great.
Ultimately, the truth is sad and involves unsolvable problems, which the article that you linked to also concluded. Realism tends to be unpopular, because it involves telling many people that they can’t have what they want. It’s generally a lot more pleasant to blame the other and pretend that they are blocking you from Utopia.
A good part of the article (and other articles on the site) is that the advice to men seems relatively decent. Certainly a lot better than: ‘be yourself’ or such nonsense. The article does place the onus on men to adapt to women and argues that women can’t be expected to adapt to men, which is probably off putting to egalitarians and MRA & instead, more PUA-friendly. However, PUAs are still going to recognize the unfairness and will merely accept it as a sad state of affairs that they cannot change. I think that this will clash with those (feminists) who don’t consider it unfair.
When the article talks about women seeking to have children young, it seems extremely wrong. My strong perception is that most women want to put off having women when young, so they can advance their career, travel and have fun in other ways, before getting locked into the ‘mommy-lifestyle.’ The man is then generally expected to accommodate this perfectly, by being an outgoing person who makes sufficient time for her at first, while later changing his preferences to be much of a provider and carer. The article fails to recognize this or talk about the consequences.
In general, there is only one contributor to the site. The articles do seem to suffer from the typical mind fallacy, where only one perspective is presented. I don’t see it going anywhere.
Excellent point about women wanting to put off kids and then expecting men to adapt, have never considered that before. The biological clock puts an imperative on having them, if not young, then not too old, but societal pressures to be successful and independent and the real desire to actually be a well rounded individual and not miss out on ‘living’ pull women in the other direction too. Have a career, freedom, travel, but don’t miss out on the family in the end. Tricky balancing act. But yeah, the expectation that men will knuckle down when the woman is ready is an interesting one.
Re: “PUAs are still going to recognize the unfairness and will merely accept it as a sad state of affairs that they cannot change.”
Is there anything you think could be done to give disgruntled incels and POAs the feeling that women/society are listening, and sympathise with their frustrations? More importantly, do you think there are any practical measures that could ease some of the frustration both sexes are dealing with in the sexual marketplace? Or is the endgame just reams of miscommunication, blame and frustration and lots of people being kinda unhappy?
The PUAs don’t care. They’re perfectly happy with the outcome of the sexual revolution and the “anti slut-shaming” campaigns. They play the game and get the casual sex. Should they decide in their 30s that they’d like to have a family and kids instead they just pick up a younger woman who’s ready for a family. As it stands they’re the only winners in this whole situation.
My coworker is 35 and he’s getting ready to marry a 22 year old. Some friends of his were making fun of him for it but he doesn’t care. This is all working out very well for him, and for her (he’s good looking and has a good job, nice car, and owns a home).
@achelois
The biological clock makes the current popular female strategy very risky, because once a woman decides to go for a family, a relatively short period is left. If it then turns out that her current partner doesn’t want to start a family and she needs to find a new guy, they have trouble getting pregnant or such, her just-in-time planning has fairly little slack, so women can then be under immense time pressure.
It’s not something that can be changed easily, primarily because of the requirements of having a career. People are expected to start working right after college and not to take long breaks or to work part-time, to advance. So postponing children is often the only option for a woman who wants to have both a career and children.
My perception is that women are much more allowed to air their grievances and talk about their failures in civilized society, among friends and family, but also in the media. I think that this has several important effects:
– It keeps these discussions much more in spaces that are not filled with the most disgruntled people, keeping people from radicalizing and building up an identity around their misfortune.
– It results in people seeing ‘rags to riches’ stories, as women more easily talk about failing in the past, even if they are successful now. This gives hope, as well as a chance to learn from their stories.
– It makes it far more clear that these grievances are widely felt. I think that incels especially, feel like they are extremely bad off compared to the rest of society, much more than is actually the case.
So one thing that can be done is to reduce these taboos. Breaking down taboos is one of the key ways in which activists effect change. A big issue here is that activists tend to need a strong community that give them sufficient status, because they tend to lose their status in general. For several reasons, this is especially hard to achieve for men’s issues.
—
Also, female ‘game’ is very socially acceptable. For example, it is totally acceptable for women to talk about and use make up. Make up is women deceiving men as to their natural looks. In part men know that they are being deceived and in part they don’t (especially when women use subtle make up). Some women constantly wear make-up in an implicit deal with their partner: I give you what you prefer, even if it is not actually me. Some women hook their partner by wearing make-up and then bait-and-switch.
The result of this socially acceptability is that it is far easier for women who are not naturally very capable at making themselves attractive, to get solid advice that works. Furthermore, women are encouraged to use some ‘dark triad’ methods. That seems far more effective and results in a better overall outcomes for both genders than to be totally deontologically moral.
In essence, a lot of male ‘game’/PUA is very similar to female ‘game’. It’s about doing things that make the man more attractive, even if it’s not what the man would naturally do. Then just like with women using make-up, some men keep up the act to give their partner what they want permanently & some do the bait-and-switch.
Just like with women, it seems that using some ‘dark triad’ methods is far more effective and results in a better overall outcomes for both genders than to be totally deontologically moral.
It seems to me that it is harder now for men to learn to use the appropriate level of ‘game,’ without going overboard or doing it too little. The latter is also a great risk since feminists tend to strongly push a deontological morality for men, based on rules that try to eliminate the risks for women. The best way to eliminate risks is to avoid doing anything that is effective and the advice by feminists to men tends to result in men and women being isolated from each other, which is rather safe, but also undesired by most men and women.
So I fear that I have to argue that pushing back against feminism on this front is also very important.
I think this is the real usefulness of the show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” It’s about the only thing that shows sympathy towards some guys who are incel. And then shows how drastically they can improve their circumstances with some effort.
Bloody hell, I read another article.
A quote:
This is actually the same kind of content that gives PUA forums their bad reputation. It’s toxic writing that attracts toxic people.
Then it actually gets worse, because she argues that men/nerds from rich backgrounds may be able to learn how to woo women, but that the situation for poor men is pretty hopeless, so we need more abortions to get rid of these men. :O
So…my end conclusion is that some PUAs may like this, but mainly because it validates their opinion that (feminist) women have completely unrealistic demands and should be manipulated emotionally to perceive men who don’t naturally have high social ability or other traits they demand. They will be hate-reading this content, rather than considering it just.
Her calling out social justice for virtue signalling is going to make her very unpopular among mainstream social justice advocates.
To be brutally honest, as awful as it is I’m pretty sure that is an accurate description of how most women think about most men. That’s how I get treated most of the time.
It reminds me of those two feminist types who were on here like a year or so ago who were like, “well yeah, I pity male abuse victims in a ‘look at the sad puppy’ way, but it’s ridiculous to believe they somehow ‘deserve’ happiness.” Except the way they said it was way more convincing that they actually believed it. Like, wow, you genuinely don’t care about any human being who does not either remind you of yourself or appear to be useful to you. I was under the impression you guys were a hallucination caused by outgroup biases.
Lemme provide a favorable out-of-context quote from the same article, to balance your unfavorable one:
I think this is unfair to her.
She’s not talking about men quietly complaining behind her back. She’s talking about strange men who publicly hit on her then insult her to her face.
I think that’s a pretty reasonable way to feel. When a guy screams “faggot!” at me from a passing car, I’m inclined to think of him as more of a stupid animal than much else.
I also agree with her that the other extreme of becoming groveling and apologetic is a total turn off.
@Aapje
On rich vs poor men, I think it was more about smart vs dumb men. Being dumb is really hard to change. Plenty of engineers and the like aren’t from rich families, but they’re smart and have a greater capacity to think their actions through, which might be why they tend to react less on gut instinct and wounded pride.
On:
some PUAs may like this, but mainly because it validates their opinion that (feminist) women have completely unrealistic demands and should be manipulated emotionally to perceive men who don’t naturally have high social ability or other traits they demand.
POA’s might read it that way, but it would be a faulty conclusion. Many women do have unrealistic expectations, but really dumb men, who are uneducated and can’t express themselves well verbally – no ‘game’ in the world is going to help them. It’s the equivalent of being fat. You can’t hide it anywhere, everybody can see it and basically everybody will judge you for it. Only dumb women pair up with dumb men (barring ridiculous high status outliers). Also, how could a really dumb man have the capacity to emotionally manipulate a woman, especially a smarter one?
I think that’s the main thing the article was trying to highlight – POV of smart woman explaining how low status low intellect men seem to her. It’s an ugly view, but honest.
Surely most smart men also view really dumb men in a similar way? I don’t imagine many SSC readers are regularly hanging out with dumb, inarticulate men… We segregate ourselves into our tribes and these men are not of our tribe. They’re of a tribe that (if we’re honest) we often look down on. That’s kind of bad, but it’s an ugly truth.
She seems to be arguing both that the social environment holds some people back, but also that men with low IQ cannot be taught.
My interpretation is that by advocating for abortions among the poor, she was addressing the first part: having fewer men grow up in a bad social environment, that is commonly found among the poor.
I don’t see any indication that she believes that the poor are dumber and favors abortions of the poor to do eugenics. If she was actually arguing for eugenics, that would make it impossible for her to get any decent traction with social justice people.
Both dumb men and women are not so pleasant to be around. She specifically wants dumb men gone, though, which is rather narcissist and sexist.
I appreciate Lipmann’s willingness to share her uglier and less socially acceptable thoughts and feelings. Public discussions of modern dating really suffer from how full of shit everybody is about what they think and what they want, so there’s real value in that. I’ll probably visit the site again.
Agreed. It’s refreshing because it’s not the sort of thing it’s acceptable to say.
Why do you think that feminists and the various subcultures in the manosphere want to reconcile?
Feminists and men’s rights activists (MRAs) hate one another despite (because of?) their nearly identical worldviews. MRAs can’t be reincorporated into feminism without a lot of compromises on important issues like domestic violence and divorce law. Feminists have no incentive to compromise on those issues.
Feminists and men going their own way (MGTOWs) aren’t going to reconcile because the latter are diligently separating themselves from the former. They don’t like each other but they don’t have to since MGTOWs make every effort to avoid institutional feminism. Feminism’s totalitarian instinct is to prevent any escape, but ultimately these guys aren’t catches to begin with and they have bigger fish to fry.
Feminists and pick up artists (PUAs) could probably reconcile. Feminists require much less effort to pick up and guys like Mark Manson have shown that you can write PUA-adjacent advice provided that you fill it with enough feminist buzzwords to get it past the censors. That said, it’s hard to talk about women’s preferences honestly within a feminist framework so this seems unlikely.
Feminists and traditional conservatives (Tradcons) are already old enemies and feminism is in the midst of a decades-long process of grinding them into the dust. That’s not about to change.
I don’t think incels are properly part of the manosphere, but nonetheless they seem to have little incentive to reconcile either.
How do feminists and MRAs have identical worldviews?
I think it’s an exaggeration, but both nominally advocate equal rights and both are primarily interested in advancing rights for *their* constituency.
I disagree with that. It seems to me that nearly all of the academic/gender studies & activist feminists want special privileges for women (benevolent sexism). My impression is that most MRAs want equal treatment.
In a society where people care far more about helping women, you will only get equal treatment by specifically demanding more for men, but asking for the same thing that women get, is only “advancing rights for *their* constituency” by virtue of society being sexist. The desired outcome is not to advance rights only for men, but to actually achieve equal rights.
@Aapje
I don’t think we actually disagree.
MRAs are basically feminists back when feminism was good (see also Fearful Symmetry.)
Thus, the majority right now are people who have noticed huge injustices and want to fix them, and while they’re susceptible to Super Happy Death Spiral type effects they don’t seem to have fallen in to any of those traps yet. There is a certain distribution of angriness, though, and as they achieve their goals only the moderates will boil off and angriest people will be left. Hopefully the angry people don’t get to bank on their predecessors reputation.
I don’t buy the “identical worldviews” thing; feminists believe in an invisible not-really-a-conspiracy against them while MRAs just think the laws are fucked because things radically changed in the last ~100 years and the law hasn’t caught up.
@toastengineer
Do you consider yourself an MRA?
I’d characterize the “old school MRAs” as basically a split (a secular heresy, if you want to call it that) among male feminists, with a few of the women going along with them. Mostly over stuff like custody and other divorce-related stuff, where the laws were based on sexist assumptions (“women are better at caring for children, men work jobs so they have money”) but that often were (or at least seemed) unfair to guys getting divorced. It became largely about this for a while, and attracted mostly embittered divorced guys. There was a while where people might as been as likely to know it as “father’s rights” as “MRA” or whatever. Some of these guys were loonies, and it attracted some guys who didn’t deserve to be anywhere near their kids, or who legit owed a bunch of back child support, or whatever.
It’s gotten a lot uglier in recent years, as it’s started attracting younger guys, whose complaint is that society isn’t fair (especially in regard to sex and dating and so on) to twentysomething (usually lower-status-in-context) men, rather that it isn’t fair to middle-aged guys getting divorced. It’s not moderates peeling off as objectives have been achieved, I don’t think. It’s that MRA, as a “brand”, has been swallowed up by redpill thinking, to the point that most people don’t think there’s a difference, if they think about it at all.
This is because the redpill elevator pitch is more appealing to men, especially younger men. “Society is unfair and let’s ask society to change; in the meantime, let’s sit around in a circle and say it’s unfair that we gotta pay our ex-wives when we don’t even get to see our kids” is kinda pathetic; “society is unfair and here’s how you can take advantage of that unfairness to get laid” is going to be more appealing to a lot of guys.
@dndnrsn
No, I’m a sympathizer but not one of them. For one thing I don’t actually actively seek out information about them, I’m just partially remembering following the anti-SJW folks back before they started winning, some of whom called themselves MRAs and were overall definitely adjacent, and partially going off the information that I’ve stumbled upon since.
I say to judge movements by their actual detectable effects on the universe, and the MRAs detectable effect seems to be a very small positive (running a small number of support organizations for divorced men that I certainly never got any help from) and a very small negative (occasionally being annoying and anti-rational in the way 90s feminists sometimes were,) summing to epsilon.
My impression was that the most prominent MRAs were mostly women; Karen Straughan, that lady who invented domestic abuse shelters, Christina Hoff Sommers (though I don’t think she ever called herself one…) uhh… others whose faces I remember but not names…
I worry that you’re confusing weakman MRAs with the real thing, though if you actually study them your perception is probably more accurate than mine. My impression from them was redpillers were their TERFs; no-one actually likes them and the few things they agree on are mostly by accident, but their enemies love to prop them up as “look at this dumbass feminist with a toilet seat on her head/look at this shitbag MRA saying he wants to knock up as women as he can and not face any consequences.” Also a lot of intentional conflation with PUA, which makes about as much sense as conflating feminism with knitting. Of course maybe the redpillers are actually growing, but I never got any impression that any of the MRAs who hung out with the “father’s rights” style MRAs thought of them as any more than “those psychos who stole our name with the help of dishonest feminists.”
The division I saw was the one between the old-fashioned “delete the laws that are explicitly about discriminating against men and boys and then quit” and the “society is unacceptably cruel and unfair in subtler ways” people who look too much like feminists to me to fully support them, because even though I think they’re ~90% right I didn’t see any Affective Death Spiral mitigation going on and a whole lot of mind-killing anger. Those two groups were held together pretty strongly by, well, the actual existence of laws and policies deliberately and openly or nearly openly designed to harm men; group 2 wanted to accomplish all group 1’s goals first, the difference is that they wanted to keep going afterwards.
I’m pretty sure I never saw anyone trying to “frame sex relations in terms of Marxist class struggle” though, they seemed too pissed at the feminists to ever do something that looked that much like them, and too right/anti-sjw-left adjacent.
Taking /r/MensRights as representative of the movement, it looks to be about 1/3 father’s rights, 1/3 opposition to false rape accusations, 1/3 opposition to feminism. Red pill stuff does not seem to be a significant part of it in terms of numbers. On the other hand, looking at /r/theredpill suggests that MRA is a minor but significant part of that movement.
@toastengineer
I don’t study it, so much as there was a whole bunch of coverage during a campus kerfuffle, and I’ve read some feminist-but-sympathetic stuff (eg, Faludi’s Stiffed). The big-name MRA who I think of is Warren Farrell; Hoff Sommers is more in fashion today? If Farrell is a weakman, he’s a weakman who’s done a lot of self-promotion.
I don’t think there’s a lot of intentional conflation; it’s simple outgroup homogeneity bias. Probably part of it too is that our society tends to put a lot of rhetorical value to using “rights language” even when what’s being talked about isn’t about “rights” in any technical sense. But mostly outgroup homogeneity bias.
Did you notice an age gap, too?
I did not, since this was all internet-based, though I would be mildly surprised if the more conservative (in the ‘don’t change society’ sense) MRAs did not tend to be older.
I have no idea who Warren Farrel is. I’m not sure how big C. H. Sommers is today but she was a biggish deal in the late 90s and had a mild resurgence when the anti-SJW movement took off. My grandfathers library contained a copy of The War Against Boys, so she crosses the “do random people have copies of this person’s books” test at least.
I’m not sure how accurate even trying-to-be-sympathetic feminist discussion of MRAs is going to be; Cassie Jay’s The Red Pill is basically an entire documentary of “I actually talked to some MRAs and it turns out everything anyone says about them is a blatant lie.” And it’s banned in at least one country (Australia) so that tells you how popular the movement is with the people in power.
In fact if your “campus kerfuffle” happened in the last couple years you’re probably thinking of those ROK nutjobs that organized a bunch of protests at colleges a couple years back; they’re radical redpillers, they just call themselves MRAs. They’re the one political organization not currently in power that genuinely scares me.
@toastengineer
Warren Farrell is more progressive than Hoff Sommers. He served on the New York City Board of NOW, so he started off as a second wave feminist, but he was actually serious about gender equality, which caused him to clash with feminists, as he started calling out sexism in women (as well).
My impression is that Farrell has been highly influential on MRAs that go beyond father’s rights, for instance, by calling men the disposable sex in 1993.
Note that Cassie Jay’s The Red Pill was not actually banned in Australia. Their first public viewing in Australia was cancelled after feminist protests & various other cinema’s and other places refused to show it. However, it was shown elsewhere and it can be seen in Australia through streaming services.
Cassie Jay was treated very unfairly by the Australian media, a true media hit job.
@toastengineer
Nah, this was before that. They were more old-school MRAs, not redpillers.
Not identical but nearly identical, at least compared to every pre-feminist ideology I’m aware of.
Both feminists and MRAs frame sex relations in terms of Marxist class struggle, with an oppressor sex exploiting an oppressed sex. All the usual tools of Marxist analysis, such as false consciousness, are on display.
Both feminists and MRAs view the relevant differences between the sexes as arising from imposed gender roles rather than biological differences, and thus share the ostensible goal of sexual equality through social reform. The fact that both are reformist rather than revolutionary isn’t unusual for modern day Marxists.
The fact that they disagree about which sex is oppressed and which is the oppressor seems hardly relevant compared to the fact that they both are using identical modes of analysis and activism. Neither one can possibly achieve their goals because their premises are garbage and their methods are ineffective at anything except for accumulating power in the hands of unscrupulous madmen.
Some feminists attack MRAs by claiming that MRAs believe that men are oppressed by women and then point to an example of women having it worse than men to ‘debunk’ men’s rights activism (note that I have never been able to convince a feminist that men are not oppressing women, by pointing to a situation where men do worse). However, the claim that men are oppressed by women is one that I have rarely heard from MRAs. Certainly far, far, far, far less than I have heard the opposite from feminists.
Social justice people who claim unidirectional oppression tend to defend it based on a post-modern variant of Critical theory*, which argues that groups who are over-represented in positions of power cannot but help themselves and hurt those who are underrepresented.
For obvious reasons, this is not an argument that MRAs tend to use.
Again you are conflating fundamentally different beliefs by leaving out important differences.
It is obvious that all social activists believe that there are unfair social aspects, or they wouldn’t be social activists, but would either resign themselves to the status quo or would embrace eugenics or technology as the solution.
However, very many feminists seem to believe that biological differences are so minor, that any significant inequality of outcome must be caused by a social element. MRAs generally seem far more willing to believe that there are significant biological differences and thus tend to focus less on equality of outcome and more on the genders being treated equally when they make (or desire to make) the same choices.
If you look at what MRAs tend to want, you see that they don’t tend to argue for a class struggle, where men must rise up and join together against the women. Instead, they tend to argue for equal treatment under the law and by (government) policy.
I would argue that MRAs tend to be more like MLK and (this wave of) feminists tend to be more like Malcolm X.
Good article and very honest. But at the end she misses the obvious. What do you do when you have misaligned goals? You compromise. This is the old adage “men trade love for sex and women trade sex for love.” The author’s hypothetical girl keeps selecting men for a relationship (love) and then giving away the sex before getting the commitment for the love. She notes that women are the gatekeepers of sex and men are the gatekeepers of relationships, but maybe the solution is to taboo opening the one gate while the other gate is still shut. Open both gates, or neither gate.
I think the idea of reconciliation is incorrect.
Fifteen years ago, the response by a typical feminist when male rape victims were brought up was to deny it was a significant issue and only brought up by trolls to distract people from real problems. Today, a typical feminist will insist that male rape victims are of course a feminist issue and always have been. The victory will be a couple of years hence, incremental, and largely invisible, even to those who fought for it, already moving on to a new fringe position.
It isn’t a matter of reconciliation. Rather, it is a matter of moving overton windows such that the things people think need to be reconciled move far enough apart that it no longer matters. There will never be a reconciliation; there will only be increasing irrelevance as the views of the groups move further and further afield and find it harder and harder to recruit new members.
(That said, a pox on the house of feminism for having made a schism necessary in the first place.)
A few thoughts.
—
Men can’t be the only ones trammelled by the combination of environment and genetics, right? I know there has got to be some reporting bias (after all, who would have the temerity to write such an essay about icky bitches trying to reach above their station?) but are there no women who are frustrated to the same degree and for the same reasons? This seems… incomplete, somehow.
—
She describes men who are unconfident, and who are basically low on prospects due to some combination of inborn and environmental factors, who are frustrated, and who are thus all the more belligerent. Presuming that the worst-off of these men might be unreachable in any practical sense, and so – she baldly asks – is it worth it for them to have been born?
Even though I strongly disagree with the way that she connects “These men were never aborted” with “I find these men revolting,” nor do I wish anyone ill (or dead), this does make me wonder if some of this issue is due to the modern professional landscape. In the not-too-distant past, there were more available jobs in professions that were more physically demanding and more dangerous, and these jobs were more valued by society. Those professions would have provided some of these guys with a better physique and a justified confidence… and also, some of them would have died in the course of their work. Think of sailors, miners, lumberjacks, firemen – all hot, all at risk. On an object level, that would fit more closely with what she describes.
So maybe the source of the issue isn’t that all of the sudden women are beset by horny troglodytes, in whom they place their justified scorn. Maybe instead the issue is how our society has aligned physicality, risk, and status in such a way that disqualifies certain persons a priori.
—
She also describes that many of these men just don’t know how to approach a woman, at all, or how to handle or anticipate rejection. Some of them have emotional outbursts, others become obsequious. I honestly dislike PUA, in terms of its premises, goals, and methods. But if it seems to work, and if it is doing so by teaching men how to be objective, project confidence, and deal with rejection, then it is accomplishing some of the relationship goals that the writer here thinks are likely unreachable. Maybe PUA can function as a transitional step. Sort of like how Karl Marx viewed capitalism.
I mean, I don’t disagree, I just think that this is incredibly obvious to anyone who has associated with humans for more than 5 minutes and doesn’t have an ideological axe to grind.
At first I had a problem with the article because it was simply an Apex Fallacy from the male perspective, but the author did bring up so-called “Invisible Men.”
Your problem is that you aren’t going to convince people that DO have an axe to grind. Like, the incel guys are going to see some of her comments about aborting the unintelligent low-game men and think all women are terrible. Which is true in a “we are all sinners” sense, but not true from a “civilization is doomed because YOU are uncivilized” sense.
@ADBG: I really think that’s the root problem with feminism, anti-racism, etc. These secular ideologies were born in Western Christian civilization but instead of saying “we are all sinners”, they say “the only thing standing in the way of utopia is that you men/whites are all sinners.”
I think this is substantially untrue, at least for anti-racism. Social Justice, with its heavy emphasis on privilege discourse, is mainly a white and Asian phenomenon and carries with it very strong connotations of self-examination — “we are all sinners, and these innocents are the victims of our sin”. It does like to pedestalize academic black or Hispanic authors writing for a white audience, but that’s not where most of the day-to-day social pressure is coming from. The way regular black and Hispanic guys talk about race shares some of the same concepts, but the overall approach is very different and its top priorities are much more pragmatic — less concerned with implicit bias, more concerned with e.g. police brutality.
(I think every time a post starting “If you are white…” has crossed my Facebook feed, it’s been shared by a white friend. I’m a little short on details, though, because that’s usually about as far as I read before unfollowing them.)
You could make a better case for feminism.
@Nornagest: OK, so change the pronoun to “we.” It’s still doing the same work as the doctrine of Adam’s Fall, but only white people are Children of Adam. How often do academics acknowledge, for example, human depravity in pre-Columbian America rather than assigning all evil to Europeans?
Depends what branch of academia you’re talking about. Historians and anthropologists are usually pretty willing to acknowledge all the horrifying shit that’s gone on in the past, although they’ll often downplay it for understandable reasons — if you spend twenty years studying the Aztecs you’ll probably fall in love with them a little, mountains of skulls and all. I took a few courses in school from a Marxian archaeologist specializing in the pre-contact Southwest, and he didn’t gloss much over as far as I can tell.
Critical Identity Studies types would very rarely bring it up, but they’d say it’s outside their ambit: those fields are more or less defined as the study of group marginalization in a modern context. I have all sorts of issues with the assumptions that bakes in, but if you ignore that it’s pretty reasonable. Though e.g. Latin American Studies is generally pretty willing to invoke positive aspects of pre-contact culture to motivate some present-day quirk.
I’m not gonna offer an excuse for sociology.
While there’s definitely a distinction between the way Social Justice talks about race vs the way everyday black, hispanic, etc. people talk about race, I think that implicit bias IS an everyday-black-people concept, if not in those words exactly.
Like, everyday black people aren’t going around talking about the Implicit Association Test and how people need to take it to see how racist they are on the inside. But they WILL talk about how the person who says “I’m not racist, I don’t have any problem with black people” can both be entirely sincere and still do racist things sometimes, if only out of ignorance. Is this a similar enough concept to “implicit bias”?
Sure. But I don’t get the sense that that takes as central a position as privilege does in SJ theory. I’m saying the priorities are different, not that the concept is totally absent — and that the priorities are different because SJ content is written primarily by and for white and Asian people who’re… how to put this charitably… dissatisfied with liberal* approaches to race, and looking for other ways to conceptualize themselves relative to it.
(*) As in “liberals get the bullet too”.
I often listen to certain modern pop philosophers like Sam Harris have conversations and think they don’t sound so much smarter than I am, but is this a mistake? When I try to speak, or write I come across as less smart than I actually am, because of the difficulties in translating fully formed many faceted concepts into human language. Could it be that since the pop philosophers are better speakers than I am, their internal thought process is again wildly more complex than my own, and I can infer mind boggling levels of thought from that?
Well, you’re in a good place to practice.
@Forward Synthesis
It seems very likely that the conversion ratio between intelligence and perceived intelligence is far from constant, so some of these people may actually not smarter than people who are perceived as less intelligent, but may be merely better at articulating their thoughts in ways that are or at least seem smart.
Also, anything that is popular is presumably of limited intelligence, given that the inferential distance probably increases with a greater gap in intelligence. So presumably, as people make a smarter argument, they will give more valuable insight to people of less intelligence, but only to a point where the other person can still follow enough of the argument. After that point, the other person may still be able to recognize that the person is smart, but they will no longer be interested in listening to them.
Since few people are interested in listening to me, I can therefor conclude that I am super-smart 😛
Ability to communicate clearly is a mix of talent and skill, and it varies across people. It’s probably correlated with intelligence, but it’s not the same thing as intelligence.
Being quick with a response is also not the same thing as intelligence, though I imagine it’s correlated with intelligence.
I know people in my field, whose work I’m qualified to evaluate, who are extremely good at communicating, and others who are bad at it. And people who are extremely quick on their feet, mentally, and others who almost need to go off for a couple hours and think about each response in a conversation.
Someone like Sam Harris is guaranteed to be a good communicator and quick on his feet, because otherwise he wouldn’t be successful at doing books and podcasts. If you judge his intelligence by how verbally adept he is, I think you’re going to overestimate him–not because he’s not smart (he sure seems smart when I’ve heard him speaking), but because he’s probably an unusually good communicator for someone with his level of intelligence.
I love reading your opinions, Aapje. Sorry to lower your intelligence.
The types of people you mention have done a lot of writing, and have been discussing/debating with many different people for a long time. Writing is a form of thinking – something like ‘thinking + ordering’, and if you do enough of it and in probing ways, your conversations naturally benefit. Similarly, speaking to many different people, especially those wiser than you are, will hone your speech.
No. I am not a neuroscientist but ‘wildly more complex’ thought processes do not seem apt to describe the mind of experienced writers and debaters. They are just traversing conceptual terrain that they have navigated before, and can see the obstacles well in advance of the ordinary person.
There is also the possibility that the fact they don’t seem that much smarter than you is because you aren’t listening closely enough, or are not grasping the magnitude of their ideas. A little epistemic humility never hurts.
I’ve had similar thoughts; I think people generally come across as less intelligent than they are “on the inside” both because communication is hard, and because good communicators edit before transmitting. But in the specific case of Sam Harris, I am pretty confident he isn’t much smarter than me — he doesn’t just say simple things, but also stupid ones.
Since popularizers target the general population, the complexity of thoughts in their work is a very poor hueristic for the complexity of their internal thought processes. I’d also question how much you really understand a concept you can’t express in your native language.
As others have said, Sam Harris and people like him are most certainly “smart,” but there’s no reason to think their ability as communicators translates 1:1 with the complexity of their thought process/validity of their ideas.
Seems trivial to think of realms where charismatic or eloquent or handsome popularizers simply aren’t as smart as the unpolished (or nerdy) practitioners/academics doing the real work.
I definitely do not think of people giving TED talks as the height of intellect.
Might be useful to distinguish intelligence from wit. In the case of Sam Harris, I think he misses the ball on quite a few things, but also has a better way with words and sense of humor than most other people of his type. I specifically remember something he said on one podcast, where he described engaging with people who come at him in bad faith as “It’s like they’ve already drawn the chalk outline of my body on the pavement and they expect me to just lie down in it”… which is one of my favorite metaphors I’ve ever heard anyone say.
How do you all interpret the name of the blog?
I know it is a near anagram of Scott Alexander, but is there a deeper meaning to it? The name wasn’t chosen at random.
Slate: A slate is a tablet, something that can be written on or the written record itself. The connection to a blog is obvious. However, a slate also means a list of candidates or propositions.
Star: A star is a performer with great talent, but I don’t think Scott is that boastful. Star also means something that is followed, a guide. A star can be followed by choice, fortune, or destiny.
Codex: A book of codes, fundamental rules or laws.
Thus, I think the name of the blog means roughly “A list of candidates for the code of destiny”
As I’ve argued before, Scott is actually an AI. His interface is a tablet (slate). His software is based on machine learning, so it is unreadable spaghetti code, similar to how a traditional codex would be a long continuous scroll. He is powered by the ITER Tokamak, in which the plasma burns as hot as a star (the scientists who control ITER are just pretending that construction is not yet done).
It’s quite obvious, really.
I’m with you on the slate as list part, but I would suggest that star codex works better when kept together as a clear references to the Codex Astartes. And what is the most important lesson of that codex? Loyalty to the Emperor. Ever wonder why the comments section is so tolerant of right wing voices? Because Scott is compiling a list of people who will be inducted into the Masons in the glorious Archipelago future.
The plan is clear. All glory to the Inevitable Masonic Technomonarchy!
I think “Slate” should be read as an adjective modifying “Star” – either the color slate, or the material. That would make the title something like “Book of the Stone Star.”
(This is supported by the header image, which clearly shows a grey star)
As for what this signifies? Well, stars in the sky are not made out of stone. Nor are celebrities. But you could perhaps describe a precious gemstone as a “Stone Star.” Like the Star of Africa. So the title would be best translated as “The coded book of precious gems.”
Clearly, the blog is a treasure map to Scott’s secret trove of gold and jewels. His posts are filled with clues and veiled references to its location, if you can puzzle them out. We know our host loves Kabbalah and finding secret correspondences – this would surely be his magnum opus.
EDIT: Even better, Scott wrote a post about where to find the Silmarils – the most valuable jewels in Middle-Earth, one of which was placed in the sky as a star. That must be where the chain of clues starts!
I just interpret it as science fiction-y sounding nonsense meant to give off the signal that if you like anagrams and science fiction, then you’ll probably like this type of place/be the type of person we welcome you here.
As a result, because I dislike science fiction, for years I ignored it when people recommended this blog to me. Which was a mistake because no one has ever articulated my beliefs better than Scott.
I always interpreted it less as scifi and more as trying to invoke images of an ancient mystical conspiracy. This blog is after all about distributing powerful and sometimes borderline forbidden knowledge to insiders of a weird math cult.
But maybe we read different scifi.
I read basically no sci-fi. I mostly just saw “star” and was like ugh booooriiinnngggg.
The name is clearly a reference to Slate magazine.* Metaphorically, Scott is constructing a concordance, or codex, containing footnotes to the magazine’s thinkpieces. The star is a common textual idiom denoting a footnote.
[*] This is probably completely wrong
This is actually very similar to what I thought at first. Back in the early-mid 2000’s, Slate used to have a “top commenter” system whereby certain recognized commenters had their posts appear with a star next to their names. They were known as “star posters” or something very similar to that. When I first saw the name of the Web site, I thought it was an offshoot of Slate formed or populated primarily by Slate star posters.
Via WNYC: a new study on school choice in the NYC public schools shows that racial segregation persists even in the absence of strict attendance boundaries. Furthermore, it’s not just “white flight” driving this, as black parents have made the most use of school choice and charter schools. Also, this study is about elementary school enrollment, which isn’t based on test scores so the Horrible Banned Discourse doesn’t come into play here.
If you believe that Brown v. Board was rightly decided, and that “separate is inherently unequal”, this throws cold water on the notion that vouchers – or residential desegregation – will produce real equality. However, the more recent Parents Involved decision prohibits race-based allocations to schools, so I don’t know how to desegregate. All enrollment by lottery? Somehow I don’t think Tribeca parents will be too keen on sending their kids to Upper East Side schools five miles away, never mind that those are both rich white neighborhoods in District 2. The only other answers I can come up with are even more outlandish and less likely to work.
I almost commented without reading the original study, which would have been an enormous mistake. I strongly recommend that everyone actually click through to the link and not just read the WNYC article.
Two important facts not mentioned in the article:
1. The largest single group exercising school choice, by a large margin, are black families (Fig 1). Similarly, black families are far and away the most likely to actually leave public schools for charters altogether; most white, Asian, and Hispanic families opt to move to different zoned or unzoned public schools (Fig 3).
2. Black families who choose different schools saw an absolutely extraordinary increase in their children’s test scores: a 13% increase in English and a 19% increase in Math scores (Fig 4).
ETA: I wrote this in a misleading way. The increase is in how many students performed at or above grade level. Still a huge improvement, just wanted to clarify.
So to sum up: Black people, when offered the choice, overwhelmingly pick the options most likely to help their children succeed. They abandon their crappy neighborhood public schools and move their kids into charter schools where they do much better academically.
We live in truly strange times when our “segregationists” are predominantly black people trying to improve their kids lot in life and succeeding!
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Is that compared to their earlier test scores or relative to the black population that doesn’t leave?
In other words, are they actually doing better at the new school or are the most capable black students leaving?
It’s relative to the population which doesn’t leave.
Now as you mention there are a number of ways this could be interpreted. The charter schools could be much better, so that more children are able to keep pace with their schoolwork. The charter schools could be more selective, so that more of the children they admit are able to keep pace with their schoolwork. It could be a combination of both of those factors. Or it could be something else entirely.
But I don’t see how either of the options you bring up are supposed to be bad things. Allowing diligent and capable kids to get out from under the yoke of their disruptive and incompetent peers is a good thing. Even if all the charter schools are doing is sorting out the problem kids, that’s a valuable service that the public schools have thus far failed to provide.
This is an archetypical crab bucket situation. The logic seems to be that we can’t let just some black kids do better in school; it’s better if all of them have lousy educations than to let any escape poverty.
It’s also worth understanding what the impact of charter schools actually is, so we can know how much of a benefit they provide and decide whether it’s worth it.
Maybe charter schools are ultimately just selecting the best students (smart, well-behaved, with parents that care enough to lean on them to get their homework done). In that case, the charters may still be making the world a better place, by making the lives of the smart fraction of the poor black kids of Baltimore have happier lives. But if that doesn’t change their life outcomes much (say, send more of them to college or help more of them stay out of jail), then we’re just running this program to make those kids happier. That’s valuable, but not as valuable as making them better off in the rest of their lives.
Alternatively, maybe they’re actually helping the kids academically, so that the kids going to the charters end up on grade level and not needing a bunch of remedial classes once they get to college, say. In that case, the benefit is a lot bigger.
We need to know that benefit and be honest about it, for charters just as for universal pre-K (which seems to me to have the same sort of questions hanging around it). Then we can decide if charters are worth the costs, or whether we’d rather accomplish the same goals in some other way (like building reform schools for the worst-behaved kids).
@albatross11
What costs are there for charters? I mean, the schools obviously cost money, but no more, and often less, than other public schools.
It just seems like if the end result is black students in charter schools, Hispanic students in poor neighborhood schools, white and Asian students in rich neighborhood schools, and this is what everyone wants, then what was the point of desegregation? Were the court cases, the protests, the fire hoses, the National Guard all for nothing?
For an even more striking example, last year the NY Times profiled District 1, which abolished zoned schools altogether and has school choice for everyone. Remarkably, self-segregation is so pervasive that two schools in the same building had dramatically different racial breakdowns.
The segregated schools that got broken down by court cases and national guardsmen were imposed on everyone by the state. Black kids weren’t allowed to go to the same schools as whites, and black kids presumably got a worse education.
What you’re talking about is the result of parents choosing where they want their kids to go, and finding schools that are a good mix for their culture and preferences. It seems completely different to me.
All kinds of things that are choices are segregated in that sense–movies, music, TV, books, favorite foods, what kind of alcohol you like, etc. We could impose some kind of coercive desegregation on the world in those areas, but it would make the world a worse place.
It shouldn’t be a mystery that when given a choice people prefer to go to the same schools as their friends and neighbors attend, to hang out with people they have stuff in common with. In NY, that just happens to fall along more black/white racial lines, while in say, Southern CA, you’d end up with difference lines.
What you’re looking for to explain the segregation results of free choice is the Schelling model. It explains how mild preferences can lead to larger segregations than you’d expect. There’s lots of academic research on how this works in various contexts.
This is a great example of what I like to call the totalitarian instinct of modern liberalism. If it is not forbidden, it is compulsory; if it is not compulsory, it is forbidden.
Under Jim Crow it was illegal to run an integrated school. Integration was forbidden.
Under desegregation it was / is illegal to run a segregated school. Integration was / is compulsory.
Now with school choice and charter schools, integration is neither forbidden nor (entirely) compulsory. People can put their kids in integrated schools if they want to but they aren’t required to. And in the process they seem to be, in New York City at least, making better choices for their children’s educations.
Isn’t this a huge victory for the cause of human liberty? Why is this regrettable and not something to be celebrated?
“The New England Puritans also used the word “liberty” in a third meaning, which became urgently important to the founders of Massachusetts. This was the idea of “soul liberty,” or “Christian liberty,” an idea of high complexity. Soul liberty was freedom to serve God in the world. It was freedom to order one’s own acts in a godly way—but not in any other.”
Their intellectual, and often physical descendents, modern progressives uphold this tradition. Freedom to them means freedom to live in a
godlycarbon neutralmorally correct way, and if you aren’t living that way then something is wrong that needs to be corrected.It’s not a question of liberty, it’s a question of equality. For over half a century the received wisdom has been if the races are segregated then the non-dominant races will necessarily be getting an inferior education. “Separate but equal” is impossible regardless of how hard you try to make it not so. (Certainly the test scores aren’t equal, but I’m not interested in arguing with Sailerites about why that’s the case. Been there, done that.) If we’re abandoning all that now, I’d expect there to be a bit more of an outcry.
So, the separate-but-unequal model would predict that the heavily-segregated Chinese language schools would lead to worse academic results for their students, right? How does that track with actual real-world outcomes?
This is similar to the situation in Minneapolis for many years. North Minneapolis has been losing students from the public schools for years. North Minneapolis is mostly Black and poor. Minnesota allows easy transfers between school districts and also also has a lot of charter schools. Most of these kids are going to suburban school districts and charter schools. The suburban schools are now more integrated, but the charter schools are far more segregated than the public schools, many of them being 80-90% Black. And I think there is one charter that is almost 100% Hmong.
Unfortunately, most of these charter schools seem to do very badly, at least based on their average test scores. Now it may be that these kids wouldn’t have any better test scores if they had stayed in the public schools, but it is suggestive that these schools don’t have much academic worth. It would be very beneficial for someone to do longitudinal studies on students going to the charters, so we’d know better if it’s the school or the kids causing the low test scores. There are a couple of charters that are doing very well, but they are in the minority. It is very interesting, however, that the largest cause of segregation in Minneapolis schools is due to “Black flight.”
I also wanted to say that I certainly don’t believe in the broad statement made in Brown that separately is inherently unequal, at least in the implication that at least one of the groups is inherently worse off when there is separate education. I think there are situations where a race or a culture could get superior education by breaking off from the main group, and the group they broke off from might also increase their achievement. I read this case, and I believe the Supremes decided rightly that the Whites did harm the education of Blacks in that case by giving them a separate (and much worse) education. But that doesn’t mean it is always the case.
One amusing (in the larger scheme of things) thing about that report: They note that in 2007 there was a Supreme Court decision forbidding voluntary desegregation plans based on race. So what did they do? Immediately go looking for proxies for race to use.
how does that even make sense? the whole point of de-segregation plans is changing the racial mix. if you’re not talking about race, what are you trying to de-segregate?
I don’t think the claim is that vouchers will actively produce de-segregation, just vouchers can’t possibly be worse in this regard than the current practice of assigning people to schools based on where they live.
the problem with segregation was that it mandated the separation of blacks into separate (and almost invariably inferior) schools (and other venues, of course). If parents have the ability to send their kids to schools filled with kids of other races, and simply choose not to, then why do we care? Do we consider the continued existence of the historically black colleges an affront to integration?
How do you mean? I think that in a genuinely voucherized school system (i.e. a system where virtually all schools are either privately operated or charters that only get funding based on enrollment) then lotteries are almost a necessity. Schools should have to admit all comers, and if they have more applicants than they can handle they should have to hold a lottery for a substantial number of them, e.g if the school has 100 slots, and they get 150 applicants, they can admit 50 of their choice and have to have a lottery for the remaining 50 slots.
Why not let them choose entirely (i.e. based on merit), or force them to choose based on distance (since all else being equal students would benefit from being at a nearer school)?
going by distance is just bringing back the public school system we have now, which is the problem we’re trying to solve. Letting schools choose their entire student bodies will lead to endless fighting over racial disparities, schools cherry picking the “best” students, and so forth. a lottery substantially cuts off those arguments.
That depends on why you believe that separate is inherently unequal.
One reason could be that, in a segregated public school system, the white parents, being more politically influential, will get resources distributed unequally in their favor–make sure that the good teachers end up in the white schools, the bad teachers in the black schools, for instance. Vouchers eliminate that situation, since all the schools get the same amount of money per student and teachers are allocated by the market not the school board.
Obviously there are other possible reasons for which that wouldn’t be the case.
Brown v. Board of Ed rejected the resource argument:
Warren quotes a lower court in the same case in stating:
Good news to share: job offer came in! Finally, the job market works in my favor, for the first time since graduating in the middle of a freakin’ recession. 15% bump is nice as well.
This puts me a lot closer to where I want to be, career-wise. No more collections for me, on to factory costing, and then hopefully building up some FP&A experience in 2 years.
Current company is likely to be a bit disappointed, but they’ve given me one hell of a run-around these last 4 months, so I’m not feeling sympathetic. Given the FP&A job I wanted to some random kid with 1 year of experience and crappy job performance kind of ruined my enthusiasm.
Congratulations on the new position! Few things better than leaving behind a negative work situation.
Congratulations!
Grats!
Congratulations, and good luck with the new job.
Awesome, great news!
So what is FP&A? I suppose I should know this since I am an accountant, but I think it is the latest terminology and I am behind the times. Maybe it is what used to be called a cost accountant, where you primarily calculate inventory costs and cost of sales? If so, that does sound a lot better than collections. More analytical and less begging customers to pay. At least to me it sounds a lot better.
FP&A – financial planning and analysis. (We (I’m in an FP&A role) are the group that’s primarily responsible for forecast (AKA Financial Planning), explaining differences between actual results and forecasts (aka Analysis). It’s on the fringe of true accounting, as it’s on the fringe of actuarial work–but you’ll generally have experts in both in FP&A at an insurance company.
The first game of SSC diplomacy (see summary here) finished a couple of weeks ago. Anyone interested in another? If you are, fill in this form. Comment below with any questions.
Geoff Graham asks an interesting question on Twitter:
Depends on the position. For most corporate positions, marathon, hands down. Marathon finishers are largely young, driven, and college-educated.
What am I hiring them for?
I would expect that the Porsche owner is a college graduate; Porsches are expensive, and most non-college careers that would lead to Porsche ownership (e.g. master tradesman, possibly elite salesperson though they usually would have college) wouldn’t lead them to applying for a job in any field I’d be involved in hiring for. There’s the chance that they aren’t college graduates and inherited or were given the Porsche, or bought a really old Porsche, but I’d bet against.
Completing a marathon selects for tenaciousness and willingness to endure pain. That’s positive too, not as positive as past success though.
So I go for the Porsche owner. Unless I find out it’s one of the SUVs.
I was gonna say, if it’s the Cayenne forget about it. In fact, I’d want to know the model and year. If it’s a 911 for instance it’s gotta be pre-1998, before the water-cooled engines. And none of those weird ones from the 80s with the pop-up headlights.
The twitter poll result is interesting, the marathon winner won hands down.
Knowing nothing else, I’d agree with that actually. College degrees are common enough now the signal isn’t as strong as it was a few decades ago. Successful marathon completion however shows good conscientiousness and good health (which helps prevent lose work due to health issues). The Porsche owner could be a talented worker who made a lot of money, or someone who has trouble controlling their own spending, or someone who makes lower amounts but focuses everything on their car, or heir to a larger fortune. Too many not helpful ways that signal can go so they’re probably the lowest for me.
You are all invited to estimate the portion of the US population that has run a marathon.
Make a guess, and check it against the actual figure, here: https://www.statisticbrain.com/marathon-running-statistics/
V thrffrq nobhg unys n creprag, onfrq ba n pehqr rfgvzngr bs ubj znal znenguba ehaaref V xabj if. gbgny ahzore bs npdhnvagnaprf, naq na rira pehqre pbeerpgvba sbe ubj jrveq n fbpvny pvepyr V unir. Gheaf bhg unys n creprag vf rknpgyl evtug.
My fermi estimate:
Bar va frira gubhfnaq va gur HF (nobhg svsgl gubhfnaq va n trarengvba, gbgny HF cbchyngvba nobhg guerr uhaqerq svsgl zvyyvba)
Survey says… Off by n snpgbe bs guvegl svir.
Eh, not too bad. (By which I mean, terrible)
I was a factor of two too large. I’m reasonably happy with that.
Wow, I guessed it perfectly right. Exactly on the nose.
This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in literally days.
V jnf bss ol unys creprag
So pretty good I guess?
Yeah, I agree with everybody else. Marathon runner. Able to work hard, patient, well-organised etc.
College degree is definitely positive, but less so.
Owning a porsche puts me off. Ok, you’re successful, but your priorities are very different from mine. I guess depending on the job that might be a good thing, but my gut reaction is negative.
This seems like a gotcha question where you’re tricked into overthinking and the right answer is to hire the college graduate.
Yes. Education is a proxy for intelligence, which is positively correlated with pretty much any kind of job. Inasmuch as the job isn’t very specific in other requirements, the college grad is the correct choice almost always.
I hate the hollow signaling of education and the overcredentializing it feeds into, but I still think you’re right!
Mmm. If my business grows to the point where I’ll be doing advert-based hiring, I’ll just have the applicants do an IQ test. (Yes, it is legal here.)
I’m not sure how much they predict each other (and presuambly you don’t know that they’re not all college grad marathon runners with Porsches). I sort of feel like I might go for the marathon runner but only because I believe most marathon runners were also college grads…
Hack the NSA to get data on all of mankind, run one of those fancy deep learning algorithms, find out which choice optimizes which job?
Question for the attorneys in this forum.
Is it possible for a judge to dismiss charges against a clearly guilty defendant on grounds that amount to “no harm, no foul” or something like that? How much discretion do judges have in these matters?
What you’re asking is basically a tautology, and for that reason the answer is “no.” The phrase “clearly guilty defendant” means, by definition, that there is a criminal statute the elements of which are each satisfied by the defendant. At that point, there is no basis to dismiss the charges. Magnitude of harm is often one such element of various crimes (e.g. damage or theft in excess of $500) and in such cases, a “no harm no foul” ruling would not be dealing with a “clearly guilty defendant.”
What you’re describing is somewhat closer to jury nullification, where a jury refuses to convict a clearly guilty defendant. The jury is, more or less, a black box, so there is more room for them to do so.
The closest judicial equivalent is a very low sentence following a guilty verdict. Except where limited by sentencing statutes, judges typically have quite a lot of discretion at the sentencing phase.
There’s also, in many states, the possibility of deferred judgement (probation before judgement, adjournment contemplating dismissal, probably other terms for it), where the defendant is put on probation and if the terms of the probation are fulfilled, the charges are dismissed without entering a judgement of guilty.
(Maryland managed to mess this up by treating PBJ as a guilty verdict in certain circumstances, which exactly spoils the reason for accepting probation before judgement in the first place)
Sure, you see a lot of this for, e.g., college kids drunk in public or other misdemeanors from an otherwise clean record. But I wouldn’t consider that to be the same thing as dismissing the charges. It’s just an alternate version of a suspended sentence which recognizes the damage that a conviction can do to a person’s record.
Interestingly, most entities requiring a background check have gotten wise to this – often you get demands for information on any arrest not leading to a conviction or any convictions which have been expunged or charges nolle pros’d and are thus not of record.
On the ‘no harm’ part of your question:
By way of counterexample, in civil/tort law a person can be found guilty of an offense in cases where there is provably zero harm eventuated from the misdeed. In such cases the ‘foul’ is acting in a way that may give rise to some harm under certain circumstances, though they did not arise in this particular case. This is sufficient grounds for civil liability.
I would say that a judge’s discretion would stop at cases like the above. It would resume again in (some) cases involving minors, those with cognitive impairments or first offenders where the it simply isn’t worth the Judge’s time. Anecdotally, magistrates routinely dismiss minor traffic offenders protesting speeding fines and red-light cameras, but this says more about ‘the system’ than anything else.
There seem to be examples within criminal law, too. One could be found guilty of trespassing, or of breaking the speed limit, even when there has been no harm.
Not to gloat, but did anyone notice this recent question on stackexchange? I rest my case that people today think differently about what is virtue and vice. 😛
Interested in your “Crying Wolf” article which I’ve referenced in the past. Can’t find it in the internet archive. Not a Trump supporter, although I would hope that good research is available to anyone even if it doesn’t make someone you dislike look even worse. I always say, when you have the truth on your side there is no need to exaggerate and the same is true with everyone claiming Trump is a Nazi. As you point out, he’s super awful but the proliferation of these groups is not what everyone is claiming.
Thanks,
Craig
IVN Contributor
Scott removed it:
But, you can find it here.
I double posted because it disappeared at first, then it came back. :/
Well, it makes me feel better about the massive text wall I created 🙂
Scott removed it:
You can find it on web.archive.org.
Hey, here’s another intermittent long post on poetry. Previous posts are on the spondee and rising and falling rhythms. Today I’m talking about the villanelle. The basic form is thus: 5 tercets and a quatrain, with 2 refrains alternating throughout, both of which are included in the first and last stanzas. The rhyme scheme (with A’ and A” for the refrains) is:
A’bA” abA’ abA” abA’ abA” abA’A”
The most famous villanelles these days are probably One Art and Do Not Go Gentle.
The history of the form is interesting. It claims roots in French and Italian peasant songs of the 16th century. It’s basically a myth), however, that the poetic form we know today was established then. Rather, the term “villanelle” referred broadly to songs or lyrics with no standard form. Strand and Boland theorize these villanelles were round songs sung to accompany farm labor, like sea shanties or African American call-and-response songs. The 1680 Dictionnaire Francois defines “villanelle” to mean an improvised peasant song. César-Pierre Richelet, the dictionary’s author, describes the villanelle as “a pious or flirtatious song, amorous and pastoral… the type of verse that can be composed only by being sung.” This improvisational aspect seems a little at odds with a work song; were the refrains of the villanelle originally meant to keep time with the performers’ work, or were they a consequence of improvising (i.e. repeating lines to give yourself time to compose new ones), or both? Further complicating the issue is Ronald McFarland’s argument that the Italian equivalent, the “villanella,” was never a real folk song, but a courtly affectation about as genuinely pastoral as Virgil’s Eclogues. This could be an issue, though, of the folk songs being a lost oral tradition, leaving only the written imitations to history.
Montaigne mentions villanelles in Essay 54, “Of Vain Subtleties,” as popular songs from people without science or writing, but containing “certain artless graces” comparable to the beauty of highbrow poetry. Vauquelin de La Fresnaye expressed the same sentiment in a poem from 1605: “Sans sentir rien de l’Art, comme une villanelle” [unconscious of Art, like a villanelle]. Other references from the time discuss qualities of the accompanying music, not lyrics. Of the 17 known poems published in the Renaissance titled “Villanelle,” “Villanesque,” etc., none share a fixed form. The French poet Joseph Boulmier, in an introduction to a collection of villanelles in 1878, claimed to have combed all the prosody manuals of the 15th and 16th centuries without finding any mentions of a fixed form.
So where did the form come from? Is there an Ur-villanelle on which the modern form is based? Yes, this would be the poem “J’ai perdu ma tourterelle…” by Jean Passerat, written in 1574 and published in 1606. It was a nonce form, and no other poem from that time or earlier is known to share it.
As mentioned above, the lexicographer and prosodist Richelet discussed villanelles, but he gave Passerat no mention. There is a more elaborate description of the villanelle in Richelet’s Dictionnaire de Rimes, but only in editions after that of 1751, long after Richelet’s death. As such, the description must have been added by another lexicographer, Pierre-Charles Berthelin. The entry says the villanelle is “a shepherd’s song,” provides Passerat’s as an example, and describes its form. That description, however, was only of Passerat’s poem in particular, not meant to be of a type. As such, some historians consider Berthelin the man who fixed the form because of this entry, though it might be fairer to say the form was fixed by people misreading it. But nobody seems to have noticed this definition nor written a poem following its example, so I think it seems important to historians in retrospect, but actually influenced nothing.
(continued…)
The second fixed-form villanelle was written by Theodore de Banville in 1845, though he added 2 tercets to Passerat’s model. I’m skeptical it counts as a conscious imitation of the form qua form, however, as it was a parody of the original poem, not an attempt to adapt the same structure to a different context. The poem is written from the perspective of a journal editor lamenting the loss of a favorite writer, Paul Limayrac, with the refrain “J’ay perdu mon Limayrac,” following Passerat’s “I have lost my turtledove.” Though parody can be a useful step in establishing a genre or convention, I don’t think it alone suffices for declaring Passerat’s rhyme scheme a fixed form; if the only sci-fi novels were “The Time Machine” and Time Machine parodies, I doubt “science fiction” would be a more meaningful category than “Time Machine books.” Anyway, it seems that Banville got his inspiration from an 1844 text by Wilhelm Tenint that described Passerat’s poem as the model of a type, not just the example of a genre, though he diverged from Passerat in implying there were no strict limitations on length. Banville eventually included the fixed-form villanelle in his 1872 Petit traite de poesie francaise, which was the text that popularized the form in England via the poets Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson. Before 1872, the only fixed-form villanelles in known existence were: Passerat’s original, Banville’s parody, another parody by Banville, and another poem by one Philoxene Boyer, written in 1867. So although there are no known villanelles from 1606 to 1845, it’s possible Boyer was influenced by some tradition Banville was not, right? Nope; the two of them were buddies who collaborated on verse.
So the villanelle is basically a 19th century invention based off one nonce form 16th century poem. This is like if some musicologists in 23rd century forgot that “rap” was a multifarious musical genre and decided it referred to “music in which somebody rhythmically talks about spaghetti.”
Gosse and Dobson introduced villanelles to the English in two essays written in 1877 and 1878. Gosse describes the form as “usually wedded to serious or stately expression, and almost demand a vein of pathos,” quite a far cry from bucolic improv, and at odds with Banville and others, who emphasized the form’s naïve and charming aspects. Dobson wrote the first known English villanelle in 1874. Championed in the late 19th century by Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, and others, French forms like the villanelle became associated with artificiality, triviality, effeminacy, exoticism, and decadence. Maybe Gosse was anticipating the counterargument.
The appeal of the villanelle to 19th English writers probably had much to do with the perception of the form as medieval and rustic, as a reaction to the constraints and moralizing of Victorian poetry. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the license of the original meaning is all but forgotten, and the fixed form is, if anything, more restrictive formally than most Victorian poetry. Perhaps the veneer of rusticity was more liberating than any looser formal constraints would have been. As Amanda French argues, the form probably would never have found appeal with English writers if not for this fictitious antiquity of, as she puts it, “a sweeter long-ago that never existed.”
More ironic, perhaps, is that the form came to fruition mostly in the mid 20th century, in the age of free verse. Maybe that was the appeal; the baggier everything got the more interesting its constraints became by contrast (also, the tendency in contemporary poetry toward more and more absurdly severe constraints). Mostly following the success of “Do not go gentle…” and “One Art,” the last 40 years might be the most productive in the history of this “ancient” form. In another irony, the form is basically absent in contemporary French poetry.
(continued…)
Since 8 of its 19 lines are repetitions, and it contains only 2 rhyme sounds, the villanelle doesn’t offer a lot of room to play around with. On the flip side, if you can nail the two refrains, the rest of the poem almost writes itself. Being so restrictive and repetitive, the form can easily become tedious, so it’s the mark of a good poet to successfully maintain interest and variety through the stanzas.
I think that some forms are better suited to expressing certain ideas and subjects than others (try writing a serious Limerick), and I’m curious what the villanelle is best suited to express. There’s not a lot of space, as contrasted with a fixed form like a sonnet, to develop an idea before one or the other refrains juts back in, forcing the mind to return to the original idea or problem. Because of this, the themes that critics reference most often are obsession and madness. The most famous villanelle on the latter is probably Plath’s. This poem I think is doubly effective for its refrains, and for the alternation between focusing on the relationship (“I dreamed you bewitched me… I fancied you’d return…”) and the intrusive chaos of images (“The stars go waltzing… God topples the sky…”).
“Do not go gentle…” is also a bit unreasonable, though it serves more as exhortation to than declaration of one’s unwillingness to submit to reality. The refrains here really grip the reader as to say, “Don’t give in! This is important. I’ll keep saying it because it’s important.” This poem employs a common structure to the form, which is enumerating various sets of stances or reactions to the main problem (“wise men,” “good men,” “wild men”), etc. Similar, somewhat, is Wilde’s poem, though that feels more like a raw accretion of detail than of perspectives. You might contrast these with “One Art,” where Bishop gradually expands the scope of the problem from the minute, “lost door keys,” to the macro, “two rivers, a continent.” I think the success of the poem has to do with it’s conscious turning away from obsession toward sober acceptance: all things are lost, but the losses discipline the heart. The poem is almost depressingly sane. I hear a similar tone in Robinson’s The House on the Hill, where the refrains feel less like unfiltered, recurrent grief and more like a statement of fact that must be repeated until its reality sinks in for the reader, the same way you view a body at the wake to force yourself to acknowledge the person is truly dead. The shorter lines augment this feeling; there is no use for “poor fancy-play” to elaborate, so it is given no quarter.
I wonder if the modern villanelle suits the “artlessness” and “popularity” of its mythical ancestors. I think successful villanelles tend to employ more prosaic refrains like “There is nothing more to say,” than stately refrains like “Dost though remember Sicily?” Though a highly technical form, the villanelle still feels much looser than a Spenserian stanza or Petrarchan sonnet, and, counter-intuitively, the refrains often feel more spontaneous than a well-developed verse paragraph. It seems Gosse’s assessment has come true, as I don’t know any famous villanelles on light, pleasant subjects. So is the form best for low-diction, high-seriousness topics? I think there’s more to say here, but I need to read more villanelles first.
Finally, the villanelle gave us one of the best uses of poetry in a movie.
(last part)
Since 8 of its 19 lines are repetitions, and it contains only 2 rhyme sounds, the villanelle doesn’t offer a lot of room to play around with. On the flip side, if you can nail the two refrains, the rest of the poem almost writes itself. Being so restrictive and repetitive, the form can easily become tedious, so it’s the mark of a good poet to successfully maintain interest and variety through the stanzas.
I think that some forms are better suited to expressing certain ideas and subjects than others (try writing a serious Limerick), and I’m curious what the villanelle is best suited to express. There’s not a lot of space, as contrasted with a fixed form like a sonnet, to develop an idea before one or the other refrains juts back in, forcing the mind to return to the original idea or problem. Because of this, the themes that critics reference most often are obsession and madness. The most famous villanelle on the latter is probably Plath’s. This poem I think is doubly effective for its refrains, and for the alternation between focusing on the relationship (“I dreamed you bewitched me… I fancied you’d return…”) and the intrusive chaos of images (“The stars go waltzing… God topples the sky…”).
“Do not go gentle…” is also a bit unreasonable, though it serves more as exhortation to than declaration of one’s unwillingness to submit to reality. The refrains here really grip the reader as to say, “Don’t give in! This is important. I’ll keep saying it because it’s important.” This poem employs a common structure to the form, which is enumerating various sets of stances or reactions to the main problem (“wise men,” “good men,” “wild men”), etc. Similar, somewhat, is Wilde’s poem, though that feels more like a raw accretion of detail than of perspectives. You might contrast these with “One Art,” where Bishop gradually expands the scope of the problem from the minute, “lost door keys,” to the macro, “two rivers, a continent.” I think the success of the poem has to do with it’s conscious turning away from obsession toward sober acceptance: all things are lost, but the losses discipline the heart. The poem is almost depressingly sane. I hear a similar tone in Robinson’s The House on the Hill, where the refrains feel less like unfiltered, recurrent grief and more like a statement of fact that must be repeated until its reality sinks in for the reader, the same way you view a body at the wake to force yourself to acknowledge the person is truly dead. The shorter lines augment this feeling; there is no use for “poor fancy-play” to elaborate, so it is given no quarter.
I wonder if the modern villanelle suits the “artlessness” and “popularity” of its mythical ancestors. I think successful villanelles tend to employ more prosaic refrains like “There is nothing more to say,” than stately refrains like “Dost though remember Sicily?” Though a highly technical form, the villanelle still feels much looser than a Spenserian stanza or Petrarchan sonnet, and, counter-intuitively, the refrains often feel more spontaneous than a well-developed verse paragraph. It seems Gosse’s assessment has come true, as I don’t know any famous villanelles on light, pleasant subjects. So is the form best for low-diction, high-seriousness topics? I think there’s more to say here, but I need to read more villanelles first.
Finally, the villanelle gave us one of the best uses of poetry in a movie.
The villanelle is the most restrictive of all sandwich forms.
This is part of what makes it fun to write–the point at which, having gotten the refrains right, the rest of the poem falls into place.
Whoa! Apologies for the repeats. I was having trouble submitting the posts and didn’t see it had gone through twice until just now. I’m not sure why that happened. I’m sorry they’re clogging up the whole thread now. I reported the repeats so maybe Scott will delete them.
It’s ending now, the morning’s first display.
The pastel coat to hide the sky shall fade.
So stand and watch the blinking newborn day.
As clouds coalesce, the crimson fades to gray,
And soon the rainbow morn will be unmade.
It’s ending now, the morning’s first display.
The dawning peacock fire knows the way,
But needs to preen before the path’s arrayed.
So stand and watch the blinking newborn day.
The sun, arisen, sets its track away,
Concealed by clouds from those below in shade.
It’s ending now, the morning’s first display.
And when the day is done the night will say
The other half must have its accolade.
It’s ending now, the morning’s first display.
So stand and watch the blinking newborn day.
(disclaimer: been a few years; had to rewrite rather than remember the first line of the third stanza. Called it “Ending Dawn”.)
Nice! And quite different from any of the examples I posted; no grief or madness here. I like how the refrains slow down the experience of viewing the dawn. I read a soupcon of irony that the refrains linger on the dawn, as opposed to emphasizing dawn’s endless recurrence, with the mention of night in the last stanza.
See also: the paradelle.
Little to add, but nice write-up, thanks.
Any examples of Wildean or Swinburnean villanelles? I love artificiality, triviality, effeminacy, exoticism, and decadence, so such things fall within my interests.
That Plath poem is very good. (I think I’ve said this here before, but it’s got a great title.)
I’ll try to find some good examples this weekend. I’m not sure if Swinburne ever wrote a villanelle; I meant he was part of the larger movement to introduce fancy French forms into English. Sorry that that was misleading.
Here’s an anthology from 1888 that focused on French forms, with 32 villanelles. W. E. Henley’s “A Dainty Thing’s the Villanelle” is probably the, well, daintiest of them.
Hey, here’s another intermittent long post on poetry. This time, I’m talking about the villanelle. The basic form is thus: 5 tercets and a quatrain, with 2 refrains alternating throughout, both of which are included in the first and last stanzas. The rhyme scheme (with A’ and A” for the refrains) is:
A’bA” abA’ abA” abA’ abA” abA’A”
The most famous villanelles these days are probably One Art and Do Not Go Gentle.
The history of the form is interesting. It claims roots in French and Italian peasant songs of the 16th century. It’s basically a myth), however, that the poetic form we know today was established then. Rather, the term “villanelle” referred broadly to songs or lyrics with no standard form. Strand and Boland theorize these villanelles were round songs sung to accompany farm labor, like sea shanties or African American call-and-response songs. The 1680 Dictionnaire Francois defines “villanelle” to mean an improvised peasant song. César-Pierre Richelet, the dictionary’s author, describes the villanelle as “a pious or flirtatious song, amorous and pastoral… the type of verse that can be composed only by being sung.” This improvisational aspect seems a little at odds with a work song; were the refrains of the villanelle originally meant to keep time with the performers’ work, or were they a consequence of improvising (i.e. repeating lines to give yourself time to compose new ones), or both? Further complicating the issue is Ronald McFarland’s argument that the Italian equivalent, the “villanella,” was never a real folk song, but a courtly affectation about as genuinely pastoral as Virgil’s Eclogues. This could be an issue, though, of the folk songs being a lost oral tradition, leaving only the written imitations to history.
Montaigne mentions villanelles in Essay 54, “Of Vain Subtleties,” as popular songs from people without science or writing, but containing “certain artless graces” comparable to the beauty of highbrow poetry. Vauquelin de La Fresnaye expressed the same sentiment in a poem from 1605: “Sans sentir rien de l’Art, comme une villanelle” [unconscious of Art, like a villanelle]. Other references from the time discuss qualities of the accompanying music, not lyrics. Of the 17 known poems published in the Renaissance titled “Villanelle,” “Villanesque,” etc., none share a fixed form. The French poet Joseph Boulmier, in an introduction to a collection of villanelles in 1878, claimed to have combed all the prosody manuals of the 15th and 16th centuries without finding any mentions of a fixed form.
So where did the form come from? Is there an Ur-villanelle on which the modern form is based? Yes, this would be the poem “J’ai perdu ma tourterelle…” by Jean Passerat, written in 1574 and published in 1606. It was a nonce form, and no other poem from that time or earlier is known to share it.
As mentioned above, the lexicographer and prosodist Richelet discussed villanelles, but he gave Passerat no mention. There is a more elaborate description of the villanelle in Richelet’s Dictionnaire de Rimes, but only in editions after that of 1751, long after Richelet’s death. As such, the description must have been added by another lexicographer, Pierre-Charles Berthelin. The entry says the villanelle is “a shepherd’s song,” provides Passerat’s as an example, and describes its form. That description, however, was only of Passerat’s poem in particular, not meant to be of a type. As such, some historians consider Berthelin the man who fixed the form because of this entry, though it might be fairer to say the form was fixed by people misreading it. But nobody seems to have noticed this definition nor written a poem following its example, so I think it seems important to historians in retrospect, but actually influenced nothing.
The second fixed-form villanelle was written by Theodore de Banville in 1845, though he added 2 tercets to Passerat’s model. I’m skeptical it counts as a conscious imitation of the form qua form, however, as it was a parody of the original poem, not an attempt to adapt the same structure to a different context. The poem is written from the perspective of a journal editor lamenting the loss of a favorite writer, Paul Limayrac, with the refrain “J’ay perdu mon Limayrac,” following Passerat’s “I have lost my turtledove.” Though parody can be a useful step in establishing a genre or convention, I don’t think it alone suffices for declaring Passerat’s rhyme scheme a fixed form; if the only sci-fi novels were “The Time Machine” and Time Machine parodies, I doubt “science fiction” would be a more meaningful category than “Time Machine books.” Anyway, it seems that Banville got his inspiration from an 1844 text by Wilhelm Tenint that described Passerat’s poem as the model of a type, not just the example of a genre, though he diverged from Passerat in implying there were no strict limitations on length. Banville eventually included the fixed-form villanelle in his 1872 Petit traite de poesie francaise, which was the text that popularized the form in England via the poets Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson. Before 1872, the only fixed-form villanelles in known existence were: Passerat’s original, Banville’s parody, another parody by Banville, and another poem by one Philoxene Boyer, written in 1867. So although there are no known villanelles from 1606 to 1845, it’s possible Boyer was influenced by some tradition Banville was not, right? Nope; the two of them were buddies who collaborated on verse.
So the villanelle is basically a 19th century invention based off one nonce form 16th century poem. This is like if some musicologists in 23rd century forgot that “rap” was a multifarious musical genre and decided it referred to “music in which somebody rhythmically talks about spaghetti.”
Gosse and Dobson introduced villanelles to the English in two essays written in 1877 and 1878. Gosse describes the form as “usually wedded to serious or stately expression, and almost demand a vein of pathos,” quite a far cry from bucolic improv, and at odds with Banville and others, who emphasized the form’s naïve and charming aspects. Dobson wrote the first known English villanelle in 1874. Championed in the late 19th century by Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, and others, French forms like the villanelle became associated with artificiality, triviality, effeminacy, exoticism, and decadence. Maybe Gosse was anticipating the counterargument.
The appeal of the villanelle to 19th English writers probably had much to do with the perception of the form as medieval and rustic, as a reaction to the constraints and moralizing of Victorian poetry. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the license of the original meaning is all but forgotten, and the fixed form is, if anything, more restrictive formally than most Victorian poetry. Perhaps the veneer of rusticity was more liberating than any looser formal constraints would have been. As Amanda French argues, the form probably would never have found appeal with English writers if not for this fictitious antiquity of, as she puts it, “a sweeter long-ago that never existed.”
More ironic, perhaps, is that the form came to fruition mostly in the mid 20th century, in the age of free verse. Maybe that was the appeal; the baggier everything got the more interesting its constraints became by contrast (also, the tendency in contemporary poetry toward more and more absurdly severe constraints). Mostly following the success of “Do not go gentle…” and “One Art,” the last 40 years might be the most productive in the history of this “ancient” form. In another irony, the form is basically absent in contemporary French poetry.
(continued…)
Hey, here’s another intermittent long post on poetry. This time, I’m talking about the villanelle.
The basic form is thus: 5 tercets and a quatrain, with 2 refrains alternating throughout, both of which are included in the first and last stanzas. The rhyme scheme (with A’ and A” for the refrains) is:
A’bA” abA’ abA” abA’ abA” abA’A”
The most famous villanelles these days are probably One Art and Do Not Go Gentle.
The history of the form is interesting. It claims roots in French and Italian peasant songs of the 16th century. It’s basically a myth), however, that the poetic form we know today was established then. Rather, the term “villanelle” referred broadly to songs or lyrics with no standard form. Strand and Boland theorize these villanelles were round songs sung to accompany farm labor, like sea shanties or African American call-and-response songs. The 1680 Dictionnaire Francois defines “villanelle” to mean an improvised peasant song. César-Pierre Richelet, the dictionary’s author, describes the villanelle as “a pious or flirtatious song, amorous and pastoral… the type of verse that can be composed only by being sung.” This improvisational aspect seems a little at odds with a work song; were the refrains of the villanelle originally meant to keep time with the performers’ work, or were they a consequence of improvising (i.e. repeating lines to give yourself time to compose new ones), or both? Further complicating the issue is Ronald McFarland’s argument that the Italian equivalent, the “villanella,” was never a real folk song, but a courtly affectation about as genuinely pastoral as Virgil’s Eclogues. This could be an issue, though, of the folk songs being a lost oral tradition, leaving only the written imitations to history.
Montaigne mentions villanelles in Essay 54, “Of Vain Subtleties,” as popular songs from people without science or writing, but containing “certain artless graces” comparable to the beauty of highbrow poetry. Vauquelin de La Fresnaye expressed the same sentiment in a poem from 1605: “Sans sentir rien de l’Art, comme une villanelle” [unconscious of Art, like a villanelle]. Other references from the time discuss qualities of the accompanying music, not lyrics. Of the 17 known poems published in the Renaissance titled “Villanelle,” “Villanesque,” etc., none share a fixed form. The French poet Joseph Boulmier, in an introduction to a collection of villanelles in 1878, claimed to have combed all the prosody manuals of the 15th and 16th centuries without finding any mentions of a fixed form.
So where did the form come from? Is there an Ur-villanelle on which the modern form is based? Yes, this would be the poem “J’ai perdu ma tourterelle…” by Jean Passerat, written in 1574 and published in 1606. It was a nonce form, and no other poem from that time or earlier is known to share it.
As mentioned above, the lexicographer and prosodist Richelet discussed villanelles, but he gave Passerat no mention. There is a more elaborate description of the villanelle in Richelet’s Dictionnaire de Rimes, but only in editions after that of 1751, long after Richelet’s death. As such, the description must have been added by another lexicographer, Pierre-Charles Berthelin. The entry says the villanelle is “a shepherd’s song,” provides Passerat’s as an example, and describes its form. That description, however, was only of Passerat’s poem in particular, not meant to be of a type. As such, some historians consider Berthelin the man who fixed the form because of this entry, though it might be fairer to say the form was fixed by people misreading it. But nobody seems to have noticed this definition nor written a poem following its example, so I think it seems important to historians in retrospect, but actually influenced nothing.
The second fixed-form villanelle was written by Theodore de Banville in 1845, though he added 2 tercets to Passerat’s model. I’m skeptical it counts as a conscious imitation of the form qua form, however, as it was a parody of the original poem, not an attempt to adapt the same structure to a different context. The poem is written from the perspective of a journal editor lamenting the loss of a favorite writer, Paul Limayrac, with the refrain “J’ay perdu mon Limayrac,” following Passerat’s “I have lost my turtledove.” Though parody can be a useful step in establishing a genre or convention, I don’t think it alone suffices for declaring Passerat’s rhyme scheme a fixed form; if the only sci-fi novels were “The Time Machine” and Time Machine parodies, I doubt “science fiction” would be a more meaningful category than “Time Machine books.” Anyway, it seems that Banville got his inspiration from an 1844 text by Wilhelm Tenint that described Passerat’s poem as the model of a type, not just the example of a genre, though he diverged from Passerat in implying there were no strict limitations on length. Banville eventually included the fixed-form villanelle in his 1872 Petit traite de poesie francaise, which was the text that popularized the form in England via the poets Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson. Before 1872, the only fixed-form villanelles in known existence were: Passerat’s original, Banville’s parody, another parody by Banville, and another poem by one Philoxene Boyer, written in 1867. So although there are no known villanelles from 1606 to 1845, it’s possible Boyer was influenced by some tradition Banville was not, right? Nope; the two of them were buddies who collaborated on verse.
So the villanelle is basically a 19th century invention based off one nonce form 16th century poem. This is like if some musicologists in 23rd century forgot that “rap” was a multifarious musical genre and decided it referred to “music in which somebody rhythmically talks about spaghetti.”
Gosse and Dobson introduced villanelles to the English in two essays written in 1877 and 1878. Gosse describes the form as “usually wedded to serious or stately expression, and almost demand a vein of pathos,” quite a far cry from bucolic improv, and at odds with Banville and others, who emphasized the form’s naïve and charming aspects. Dobson wrote the first known English villanelle in 1874. Championed in the late 19th century by Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, and others, French forms like the villanelle became associated with artificiality, triviality, effeminacy, exoticism, and decadence. Maybe Gosse was anticipating the counterargument.
The appeal of the villanelle to 19th English writers probably had much to do with the perception of the form as medieval and rustic, as a reaction to the constraints and moralizing of Victorian poetry. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the license of the original meaning is all but forgotten, and the fixed form is, if anything, more restrictive formally than most Victorian poetry. Perhaps the veneer of rusticity was more liberating than any looser formal constraints would have been. As Amanda French argues, the form probably would never have found appeal with English writers if not for this fictitious antiquity of, as she puts it, “a sweeter long-ago that never existed.”
More ironic, perhaps, is that the form came to fruition mostly in the mid 20th century, in the age of free verse. Maybe that was the appeal; the baggier everything got the more interesting its constraints became by contrast (also, the tendency in contemporary poetry toward more and more absurdly severe constraints). Mostly following the success of “Do not go gentle…” and “One Art,” the last 40 years might be the most productive in the history of this “ancient” form. In another irony, the form is basically absent in contemporary French poetry.
(continued…)
Hey, here’s another intermittent long post on poetry. This time, I’m talking about the villanelle.
The basic form is thus: 5 tercets and a quatrain, with 2 refrains alternating throughout, both of which are included in the first and last stanzas. The rhyme scheme (with A’ and A” for the refrains) is:
A’bA” abA’ abA” abA’ abA” abA’A”
The most famous villanelles these days are probably One Art and Do Not Go Gentle.
The history of the form is interesting. It claims roots in French and Italian peasant songs of the 16th century. It’s basically a myth), however, that the poetic form we know today was established then. Rather, the term “villanelle” referred broadly to songs or lyrics with no standard form. Strand and Boland theorize these villanelles were round songs sung to accompany farm labor, like sea shanties or African American call-and-response songs. The 1680 Dictionnaire Francois defines “villanelle” to mean an improvised peasant song. César-Pierre Richelet, the dictionary’s author, describes the villanelle as “a pious or flirtatious song, amorous and pastoral… the type of verse that can be composed only by being sung.” This improvisational aspect seems a little at odds with a work song; were the refrains of the villanelle originally meant to keep time with the performers’ work, or were they a consequence of improvising (i.e. repeating lines to give yourself time to compose new ones), or both? Further complicating the issue is Ronald McFarland’s argument that the Italian equivalent, the “villanella,” was never a real folk song, but a courtly affectation about as genuinely pastoral as Virgil’s Eclogues. This could be an issue, though, of the folk songs being a lost oral tradition, leaving only the written imitations to history.
Montaigne mentions villanelles in Essay 54, “Of Vain Subtleties,” as popular songs from people without science or writing, but containing “certain artless graces” comparable to the beauty of highbrow poetry. Vauquelin de La Fresnaye expressed the same sentiment in a poem from 1605: “Sans sentir rien de l’Art, comme une villanelle” [unconscious of Art, like a villanelle]. Other references from the time discuss qualities of the accompanying music, not lyrics. Of the 17 known poems published in the Renaissance titled “Villanelle,” “Villanesque,” etc., none share a fixed form. The French poet Joseph Boulmier, in an introduction to a collection of villanelles in 1878, claimed to have combed all the prosody manuals of the 15th and 16th centuries without finding any mentions of a fixed form.
So where did the form come from? Is there an Ur-villanelle on which the modern form is based? Yes, this would be the poem “J’ai perdu ma tourterelle…” by Jean Passerat, written in 1574 and published in 1606. It was a nonce form, and no other poem from that time or earlier is known to share it.
As mentioned above, the lexicographer and prosodist Richelet discussed villanelles, but he gave Passerat no mention. There is a more elaborate description of the villanelle in Richelet’s Dictionnaire de Rimes, but only in editions after that of 1751, long after Richelet’s death. As such, the description must have been added by another lexicographer, Pierre-Charles Berthelin. The entry says the villanelle is “a shepherd’s song,” provides Passerat’s as an example, and describes its form. That description, however, was only of Passerat’s poem in particular, not meant to be of a type. As such, some historians consider Berthelin the man who fixed the form because of this entry, though it might be fairer to say the form was fixed by people misreading it. But nobody seems to have noticed this definition nor written a poem following its example, so I think it seems important to historians in retrospect, but actually influenced nothing.
The second fixed-form villanelle was written by Theodore de Banville in 1845, though he added 2 tercets to Passerat’s model. I’m skeptical it counts as a conscious imitation of the form qua form, however, as it was a parody of the original poem, not an attempt to adapt the same structure to a different context. The poem is written from the perspective of a journal editor lamenting the loss of a favorite writer, Paul Limayrac, with the refrain “J’ay perdu mon Limayrac,” following Passerat’s “I have lost my turtledove.” Though parody can be a useful step in establishing a genre or convention, I don’t think it alone suffices for declaring Passerat’s rhyme scheme a fixed form; if the only sci-fi novels were “The Time Machine” and Time Machine parodies, I doubt “science fiction” would be a more meaningful category than “Time Machine books.” Anyway, it seems that Banville got his inspiration from an 1844 text by Wilhelm Tenint that described Passerat’s poem as the model of a type, not just the example of a genre, though he diverged from Passerat in implying there were no strict limitations on length. Banville eventually included the fixed-form villanelle in his 1872 Petit traite de poesie francaise, which was the text that popularized the form in England via the poets Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson. Before 1872, the only fixed-form villanelles in known existence were: Passerat’s original, Banville’s parody, another parody by Banville, and another poem by one Philoxene Boyer, written in 1867. So although there are no known villanelles from 1606 to 1845, it’s possible Boyer was influenced by some tradition Banville was not, right? Nope; the two of them were buddies who collaborated on verse.
So the villanelle is basically a 19th century invention based off one nonce form 16th century poem. This is like if some musicologists in 23rd century forgot that “rap” was a multifarious musical genre and decided it referred to “music in which somebody rhythmically talks about spaghetti.”
Gosse and Dobson introduced villanelles to the English in two essays written in 1877 and 1878. Gosse describes the form as “usually wedded to serious or stately expression, and almost demand a vein of pathos,” quite a far cry from bucolic improv, and at odds with Banville and others, who emphasized the form’s naïve and charming aspects. Dobson wrote the first known English villanelle in 1874. Championed in the late 19th century by Oscar Wilde, Swinburne, and others, French forms like the villanelle became associated with artificiality, triviality, effeminacy, exoticism, and decadence. Maybe Gosse was anticipating the counterargument.
The appeal of the villanelle to 19th English writers probably had much to do with the perception of the form as medieval and rustic, as a reaction to the constraints and moralizing of Victorian poetry. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the license of the original meaning is all but forgotten, and the fixed form is, if anything, more restrictive formally than most Victorian poetry. Perhaps the veneer of rusticity was more liberating than any looser formal constraints would have been. As Amanda French argues, the form probably would never have found appeal with English writers if not for this fictitious antiquity of, as she puts it, “a sweeter long-ago that never existed.”
More ironic, perhaps, is that the form came to fruition mostly in the mid 20th century, in the age of free verse. Maybe that was the appeal; the baggier everything got the more interesting its constraints became by contrast (also, the tendency in contemporary poetry toward more and more absurdly severe constraints). Mostly following the success of “Do not go gentle…” and “One Art,” the last 40 years might be the most productive in the history of this “ancient” form. In another irony, the form is basically absent in contemporary French poetry.
Since 8 of its 19 lines are repetitions, and it contains only 2 rhyme sounds, the villanelle doesn’t offer a lot of room to play around with. On the flip side, if you can nail the two refrains, the rest of the poem almost writes itself. Being so restrictive and repetitive, the form can easily become tedious, so it’s the mark of a good poet to successfully maintain interest and variety through the stanzas.
I think that some forms are better suited to expressing certain ideas and subjects than others (try writing a serious Limerick), and I’m curious what the villanelle is best suited to express. There’s not a lot of space, as contrasted with a fixed form like a sonnet, to develop an idea before one or the other refrains juts back in, forcing the mind to return to the original idea or problem. Because of this, the themes that critics reference most often are obsession and madness. The most famous villanelle on the latter is probably Plath’s. This poem I think is doubly effective for its refrains, and for the alternation between focusing on the relationship (“I dreamed you bewitched me… I fancied you’d return…”) and the intrusive chaos of images (“The stars go waltzing… God topples the sky…”).
“Do not go gentle…” is also a bit unreasonable, though it serves more as exhortation to than declaration of one’s unwillingness to submit to reality. The refrains here really grip the reader as to say, “Don’t give in! This is important. I’ll keep saying it because it’s important.” This poem employs a common structure to the form, which is enumerating various sets of stances or reactions to the main problem (“wise men,” “good men,” “wild men”), etc. Similar, somewhat, is Wilde’s poem, though that feels more like a raw accretion of detail than of perspectives. You might contrast these with “One Art,” where Bishop gradually expands the scope of the problem from the minute, “lost door keys,” to the macro, “two rivers, a continent.” I think the success of the poem has to do with it’s conscious turning away from obsession toward sober acceptance: all things are lost, but the losses discipline the heart. The poem is almost depressingly sane. I hear a similar tone in Robinson’s The House on the Hill, where the refrains feel less like unfiltered, recurrent grief and more like a statement of fact that must be repeated until its reality sinks in for the reader, the same way you view a body at the wake to force yourself to acknowledge the person is truly dead. The shorter lines augment this feeling; there is no use for “poor fancy-play” to elaborate, so it is given no quarter.
I wonder if the modern villanelle suits the “artlessness” and “popularity” of its mythical ancestors. I think successful villanelles tend to employ more prosaic refrains like “There is nothing more to say,” than stately refrains like “Dost though remember Sicily?” Though a highly technical form, the villanelle still feels much looser than a Spenserian stanza or Petrarchan sonnet, and, counter-intuitively, the refrains often feel more spontaneous than a well-developed verse paragraph. It seems Gosse’s assessment has come true, as I don’t know any famous villanelles on light, pleasant subjects. So is the form best for low-diction, high-seriousness topics? I think there’s more to say here, but I need to read more villanelles first.
Finally, the villanelle gave us one of the best uses of poetry in a movie.
Is effective altruism even theoretically possible?
Effective altruism in a nutshell is the idea that people who hope to be genuinely altruistic should be more attentive to the actual effects of their purportedly altruistic acts, so as to make sure those acts aren’t unintentionally suboptimal (or mostly in the service of other non-altruistic goals), but that they are instead doing the most to advance their genuinely altruistic values.
Most effective altruists seem to be motivated to alleviate suffering (human and sometimes animal suffering). Such people consider an altruistic act most effective when it alleviates more suffering than any of its alternatives, and they consider a main goal of effective altruism to identify which acts are and are not like that.
Such altruists are typically not interested in picking favorites among sufferers — sufferers in a far away land who you will never meet, and sufferers next door who will thank you personally for your help, are considered equal or at least very similar.
The same goes for sufferers distant in time. The suffering of someone alive today is no more or less suffering than that of someone not yet born, and the prevention or alleviation of either is a blessing. I’m sure there’s some debate over whether currently suffering people deserve some higher weighting in our evaluations over future people, but I doubt there are many effective altruists who think the suffering of future people ought not to be included in their calculations at all.
Something about this was troubling to me, but it just was sort of a vague itch in the back of my mind until I recently read G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica. Moore takes a stand that seems at least very harmonious with ethical altruism:
But he goes on to say:
Moore raises the hope that perhaps as the effects of our actions echo into the future, they become muted and difficult to distinguish from any other actions we might have taken. (“The effects of any individual action seem, after a sufficient space of time, to be found only in trifling modifications spread over a very wide area, whereas its immediate effects consist in some prominent modification of a comparatively narrow area.”) But Moore was writing before the widespread knowledge of chaos theory, which showed us that small changes in the initial conditions of some systems can cause enormous differences in a later state. That history is such a system strikes me as likely.
This suggests that effective altruism, of the sort that gives weight to future effects as well as immediate effects, might not be possible.
I would be very interested in reading the thoughts of SSC readers on this conundrum.
Chaos theory doesn’t really make any sense from a chemical or a biological perspective. If you push a single molecule in a random dimension, statistical mechanics tells you that there is essentially no change on the macroscopic scale. The equilibrium states maintained by homeostasis are less absolute than those in chemistry but it’s still pretty much the same story. Small perturbations don’t amplify throughout the system; they’re quashed unless they exceed a critical threshold.
Given that we live in a world of chemistry and biology, I don’t think there’s much to fear from butterflies flapping their wings. Small acts don’t account for much unless they’re at a critical point.
That said, I do think that EAs and utilitarians generally don’t have enough intellectual humility. The further you are removed from the beneficiaries of your charity in time and space, the less effective you’ll be for the simple reason that you can’t check if your charity is actually doing any good. If you volunteer at a local homeless shelter or a soup kitchen you can see with your own eyes what the people you’re helping need and which of those needs are still unmet. If you send a check to some foundation working on the other side of the world, the absolute best that you can do is pray that whoever collected, analyzed and reported the data didn’t miss anything important.
So how does a tiny nerve impulse result in a punch being thrown, or a gun being fired? Living systems are not in equilibrium. Homesostasis is not equilibrium: thermogenysis is supposed to keep yo out of equlibirum.
I’m going to ignore your example and substitute one which I think illustrates your point more strongly: a single photon absorbed by a retinal rod cell can result in activation of neurons, to the point that humans can consciously perceive as few as 100 photons.
I don’t see this or your original example as contradicting what I said, because amplifying the signal from one or a hundred subatomic particles into a behavior relies on unbelievably precise control of exactly the sort of critical thresholds I mentioned.
A hundred UV photons which are absorbed by the DNA and create as many lesions is well within the ability of normal DNA damage repair processes to handle; it takes an incalculably high number of such lesions over a lifetime to cause noticable health problems. A biological system which couldn’t handle that kind of perturbation would never have survived into the present. The fact that the human eye can pick up the same number of photons in the visible range isn’t a sign of how powerful the photons are, but of how extraordinarily light-sensitive the rod cells has evolved to become compared to every other cell type in the body.
Getting back to the origin balance point, small acts can amplified, and there is no guarantee that they won’t make a large difference to the future.
You’ve got chaos theory backwards. Gases are chaotic, but we just don’t care about the microstate.
Just had an IRL discussion in which I argued against what I think I’m correct in calling the “strong AI”* view; that consciousness is entirely algorithmic and any implementation of such an algorithm is just as conscious as any other. This was a first for me, as I would usually argue in favour of it. I think it’s safe to say I lost the argument.
I’m aware this is probably quite a strong AI-heavy crowd, but what do you think are the best arguments against it? I’m pretty agnostic on the issue, but I definitely find it easier to argue in favour of it than against. (Which, in itself, makes me think that maybe it’s right…) But perhaps I’m just not well-versed enough in the “against” arguments.
Grateful for comments and pointing-in-the-right-direction in terms of the literature.
*Wikipedia informs me it is also known as the “computational theory of mind”.
I’ll give the typical philosopher’s response: it depends on what you mean by “consciousness”. If you just mean perception (the ability to take in information from the environment), then it can be algorithmic, sure (but may not be necessarily algorithmic). If by consciousness you mean “has qualia” or “phenomenal experience” or any of those other philosophical terms, then you need to specify what properties you take qualia (or whatever) to have and how algorithms can have those properties.
Of interest might be Sydney Shoemaker’s Functionalism and Qualia.
Aye, defining consciousness properly is a bugger. It always seems pretty hard to put a good description/definition to that doesn’t just lead to “but what do you mean by…” ad infinitum, but it’s among the most obvious “I know it when I see it” type things out there.
I think what I mean is subjective experience, but I might not be using that term the same way as the philosophers. I feel as though it’s impossible by definition to measure externally? Which doesn’t seem very helpful.
Naively it seems to me like the only way to prove that algorithms can be conscious would be to show that every process in the human brain is algorithmic, since there is only one thing I know for sure has consciousness and it’s me.
Imagine a chatbot that simply implements a lookup table:
if messageHistory=="Hi there":
respond("Hi yourself")
else if messageHistory== ["Hi there", "What's on your mind?"]
respond("Nothing, I'm bored")
else if...
With a big enough lookup table, you could get a chatbot whose performance is indistinguishable from human. Sure, eventually you’ll reach the end of the table and the conversation will stop, but humans stop when they die of old age, so if we make a ridiculously large table that can hold 150 years of conversation, it’s now at least as capable of holding conversation as a human. Sure the database would be the size of a galaxy, but this is a hypothetical, we get to make galaxy-sized databases.
There is obviously some kind of consciousness-ish quality that a human has and this chatbot lacks, despite the fact that they outwardly act the same. Different things are happening in their “minds”. Essentially, I think that lookup tables prove P-zombies are a coherent concept. You can implement an algorithm which performs identically the outputs of a human, but if the word “conscious” is to mean anything like what we generally use it for, one must admit the chatbot is at least differently conscious than the human, and I would argue less conscious.
But maybe I’ve missed what you meant about implementations of conscious algorithms, if so, could you explain a bit more?
Yeah but who wrote the lookup table?
I wouldn’t call the table itself “conscious” but I would call any process able to generate such a table with non-negligible probability “conscious”, much like I don’t call a telephone or a book conscious but I do call the people I talk to on the phone or who wrote the book conscious.
At that point, what do you even mean by consciousness? Does a process feel pain? Does a process feel happiness? Can a process love?
The problem with the p zombies concept is that it’s not just saying that something can have the appearance of a conscious being while being unconscious. That seems true enough. It also claims that something can have the exact same physical structure, down to the molecules, of a conscious being without being conscious. That is incoherent.
No, it’s just the contradictory to physicalism.
Given that none of us can actually tell whether we’re p-zombies or not, it doesn’t seem to be a very useful or interesting concenpt.
No we can’t tell ignota we ourselves are p-zombies, just not if anyone else is. Just think for a second about anything. Were you able to think? Congrats you’re not a zombie, you just can’t prove that too me. As far as I can tell I’m the only proven conscious being, though I magnanimously grant everyone on this site the benefit of the doubt.
A p-zombie would also think they’re conscious. I think I’m conscious, but maybe I’m not. If p-zobmies are possible, then it’s possible that I’m a p-zombie. How could I tell whether I’m really conscious or whether I’m just a p-zombie that thinks I’m conscious?
A p-zombie would tell everyone else that they think, feel, and perceive that they are conscious. That’s not the same thing, even if it is externally indistinguishable.
A p-zombie would also have the belief that they are conscious, as well as have detailed beliefs about their perceptual states. They would even have (false) beliefs about what it’s like to be them.
The alternative is that a p-zombie says that they are conscious, but knows they aren’t and thus is lying. That would not only be an argument against the identity of the conscious with the physical, but the identity of the intentional with the physical. The supposition of zombies is that all physical states are the same; if they didn’t believe they were conscious, then their intentional/psychological states would also be different. I don’t think the zombie hypothesis is meant to be so broad.
A p-zombie would not think, period, no? From wiki (emphasis added):
So why, from the inside view, does “I think, therefore I am” not apply..?
In phil mind, at least, consciousness is not exhaustive of thinking. Intentional processes (believing, perceiving, deciding, desiring, and so forth) are also “thinking”. Indeed, “thinking” really isn’t used much as a term in philosophy of mind because of it’s imprecision. A p-zombie without intentional states would certainly be something: a complex agent indistinguishable from a human that has no beliefs, representations, perceptions, etc.
Not technically. I call the idea you are getting at C-zombies.
I think you’re taking a particular algorithm that mimics consciousness and arguing that it either isn’t conscious or is less conscious than a human. I think this doesn’t answer my question because there could be *other* algorithms that you’ve not imagined that also mimic consciousness and actually are conscious. I think you’ve essentially picked one weak example and disproved it and then claimed that you’ve disproved the general claim that such things can exist. I might not be understanding you right, though, so please correct me if that’s the case.
On an unrelated note, I feel as though you’re sweeping something under the rug when you make your table so big it can hold 150 years of conversation. I think if you’re allowed galaxy-sized databases I’m allowed to keep asking your computer questions forever. It’s true that humans die, but somehow I really don’t feel this is a fair comparison. The fact that your lookup table runs out after 150 years is an indication that it’s not doing any creative thinking. The fact that I run out after less time than that is because my machinery breaks down. Do you see what I’m getting at? I’m really struggling to put it into words. But anyway, I think this is beside the main point.
I agree with Urstoff and Ninety-Three.
My own contribution: I used to agree with Dennett, Hofstadter, etc. Then I investigated the question “What does it mean for a physical system to ‘implement’ an algorithm?” That changed my mind. Spoiler: The natural ways to define implementation yield the result that almost any system, including the rocks beneath your feet, implements almost every algorithm. As far as I can tell the only way to avoid this result is to put some sort of complexity limit in there: “The mapping between states of the physical system and states of the algorithm must be describable in less than 1000 lines of Javascript.” But (A) this is a sign that we are at a dead end, and (B) depending on what complexity bound you use, it could very well turn out that most AI would not be conscious even though they are simulating a human brain exactly. If the human brain sim is on a virtual machine in silicon, that’s extra steps for the mapping to explain…
Check out http://www.consc.net/papers/rock.html for a slice of the literature on this issue.
I don’t think this works.
The algorithm of human consciousness may be implemented in the brain, but it is wired into an entire human body. It receives inputs from the environment — signals from your eyes to your visual cortex, for example — and produces outputs that affect the environment around it.
Even if you can produces some elaborate mapping between my brain and the rocks beneath my feet, there’s no way to argue that the rocks beneath my feet are receiving input and producing output in any meaningful way. Your link goes into this: Putnam’s argument about rocks implementing all algorithms is only true for inputless finite-state automata. In the context of the recent-ish SSC posts about perceptual control theory, that’s a huge gap. If brains really do work by attempting to minimize predictive error, then the tight causal loop between input and output is probably really important.
The question should not be whether the mapping between the physical system and the state of the algorithm is simple. The question should be whether the algorithm’s outputs influence its outputs in the right ways to keep it running.
You can run a copy of Firefox without an internet connection, but it won’t browse the web. You can run a copy of a human brain without inputs and outputs, but it might not be conscious. That doesn’t mean Firefox isn’t algorithmic. I don’t see why the same isn’t true for consciousness.
Right, sorry it took me so long to get back to this:
Yes, input-output relations are super important for consciousness. So instead of finding a way to interpret the rock as your brain, we find a way to interpret it as a computer simulating a virtual environment which contains, among other things, your brain. Then you have all the right input-output relationships.
Put it another way: What’s the difference between a generation spaceship with a bunch of humans inside, and a comet of similar size? (Suppose that, for whatever reason, the generation ship doesn’t have any sensors or actuators with which to communicate with the outside world. If the outside world wants to talk with it, it’ll have to cut it open.)
Answer: No difference, at least not at the level of algorithm-implementation. Both systems can be interpreted as implementing a certain “Several humans exist in an environment of such-and-such specifications etc.” algorithm, of which there are sub-algorithms that are conscious (the particular humans.)
Of course, the interpretation of the comet is ridiculously complex and unnatural, whereas the interpretation of the generation ship is elegant and straightforward. But why should that matter? And if it does matter, then arguably less-elegant implementations of my brain (e.g. in an ancestor simulation) aren’t conscious either.
It’s been a while since I thought about this. Now that I write it out, I wonder whether maybe there’s some trick being pulled in the way algorithms can embed in other algorithms–I thought that worked, but I never rigorously checked.
Thoughts?
This is a very interesting point that I’ve never considered. However, I do find Iain’s response to be rather compelling.
Thanks! I think so too, like I said, it’s what changed my mind.
See above for my response to Iain.
The biggest piece of the argument I see is the free will aspect.
Algorithms are inherently deterministic. Consciousness often implies a kind of awareness and decision making.
While neither is completely for or against free will, it’ll be a debate on its own to untangle it.
And people tend to have strong opinions regarding free will.
The second is the whole “wisdom as a group/emergent intelligence” thing.
The whole Chinese gym, nation, etc. thought experiments.
If so, are countries conscious (more conscious?)? systems like capitalism?
If they do agree that they are, then the values people place on consciousness probably don’t match up with their definition of it.
People might not like breaking up a nation or a system, but not in the same way as killing a living being.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_algorithm
I am of the opinion that there is nothing about consciousness and free will that goes against determinism. Just because my high-level, course-grained picture of the world involves enough unpredictability for choices to seem nondeterministic doesn’t mean that the underlying physics is nondeterministic.
So if my deterministic neurons can produce effectively free will then why can’t deterministic chips and wires give rise to effectively free will?
If it’s a debate and you’re asking for arguments against “strong AI”, then these are it.
This is different than trying to convince YOU against “strong AI”.
As I mentioned, determinism doesn’t necessarily negate free will and there’s schools of thoughts that combine the two – Compatibilism.
That is however, its own debate with its critics and arguments.
Unless you think THAT is settled, then it still stands regardless of where your opinion of it is.
Did you? I missed that.
I don’t really see how free will is relevant one way or the other to this question, though.
That “strong AI” might imply that their consciousness is deterministic + Some feel determinism is against free will + they are not willing to abandon their belief in free will.
So they are against the “strong AI” argument because it undermines free will.
You can try to break it at any of the points, but as I said, those tend to be their own debates (which you can find separate arguments for).
I don’t know about strong arguments, but I defended one from James Ross that there must be immaterial aspects to the mind in an earlier thread. The discussion starts here, and I do link to Ross’s paper when I bring it up.
ETA: I see now that soreff left a response after my last one which I did not respond to. Draw your own conclusions as to who had the better of the discussion.
I think this isn’t quite what I’m after, but thanks anyway. I have very high confidence the mind is entirely material. The question I’m thinking about here is: assuming that the mind is entirely material, can we be sure that its operation is algorithmic?
I’m not seeing the hide comment button or the up arrows to quickly navigate to parent posts, what’s up with that?
I see them. Must be wrong on your end.
There was some discussion at the end of 100.5 from people who were having trouble with Bakkot’s javascript enhancements not loading. Could be that?
I was the one who asked about this in the other thread. I’m glad it’s not just me, although we do seem to be in a minority. Can you load this webpage?
https://bakkot.github.io/SlateStarComments/ssc.js
If not, then your problem is probably the same as mine, but I don’t have a solution.
@Fahundo. It seems to be working again for me. I didn’t change anything.
Doesn’t load for me
Regarding the post/fiction – https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
Upfront critique- I did not find this story to be that good.
The characters are fairly flat and uninteresting. The setting was not rich or compelling.
The central messages of gradually increasing burdens of knowledge learning and reduced knowledge creation was not relatable, realistic, or at least led to much discussion.
And there’s just way too many “why didn’t they” moments in the plot itself.
However, two footnotes? additions? fanfictions? could patch up quite a few of the holes, though possibly further weakening the central messages.
1-
When talking about alchemy, one generally associates it with lead to gold (or changing one thing to another in general), elixir of life, proto-chemistry, between science and magic.
There also is another concept introduced with alchemy, that while generally not that well-known, well until the popularity of a certain anime, artificial biological beings – homunculus.
Not only will it serve as a general purpose explanation for the weirdness (and rigid limitations) of the tower alchemists’ nature, it also helps solve some of issues that weren’t really even brought up like recruitment.
Though now it also prompts some other questions (ie. why don’t they just create millions of them to speed it up), the issues I thought of could be answered without introducing new concepts (ie. they already reached the limit of where marginalbenefit(alchemist) = cost(additional overhead))
It also enriches the setting and/or as a possible AI stand-in.
2.
A sort of expanded ending I came up in my head that introduces two important ideas.
A chambermaid descends from the tower to find the general waving his sword and yelling at the alchemist.
After some frantic shrieks and rushed explanations, the maid sighs and tells off the alchemist for not being truthful.
“The alchemists locked in the tower are indeed smart. So smart that they can’t even feed themselves and I need to pour food down their throats when they are unconscious like some kind of mother bird.”
This establishes two things – one, regarding the questions “why don’t they do *this* to be more productive”, answers -“well, maybe they already have”.
Everything they could do to optimize finding the equation, while still allowing enough stability to allow the thousand year search, they already implemented.
Not only will that include not dealing with eating, cleaning and everything else, but it’ll also mean they’ll probably be speaking some optimized high density no ambiguity language that doesn’t even have the word king or possibly not even illness.
The second is that it really pushes a motive in why this all occurred in the first place.
Though the alchemist in the story that speaks to the general isn’t one of the alchemists in the tower, he still places something regarding them – PRIDE.
Rather than just state that they couldn’t do it or it’s not worth it, he wants to boast about how important their work is, how vital it is, how much energy has been devoted to it, how close they are to getting it.
An intelligent solution would be to pretend to be one of those in the tower, do some fake diagnostics on the heir and then say that they are unable to cure it with the medicines they have available, but are working on one that could work – though probably wouldn’t be ready in time.
But he’s not meant to be some super-capable HR person. He’s someone who was meant to be dedicated to this awesome project that can’t be spared a second – but failed in entrance exam and had to work as a spokesperson for.
Please point me to a good essay that explain transhumanism, in the sense that motivates being why AI safety is such an important topic. Let me explain what I don’t understand about this.
So Scott and Eliezer explain that if the AI researchers succeed to make AI more intelligent than the top humans, then they’ll be able to make even more intelligent AIs. This will then spiral into a superintelligence that is so much better than humans in everything we do that we have no chance to outcompete or control it in any way. I’m fine with this part. People debate how many years into the future this is, or whether it’s even possible at all, but that’s not the part I want to discuss here.
The argument goes that the goals of the superintelligence will be very different from the goal of humans. This is because we can’t describe our human values well enough to teach the AI the right goal function. The new world that the superintelligence creates will then not be what us humans want, so this is considered a bad thing. If that is so, then I’m siding with the superintelligence. My problem is that I don’t understand what these human values are that Scott and Eliezer seem to care about, the ones that they believe a superintelligence wouldn’t respect, and I’d like an essay that tries to explain them to me.
There’s this image painted about the paperclip maximizer. The AI is told to make paperclips. Being smart, the AI wouldn’t just copy our paperclip factories and slightly improve the assembly line process to make paperclips faster. No, it instead plays the long game and becomes a god, spreads all across the universe, uses its tremendous intelligence to turn all the stars as raw materials available for his use, and in the end makes paperclips. At the same time, the AI doesn’t care about the life and wellbeing of the humans of Earth, so it turns them to slaves to assist him in rising to power, then abandon them to extinction once we are no longer useful to him. He does this not because he intrinsically wants to cause suffering to humans, but because this is the most efficient way to achieve its long-term goals. But all this doesn’t sound that terrible to me. Wait, hear me out.
Some people take a luddite view where all technological progress of civilization is bad, we should never make self-driving cars that make all the truck drivers unemployed, and all humans should spend their day ploughing fields to produce wheat, earning their food with the sweat of their own brow. I don’t agree with this position, but one can at least make some internally consistent arguments for it, and if this was what you believed, then I understood why you didn’t like the superintelligence taking over. But this is definitely not what Scott and Eliezer say.
Scott and Eliezer do want progress in technology. They want us humans to become the gods ourselves if this uncaring universe doesn’t have one, spread in the universe, reshape it in our image, and use all the stars as raw materials for our long-term goals, or at least share them with other intelligent aliens that we meet or create. On route to this, they might also enhance the intelligence of humans using a combination of biological technology or applying the right incentives to selection. As far as I understand, they want exactly the same future that they claim the paperclip maximizer AI would create. There’s the small point I mentioned about enslaving all humans to assist you in rising to power and then abandoning them to their extinction once they’re no longer needed. But the problem is, I’m not convinced that humans wouldn’t do this. Humans have done war and slavery so much that I don’t see a guarantee that it won’t happen again. Such bad things could happen in many ways. A powerful but mad dictator could commit genocide to further his political agenda. Or we could avoid dictators, but fall into some trap where we can’t coordinate towards our goals, and even though all individual actors are benevolent and wouldn’t want to enslave humans, the system that emerges in uncaring and doesn’t share our values in the way Scott calls Moloch’s work. Or perhaps the humans that are biologically enhanced will no longer be able to empathize with other humans, and won’t treat them as real people, and will only use them as tools for the goals of their group.
What I’d really like to know is, what are these human values that really distinguish the scenario where the AI becomes god and turns all the stars to paperclips from the scenario when humanity becomes god and turns all the stars to cat videos. You could argue that we humans intrinsically value the life of intelligent beings, and will spread intelligence everywhere. But I don’t think this is a difference, because the argument about the AI says that intelligence is the weapon that lets the AI become all-powerful, and the AI knows this, so it will also spread intelligence everywhere to be able to achieve its goals. I’m quite sure the difference is not some stupid bigoted value like where the humans have pink furry skin and the AIs have green scaly skin, and green scaly lizardman don’t count as real people, so it’s intrinsically more valuable to spread human intelligence than lizardman intelligence. So what is the difference really?
I call these real human values “transhumanist” only because Scott seems to call them that in “https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/” , but I could be wrong in that. So if I misunderstand that, then ignore the “transhumanist” terminology please and try to answer my question about human values that an AI might not share.
Yudkowski has a bunch of long posts on his idea of human values, which he calls “coherent extrapolated volition,” or CEV for short.
The gist of CEV is that it’s the sort of thing that we would want if we were the people we wish that we were. If we were more morally upright then we would want the things that we should want and if we were smarter then we would know how to get them. The idea is circular and not terribly original but it’s a good discussion prompt.
The big problem is that Yudkowski has a massive ego. Since he’s the smartest and most morally upright human in history [citation needed], clearly humanity’s CEV will look more like his personal values than anything that people actually value today. There will be no faith or fidelity, no sense of purity or purpose, just smug hedonism and endless meaningless games.
> The big problem is that Yudkowski has a massive ego.
This is likely. But I’m asking on this forum because Scott seems to care about this too, which is why I’m pointing to the part of “https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/” where he says he’s a transhumanist. So it’s certainly not only Eliezer who has an idea about this.
Update: thanks for the CEV part though, I can look that up at least.
The person I wish I were is probably much worse than who I am.
Maybe a little reflection on your wishes, with the intent of doing a bit of updating, is in order, then?
I have ideas about what tai chi would be like if I were better at it than I am. When I achieve actual improvement, it isn’t like what I imagined, it’s better.
I can easily believe that people can’t do that much to imagine better versions of themselves.
An alcoholic can imagine not drinking, and they’d be better off not drinking, but that doesn’t mean they can do a good job of imagining the good things about living sober.
Eh, I can sympathize a bit with what mrthorntonblog is saying. There are times when I wish I could be a saint, but there are also times when I wish I were less morally constrained so that I could go out and indulge in whatever activity is tempting me at that moment. In the latter times, the person I wish I were is definitely worse than the person I actually am.
The big problem is that Yudkowski has a massive ego. Since he’s the smartest and most morally upright human in history [citation needed]
I believe we have a challenger for the crown in Mr Vinay Gupta who seems to be certain he and his are the only, solely, truly and really enlightened humans what are also smart and can think gooder on this planet out of every culture and era. Clash of the Titans ahoy! 😀
Whatever my opinion of the guy, I don’t think there’s any call to bring him up here.
I get that you don’t like him, but is there a reason you’re mispelling his name? A number of his critics do this and I don’t know why.
My bad, I keep forgetting to Google the guy’s name before writing anything about him.
His last name is spelled in a non-standard way for how it’s pronounced, I don’t even try to remember how to spell his first name, and using his initials is a shibboleth for his admirers. So there’s really no good option besides copy-pasting the damn thing every single time.
Anyway the point isn’t to convey disrespect. I can do that just fine without misspelling his name. It’s because his name is unusually hard to remember.
-sky is the Russian or Ukrainian transliteration (as in “Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky”), -ski is the Polish one (as in “J. Michael Straczynski”). They’re both suffixes that mean “from the region” or “the estate of”, roughly equivalent to the German “von”.
Does it have the same aristocratic connotation as a nobiliary particle like von? Or just the same literal meaning?
Originally, yes, but at some point in the early modern period it started being used by people outside the nobility. The implication’s a lot weaker in Polish (or presumably Russian, though I know less about that) now than it is in German.
I’m going to have to remember “Eliezer von Yudkow.” 🙂
If that lets me call our gracious host “Doctor von Scott”, I’m for it.
@Nornagest: Yesss. I mean, they both think an intelligent’bot that would otherwise doom us can be programmed to be Friendly, bringing Victory from Doom.
If human value were coherent, cat videos would not exist.
…human survival?
I care about the survival of intelligent beings. Whether the linage starts with, say, the daughter of my brother or a program in a computer, those are clearly not the final forms. The beings in the future will look different, and I don’t care about their skin color. Survival is survival in either case.
A superintelligent being would be the best way for this, because it’s less likely to make stupid mistakes like killing everyone on Earth with nuclear missiles before there are enough people outside Earth, or destroying civilization through global warming. I don’t know what the best path is for that superintelligent being, but I don’t intrisically care whether it starts with making biologically engineered humans or with AI computer software.
Most people do not agree with this. I don’t care about “intelligent beings” in the abstract. I care about intelligent beings that either share continuity with my in-group and/or share my values.
Is a world where the only intelligent being is a paperclipper something that doesn’t bother you in the slightest?
> I care about intelligent beings that either share continuity with my in-group and/or share my values.
Right, and then we’re back at my original question. What are your values? The important ones, the ones you care so strongly about that you would like future humans to keep.
Other than self-preservation and eventually becoming god and reshaping the universe in your image, which I expect the paperclip AI will follow as well.
Do you want me to just list everything that people value?
Other people and our relations to them
Aesthetics(art, literature, movies, etc.)
Happiness
Truth
Autonomy
Security
Do you not care about any of these things?
What if the superintelligent being concluded that the surest path to survival was to kill everyone else on earth with nuclear weapons?
Okay, so it sounds like your concern is that after the point where we know enough to make an unaligned superintelligent AGI, but before we figure out how to make an aligned one, we might accidentally go extinct and fail to spawn an intergalactic civilization, because of human foibles. So we should just build a superintelligent AGI as soon as possible and let that be our legacy.
Honestly, I’d rather we nuke ourselves than spawn a ruthlessly expansionist superintelligence that kills not only us, but any other weaker life form it encounters in the universe. But if we put that aside for the moment, there’s a compromise solution: As soon as we know how, we make a superintelligent paperclip maximizer or whatever, but we put it on a timer, so that it won’t activate for, say, 100 years, and in the meantime we can turn it off or extend the deadline whenever we want. Then we deposit it someplace relatively safe, like the Moon or Mars.
This way, if we figure out AI alignment, we can shut off the paperclip maximizer before it activates, and everybody wins; if we nuke ourselves, too bad, but at least we pass on the torch to the paperclip maximizer.
> But if we put that aside for the moment, there’s a compromise solution: As soon as we know how, we make a superintelligent paperclip maximizer or whatever, but we put it on a timer, so that it won’t activate for, say, 100 years, and in the meantime we can turn it off or extend the deadline whenever we want. Then we deposit it someplace relatively safe, like the Moon or Mars.
I don’t think that can work, at least not in the timescale before we colonize exoplanets, for two reasons.
1. Even a superintelligent paperclip AI needs some resources to start to ascend to power. Just like any dictator, it would probably start by taking over some industrial countries, and using its existing infrastructure to start manufacturing whatever it needs to start to expand. Like, you know, become president of the U.S., make the armed forces build rockets for asteroid mining, or whatever. If you put an inert superintelligence of the Mars, and then the humans civilization dies out before it can expand to places other than Earth, then the superintelligence won’t have a civilization to take advantage of, and will eventually die too.
2. I think the AI safety people are worried that we’ll cross the intelligence threshold so suddenly that we won’t know where to stop. There won’t be a point when we have an AI that we’re sure is powerful enough, but it can’t yet become powerful.
Yeah, those are valid objections. I still don’t think the payoff of spawning a universe-colonizing superintelligence is so intrinsically valuable that we should just go for it without any regard for the interests of pre-existing sentient lifeforms.
I guess another analogy one could make is with evolution. Evolved organisms have flourished on Earth, and from a super-far-mode perspective, one could just say “That’s good. Flourishing life is better than barren rocks floating in space. Life should flourish throughout the universe.” But almost everything we consider bad is also a byproduct of evolution. It doesn’t seem that bad until you think about it in near mode, e.g. when you think of a time when you or someone you especially empathize with was suffering terribly. By comparison, the suffering of, say, dinosaurs, doesn’t seem all that morally significant. But that’s just a quirk of our psychology. If we have the choice, I think it is incumbent upon us to try to treat the well-being of hypothetical sentient beings of the far future as morally significant, rather than just abandoning them to the cruel vicissitudes of natural selection.
I suppose if I had reason to believe that Earth life represented the universe’s one and only shot at hosting any phenomenon more interesting than a bunch of barren rocks floating in space, I might be more concerned with spreading life beyond Earth as fast as possible than I am with seeing to the well-being of said life, but the universe is a big place, and it’s probably going to be around for a long time, so I’m pretty sure that if we blow it, some alien life form will eventually get a chance to make the universe a livelier place.
Do you really? If so that’s a very different value system from mine and I think most people’s. I don’t consider intelligence a terminal value, just an instrumental value – an enormously important instrumental value, but still just instrumental. The only terminal value is the well-being of conscious creatures.
And this distinction is key here. If we build a real paperclipper that takes over the universe, it would likely be extremely intelligent, far more intelligent than all of humanity combined by any sensible measure, but it might not be conscious. Even if it were conscious, it might not be happy. Even if it were happy, it probably wouldn’t be super duper happy.
Or abstractly put, optimizing for the number of paperclips is very different from optimizing for the well-being of conscious creatures, and this is why we want to avoid it.
It’s actually also very different from optimizing for intelligence. A paperclipper would presumably just make itself as smart as it needs to and then focus on making paperclips. If you don’t care about consciousness at all and just want to have intelligent beings, you shouldn’t waste so much time making paperclips, you should create lots of other beings like you, or alternatively turn the universe into lots of CPUs for yourself rather than into paperclips.
> it might not be conscious
I don’t understand what consciousness could mean here. If, when you say you care about consciousness more than about intelligence, you mean that you want to encourage vegeterianism because eating meat will make the unintelligent but conscious chickens suffer, I could understand that. But I can’t imagine what an intelligent but unconscious successful paperclip maximizer AI would look like. I don’t believe that philosophical zombies who behave intelligently but lack a soul can exist.
> it might not be happy
I definitely don’t buy this one. If you were saying that the enslaved humans weren’t happy under his rule, I could understand that. A human living today can be very unhappy because he lives in an unstable country where a mugger could slit his throat on the street any day, or because he has a terminal illness with no hope for a cure, or because he can’t earn enough to feed his children, or because to earn enough he has to work 80 hours a day and has no time for recreation and pursuing his own happiness. A successful paperclip AI can’t be unhappy in any of those ways. If it can only work on meaningful intellectual tasks like designing warp drives and paperclip assembly lines for 40 hours a week, and needs to relax and watch TV series the rest of the time, then it knows that and will allocate adequate resources to provide that recreation time for himself.
Okay, so the core of the disagreement here is that you think a superintelligent machine is necessarily conscious and very happy. If you ever try to discuss this topic somwhere in the future, I would suggest starting from there, because up until now I’ve been rather confused as to why you think a paperclipper scenario could be an okay outcome.
So… I think you’re wrong about how you think about a) the link between consciousness and intelligence and b) the link between consciousness and human-like emotions.
I agree with you about the non-existence of philosophical zombies, but for reasons that don’t tell me anything about artificial intelligence. Afaik, a philosophical zombie generally refers to someone who is just like a human, claims to be conscious, but isn’t. That strikes me as implausible because we actually notice that we are conscious, so I don’t see why any being would be mistaken about being conscious.
But that doesn’t mean an intelligent AI needs to be conscious. I think an unconscious AI might be possible, and such an AI would be aware that it isn’t conscious. So the argument against philosophical zombies doesn’t apply. Do you think there is a different argument for why an intelligent AI must be conscious?
Please stop me if I’m ascribing false beliefs to you in this paragraph. It seems to me like you imagine intelligence as this complicated thing that we haven’t yet figured out how to program, but once we do, the thing we created will be conscious and it will, therefore, have feelings of stuff like stress and satisfaction.
This is, I think, false. I’ll taboo the term intelligence for myself here – what AI people are trying to get into AI is effective general problem-solving capability. Right now we have the effective very-narrow problem-solving capability (e.g. in a pocket calculator) and effective kinda-narrow problem-solving capability (in AlphaZero). We’ll keep making it more general and at some point reach something that we would describe as AGI.
Throughout that process, consciousness may or may not gradually evolve. There is something which our brains do that makes us conscious. We both agree that it’s not about biology, so it must be the ‘process’ of thinking – something I could call an algorithm. Maybe this algorithm is essential for achieving generality and so AI people will also stumble across it. Or maybe it’s something more exotic that evolution dug up to have an effective punishment mechanism, and we’ll find a different (better?) way to achieve generality. I’d assign something like 40% to the first smart AI being conscious.
But more importantly, even if the AI is conscious, it doesn’t then start to do something about its well being. Humans do something about their own well-being, but that’s because we were designed by evolution and evolution rewards us for doing something about our well-being (at least in the ancestral environment). If an AI becomes conscious, no magic happens. It doesn’t give it any additional agency it didn’t have before. Like, suppose for a moment that we create an AI and it is suffering. If that AI is a paperclipper, then I think that, as a matter of computer science, it is just a fact that it won’t do anything to mitigate its own suffering, even though I’ll totally grant you that it could. If its utility function rewards paper clips, then it is perfectly allowed for it to suffer, for it to realize that it’s suffering, to have the opportunity to make itself happy instead, but to still continue suffering indefinitely.
If you disagree with that, then you have to provide me a reason why it would.
Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not claiming that you can’t build an AI that cares about its own happiness. In fact, I’m over 99% sure that you can. Pick any mind you want, human-like, animal-like, conscious or unconscious, whatever. It’s possible to build that mind. But it’s probably really really hard, and it doesn’t happen automatically. As for this discussion, I think that by calling this AI we’re talking about a paperclipper, we’ve pretty much ruled out that it is the kind of mind that cares about its own happiness. A Paperclipper by definition cares only about making paperclips. Somthing that cares about its own happiness wouldn’t just make paperclips.
So for the paperclipper scenario to be ethically okay, it would have to just happen to be really happy despite not doing anything about its happiness. That strikes me as very unlikely, and again, even if it were the case it would only be a fraction of the happiness that minds which have actually been optimized to experience happiness could experience.
As an aside, I am a vegetarian and would encourage others not to eat meat to prevent animal suffering.
sty_silver: Thanks, that’s a good objection. Yes, I did assume that the AI would be conscious like you write above, but now I’m less sure about that. I still think though that if the AI can feel happy and unhappy, then it will try to become happy.
Do you think it is possible for consciousness to depend on being made of a particular kind of matter? Because, if so, a kind of zombie is implied.
An AI is not necessarily a computer. Not everything is a computer or computer-emulable. It just needs to be artificial and intelligent! The extra ingredient a conscious system has need not be anything other than the physics (chemistry, biology) of its hardware — there is no forced choice between ghosts and machines.
A physical system can never be exactly emulated with different hardware — the difference has to show up somewhere. It can be hidden by only dealing with a subset of a systems abilities relevant to the job in hand; a brass key can open a door as well as an iron key, but brass cannot be substituted for iron where magnetism is relevant. Physical differences can also be evaded by taking an abstract view of their functioning; two digital circuits might be considered equivalent at the “ones and zeros” level of description even though they physically work at different voltages.
Thus computer-emulability is not a property of physical systems as such. Even if all physical laws are computable, that does not mean that any physical systems can be fully simulated. The reason is that the level of simulation matters. A simulated plane does not actually fly; a simulated game of chess really is chess. There seems to be a distinction between things like chess, which can survive being simulated at a higher level of abstraction, and planes, which can’t. Moreover, it seems that chess-like things are in minority, and that they can be turned into an abstract programme and adequately simulated because they are already abstract.
To expand on the last point: suppose you get a positive TT result for one system, A. Then suppose you duplicate the software onto a whole bunch of different hardware platforms, B, C, D….
(Obviously, they are all assumed to be capable of running the software in the first place). They must give the same results to the TT for A, since they all run the same software, and since the software determines the responses to a TT, as we established above, they must give positive results. But eventually you will hit the wrong hardware — it would be too unlikely to always hit on the right hardware by sheer chance, like throwing an endless series of heads. When you do hit the wrong hardware, you get a false positive. (Actually you don’t know you got a true positive with A in the first place…)
Thus, some AIs would be “zombies” in a restricted sense of “zombie”. Whereas a zombie is normally thought of a physical duplicate lacking some non-physical factor essentual to consciousness, these are software duplicates lacking some special feature in their hardware. A Computaional zombie is an exact equivalent of a genuine Artificial Consciousness, but only with regards to the kinds of inputs and outputs allowed under a Turing test. If we had some reason for believing that silicon circuitry could be conscious and germanium circuitry couldn’t be, we could easily detect the zombiehood of the germanium zombie just by looking “under the hood”. However, hardware inspection is not allowed in a Turing Test.
This possibility of Computational Zombies comes about because of the separability of software and hardware in a computational approach, and the further separation of relevant and irrelvant behaviour in the Turing Test. (The separability of software simply means the ability to run the same software on differenet hardware). Physical systems in general — non computers, not susceptible to separate descriptions of hardware and software — do not have that separability. Their total behaviour is determined by their total physical makeup. A kind of Articial Intelligence that was basically non-computational would not be subject to the Compuational Zombie problem. Searle is therefore correct to maintain, as he does, that AI is broadly possible.
Possible but very unlikely, I would say.
Eliezer Yudkowksy has talked about that exact question in this debate, so my first instinct is to refer to him; he’s done a better job arguing than I will do here. The person he was debating had the position that changing the matter is very likely to remove consciousness.
I agree with you that emulability is not an inherent property of physical systems, and that there is a difference between things like chess and things like planes. I actually agree with almost all claims you make. But I disagree with the conclusion, because consciousness is exactly the kind of thing that seems to be like chess rather than a plane. The first reason that Yudkowsky also points to is that you could have a simulated brain that’s isomorphic to the natural brain in inputs and outputs, which implies that the thoughts “I observe that I am observing something” and “I think therefore I am” will at some point appear, and it seems unreasonable to claim something having these thoughts isn’t conscious.
And the other reason that I would add is reductionism. Atoms don’t actually know whether they’re part of meat of siliocn, so on a really fundamental level – and this is the level which could be emulated – there is no different matter. Only in the interplay of different atoms do you get something that feels like matter, and it seems unlikely to me that whatever determines consciousness cares about this higher level. In other words, it seems to me that the exact law which governs where consciousness appears would have to be quite complicated if consciousness did depend on matter.
@b_jonas:
Why?
@StySilver
Are you saying zombies are impossible, or low probability?
In the absence of any reason to believe otherwise , we should assume that reports of conscious experience are prompted by conscious experience….but material replacement is such a reason, if it even possible for material replacement to matter
Given the confusion about how consciousness works, I don’t know how you can be sure that it works like chess. Do colours and pains and feelings work like chess?
Low probability. I’m not sure that it works like chess, but I think it’s very likely, around 90%, for the reasons I sketched out.
Imagine two intelligent beings. One of them is an ordinary, 100 IQ human who values ice cream and cat videos and so on. The other is a robot that only values paperclips. It’s only got an IQ of 105 so it’s never going to personally have an intelligence explosion and tile the universe with anything, but it’d really like to. Also, for the sake of making them more equivalent, it’s only got about fifty years of life left before unavoidably dying due to some kind of hardware failure.
If they’re both trapped in a burning building and there’s only time for one of them, would you rather save the robot because it’s more intelligent? Is it at least obvious why many people would rather save the human? If so, extrapolate from there as to why we would prefer to tile the universe with humans and cat videos rather than paperclipper instances and assembly lines.
> If they’re both trapped in a burning building and there’s only time for one of them
Asimov has a short story “Kid brother” about this. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but I don’t think it’s relevant to the question I asked.
Suppose that a close relative of yours and a brilliant leading rocket scientist is trapped in a burning a building, and you can save one. The scientist might be important for the future of humanity because his inventions will allow us to colonize other planets saving humanity when Earth becomes toast. But the difference isn’t so obvious that I would know that humanity would definitely be doomed if the scientist dies in the building. (This is a thought experiment – in practical emergency situations you never get such clean tradeoffs.) If you asked me this, I’d answer that I’d save the close relative. This is for a purely selfish reason: while the scientist might help humanity in the long term, my family is likely to help me later when I’m in trouble, so it helps me personally more to save a family member.
But you can’t extrapolate from that to more than a few generations into the future. I already don’t care about what life my dead great-grandparents lived, nor about more distant relatives that I never meet. If a third cousin of mine got in a burning building, then him being my third cousin wouldn’t do him any favors. I don’t particularly care much what happens with my blood relatives who’ll be born generations after my death either. So in the far future, I’d prefer people in general to colonize other planets more than my distant future relatives to survive in particular.
In fact, I already care more about the happiness of personal friends I’ve made at work (who aren’t related to me by blood) than of my third cousins. While in practice there are very few people of color in Hungary in my social class, I hope you’ll still believe me if I say that I don’t care much about the skin color of people I meet at work. If I met an AI with IQ 105 at my next job, I’d judge him on his behavior rather than what hardware he’s made of. If he behaved in a way that seems to clash with my values and habits, then I wouldn’t befriend them because of that, but then I also don’t vote for human politicians who advertise political values I don’t agree with. I don’t care whether someone got created from a biological process or not, and won’t prefer humans just because I share some of their genetic information.
So yes, I might save the robot from the fire if he’s similar enough to humans that this is even a valid question.
Good old New England values.
No, really, it’s basically the Lovecraft insight: alien intelligences must have values and goals orthogonal to ours, so don’t make any non-human intelligences and be scared of any that are already out there.
How this extends to human outgroups is left as an exercise for
Lovecraftthe reader.I don’t think it has much to do with what is objectively valuable, so much as if we build an AI aligned with human values, we get more of what we value, and if we build one that’s misaligned we get less down to possible extinction. It’s selfishness write large. I suppose there’s an issue about whether we should just amplify our arbitrary values, without bothering about objective morality, and another issue of whether an AI arriving at the one true objective morality would be safe for humans….
There doesn’t need to be a difference. We want to maximize human values because we are humans, and those are by definition the values we maximize. Clippy feels the same way about anything that cares about things other than paperclips as we do about it.
Any intelligent actor can be modeled as if they were trying to increase the value of some mathematical function that takes the state of the universe and gives a number; “human values” is our function. Actually listing “human values” comes down to just making lists of things people like/say they like.
They aren’t “intrinsically more valuable” than alien values – nothing is valuable outside of a value system! We’re brought up to try to take alien values in to consideration, but the reason for that is that other human beings tend to have slightly different values in the grand scheme of things, and e.g. very very few of us actually want to maximize the number of suffering puppies and babies. People in the past had big hyper-destructive wars over what seem to us now to be small differences in values, so people in general have learned that it’s better to perform “value handshakes” with everyone around you, that cooperation overlooking differences is usually the path to the happy ending of whatever story you’re telling.
But that only works because we’re not in an environment where people have significantly diametric values; in a world with two people, each wanting the exact opposite thing as the other to the exact same extreme, there is no happy ending, no moral rule will lead to a better outcome than one killing the other.
Thus, the best you can do is try to maximize your own values, with the caveat that the best way to do that is usually to respect the values of the people around you as well.
I do disagree that there is any such thing as “human values” that has any chance of applying to a majority of humanity for more than a few decades, though.
Are there any people here who would be unafraid entering [let’s say: alone and at night] a haunted house, or an abandoned mine that’s rumored to be haunted, etc.?
I have an entirely materialistic worldview, and I am about as certain as I am of anything that ghosts, spirits, etc. aren’t real– but you could never, ever, ever get me to walk alone into a house purported to be haunted, at night, for more than maybe a minute or so. I think my behavior is mostly normal in this regard, and yet one occasionally sees videos taken by people (including believers in the paranormal!) who do seem willing to do these things… so I thought I might as well ask around, and see how other people think.
If it’s daylight or the site’s occupied, it barely registers most of the time, although I might think about it if the building creaks late at night when I’m alone or trying to get to sleep. It becomes a lot more salient if it’s dark and abandoned, particularly if it’s also overgrown and decaying, but we’re still not talking terrifying — it’s pleasantly scary to me, like a roller coaster.
Relevant to your interests
I wouldn’t be worried about the haunting. But an abandoned mine is just plain physically dangerous, and an abandoned house also, especially at night when it’s harder to see structural damage. So you wouldn’t see me going in without a good reason (and good light).
You know I was initially going to say that, but then I thought “wait a minute, that doesn’t explain why a Korean would be afraid of the fan, there’s nothing that could happen there!” If a really stretch, maybe a room that is sealed off enough to count for the fan death fear is sealed off enough for carbon monoxide poisoning to be an issue? Or maybe poorly insulated electrical wires could be a more legitimate aspect of the fear? But I have no such fear and have slept in rooms with closed doors and fans on a lot. So there’s clearly some cultural aspect to the fear that goes beyond the reasonable-ish “old creaky houses could cause accidents.”
So here’s the half-baked idea I’m considering. Westerners are worried about malevolent intelligences in general and Korean are worried about health problems in general. I’m reminded of when I lived with a South Korean roommate for half of a year he was always super worried about health issues. He also introduced me to the idea that drinking cold water causes headaches (which as far as I can tell is completely wrong, still doesn’t happen to me), he always wore gloves on mass transit, and was worried about germs generally. On the other hand he never talked about being worried about safety from other people, whereas American horror stories are almost all “this evil sentient thing is trying to murder you!” Even if you know ghosts are fake, maybe as a westerner we grow up afraid of potential malevolent actors going after us in general? Whereas a Korean would be afraid for their health even knowing that fan death is complete BS?
China, Japan, and Korea have lots of ghost stories.
True, though I don’t really know the ratio of “ghost is scary” to “ghost is benevolent/neutral” type stories compared to the West. Maybe it’s the same and they’d be just as freaked out spending the night in a haunted house? Not really sure on that. I still think that the evil being aspect of the building is important to the root of most fears about it rather than the safety of the construction.
Very entertaining ghost stories.
I seem to recall that “fan death” was something made up to cover for Mob hits back in the day, so there’s no reason to think it’s an evolved belief that serves a purpose to the average person.
Except that there’s got to be some reason (not necessarily a practical reason about not dying) why fan death caught on so strongly as a meme and a visceral fear.
I’m more or less the same (don’t believe* in supernatural but would not willingly explored a haunted place alone in the dark).
For me at least, it’s just like scary movies and TV shows. No, I don’t believe in dark creatures that stalk you as a second shadow and then eat you, but the Dr. Who episode “Silence in Library” still kept me up with the lights on all night. Also had to give up after two episodes of Stranger Things 🙁
(Oddly, the one “scary movie” that didn’t bother me too much was 1408. I saw a small part of it before watching the whole thing, but I don’t think that partial knowledge of the plot was what made the difference.)
* I mean, I haven’t thought about it deeply, so maybe I believe in it at some subconscious level, whatever.
This strikes me as general fear of the unknown.
You know there aren’t spirits, but you don’t know what *could* be in there.
What helps me with fear of the unknown is worst case planning. Think about the worst thing that could possibly be in the house, and have a plan to deal with it.
Yeah, leaving aside obvious safety issues as mentioned by other posters- I don’t care. No issues at all. I’m an arachnophobe, so I understand irrational terror, but darkness just doesn’t get me that way. Maybe it’s from years of having terrible eyesight and preferring to sleep in pitch-blackness anyway? Maybe it’s from camping far from other humans? Maybe just a general childhood spent in the sticks? *shrugs*
EDIT- Ghosts don’t enter into it. I’m an atheist and very materialistic, and seem to (upon introspection) believe that “in my bones”. Not bragging, just can’t feel the haunted-house-scariness. It’s like asking someone with no sense of smell if smelling manure bothers them- of course not, they can’t smell!
I not only would, I have. Being alone in any dark, unknown place at night can be moderately unsettling, but the haunting rumors didn’t add to it particularly.
I wouldn’t be comfortable doing it. That’s not to say I couldn’t overcome my reluctance in the right circumstances, and I have actually done versions of it in some instances, but I still wouldn’t be comfortable. I’m not a materialist, though I’m not a believer in ghosts, nor do I fear attack by any supernatural entity in any folktale or horror movie sense. I think “getting the willies” is just that sense where your lizard brain is telling you, in increasingly uncertain terms, “you’re vulnerable.” In my opinion, lacking that sense of unease in such a setting is far more unusual than having it.
I would be afraid, but I expect I’d be able to walk around in a haunted house if I had some reason to.
Similarly, I’m still fairly afraid of the dark, but it doesn’t prevent me walking around in my house or outside at night when I have any reason to do so (in contrast to what it used to do when I was a child).
Religious and superstitious beliefs tend to persist when they function as primitive social adaptations to real problems. Though paranormal haunting seems improbable from a materialistic worldview, the idea that these environments might pose a real (physical) danger might well be accurate. So it might be a good idea to understand exactly why others regard certain locations as dangerous, despite rejecting paranormal claims.
TL;DR: Chesterton’s Fence
Yeah. like a couple of others, I can’t claim I would be entirely unafraid, but I certainly wouldn’t refuse to do it or do a swift retreat if I did do it. Embarrassment at my irrational fears would be a more powerful motivation for me than the irrational fears themselves.
I don’t know if the rumours of haunting would make me more scared: but I wouldn’t enjoy spending lots of time in any large dark area with random noises to be honest.
I definitely have some superstition despite not believing it though. Particularly ‘tempting fate’: I wouldn’t joke about plausible bad things happening to people I care about (not that I think it will make it happen, it’s a mix of ‘feeling wrong’ and suspicion I would feel worse if it happened by chance).
Reminder: a week from today we’ll start discussing Greg Egan’s novel, Incandescence.
I bought a copy for this, so it had better be good 😉
Ditto, though reading the first three chapters last night certainly piqued my interest.
I’m curious to learn what you thought, although I’ll save it for the thread.
Personally, I’m somewhat glad I read it, but I have high hopes for the discussion, so hopefully I’ll come out of the week with a strong positive.
Thanks! I recommended Diaspora to somebody about a year back, but actually haven’t read any other Egan, so I’ll be glad to joint in.
I adore his short story anthology Axiomatic, and Terranesia is also a lot of fun.
I’ll try to join if the library has it or if I can overcome my stinginess to buy the $12 kindle version 😛
@johan_larson – how much do we need to have read, and do I need to have rot13 working?
Thanks!
You should have read the whole book. The discussion will be fully open. We will write freely about everything in the book, including potential spoilers.
What is the minimum number of national borders you must cross to travel by land from Buenos Aires to Ottawa? Assume all land and river borders are traversible.
I get 11, two ways.
V trg gra obeqref, ryrira angvbaf. Ner lbh njner gung Netragvan unf n obeqre jvgu Oenmvy?
Ab, lbh’er evtug, V jnf guvaxvat “ahzore bs pbhagevrf” orpnhfr gung’f jung cerivbhf dhrfgvbaf nfxrq sbe.
And I missed that border.
I was able to get 10.
Netragvan -> Oenmvy -> Pbybzovn -> Cnanzn -> Pbfgn Evpn -> Avpnenthn -> Ubaqhenf -> Thngrznyn -> Zrkvpb -> HFN -> Pnanqn
Fun fact: if you want to do this, you’ll have to go off-road.
Are the crocodiles as bad as they say?
That gap seems like some sort of failure of civilization. How did we manage to draw roads all up and down North and South America, but not through that bit?
Environmentalists don’t like the idea, the locals don’t like the idea, and it apparently helps keep diseases (like foot-and-mouth disease in cattle) from spreading.
I guess 11, get 11 but have one wrong
Pnanqn
Rfgnqbf Havqbf
Zrkvpb
Thngrznyn
Ubaqhenf
Avpnenthn
Pbfgn Evpn
Cnanzn
Pbyhzovn
Rphnqbe Creh, Puvyr (frireny nygreangvirf-Oenmvy,Hehthnl)Netragvan
1. Netragvan-Oenmvy
2. Oenmvy-Pbybzovn
3. Pbybzovn-Cnanzn
4. Cnanzn-Pbfgn Evpn
5. Pbfgn Evpn-Avpnenthn
6. Avpnenthn-Ubaqhenf
7. Ubaqhenf-Thngrznyn
8. Thngrznyn-Zrkvpb
9. Zrkvpb-HF
10. HF-Pnanqn
I take it y’all are familiar with the criticism of female characters being illustrated so that, while facing the viewer, they manage to show him both their butt and breasts?
Well, here’s a children’s book about Goatee and Pismo, two real-life pet goats from California who learned to surf.
With most other mammals, the T&A usually line up anyway. Seems having the female turn around and look at the male attempted to be amorous is less objectifying all told.
Well, that’s… distracting. I suppose they have an excuse in that goat udders always look vaguely obscene in real life (cow udders don’t, for some reason), but that shade of pink looks like it belongs on a baboon.
Yeah I agree that was a poor color choice.
Re cows: the prominent veins width size of my wrist that lead to the udders wig me out a bit. (This might just be dairy cows.)
What’s the standard procedure, when designing a medical test, to determine the right tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity (where I’m picturing a tradeoff involved in choosing the threshold for a positive test or something similar)? This seems like an incredibly hard thing to do, especially because remotely rare diseases will lead even small deviations from perfect specificity to create high false positive rates. On the other hand, false negatives seem like they’d be incredibly dangerous. I’d imagine there’s some sort of standard for how to strike this balance, and there seem enough medically-informed people who hang out around here that I figure people might have insight.
Epistemic status : professionally interested and partially-informed, but I don’t know if there is a standard industry line. Others may, and if so I am interested to read their responses.
It depends on what you want to do with the test! If you are screening for a disease (testing a broad population for it without a high degree of suspicion for any particular individual), then you generally want your test to be highly-sensitive – or, better yet, you want your diagnostic likelihood ratio for negative results to be low. If you are looking to confirm your suspicion of a disease, you may want a different set of characteristics. Moreover, one must also consider the rates of harm and benefits in patients who receive treatment for the target illness. The goal of medicine is to provide optimal care, and this is not synonymous with optimal classification procedures. There’s a good description thereof in A primer on receiver operating characteristic analysis and diagnostic efficiency statistics for pediatric psychology: we are ready to ROC. J Pediatr Psychol. 2014 :
(For another description of that important principle – albeit in the venue of test interpretation rather than test design – see The threshold approach to clinical decision making. N Engl J Med. 1980.)
Now, “A primer on…” describes the use of Cohen’s kappa to optimize these thresholds, but that’s not the only way.
One good (and very prevalent) way is to use a receiver operator curve, which is a plot of true-positive rate vs. false-positive rate. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve Analysis for Medical Diagnostic Test Evaluation. Caspian J Intern Med. 2013 briefly describes how to use the ROC to find an optimal cut off :
Another good way to optimize is to maximize your Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC). A worked example I have on hand : Mammillary body changes and seizure outcome after laser interstitial thermal therapy of the mesial temporal lobe. Epil Research 2018. The researchers demonstrated that if you take a patient with hippocampal seizures, and you ablate their hippocampus such that the mammillary body shrinks, the degree of shrinkage is correlated with the probability of seizure freedom.
If we want to build a binary classification scheme out of those results (mammillary body shrinkage of at least ___% is associated with seizure freedom), we can graph the MCC as a function of our threshold. MCC seems to maximize at ~20% in mammillary body volume reduction, which corresponds to a sensitivity of 0.92 and a specificity of 0.88.
Edit : less wall-of-text-y ; clarity
Very good info, so I’ll just add 2 cents:
– Never use the Youden index as it implicitly declares sensitivity and specificity to be equally important, and that’s almost never the case.
– pAUC is often preferable to AUC in these cases as for practical reasons only a small range of FPR is of interest.
Cool, thanks! More tests than I had realized existed, though not surprising I guess. I’m somewhat (but not really…) surprised that it sounds like there isn’t a single test that’s considered the standard to use. I guess context will determine what’s best, but it sounds like from your answer at least that there isn’t an answer to which test to use when? Whatever maximizes patient outcomes though…
The point about the intent of the test determining how sensitive it needs to be/how non-specific it can get away with being makes a lot of sense, but means that I didn’t get the “this much sensitivity and this much specificity is what we require” answer I was hoping for. I guess it’s just more complicated thank that would allow…
Unfortunately.
Mammograms (as you mention below) are good example. They are first-line in the appropriately-selected patient – for instance, screening for breast cancer in a 65 y.o woman. In contrast, a screening mammogram would be grossly inappropriate in a 30 y.o woman. But, if a 30 y.o woman detects some kind of breast lump on a self-exam, a mammogram might be helpful.
(Note : I have nothing to do with testing for breast cancer. If someone knows better than I, CMWIW.)
You should check out The threshold approach to clinical decision making. N Engl J Med. 1980. (Let me know if you have trouble with a paywall.) It’s a very good explanation of how to handle medical testing. I really think it might make things more clear.
I would also encourage you to think of likelihood ratios instead of sensitivity and specificity. Whenever we perform any kind of medical test, we must start with our pre-test probability (mathematically speaking, our priors, and medically speaking, our clinical suspicion) and allow the test’s results to update/modify/refine that to a post-test probability. Likelihood ratios are how to do that updating in a precise way. They are medical Bayesianism.
Likelihood ratios are calculated from sensitivity and specificity. Knowing how they are calculated can show you why a test with near-perfect sensitivity can still suck if it has really bad specificity.
Likelihood ratios in diagnostic testing – wikipedia
Likelihood Ratios and Diagnostic Tests (Bayes’ Theorem) – StatsDirect
Some good comments already. I don’t know to which extent the following points have been included in the links provided, but I decided to add them here anyway.
One point worth emphasizing is that you’ll always want a mixture of sensitivity and specificity (or, more broadly, test properties) that’ll mean that your test has clinical relevance. This relates both to the type of test you consider and when/whether to test at all (rather than treat/not treat without testing first). If you’re worried someone has disease X and there’s a high risk of said individual having disease X due to the clinical presentation, some tests will for example be inappropriate even if they are very good at making the distinction between individuals requiring treatment X and individuals not requiring treatment X, for example because they take time to perform that the patient might not have – not an uncommon situation in emergency medicine. If you’re so worried you’d treat him regardless of the test result, you shouldn’t test. And the same goes for low-sensitivity screens; if a positive test result of a screen does not imply that you’ll actually act on the result of the screen, you shouldn’t perform it (in screening contexts cost effectiveness is usually critically dependent on how you follow up on the test result, and in many contexts inadequate follow-up means that the value of the test goes down a lot).
Cost effectiveness is another variable that would/should probably (in an ideal world?) enter the analysis when you’re judging what is or is not a good mixture of sensitivity and specificity – you should be willing to pay more for more precise tests, but only to the extent that those more precise tests lead to better outcomes (you’re usually optimizing over patient outcomes, not test accuracy).
Skef also mentions this, but the relative values of specificity and sensitivity may well vary during the diagnostic process; i.e. the (ideal) trade-off will depend on what you plan to use the test for. Is the idea behind testing this guy to make (reasonably?) sure he doesn’t have colon cancer, or to figure out if he needs a more accurate, but also more expensive, test? Screening setups will usually involve a multi-level testing structure, and tests at different levels will not treat these trade-offs the same way, nor should they. This also means that the properties of individual tests can not really be viewed in isolation, which makes the problem of finding ‘the ideal mix’ of test properties (whatever these might be) even harder; if you have three potential tests for example, it’s not enough to compare the tests individually against each other, you’d ideally also want to implicitly take into account that different combinations of tests have different properties, and that the timing of the test may also be an important parameter in the decision problem.
rahien.din’s message has a lot of info, but I felt like it left out (or buried) the primary design factor.
It’s fairly rare for there to be a condition that can’t be diagnosed with a pretty degree of accuracy. If the person is available to be tested, there is generally a set of tests that can be run (possibly multiple times) to arrive at a highly reliable conclusion.
The kind of trade-off you ask about is therefore mostly a matter of “front-line” tests. And therefore the simple answer is: bias towards false positives, and follow up positive results with a more expensive and definitive test or tests. As long as the first test isn’t wildly inaccurate, you want to avoid false negatives as much as possible and funnel the positives into a more definitive test.
Ahh fair that makes sense. I think vaguely the motivation for this question in the first place was the fact that I’ve started hearing a decent amount of discussion about how over-testing people is bad because of negative outcomes (especially financial) associated with false positives. I think I hear it mostly with regards to mammograms, but the logic seems to be “when a disease is rare enough, our imperfectly specific tests will always lose to Bayes’ Theorem”. Mammograms are obviously ~front-line, so I guess that means their goal is to be highly sensitive at the cost of specificity that other tests (biopsies?) will handle, but the fact that false positives are bad enough to justify sometimes simply not using the test it seems to imply that the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity is really important, even at the front lines.
I believe the conventional wisdom is that the primary issue with “over-testing” is that it is difficult (and stressful for the “patient”) not to treat a disease once it is identified, and more testing leads to more disease identification prior to any symptoms. Some conditions are good to catch “early”, but others may be counter-productive to treat before they develop into something worse.
So more testing leads to more treatment, which leads to more complications from treatment.
Following up on the interesting discussion on “incels” two threads ago, is there anything that society can do, collectively or individually, to help incels?
1) I’m sympathetic to Dan Savage telling lonely hearts to hit the gym, get a haircut, practice talking to people, etc., or to the “I got through it” posts that always pick up angry responses on /r/incel, but obviously there are a lot of people who believe that won’t work, either correctly or not.
2) By contrast, I’ve seen a lot of arguments that the way to solve the problem is to confront incels and get them to acknowledge that they don’t have a right to sex. I confess that I don’t get this one, but I want to, so I’m sure I’m being reductive and would love to be educated.
3) To be even more unfair, other possibilities seem to be sex robots (Hanson) or a return to traditional values (Douthat).
Any thoughts?
1. I’m not just sympathetic to this; this is what I think. A lot of people in that sort of circle are people who need the message “suck it up buttercup” and instead got a message that mixes self-pity with “this can’t be changed” and a toxic, self-reinforcing community with beliefs that make them worse people and make it less likely they’ll get laid, find love, whatever.
2. Seems less profitable than 1. “You’re miserable, and that’s partly of your own making, and some of the stuff that’s not of your making you can still work to fix or alleviate, and you can probably be less miserable if you put the work in and stop being nasty” is a far better message than “you have no right to not be miserable.” Sure, there’s no right not to be miserable. So what?
3. People whose problem is that they don’t feel desired or validated or whatever won’t be helped by stuff that doesn’t do those things. Beyond the other issues, sex robots won’t do those things, any more than porn or whatever will. As for traditional values, patriarchal societies where high-status men have multiple wives/concubines are pretty dang traditional, and they also have problems with low-status young men who can’t get laid/relationships. Just as traditional are societies where a man getting a wife is basically making a business deal with her father; these societies have problems with young men who can’t seal the deal literally with the dads any more than incels can figuratively with the daughters.
What’s new here is not the existence of lower-status, usually-younger, men who are or consider themselves unfuckable, unlovable, whatever. What’s new here is technology that allows these ugly, counterproductive communities (if you want to attract women, adopting an ideology that takes a very dim view of women is counterproductive; if you want to get laid, hanging out with people who share in common that they can’t get laid isn’t gonna help) to exist.
Further, I don’t like the framing of “how to help them” – they simultaneously need to help themselves and play hole-in-the-bucket as to why they can’t.
I mostly agree with you, but I think there may be a lesson to be imparted along the lines of “women have the right to their own preferences, these are not always honestly communicated in our culture, and you have to think about what you have to offer the other person.” Like reminding someone interviewing for a job to focus on why the company wants them rather than vice versa.
If it is not the case that you have some tribal bigman with a harem, the above situation could be of help to incel men, as there would be pressure on the alphas to settle down with a single woman, especially after having fathered a child, and to stay attached to that one, freeing up more of the average women for these average guys. (Inasmuch as some men will have nothing to offer a father, some fathers will be getting no better offers.)
Also, as we tried to impress upon Kevin in the past, many traditional societies had some respected role for voluntarily celibate men, monks or priests or the like. That’s not the same as men who wanted wives but couldn’t get them, but it is an option.
If it is not the case that you have some tribal bigman with a harem, the above situation could be of help to incel men, as there would be pressure on the alphas to settle down with a single woman, especially after having fathered a child, and to stay attached to that one, freeing up more of the average women for these average guys. (Inasmuch as some men will have nothing to offer a father, some fathers will be getting no better offers.)
Yeah, what people who make the harem argument are overlooking is that our ancestors lived in Christendom, where patriarchy involved shaming high-status men into settling down with one wife.
At what point did kings, etc, not have mistresses?
EDIT: Let me put it this way. Social mores about sex haven’t changed as dramatically as some think – people are a few times more promiscuous than previously, overall, not a dozen or a hundred. The norms for referring to sex have changed far more than the actual having of sex.
@dndnrsn: St. Louis? Good King Wenchesless? 🙂
I mean, you’re right that people today are not a dozen times more promiscuous than they were in Christendom, but changing behavior at the margin can be powerful.
Yes, the king might have a mistress or two, and all of it kept very discreetly. But he wasn’t forgoing marriage to bang wenches off Ye Olde Tynder every night. Today we have men who are decidedly not kings doing that sort of thing.
Plenty of kings weren’t particularly discreet about it.
If you’ve reduced the defection rate to just the king, I’d say you’ve pretty well succeeded from a societal distribution-of-sex standpoint. Of course you’re tinkering at the margins, but shrinking those margins drastically is very valuable!
Think about it from this perspective. We’re balancing off conflicting interests: women’s interests in getting the best genes vs society’s interests in not having a few men monopolize all the women.
Prohibition is one route. Another is raising the cost of engaging the activity to be discouraged so that people won’t take it unless it really is that much better. There’s probably no way to make “dem royal gametes” undesirable for women. So don’t prohibit that. But do make it clear that those genes better really be all that, to the point that they are worth forgoing the social support of a man working for your household, and your bastard kids getting any sort of inheritance.
I think in practice, I think that’s what old English common law filius nullius did. Good girls wait until they’re married, and lock down a good man who will support her and her children. Good men see that their best chance to get the goods is to work hard and be a net positive to society, so most of them go down that path. And the lord still gets to bang the scullery maid, who really doesn’t have any better prospects, and so those nice high-status genes still disseminate into the lower classes.
Back in the Good Old Days, prostitution was a lot more common. This claims that 69% of men in 1911 said they’d paid for sex, whereas that figure was 15% in 2007.
Actually the link you provided says the 69% figure (nice) was in 1948. If my history is right, I’m pretty sure there was a minor historical incident right before then that might have increased prostitution demand.
I’m not just talking about kings; the “etc” there is doing a lot of work. In some times and places, it was common for parish priests to have mistresses! There was a special fine for priests with mistresses; many treated it as the cost of doing business, so to speak.
rlms’ link is important. Men are a lot less likely to frequent prostitutes now – both married men (whose wives will be less likely to see sex as an imposition due to better contraception, antibiotics, and social changes) and unmarried men (who can get sex from their girlfriends, or hookups, or whatever). But back then, they were having lots of illicit sex with prostitutes.
The sexual landscape is very different, but there was no lost age of chastity.
@rlms
@ christhenottopher
Actually, that 69% figure came from Kinsey, and is (like not a few of his statistics) pretty much totally bogus.
(Source)
@LewisT
I do at least feel gratified in my guess that military service could increase prostitution usage was supported (given that serving had 23.3% with prostitution usage while not served was 9.1%). Though I am still slightly disappointed the kabbalistically appropriate number 69% was inaccurate.
That figure did seem remarkably high, but I think it’s still safe to say (based on other evidence) that prostitution was considerably more common in the past, especially if you go back to pre-syphilis Europe.
Considering your last datapoint turned out to be garbage, shouldn’t you either give decent citations (the written occurrences of kings having mistresses or even the occasional parish priest don’t count because that still doesn’t give you any thing but a couple anecdotes; may as well compare to Genghis Khan) or consider the possibility you were wrong?
@quanta413
What does Kinsey just making numbers up/running some kind of grad student sex club/whatever he was doing, have to do with earlier historical sources on mistresses or prostitution or whatever?
Especially past a certain point, hard numbers are tricky to get. There’s a reason that medievalists have to do at least some “well, based on the Decameron, we can say this about the society that produced it” or whatever.
I tried to do some back-of-the-envelope calculation on how many prostitutes there were in England and Wales today vs the 1890s; ran into the problem that the sources back then are either cops (trying to downplay the number of prostitutes, usually by counting only arrests or even convictions) or social reformers (trying to really highball the number of women in prostitution as proof of the need for social reform to save said women from being in that line of work). Sources now are more reliable, but still run into the problem that you’ve got a tug-of-war between those who want to downplay it since it’s happening on their watch and those who want it as proof of how awful society is.
Precisely. There’s almost no way to know, so any claim about more or less prostitutes per capita than the past without huge error bounds is almost certainly unjustified.
So when your numerical datapoint is wrong, you don’t doubledown with “considerably more common in the past” with absolutely no evidence.
Go back to medieval times or even early America. You’ve often got a whole bunch of agrarian farmers living in small villages. It’s such a different society as to be almost incomparable. It wouldn’t be surprising if they had less prostitution because they didn’t go anywhere and a market for prostitution basically couldn’t form in a small population where everyone knew each other. Cities had prostitutes but were a small fraction of the total population unlike now. The gap between population density now and then means enormous differences.
I doubt the moral differences are the determining factor.
@quanta413
First: a datapoint about prostitution in the early-mid 20th century being wrong doesn’t undermine data points about prostitution from before then.
Second: It’s not a moral difference, it’s a technological difference.
Prior to the early-middle 20th century: no antibiotics, no Pill, no safe abortion, no way to reliably check the paternity of a given child. The first three make sex risky, for both men and for women (worse for women, and this is probably further offset by greater male risk-taking behaviour). The last one makes sex riskier for women socially – a woman wants a reputation for chastity outside of wedlock because it will feed into a reputation for fidelity within wedlock; she wants to minimize the chance her husband will get correctly or unjustly suspicious and turf her out or whatever – as well as meaning a higher chance then than today that a guy will end up unknowingly raising another man’s child. If you are a family with the means to keep your daughters indoors or otherwise under supervision, you do that; if you’re not, you’re SOL, and you just gotta hope your daughter sent off to work as a maid at the local rich guy’s manor doesn’t catch the eye of the rich guy or his son.
Development of good, reliable, hormonal contraception, where a woman doesn’t have to convince a guy to put a condom on, etc, that changes a lot, as does safe abortion, as does antibiotics. It probably changes women’s sexual habits more than men, because men are idiots that way – the threat of syphilis or pregnancy probably dissuaded more women from sex than the threat of syphilis or getting someone pregnant dissuaded men (if, with modern medical technology, men and women were equally risk-averse and had the same sex drive, this would predict that lesbians would have the most sex partners and gay men would have the fewest – obviously not the case).
The change in the sexual landscape in the middle 20th century saw more men get sex from their girlfriends, especially first-time sex, and less with prostitutes. Female prostitutes are one of the possible responses to a situation where sex is risky and women are more dissuaded than men (due probably to some combination of the risks being greater to women and to less risk-taking behaviour): they are essentially professionals paid, in part, to take on risk and harm, in that context. Another outlet is situations where there’s a lopsided bargaining position, like wealthy men going after their servant girls. When for a “respectable woman” having sex with a guy who hasn’t put a ring on it is a less potentially bad choice, more women will do it. This means less demand for prostitutes.
Taking “there are no more or less prostitutes now versus a hundred or two hundred or however many years ago” as the default assumption is, I think, a mistake. There’s a lot of reasons to think that there were more prostitutes per capita back when a nice respectable guy couldn’t lose his virginity to his nice respectable girlfriend, or whatever.
Further, there’s lots of historical reasons to think that high-status men, regardless of the society, have always sought out as many sexual partners as their society will let them have, plus wiggle room.
@quanta413
If you think “the written occurrences of kings having mistresses or even the occasional parish priest” is the kind of evidence that might be brought up in support of the claim that prostitution was more common in the past, you should read more about the issue. Priests didn’t sometimes have mistresses, they owned brothels and claimed that “If you expel prostitution from society, you will unsettle everything on account of lusts”.
@rlms
Cherrypicking a random brothel just outside of London tells you almost nothing except about London at that time. Corrupt bishops are hardly surprising. It’s barely better than just happening to sample modern U.S. mores on prostitution by looking only in a 5 mile region around Mustang Ranch in Nevada.
@dndnrsn, rlms
You are both ignoring the primary point I already made about social differences.
Low density agrarian societies cannot be assumed to have prostitution patterns matching the major cities of their time. Sure, the pill etc, cut the opposite direction. But when people live in very small communities and rarely leave them, it’s not conducive to a sustained pattern of widespread prostitution. There’s no theoretically sensible way to know the magnitudes of either effect. So all that’s left is empiricism on weak data.
But in the past, looking at major cities or armies or whatever is explicitly biasing the sample in an extreme way. It’s not representative of a population that’s predominantly rural and agrarian. And this is true up until what? The 19th century?
There’s no way to know if at various points, the past was roughly similar, had an order of magnitude more or less prostitutes per capita without doing the brutal work of trawling through and trying to figure out how many prostitutes there are in a significant sample of tiny villages or towns. And good luck about something people mostly hide.
I hold that our error bars are just way too big to know if prostitution is more common now or in the past. It’s not like our current measurements are even going to be reliable to better than a factor of 2 or 3 or something like that. How would you even know how bad your systematic errors were? How do you count people that bounce in and out of turning tricks? Escort services? etc. And the problem just gets worse as you go back in time.
@quanta413
This is a good point. It raises the question: how large does a settled group of people have to get before that anonymity effect sets in? If it kicks in relatively high, if say you need several thousand people before John the Miller can throw his coins to a prostitute without everyone knowing, that would support your side. If it kicks in smaller – if a decent-sized village would be enough to cover up some sins – that would support mine.
There’s also some sexual activities that won’t be necessarily constrained in the same way. Everyone might know that the duke has a habit of impregnating and discarding servant girls, but he’s powerful enough that nobody really wants to point it out. Bad behaviour by a powerful individual can be an open secret without the person suffering any consequences.
One could try to estimate sexual habits more generally by comparing, say, wedding dates to birth-of-first-child dates. That wouldn’t say much about prostitution, but it would say if people were having sex before the wedding.
(It’s only one anedcote, but it’s an amusing one: I remember, from a long-ago course, a collection of local court records, I think English, can’t remember the century. In one, a man was charged with some sort of crime for having, allegedly, promised a woman he would marry her if she slept with him, which he had not done. Can’t remember if he was found guilty)
OK, so, what’s “the past”; where are we starting for these purposes? When’s the good old days, or at least the better old days?
EDIT: And more generally, my overall point – this isn’t really about prostitution – is that it’s hard to square with one of the core redpill ideas, which is that things used to be better: that there was a golden age when stuff was considerably better for average or sub-average guys, sexually at least. This is a questionable proposition. There’s always been low-status guys and high-status guys and the latter have always had more partners lifetime. I think the major difference is a recent technological change that’s let the low-status no-sex guys connect with each other, figure out their numbers, and stew.
I think people tend to forget that males had a high rate of mortality in the past, higher than women. If 10-60 percent of men died in conflicts in tribal societies, that leaves an abundance of women for the survivors. In this context, the higher male sex drive actually makes sense. My view is that we should decrease the number of males born relative to females, so that the sex drives of the two sexes balance out. Just like in ancient times.
@dndnrsn
Agreed. It depends heavily on social effects and size of settlements. I’d assume that much like now, prostitution is highly unevenly distributed. We know prostitution springs up near heavily male areas/routes. So truckers, sailers, mining camps, armies, etc.
I figure that in a lot of areas in the past, a significant number of people had sex before marriage risks be damned. Pretty much like they do now.
I agree there is good reason to suspect this may have been more common. It’s just this isn’t prostitution so it wasn’t what I was including in a count. We don’t know the rates of this now either, but it’d be surprising if there weren’t a significant number of people behaving this way.
We could probably estimate the rate of illicit sex (almost always rape) on say, U.S. southern plantations in the 19th century. We know it can’t be low considering the average % of European ancestry of African Americans.
Similar qualitative behavior may occur in any highly stratified society where powerful men have control over lower class/caste/slave women. Although it’s possible some social arrangements lead to lower rates of it. Caste systems maybe? They sometimes managed to keep their line of descent within a single group making them genetically distinct from each other (not true of all castes though). That implies illicit sex across the “wrong” castes rarely led to children who themselves had children.
This is certainly true. I’d be a little surprised if no one had tried this. The question of estimating a lower bound on the amount of pre-marital sex is an interesting one.
An excellent point. There are probably times in the past with more and probably times with less prostitution. And of course, we already agree the pattern should vary heavily by where we look.
I’m saying that it’s going to be hard to really know what times had more or less prostitution outside of extreme cases. On the other hand, we can relatively easily estimate what places have more or less prostitution.
I agree the redpill thing is at least partly mythological. I don’t think it’s totally wrong though. The various factors that add up to high and low status in a partner aren’t weighed the same the same with modern sexual mores as the factors would be weighed during periods when people got married and had children earlier and divorce rates were much lower (so pre-1960 or thereabouts). And if you step back to the 1800s, it’s hard to imagine any woman shacking up with a man who’s practically unemployable for any length of time. Life was just too damn hard for that. But that’s something that’s possible now although still looked down on.
@The Red Foliot
Tribal societies is rather further back than I was thinking. My impression is that at least post-childbirth, women’s mortality rates were notably worse than men’s in most places for couple millenia. Although war can quickly reverse the pattern. But my impression was that war wasn’t so common as to reverse the skew at all times.
My vague recollection is there are about 105-110 males per female at birth, so your plan is certainly appealing if there was an easy way to pull it off. Although I’d only push it to there being an equal amount of males and females. I don’t like the idea of an imbalance because I’d prefer a relatively monogamous civilization not a polygamous one or one with a bunch of people alone.
From what I’ve read about the 1700s and 1800s, prostitution outside of cities more often took the form of a local girl who would sleep with a small number of guys who were friends. It was less anonymous. One or several guys with money would “keep” a girl – pay her rent etc. Because of fear about diseases, it was a lot less random. They’d find an easy/desperate girl, and control access to her. Then a lot of times, especially if she got pregnant, they’d find some not too smart man, convince him to marry her, and they’d move to a new town where she could get a new reputation. It seems like prostitution was pretty common, especially out west, but sometimes it looked more like having a girlfriend than what we’d think of. Any sexually active woman outside of marriage could be considered a prostitute.
@quanta413
I wish I could find my copy of a book of essays about the intersection of the military and medicine; there’s a chapter on VD in WWI. One of the statistics is that VD infection among the troops tended to be low (I think 10s-20s?) double digits, fairly chronically.
Oh, people are idiots. We’ll make really bad choices for sex. But the bad choices are less bad than they used to be, for the most part.
Wouldn’t a society like that have two “tracks” regarding what’s considered illicit? After all, there’s an underclass of people who are despised, and before a certain point, enslaved. Doing awful stuff to them would be more accepted than doing it in general.
Hackett Fischer claims that in general the Cavalier semi-aristocracy of the South tolerated a level of sexually voracious/predatory behaviour by high-status men that wouldn’t have been tolerated further North, as I recall, but I may be getting that muddled. I read the book some time ago.
“Girl falls in love with guy from the wrong side of the tracks and her family murders them” is something that exists in multiple societies, isn’t it? Presumably, at least in part, they were killed to prevent children.
I vaguely remember reading something about looking at New England Puritan communities, the church registries of weddings and births. The level of “baby born 6 months after wedding” was higher than one might expect from Puritans. This could be more “there was some level of tolerance for sleeping with someone you were engaged to, for serious” or more “blunderbuss wedding” territory. Those both fall in different places on a spectrum where one end is “you may have sex after marriage, but you have to feel guilty” and the other is “it’s impolite to ask your casual sexual partners’ names” or whatever.
Yeah, it’s probably easier to try to estimate over place rather than time.
I have a sense that the situation is slightly different – people are still determining status using old-fashioned measures that are somewhat atavistic. For example: in a society where authority is determined in part on physicality, strength, combat ability those things will be high-status in a guy. Society changes more quickly than we (our biology, our socialization, whatever) do. So we count those things for status in contexts where it makes no sense: don’t American presidents tend to be taller than the average? (Is the US a place where wealth gives enough of a nutrition edge to make people taller? Because that would explain taller leaders in some places and times).
The anecdotal “criminal amoral shithead who has an endless procession of women” – the toughest guy in the trailer park who doesn’t take no shit from nobody might be a loser today, unemployable and sleeping on his girlfriend’s couch. By the standards of most of human history and prehistory, a guy who plays a lot of dominance contests, is relatively good at them, and is able and willing (probably too willing) to resort to force is probably a catch. To put it another way: maybe the difference isn’t that guys like that didn’t exist back in the medieval village or the hunter-gatherer band; maybe the difference is that back then there were more financial and social rewards for being that guy.
A couple of points tangential to the thread.
1. We don’t have data on prostitution, but we do have data on premarital sex–more precisely, on the fraction of brides who were pregnant. For several European cities in the late 19th century it was about a third. That’s from memory, but I think accurate.
2. It may well be true that in hunter-gatherer societies male mortality was higher than female, giving a high f/m ratio. On the other hand, in somewhat later societies, the most dangerous thing that any large fraction of the population did was childbirth, which could give the opposite result.
@dndnrsn
That’s pretty high. Chlamydia and Gonorrhea mostly I suppose?
Agreed. It’s a pretty great improvement.
Yeah, pattern definitely doesn’t vanish post slavery either even if it weakens. One of Zora Neale Hurston’s novels has a main character who’s an illegitimate child of one of the semi-aristocracy and a sharecropper. And there’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”.
That’s got to drive down the rate of couples even trying too though right? I mean, when you’re damn sure your families will murder you, that’s a hell of a deterrent. The lack of past gene flow between many jatis implies a pretty high rate of successfully discouraging breaking the taboo or of halting the reproduction of anyone who broke the taboo (or at least expelling each member of the illicit couple from both groups). I figure even the hardiest of fools is usually dissuaded.
My vague understanding of what’s distinct about population clusters in much of India is the sheer level of consistent long term strictness implied by the genetics of many jatis. Europe has a lot of gradients between Germans and Danes, Germans and Swiss, English and Scots, etc. And their social structure has changed drastically several times in the past couple millennia causing gene flow across previous social boundaries even if the “murder people who mate across the wrong lines” was a still a rule at any given time, Europeans apparently failed to define what the “wrong lines” are consistently for a few thousand years.
I’m not convinced that being willing to resort to force against other humans is particularly advantageous in 19th century America compared to now. Or in a medieval village compared to now.
The more risky life is, the more atavistic rage heads can fuck it up for everyone else. I think the modern U.S. and Europe in some ways are more conducive to behaving this way than the past might have been.
This theory also seems to cut against social survey data where we find that Western “modern” men have values/aggressiveness distinctly higher than women whereas men from more “traditional societies” don’t. Or something vaguely along those lines. People have mentioned it here before, but I can’t remember the results/wording very well.
It is possible that someone who may be considered a loser now might have done well in the past, but I kind of doubt it for a lot of reasons.
“Yes, the king might have a mistress or two, and all of it kept very discreetly. ”
What? Plenty of kings had large harems at their whim, even in Christondome.
@quanta413
I can’t remember if they listed the diseases. Gonorrhea was probably the bulk, I would guess; it’s extremely noticeable. I think the highest rates were among Canadians, of the nationalities’ soldiers they looked at – into the 40% range, if I’m remembering it correctly. So either Canadian soldiers were having more sex with prostitutes, or were somehow worse at not getting the clap, or were more conscientious and likely to report that they had it, or were treated better than other nationalities when they reported they had it (I think that different armies treated it differently – some punished men in treatment for VD, which would give them an incentive not to report that they’re pissing funny).
On the other hand, “star-crossed lovers” are a trope in many cultures’ stories. They just have different reasons why they’re star-crossed, and they’re more crossed in some cultures than others. The use of it as a central trope in works of fiction in a given culture would suggest that it’s something taboo enough to be interesting as a plot device (the story of Romeo and Juliet, two young lovers, who get together without any obstacles and don’t kill themselves due to a series of dumb miscommunications, is not a very interesting story) but would be familiar enough that it wouldn’t completely kill suspension of disbelief.
Oh, I’m just spitballing here. It depends on how much you trust numbers claiming that, say, medieval England was considerably more violent than England today. The authorities were arguably much worse at preventing violence, on average. In such a situation, being able to use violence one’s self would be more attractive.
How so?
I’d be interested in seeing that, and the definitions.
I think it depends on what kind of loser. Additionally, the other form of the atavism is in non-losers: it’s that we value things that signal strength and potential to do violence, even in contexts where neither strength nor violence are necessary or even desirable. If you have two, say, business executives, the one who’s a bit bigger and taller will probably do better, if all else is equal. I think it’s because there’s some part of our brain/some part of our socialization/both that deep down still expects the big man to lead his guys in battle against the raiders from the tribe a couple valleys over/lead them in a raiding party against the tribe a couple valleys over.
@ohwhatisthis?
To my recollection, it’s more like “a few kings, highly infamous for their scandalous behaviour, were indiscreet about keeping multiple lovers”. I recall Charles II of England, and one of the Polish kings deeply conflicted with the Church over unchristian behaviour.
Can you substantiate what you mean by “plenty”?
From this list, all but two or so of the British kings had public mistresses that were notable enough to have their own Wikipedia pages. Around half had several. Likewise, the list of sexually active popes is distinctly non-empty.
???
Starting with William the Conqueror, there are eighteen kings of England not on that list:
William I
William II
Henry I
Stephen
Richard I
John
Henry III
Edward I
Henry IV
Henry V
Henry VI
Edward IV
Edward V
Edward VI
Charles I
William III
George V
George VI
And I count five who are not believed to have slept with any woman other than their wife,
Edward II
Richard II
James I
Charles I
Charles III
plus three more who did so only before marrying or taking the throne
Richard III
Henry VII
William IV
By comparison, notoriously sleeping with multiple mistresses is limited to four or five English monarchs of the past thousand years, none of whom are exactly considered role models.
This is just from fiction, but my impression is that smallish communities might have a prostitute. Everyone knows who she is, and I’m not sure whether everyone one knows who all of her customers are. She isn’t respected, but she’s there.
All the *British* kings (I was being deliberately obtuse). The *English* kings seem to have had fewer, although it seems plausible that that is to some extent due to a lack of historical evidence rather than a lack of mistresses (I assume we also know less about e.g. the sisters-in-law of medieval kings than modern ones).
I was going to reference the biblical story of Tamar and Judah to show that prostitutes were not unheard of in small ancient agrarian communities, but those may well have been temple prostitutes, indicating that perhaps there wasn’t enough business for full time sex workers. (Joke; but still confounded for other reasons)
@Randy M
You are assuming here part of the whole redpill worldview (which incels have adopted – they just believe that something they cannot change is keeping them from acting on the advice that’s a part of the worldview): namely, that the top guys are hogging all the women, or that women are “ruined” for normal guys by the top guys, or a combination of the two. This is a big assumption to make, and it sounds like you’re taking it for granted.
Is there actual survey data or something that either demonstrates this is true or that it’s not?
If it’s true that some women are “ruined,” it ought to be kept in mind that this happens to men, too (though not the incels, probably).
I am assuming that as monogamy increases, there are more mates to go around.
You seem to be assuming that that people can be polygamy (serial or concurrent) will increase the options for those who find it hard to get mates, and this has many assumptions baked in as well.
@Randy M
Why do you assume I think that? I don’t know whether changes have made things better or worse for the average person, or for the bottom third, or whatever, speaking statistically.
Rereading my jumble of typos, I’m not sure what you think I think you are assuming. That aside…
My original point was that if there is more encouragement towards monogamy, and sexual continence otherwise, there would be fewer men without access to women, except for those that were worse for partners of their respective caliber than being alone–presumably not including the category we feel sympathy for, those with pro-social behavior but some deficit in sex appeal.
This doesn’t entail assuming that in the current milieu a woman will necessarily become an alpha widow or harem member, but that there is some of that behavior on the margins; some women who have hope of settling for part of an alpha who would otherwise settle for all of a beta. Do you think this is an unlikely state? It doesn’t have to affect every woman to leave some men lacking.
An alternative assumption is that with more wanton hook-ups and breaking down of standards (something akin to your fully realized sexual revolution, perhaps) there would be more nookie for everyone. This is a theoretical possibility, but not a convincing one; you’d probably eliminate more of the virgins than at present, but still have lots of people without regular sex or companionship, since there would be more hope of getting some attention from the most desirable and little reason to change what constituted desirable.
“I am assuming that as monogamy increases, there are more mates to go around.”
This is true relative to a situation where a small cadre of men are monopolizing multiple women. But I don’t think such a “harem” system describes current reality.
Rather, it’s more like there’s a continuum of promiscuity with both men and women at either end and all along. And it seems like (most) of the hooking up occurs between people on similar levels of that continuum. There are certainly “Chads” and… I don’t know, “Chadettes”? Chad might be hooking up with a dozen women over the course of a year, but it’s not as if those women never date anyone other than Chad.
I think the two parts of this are separable and the latter is sometimes underheard and could be useful to these guys.
Yeah, but if someone is caught up on how unfair the situation is, pointing out that any remedy other than making oneself more appealing (because the other party has the right to have their desires fulfilled) may not be fully persuasive but may be useful.
Having read the specific Douthat article and Douthat generally, he’s not talking about a return to polygamy, or even a full return to the 1950s-type values. In the article, he specifically pushes back against what he calls a Hugh Hefner morality that puts having lots of great sex all the time as one of the most important things in life. He seems to suggest that if the rest of us all put just a little more value on chastity, incels wouldn’t feel so left out.
Here’s what Douthat says.
Did it? Do we have some kind of Chad Index over time to measure the sexual marketplace? He just flatly states it. What’s his source? What’s his evidence?
Yeah, relations are pretty bad. Whole bunch of possible reasons. But it’s not because of the “new landscape” because there isn’t really a new landscape as in his first and third points here.
This is really exaggerating. The modern sexual culture is incoherent; the sexual revolution kinda stalled halfway. It’s not like he says it is. Virginity and celibacy are less admired, but the mainstream view does not seem fairly described as “Hefnerian” – maybe influenced by, sure.
I think his article is looking back to a golden age that never existed. A silver age, maybe.
There’s definitely a new landscape. Divorce, delayed marriage, women in the workplace, the pill, all these things have changed gender relations in some pretty major ways.
I agree that Douthat and the Red-Pillers are buying into a Golden Age that never existed. I made this point on a different forum, but while it’s obviously true that women prefer wealthier, more fit, and wittier partners and men prefer younger and more attractive partners, both sexes have malleable tastes. We can settle and be happy with something “reasonable.” It’s why we still have ugly people: ugly people got laid and made babies, too.
Red Pillers point to stuff like massive cities and online dating and such that creates a supposed “cock carousel” that women “ride” which means they can never be happy with a normal man, and that may be true for a small number of women who adapted poorly to the new landscape. Similarly there probably are a few women and men who cannot get off Tinder and just settle with someone. And both men and women probably have unrealistic expectations as a result of porn/romance novels that makes their real-life partners a bit disappointing.
But these problems are all over-stated. There are other secular trends driving us towards delayed marriage and caused the divorce bump. And if anything is causing a drying up of sex, it’s the damn smartphones! People aren’t spending too much time on Tinder and checking out guys/girls, they are too busy playing video games and seeking validation from Facebook! Or Snapchat! Or whatever app is “cool” this week!
Most people are still just people, just some of the details changed.
If you’re going to blame tech, I wouldn’t blame the smartphone but the Sony Walkman and its descendants. Put the headphones in, eliminate casual social interaction. Great for misanthropes, maybe not so great in the long run for normal people.
However, I think another thing has been missed — violence. Namely, there’s not enough of it. War and violent crime used to kill off a LOT more young men, more than young women. This certainly cut down the competition. Participating in war and violence made the men more attractive to women. And the guys not suited to violence got their chance when the tough guys were actually off at war.
Now? We’ve got 115 young single men for every 100 young single women nationwide. The odds are bad, and those men who were low-desirability to begin with get the worst of it.
Douthat talks about sex, gender, and relationships fairly regularly in his columns, so you might have to read more of his writing to clarify.
If I could try to summarize his views:
—First off, he’s a moderate-conservative Catholic.
—He thinks that American culture broadly encourages people to have as much sex as they can get, and portrays casual sex and one-night stands as totally acceptable, if not normal. His evidence: Movies & tv, including those aimed at teenagers, are sex-saturated. The prudest standard you’ll usually see is “Wait for the right guy/girl”, where the standards for “right” are little more than “We’ve dated for a several months”. Both sex-positive feminists and Hugh Hefner-type men openly endorse the “Have lots of sex” mindset. “Wait until marriage, or at least near-marriage” is losing popularity, even among devout Christians.
—He’d probably agree with you that “the sexual revolution kinda stalled halfway”, in the way he describes how predatory men sort of hijacked the sexual revolution and turned it into a way for them to acquire sex more easily. When there’s a presumption that women enjoy casual sex just as much as men do, it makes it much easier to pressure and abuse women and call it “consent”.
—He’s not too nostalgic though. He recognizes that “in a world of more stringent moral rules, a world that emphasizes sexual restraint and make chastity a virtue, the same predator might find a different way. He might be more aggressive, for instance, and then play on his victim’s sense of shame, her desire to be chaste and her feeling that she’s been soiled by the encounter, to induce her not to tell anyone and perhaps even to continue seeing him, because after once you’ve fallen there’s no point in getting up… Conservatives arguing for a different, thicker sexual ethic than just the rule of ‘consent’ need to recognize that any revived code of sexual restraint would need to draw on the insights of feminism as well as those of pre-sexual revolution sources”
—He thinks that sex and marriage are split along class lines. “In upper class circles, liberal social values do not necessarily lead to libertinism among the people who hold them, and indeed quite often coexist with an impressive amount of personal conservatism, personal restraint…[because] the influence of a libertine culture is counteracted by the dense network of adult authority figures whose examples matter more than what you watch and read and consume.” Given his belief in the importance of marriage to create stable and prosperous families, this is part of what he means by sexual-revolution-as-neoliberal-deregulation, benefiting the privileged and socially adept who can navigate the new rules. Not directly relevant to incels here, but it gets at what ADBG said about divorce, delayed marriage, the pill, online dating, and (I’ll add) online porn changing the way that people approach relationships and what they want when they’re in them.
I think it’s fair to infer into Douthat that he thinks the cultural norms surrounding sex should be much more chaste than they currently are, but not so chaste as to recreate the days when sex outside of marriage was unspeakably shameful.
Did it? Do we have some kind of Chad Index over time to measure the sexual marketplace? He just flatly states it. What’s his source? What’s his evidence?
Back in Ye Olde Dayes up to the 1970s when Nice Girls Didn’t and there was supposed to be at least the pretence of waiting for marriage, a man who could get dates but not sex, or couldn’t even get dates, could console himself that Nice Girls Didn’t and it was just bad luck that he didn’t have the good job or whatever to be able to afford marriage.
Now that sex outside of marriage is normal, and Nice Girls Do and do a lot more than vanilla missionary sex, a guy who can’t get a date doesn’t have that sop to his self-esteem. Now that everyone is supposed to be having sex when they turn fourteen*, what’s your excuse to be eighteen and a virgin who can’t even get a kiss?
*No I know everyone is not, but the blather about ‘we have to let minors have access to contraception and abortions without the consent or knowledge of their parents or else terrible bad things will happen’ sure makes it sound as if everyone is having sex at fourteen.
I meant to consider this point yesterday. We haven’t had a significant war in a while, one that could serve to skew the sex ration. Perhaps that results in more men being left out, though it seems it should make things more even unless one sex had more chance of being content sexless, or…
Wait, what? Why that imbalance?
I read Douthat semi-regularly and I think that in general he’s too ready to believe what the past said about itself. There are some things where it hasn’t gone from “doesn’t happen” to “happens” but from “happens but we say it shouldn’t” to “happens and we say it’s OK.” It might happen more. But how much more? High-status aggressive men who sleep with lots of women aren’t a new invention, at a minimum.
@RandyM
I don’t know why the imbalance; my intuition would be mostly “male divorcees with younger women”. There are also more men born than women (105 to 100), which likely accounts for some of it.
Hmm… if the pool of men is those ages 15-60 and the pool of women is those ages 15-55, then that ratio makes sense, I suppose.
We might also have to consider how vigorously one is searching; presumably younger people are looking for romantic companionship more than older people, on the basis that they have more reasons to do so (family formation, economic support).
That accounts for all of it if we assume that 2/3 women are not single. The singles pool is going to enrich in men as pairs drop out, provided the death rates are the same. I suspect that some of it is women marrying older men, but I don’t think we should discount raw birthrate in an age when we aren’t finding new and exciting ways to kill off our young men.
“Now that everyone is supposed to be having sex when they turn fourteen*, what’s your excuse to be eighteen and a virgin who can’t even get a kiss?”
Age of first sexual experience is going up bit by bit and the number of partners is going down bit by bit.
I agree with A Definite Beta Guy:
That Golden Age being a legendary time before the feminism, the pill &co, when any guy, regardless of his attractiveness and courtship skills, could receive a young, virgin bride if he was considered ok by her parents. That part may be somewhat true, many of today incels may have married a virgin bride (although let’s not forget that Andersen, the famous writer, was probably an incel of his time).
But what followed after that young and pretty virgin bride (usually still a teen) was married against her will to an unattractive husband with low social skills?
Think about it: most unmarried girls were virgins, educated at the monastery or under the strict surveillance of their housewife moms and maybe also governesses; both the girls and the mothers knew that a single mistake meant the girl was “lost”.
So, for all the young men who didn’t yet have the situation to marry and sustain a family, or didn’t yet want those responsibilities, there were mainly two possible sexual targets: the prostitutes (risky because syphilis) and other men’ wives.
The incel-equivalent would have been an ideal husband – for a prospective Don Juan:
– not attractive, his forcefully married pretty wife doesn’t love him.
– no social skills; isolated, few friends, no experience in courtship, so the chances to observe or be informed that his wife cheats are weak.
– not physically fit – so chances to be a physical threat for the lover are weak.
So, in that “Golden Age”, the incels wouldn’t be virgins but would most probably be cuckold, raising
Chad’sCasanova’s children.I think the Red Pill theory has such a success because most men nowadays read less literature (except SF or fantasy).
My random thoughts:
1. As with all things the inceldome thing is a combination of factors beyond the control of the individual male plus factors that are theroetically within the control of the individual male but are very difficult to act upon without some degree of collective will power.
2. It should be emphasized strongly that the kinds of ‘self improvements’ that people insist incel’s perform to improve their chances of getting women should not be advocated for on the grounds it will improve their chances of partnership. (The fact that it probably will is irrelevant)
Better life routines, more musculature (I am going to be a bit unfair and assume the typical incel has either too much fat and/or too little muscle) , higher activity levels; these things will generally raise a male’s self esteem and quality of life regardless of whether they die a virgin or not.
3. A lot of anecdotes are getting thrown around and very little data. For example, incels and the women that despise them are accusing the other of having standards that are too high. Almost no one as far as i can tell has bothered to provide data to support their claims. I say almost because there is a bit of data that suggests women have a higher probability of being in a sexual relationship between the ages of 18-25.
4. “You’re not entitled to sex” — This is a very frustrating statement to me because I simultaneously agree with it and yet I can barely restrain myself from hold the people who say it in absolute contempt.
Personally, I don’t believe in rights of any kind and I do not believe that anyone is entitled to anything (I’m partly frustrated because people who say that ‘Sex is not a right’ often but not always believe that people (mostly women) have rights to a laundry list of arbitrary goodies (In an absolute or a social sense) — This view of entitlement[s] seems to come from a position of which groups you sympathize with and which you hold in contempt. However there are nevertheless consequences to supporting social systems which create extreme amounts of inequality.
If for example a market economy naturally produces a working class operating at the margins for whom wages tend not to increase; it is generally agreed by progressives that having some hedging mechanism (which at a bare minimum could be a strong social norm for charity, and in other cases a welfare state) is valuable/necessary if for no other reason then creating a mass of persons that will threaten the existence of the otherwise wealth-generating system.
I see a similar argument to be made for modern sexual relationships. If modern technology plus modern social liberal sexual norms produce a system where a significant portion of the population (The majority of whom let me remind you are men of fighting age who often have nothing to lose) are alienated from nearly all social interaction; this threatens the stability of the system. So it is worth addressing with more than condescension if for no other reason than to keep the system working.
I strongly disagree with #2.
It may be true that working out more is a good idea, even if it doesn’t attract women, because it will make me healthier.
But as someone who is currently NOT working out, I’ve already presumably run the cost/benefit analysis in my head, and concluded that the health benefits alone don’t justify the time expense and physical discomfort of working out.
Therefore, the other general benefits are irrelevant. If you want to convince me to work out, you need to convince me that it will help solve my immediate and most pressing problem. Particularly if there are other approaches to my immediate and most pressing problem that will demand similar resources (i.e., every second and dollar I spend on working out is a second and dollar I’m NOT spending practicing approaches, etc.)
It’s like suggesting that a poor person looking for a job should read more Shakespeare. Like, okay, maybe reading Shakespeare is good advice in general and we’d all benefit from being well-read. But man, the guy has bigger problems at the moment. So unless that advice is of the form of “Read Shakespeare so that you can pass an Intro English class in Community College and get a degree and make more money,” it strikes me as very bad advice indeed.
Our disagreement comes from where on the cost benefit analysis personal health falls.
There are certain approaches to improving health that are extremely costly and I wouldn’t advocate for. And perception of cost is also a function of how the method is integrated into the person’s lifestyle; so doing these things with the support and participation of other people helps.
I wouldn’t tell someone to go to the Gym for 2+ hours a day or something. [unless they could do it with other people] — But low hanging fruit like changing sleeping patterns, developing a personal hygiene habits, reducing the amount of sugar in your diet; they’re difficult to start at first but have zero cost to maintain once they become habitual.
Okay, yeah, obviously.
But my point is, a recommendation of “start working out to improve your health” is hardly new or groundbreaking or uncommon. Everyone has already heard this. And if you’re making that recommendation to a sedentary person, they’ve presumably already done the cost benefit analysis in their head and came out on the negative side of it.
So you’re going to have to offer them some sort of additional benefit… and if you readily concede that your advice will not solve what they deem to be their most urgent and pressing problem, it shouldn’t be any surprise whatsoever that they don’t take it.
@Matt
I’m not so sure. Scott’s talked about how a doctor recommending that you stop smoking is actually pretty effective at getting people to stop relative to baseline. I suspect that much the same would be the case with working out.
The key word there being doctor, thus making it a recommendation from authority. I’m just struggling to see this as an effective conversation:
Guy: How do I get a girlfriend?
Other guy: You should work out.
Guy: That will help me get a girlfriend.
Other guy: No, but you’ll be healthier, and health is very important.
Like, how is that helpful?
@Matt M
The way you’ve written the “advisor” script isn’t how I would think about the advice. It would be more like “Not directly it won’t get you a girlfriend, but you’ll be healthier. Healthier people are often more attractive. You’ll also build confidence, and confident people tend to be more attractive. You’ll gain satisfaction from seeing progress along one axis of your life, which can help break through mental blocks or mental health issues which are whispering that you’re hopeless. It will also open more environments to socializing (e.g. sporty environments) which expands your potential pool. No, working out won’t directly get you a girlfriend (unless you meet someone at the gym) but it might help make you a happier, healthier person. At which point you might care somewhat less about your girlfriend status. Besides potentially making you happier in the interim period, being more satisfied with your single status may help you to exhibit less signs of desperation, which also tends to make you more attractive.”
Personally, I think the most destructive advice that is widely disseminated is “always be yourself” because many people unfortunately interpret that as “your worst habits, vices, quirks, hygiene, and oddities are ‘yourself’ so be true to those.” Better advice, of the nature bean is suggesting, is “always be striving to be an improved version of yourself” both for inherent and instrumental reasons.
@Matt M
The way you’ve written the “advisor” script isn’t how I would think about the advice. It would be more like “Not directly it won’t get you a girlfriend, but you’ll be healthier. Healthier people are often more attractive. You’ll also build confidence, and confident people tend to be more attractive. You’ll gain satisfaction from seeing progress along one axis of your life, which can help break through mental blocks or mental health issues which are whispering that you’re hopeless. It will also open more environments to socializing (e.g. sporty environments) which expands your potential pool. No, working out won’t directly get you a girlfriend (unless you meet someone at the gym) but it might help make you a happier, healthier person. At which point you might care somewhat less about your girlfriend status. Besides potentially making you happier in the interim period, being more satisfied with your single status may help you to exhibit fewer signs of desperation, which also tends to make you more attractive.”
Personally, I think the most destructive advice that is widely disseminated is “always be yourself” because many people unfortunately interpret that as “your worst habits, vices, quirks, hygiene, and oddities are ‘yourself’ so be true to those.” Better advice, of the nature bean is suggesting, is “always be striving to be an improved version of yourself” both for inherent and instrumental reasons.
The biggest problem with telling incels “do X and you will get a gf” is that, for a lot of them, they’ve already been told this, and it turned out not to work, and they feel cheated. It was a different “X” but that’s irrelevant to the pattern-matching they are doing.
Make it more socially acceptable for parents to arrange marriages or at least help with the process when their children can’t find mates themselves.
I don’t know how much of this happens in the Indian overseas diaspora.
Re 2:
I think there’s an important distinction between “nobody is willing to have sex/be intimate with me, and I’m really upset about that” and “the fact that nobody is willing to have sex/be intimate with me is a reflection of how horrible women are”. The latter is disgustingly common from the little I’ve seen of incels, and I think is toxic enough to require serious attention. As far as I can figure, it’s the perspective that “you aren’t entitled to sex” is directed at. I don’t think anybody is trying to say “you have no right to want sex”, they’re saying that you can’t look down on other people for their choice not to have sex with you. I don’t think it’s a solution to help them, but it’s an important response to their discourse. I think it makes sense to do it in parallel with actually helping, but I think it’s pretty problematic to only help without pointing out that a lot of their discourse is horrible.
I agree with the sentiment but question the sincerity of the feminists who voice it here.
Intersectional feminism normally has zero problem with labelling sexual preferences as problematic. If a man doesn’t want to date a woman because of her weight, race, sexual history, or even the fact that she was once a he then he’s a bigoted asshole. There is a very narrow range of acceptable sexual preferences and the rest are a sign of conscious or unconscious bigotry.
Women shouldn’t be coerced into dating ugly and unpleasant men, that should be obvious to everyone. But it should be equally obvious that coercing men and women into dating a laundry list of so-called oppressed groups is equally wrong.
I agree that this sort of thing shows up in rhetoric, but in actual Blue social circles — or even among full-blown social justice activists — that rhetoric seems to be honored more in the breach than the observance.
The problem of course is that the, for lack of a better term, “toxic” incels don’t have meatspace blue social circles, and just get the nasty Twitter rhetoric.
I don’t think Nabil’s description of feminists even necessarily holds a contradiction. It seems to me totally possible to both hold “You should not categorically remove someone from the dating pool because of weight, race, sexual history, or trans-status” and “You cannot be compelled to date any particular individual”.
What I’ve actually seen in practice among social justice aligned people is “We, as a society, should reduce the stigma that makes certain superficial characteristics undesirable”, without necessarily compelling or coercing any specific individual into dating any other specific individual. Like, a very Leftist trans-woman I know lamenting that she had men who would flirt and go on dates with her, knowing she was trans, but those men would refuse to be seen in public with her, refuse to be in any pictures with her, and refuse to introduce her to their friends because the *friends* thought that dating someone trans was nasty.
This is actually the exact kind of debate I see among social-justice type people on facebook. “So I don’t wanna tell anyone they can’t have preferences, because we all have preferences, but our preferences are influenced by society’s oppressive standards. How do we change society’s standards without telling individuals they can’t have their preferences?”
@mdet
But doesn’t that mean that a person then has to lie if they aren’t attracted to overweight/black/promiscuous/trans people? Because if they honestly state that their reason not to date an individual is categorical, they are then seen as creating oppressive standards, aren’t they?
I am not willing to believe that SJ people in general are very good at separating categorical reasons not to date people that are merely based on stigma vs those that are based personal preference.
In fact, given that people internalize social norms, I don’t even think that this distinction clearly exists.
I have an admittedly cynical view, but that selective enforcement seems more like a feature than a bug.
In my very blue circle, the main time when accusations of bigotry for sexual preferences get pulled out is to attempt to remove competition by other women. If any man lower than you on the progressive stack prefers women with traits that you lack, he’s a bigot and needs to be called out.
Race produces the clearest examples of naked self-interest. White feminists rail against the racism of white men dating Asian women. Black feminists rail against the racism and colorism of black men dating white or lighter-skinned black women respectively. Etc, etc.
The thing that makes it less amusing is that it’s relatively easy to get caught in the crossfire. If a woman gets salty enough about you choosing another woman over her she has the option to threaten your career and social standing potentially years down the line.
because the *friends* thought that dating someone trans was nasty
Put it down to my cynicism, but I don’t think the “friends” were the problem so much as the guys themselves; it sounds parallel to the “fat/ugly girl who is good enough to fuck but you don’t want to be seen in public with her, because she’s low-status and you don’t want other people to think that she is as good as you can get and you can’t do better”.
Guys who like to date trans women but don’t want to be seen as a boyfriend are not guys who seriously mean “oh honey, I’m perfectly okay with this, but my friends on the other hand…” They are “I’ve got a fetish for chicks with a dick but society in general thinks that kind of preference is low-status so I’m not going to have people thinking I can’t get a real woman”.
You are just restating mdet’s point in different words.
The claim is that there are a bunch of fat/ugly/trans/whatever people who would be happily getting it on in mutually fulfilling relationships if not for concerns about status. Nobody is being asked to ignore their own preferences; they are being asked to stop reinforcing social norms that say some of those preferences are objectively better than others. If you politely turn down a fat girl, nobody will bat an eye; if you spend a lot of time talking about how fat people are inherently repulsive and undateable, people will object.
if you don’t want to be seen in public with the fat girl you are banging on the down low because you’re afraid of what other people will think, that’s bad. One part of the solution involves you sucking it up and not caring what other people think; the other part involves other people learning to keep their opinions to themselves.
Edit: As Fion says below: “shouting about those preferences may indicate that you’re being a bit of a dick”.
@Iain
Of course, it can also be the other way around: that the incel is getting ignored by some because of status concerns.
If you are in the situation we are talking about — where somebody will have sex with you but not introduce you to their friends because of status concerns — you are by definition not an incel.
Also: to the extent that incels can’t find love because they are (say) fat, they are already the direct beneficiaries of attempts to reduce status concerns around dating fat people.
This is super common from the higher status male, lower status female perspective, but does it ever happen the other way? I feel like males see sex as the ultimate validation while females see public relationships as the ultimate validation.
While I’d prefer a super hot woman be very publicly into me, I’d certainly happily settle for “sex but I’m not allowed to tell anyone.”
I agree with Iain & fion.
I also agree that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to change “society’s” standards without changing any individual’s standards. No one really wants to change their own preferences, so the only thing that really ends up happening is shaming people who proclaim out loud “People like X are undesirable”. Occasionally someone may call out an individual for dating / marrying the “wrong” person, as Nabil says, but I’ve never seen anyone do this without criticism and pushback.
Sarcasm on:
But where have all the GOOD men gone?! If Jane can’t get a date (with a suitably attractive, suitably educated, suitably healthy) young man, it’s time we “have a conversation.” And don’t you worry, we have no problem laying out the laundry list of social problems that contribute to this problem of Jane being single. The first of which is obviously porn. Porn just makes men have too high standards and makes them have unrealistic expectations in bed.
Sarcasm off.
Obviously there’s a huge difference in how these issues are treated in the media, and the incels (being redpill adjacent) are aware of it. I don’t see how anyone would respond to the cultural criticism with anything other than a “Yeah, right.”
I think I probably count as an intersectional feminist, albeit an atypical one because I read SSC… But I don’t think refusal to date women because of their race, weight, sexual history etc. makes you a bigoted asshole and I *think* most of my fellow feminists would agree with me.
But we’re sweeping some stuff under the rug with the word “refuse”. Having a preference for X over Y doesn’t mean “will never choose Y under any circumstances”. If you’re in the “never under any circumstances” camp then you’re probably a bit bigoted; but if you just have certain preferences then feminists should leave you alone.
(Of course, shouting about those preferences may indicate that you’re being a bit of a dick, and that may sometimes be what’s provoking the feminists. There’s lots of people that I have a total lack of attraction towards, but I tend to keep that to myself.)
Would you say that, for example, a gold-star lesbian who will never have sex with a man “under any circumstances” is bigoted against men? Is she being a dick by not keeping that preference to herself?
I would be very surprised and a bit concerned if you said yes in either case. Yet you seem entirely comfortable applying the same standard to straight men that you would rightly consider abhorrent if applied to LGB people.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
I think there’s a difference between sexual preference and sexuality. But don’t think I’m using that as a way of weaselling out of admitting any anti-straight-man bigotry on my part.
A straight man who will never have sex with a man under any circumstances is also not bigoted against men, and he is not being a dick if he proudly proclaims his heterosexuality.
A black lesbian who will never have sex with a white person under any circumstances probably is a bit of a bigot.
I don’t want to imply that you’re dishonest or weasely, and if I have I apologise. You seem like a very upright and interesting person.
But I don’t think that your distinction between sexuality and sexual preferences is had any basis in reality.
A lot of self-proclaimed lesbians still have sex with men and enjoy it. It’s actually a recurring controversy in the lesbian community: if these women are considered “real lesbians,” then it implies (to use your terminology) that lesbian sexuality is nothing more than a sexual preference.
If it turns out that a higher proportion of lesbians seek out sex with men than, say, white men seek out sex with black women* the does that mean that race is a sexuality and gender just a sexual preference? It seems ridiculous but that’s the logic of your categorization scheme.
*For the record I actually find black women very attractive. That doesn’t mean that I can’t be a racist, obviously, but I think it helps to clarify where the frustration is coming from. Someone who presumes to tell me what to do can go straight to hell even if it was what I was doing anyway.
@Nabil ad Dajjal
Don’t worry – I didn’t take any such implication from you. Good of you to clarify just in case, though. 🙂
I’ll confess that I don’t actually know that many lesbians, but I do know lots of gay men who, when you discuss sexuality with them, say that they’re actually bisexual with a preference for men. They use “gay” because, for whatever reasons, they find it a useful label. I would guess that this is the same for some lesbians. Perhaps they feel more affinity to the lesbian community than to the bisexual community, or perhaps they have experienced not-being-taken-seriously when they call themselves bisexual (“it’s just a phase”, “she hasn’t met the right man yet”, “she’s curious and experimenting” etc.).
To be honest, the way I personally view sexuality is more as a preference, but I’m pansexual, so I probably just don’t really understand what it feels like to be monosexual. I do have many straight friends, though, who insist that they feel absolutely no attraction whatsoever to anybody of the same sex as them. This seems kind of weird to me, but I tend to trust them.
@fion
I’ve seen people argue that bi people have very low status in the LGBT community. That may play a role as well.
@Aapje
Yes, probably. All the LGBT communities I’ve been in have been very bi-friendly, but you’re right that that’s not always the case.
Yeah, redpill is a terribly unproductive model of courtship if you aren’t getting results. (I don’t think it’s great if you are getting results, but I have to admit that I don’t have any first hand experience.)
I don’t think the common lefty twitter response – to make sure that these losers understand they don’t have the right to be loved or accepted – is likely to work. Of course the IMHO correct response – that you have a better change of being loved and accepted if you work the problem than if you don’t – may not work either. Maybe the solution is the right nootropics. (Now that I think about it, not really kidding).
Even the second isn’t right; any number of “alpha jerks” look down on women who refuse to have sex with them. It’s a nasty sort of self-confidence, but it beats no self-confidence at all. But in fact I think a lot of these incels have been told something along the lines of “How dare a disgusting toad like you want sex? Gross!”
What do you mean the second one isn’t right? “can’t” was the wrong word there, I meant “shouldn’t”. Yeah, I’m sure plenty of alpha jerks do that, and they’re also being assholes. It’s of a different sort I think, looking down on individual women instead of women as a whole (which plenty of incels do), but it’s also very problematic.
That’s horrible, I totally agree with you. Anyone who says that should absolutely stop now. If that’s part of the set of people described by J Mann’s point 2, then that’s definitely something to weed out. My goal though was to justify part 2 as part of the conversation, and I do think it has an important place as a response to people who legitimately think they’re entitled to women’s bodies. I’ve seen incels advocate laws that would provide them sex. Perhaps that’s an extreme fringe (though I sort of doubt it since the incel groups we’re discussing are already an extreme fringe), but it’s an important thing to keep in mind. Yes, everyone has the right to want intimacy, to strive for intimacy, and to be upset if they fail to receive it, but no, you don’t get to demand other people’s bodies from them and when conversation gets to that point it needs to be emphatically shut down.
I mean looking down on (particular) women who don’t want to have sex with them is probably healthier for the incels than internalizing the idea that they’re unfuckable. Unless they’re literally elephant-whales with incurable halitosis. As for “problematic”, I don’t think someone else’s internal state is really something that can be reasonably subject to moral judgement, only the actions they take based on it.
The incel “movement” seems to be a bunch of nasty people with terrible ideas, but going from that to “the people treating them like shit aren’t doing anything wrong” isn’t right either.
@The Nybbler
I’m not referring to incels looking down on particular women, I was saying that about “alpha jerks”. With incels I was specifically taking issue with the fact that they often look down on women as a group, and I think that’s really dangerous.
“problematic” doesn’t have to be a moral judgement. I sortof agree with you that actions matter more, but what I’m saying is a widespread belief that “women are horrible because they won’t have sex with me” is really dangerous whether or not every individual acts on that belief. I think I agree that we shouldn’t pass moral judgement on people who believe that without acting, but we can try to take action against that belief. In terms of discourse in society being in part a war between ideas, fighting against that idea has merit if it’s possible to make it less common.
We probably shouldn’t pass moral judgment on people who are privately racist but capable of somehow not acting on it at all. We should, however, spend time as a society trying to educate against racism so that racism becomes less common, even as a privately held belief.
I never said that, I tried to say the opposite. We shouldn’t be treating them like shit. That said, when they frequently hold dangerous beliefs, I think some of the time we could be spending ‘helping’ them should be spent trying to educate/fight away those beliefs.
A not insignificant portion of Chads strike me as looking down on women as a whole.
Looking down on women as a group isn’t the only thing getting incels in trouble. Lots of sexually successful men do that; you’ll see tedious thinkpieces condemning them, but their bad behavior doesn’t always hurt them in meatspace. Witness Sean Connery on slapping women. An extreme case, but not actually that weird. A significant minority of men are sexually successful jerks.
If you know an “incel” personally, or if you are one, option 1. is the only humane choice. It works, demonstrably, and frankly it’s solid life advice that a lot of regular guys could use too. Some of the more bitter guys are resistant but ultimately you can’t force someone to change. The best thing that you can do is to give them actionable, useful advice.
People who talk about sexbots, prostitution, or “government issued girlfriends” are usually flogging an ideological dead horse. Usually they’re libertarians trying to make a satire of statist justifications for taxation or conscription that nobody else gets. They’re not serious suggestions and anyone who makes them deserves a smack.
People who take these guys as an excuse to rail about supposed male entitlement were covered well in Scott’s ‘Radicalizing the Romanceless’ a few years back. It’s all of the ideologically-driven inhumanity of the second group married to a sort of childlike cruelty.
I don’t think incel per se is a societal problem, although it is likely a symptom of wider problems with our dating culture. A lot of these guys would likely still have trouble courting women in a traditional society but they would have much more support from their families and communities. Loneliness is lethal and in the modern world romantic attachments are all many men have.
I have nothing to add other than seconding all of this. Incel guys are failing due to personality limitations and high standards. They should do things within their own power to improve themselves and lower their standards. That means getting to the gym, getting a haircut, and dressing well.
This comes from a guy that could probably be described as “incel” when younger.
My trigger point is when people confuse personality limitations with dating with personality flaws as an individual. If women choose not to have sex, it doesn’t have anything to do with you as a person. I feel if we remove the sex from the picture and look at a different aspect of life, this will be intuitive: you might be a real crappy interviewer and find it hard or impossible to find gainful employment due to your poor interviewing skills. This might not map AT ALL to your actual job skills, and has absolutely NOTHING to do with your actual worth as a person.
Returning to traditional values is trying to put the genie back in the bottle: it’s not going to happen. The best you can do is stay inside relatively conservative communities, but even those are exposed to external influences.
And, yeah, the idea that libertarians want to force people to have sex? Or provide government hookers? Come on.
There is a novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, by a libertarian along these lines.
It’s quite amusing, however, to see how quickly some people will flip from supporting economic redistribution to libertarian arguments when it comes to sexual redistribution.
It’s almost as if ideological positions tend to align with self-interest rather than logical consistency.
“It’s almost as if ideological positions tend to align with self-interest rather than logical consistency.”
Or possibly people think women differ from property in an important way.
I’m not sure that that’s the best way of framing it, though. You could easily formulate a reasonable traditional monogamy-based ‘sex redistributionism’ in which men at the upper end of the attractiveness scale are not allowed to monopolise more than one woman (which I think is a core incel complaint?), meaning that those other women must choose between a less attractive partner or no partner, but are, crucially, still free to choose. This would not eliminate the incel problem, but it would presumably mitigate it.
Or, if, as I’m sure some libertarians will argue, economic redistributionism entails the obligation on the wealthy to provide a service of giving away money to those who have less, and sexual redistributionism entails the obligation on the attractive to provide a service of giving away sex/intimacy to the less attractive, then either both (the wealthy and the attractive) or neither are being treated as property. If, of course, there are serious differences in, say, fungibility between sex and money, which there are, then you can argue that they are serious enough to break the analogy, but I don’t think that you can declare the analogy broken without making that argument.
No, the government wouldn’t seize or redistribute the woman, just her sexual labor, in the same way the government seizes and redistributes economic labor in the case of taxation or martial labor in the case of conscription.
@Winter Shaker
Fungibility would indeed be my argument. Money is our most universal exchange. If you want to give a good or a service to somebody, you could do that, or you could give money. And if you owe somebody something, you can pay them in money.
So if some people are advantaged and others are disadvantaged, and we want to do something about that, we redistribute money from one group to the other. We do not force them to have sex, or bake a cake, or build a house for somebody else; we force them to give money.
I would engage with a libertarian who used “we should force sexy people to give money to unsexy people” as an example argument, but not if they used “we should force sexy people to give sex to unsexy people”.
EDIT: @Conrad Honcho, I think my point responds to you as well.
That example seems ill chosen.
@fion and with regards to conscription / the draft? Your own soldiering is not fungible.
@Conrad Honcho
Oops. Sorry, I missed that. I’m opposed to conscription anyway, though. Except perhaps in cases of existential crisis.
@Aapje
Haha, I knew exactly what that link was going to be without clicking on it. I’m not sure whether you’re making a serious point or just an amusing observation.
If the former, I would argue that it’s a different discussion. We were talking about using forced labour as a means of redistribution and comparing it to taxation as a means of redistribution. In that example, some people were offering a service in exchange for money, some people tried to take up that offer of service and provide some money, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t on offer any more.
You’re not wrong – but I think a prohibition on prostitution prevents this from really “working.”
We require people with lots of food to give money to people with no food because then those people can use the money to get the food they need.
So long as the unsexy are not allowed to use money to get what they need, giving money to them is virtually useless.
@Matt M
Well obviously prostitution should be legalised. I thought that was a given. 😉
There is a famous classical account of just such a scheme. I discuss it in the webbed draft of one of my current writing projects.
@DavidFriedman
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing!
@fion
Semi-serious, semi-anticipating what seemed inevitable.
That depends on how you frame it. The bakery did offer to make cakes for money, but did they offer to make gay wedding cakes for money?
Furthermore, it seems to me that a sale is not necessarily just about exchanging a good/service for money. I’ve given away and sold things for an extra low price to people because I liked them. The same for services. For me, the good feeling that I got from making a trade/gift to a specific person was part of the transaction. I would not be happy if I were be forced to treat a person that I liked the same as someone I didn’t.
You can (simplistically) frame sex the same way: the base transaction is two people providing a service that gives the other an orgasm, but there is extra benefit to having sex with someone who is pretty, nice, etc. This is not strictly necessary for the base transaction, you can get an orgasm with an ugly, nasty, etc person as well.
Let’s say that a person greatly dislikes having sex with a pro-gay marriage person. Is this not very similar to the feeling that the baker had when forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding?
Is there truly a fundamental difference or is the difference more subjective, where you have upsides and downsides to forcing people? Do people decide what is appropriate based on whether the downsides outweigh the upsides for the situation at hand or are they truly principled?
Call me a cynic, but I strongly question many of the ‘principles’ that people claim to uphold, as it seems that people often start by deciding how they feel and then they later scrounge around for a principle that they can use to defend their position.
@fion
Neither sexbots nor prostitution would require thinking that women are similar to property, and that’s not even getting into redistributive social technology such as (non-serial) monogamy.
But your willingness to jump to such a conclusion parallels libertarian arguments that taxation is a form of slavery.
I doubt you would consider “Or possibly people think citizens differ from property in an important way” a good faith response to economic redistribution.
@Aapje
I don’t actually have a strong opinion on the gay cake thing. My feeling is probably actually in favour of the cake-makers. I think it’s a good principle that both sides of an arrangement can choose not to do it. I think it’s a more important principle in some cases than others, because some services are more personal than others. For somebody to get to the checkout of Sainsbury’s to be told that they won’t be served today (or even being turned away at the door) is a lot worse than somebody walking into a hairdresser’s without booking and being told that they won’t cut their hair. I think baking a personalised cake is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum and sex is way off to one end.
And again, there’s a difference between services that you normally do for money and services that you normally do free. If you’re giving out cookies to your friends (and perhaps some strangers) and one particular stranger comes up and asks for a cookie, obviously you can say no. If you’re a cookie seller purporting to sell to all comers, and then somebody comes and you don’t sell, then I would probably think you had done wrong (although I’m not sure whether I think the law should get involved…).
@Education Hero
I was responding to glibness with glibness. I accept that I probably shouldn’t have.
I didn’t consider “It’s almost as if ideological positions tend to align with self-interest rather than logical consistency.” as a good-faith interpretation of other people’s opinions.
@fion
Sure. Your intuitions are a spectrum where you weigh different pros and cons, not a single principle that you uphold in all cases. That is my point.
If people look at it this way, then it is much harder to be super outraged when someone draws the line on the spectrum differently.
@Aapje
What principle am I supposed to be defending here? “Don’t use forced labour as a means of redistribution”? I’m fairly sure I believe that principle should be consistently applied to all real-world situations. The gay cake is neither a relevant example nor one where I come down on the “wrong” side of my principle.
No worries, your glibness was perfectly warranted and fine.
My point, glibness completely aside, was that your underlying argument against sexual redistribution inevitably looks similar to arguments against economic redistribution. Both entail varying levels of coercion, depending on the exact extent and manner in which they are executed.
@Education Hero
My argument against sexual redistribution was an argument against forcing attractive people to have sex with less attractive people, because that’s how I interpreted the proposed argument. My argument that that was different to economic distribution was that I think there’s a qualitative difference between forcing somebody to give up some vouchers that can be traded in for services with third parties willing to provide them and forcing somebody to provide a service.
If you want to talk about using tax dollars to pay for state prostitutes then we can have that discussion instead. Part of me suspects we were talking past each other a bit, where I was responding to a particular, particularly unpleasant example of a more general idea you were referring to.
To be clear, my arguments so far are only against sexual redistribution by means of forcing attractive people to have sex with less attractive people. And those particular arguments do not apply to economic redistribution at all.
@fion
‘Forced labor’ seems like a term where the subjectivity is already built in. At the level of coercion that people deem unacceptable, they call it ‘forced.’ Anything below that they call ‘free choice.’
Neither tend to be accurate terms. There is pretty much always a choice other than to comply (even if it is just suicide) and consequences to not making a choice.
I’m probably going too meta now, though. I’m in such a mood.
@Aapje
Fair enough. It is a loaded term. Would “legally mandated” be better?
I do want to avoid just saying “coerced” because I think it’s a bit too vague. The law, peer pressure, societal pressure, economic pressure, aggressive bribery (I don’t know if you were part of that discussion; if not, just ignore this one) are all arguably coercion. But it’s not just a spectrum. There are a few discrete and qualitatively different flavours.
@fion
How would you respond if someone argued against economic redistribution with an argument that forcing more productive people to provide for less productive people?
Those arguments would apply to economic redistribution if you similarly limited economic redistribution to “forcing more productive people to provide for less productive people”.
Can you see that you are defining sexual redistribution much more narrowly than economic redistribution?
@Education Hero
Again, I think there’s an important difference between “forcing someone to provide a service for someone else” and “forcing someone to give money to someone else”.
If you proposed a method of economic redistribution whereby rich people had to, I don’t know, provide free financial advice to poor people I would be opposed to it. That is the appropriate ‘economic’ version of the sexual redistribution we were discussing, not taxation.
I fall into this category. I can accept that I’m not desirable; as noted, I have no right to the companionship of another, especially of my choosing.
But I find this horribly hypocritical when one of the things I am good at doing, making money, is substantially taxed. And given the way the tax system and employment preferences in this country work, that money is going to disproportionately benefit women and the children of other men.
I would be okay if I got to keep my money (and possibly use my financial security as a bargaining chip in the mating dance) and ended up alone. But if I’m going to be taxed for something I have in surplus to the benefits of others, I don’t consider it remotely fair that I don’t get to benefit from the surplus sexual value that women have.
I don’t consider it remotely fair that I don’t get to benefit from the surplus sexual value that women have
Excellent, Garrett, we’re going to re-distribute some of that surplus sexual value to you. Meet your date and bedmate for the night, Judy. Sure, she’s twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier than you, has three kids, is not a natural blonde and is going to be soaking her dentures in the bathroom tonight, but hey she’s got all that unfair sexual value stored up and you are the lucky recipient of it!
This “taxation and sexual redistribution” parallel is making me want to quote Vespasian about money does not stink. Your high-value high-earner tax dollars go into the same gaping government maw as the taxes from the high school dropout burger-flipper. Same with sexual redistribution; why do you think you’re going to get the nineteen year old supermodel instead of Judy?
I feel the urge here to quote from a C.S. Lewis short story called Ministering Angels, about an all-male expedition to Mars who have been there for a year or so, and back on Earth it’s been decided that Men Have Needs and they’ve solicited women volunteers to go fill those needs.
It’s the same kind of thinking as ‘women have all this sexual surplus value’ and the first two ladies who arrive on Mars are not the kind of ‘nineteen year old supermodel’ version that this “it’s not fair women can get laid” argument seems to assume when it’s proposed that “there should be a law that makes women accept boyfriends” (the unstated but assumed corollary is “and so Sally who turned me down in high school will have to go out with me now, hah!”). Sorry guys, you’ll get Judy not Sally 🙂
(I think the story is very funny and have done ever since I read it years back, but I suppose some women and men would find it full to the brim of Problematic) 🙂
I’m sympathetic to your position, but how do you think the laws should be changed so that you can get your fair share of the sexual pie?
@Deiseach:
“why do you think you’re going to get the nineteen year old supermodel instead of Judy?”
For the same reason that I think that poor people are getting more of my net tax dollars than rich people are. It’s explicitly about balancing the scales.
@fortaleza84:
As much fun as it is to watch people go through with mental contortions separating different kinds of labor and taxation, the easiest would be the alternate model where redistribution ceases.
I agree, but my point is that you took a leap from “sexual redistribution” to “forcing someone to have sex with someone else”; further, I noticed that you did not make a similar leap when discussing economic redistribution.
You originally replied to my original post which discussed “sexual redistribution” without mentioning anything about forced sex. My post was a response to the quoted portion of Nabil ad Dajjal’s post that mentioned “sexbots, prostitution, or ‘government issued girlfriends'”.
You are the one who brought up the concept of forced sex and its treatment of women are property. Your implicit assumptions in doing so only corroborate my argument that you are demonstrating an attitude towards sexual redistribution that parallels the libertarian attitude towards economic redistribution.
Garrett in the comment above you seems to be proposing redistribution of sex with specific people.
@rlms
No, he is not. Both in that post and his previous post, he has instead proposed a cessation of economic redistribution:
He suggests ceasing of economic redistribution might be the easiest thing, but he doesn’t rule out other models, and the response to Deiseach suggests he is entertaining the possibility of redistribution of sex with specific women to some degree.
Not ruling out a model ≠ proposing it, but even leaving that aside, he actually has ruled it out by stating that he has no right to the companionship of another, especially of his own choosing.
He has in fact sought to demonstrate to Deiseach the hypocrisy inherent in economic redistribution without sexual redistribution, by paralleling the arguments for economic redistribution.
However, he has clearly proposed that this hypocrisy should be resolved by ending economic redistribution.
How does that fit with
?
Because he’s discussing the obvious parallel to taxation and the arguments behind it, in order to demonstrate the aforementioned hypocrisy.
So the implication is that both methods of redistribution are terrible? That’s not the impression I got, it sounds to me more like he things both are moderately bad.
Radicalizing the Romanceless was a great post full of Old-Testament Scott, including literally threatening people with hell (and being banned from SSC). Thank you for reminding me it exists.
Oh man. Government-approved and government-mandated courtship rituals. Not looking forward to that.
If it’s anything like government-approved and -mandated health education as it currently exists, it’ll probably be horribly inept and out of touch. But on the other hand, it’ll probably be hilariously inept and out of touch.
If anything, you’re looking backward to it!
(Quoted in full, because Tumblr is slow tonight):
That’s a really well written piece, thanks!
I know more than a little about WWII, and not just about battleships, and I don’t think that’s quite right. Yes, the government and various other organizations did attempt to provide some females around the fighting men. But they weren’t girlfriends as we’d understand it. The girl you danced with at the USO (or whoever was organizing the local soldier’s dance) might well have been going to a dance every weekend with a different soldier. And no, she probably wasn’t sleeping with each of them. This was the era before antibiotics, and the biggest public health problem in the rear areas was VD, so that sort of thing was discouraged. And I think the difference between “spend a voluntary, non-sexual evening with a man who is serving his country” and “we’re going to draft you to be the girlfriend of this random guy” is pretty obvious.
I think the view of the WACs is too cynical. They (and other women auxiliaries) didn’t generally go to places that had no civilian women around. The WAVES at least never deployed outside of CONUS and Hawaii. Nurses did go overseas, but I don’t think there’s any way you could say they were there simply as girlfriends. On hospital ships (which is what I know about offhand) the grunt work was done by male pharmacists’s mates under the supervision of the female nurses. If “providing girlfriends” was an objective, then I suspect they’d have used female orderlies.
@bean, that’s a very useful elaboration, but I don’t think it’s as distinct as you’re implying. To a large extent, “spend a voluntary, non-sexual evening with a man who is serving his country” is “volunteer to step out with him for the evening,” or to update the 1940’s language, “be his girlfriend for an evening.”
True, it was inside CONUS+Hawaii, but it was still a very sizeable something.
@Evan
There’s a couple of key differences. Girlfriend in a modern context brings a bunch of baggage that simply doesn’t apply to a USO dance. At closest, it’s a well-chaperoned blind date with a random soldier. Sure, maybe you get the scrawny, ugly guy with bad breath. But there’s also the chance of getting to spend the evening with that hunky sergeant. And I suspect they switched partners throughout the evening, so you may have to put up with the ugly guys to dance with the cute ones. At very most, if you’re going to do something more with a guy, it’s your choice, and you can decide you aren’t going to seek out the scrawny guy at the next dance.
CONUS+Hawaii was the reach of the WAVES. I don’t know about the WACs specifically (their wiki article is a lot worse), but I do know that dances as described were quite common in the UK for US forces stationed there. Also, remember that the alternative for the girls participating was probably no boys at all, because everyone was in uniform. I don’t really want to learn the details of any incel proposal, but I can’t really see how it could be anything other than a forced redistribution of girls to those of lower attractiveness, which is pretty different from girls getting to enter the lottery when they have limited choices.
The more I think this over, the more problems I see. AIUI, the girl at the USO was basically doing what she would have been doing for fun/to meet boys anyway, and she probably went about 25% out of patriotic duty and 75% because that’s where the boys were. I think something like 2/3rds of young men were in uniform, and the ones who weren’t were probably disproportionately the bad ones. (I don’t have eligibility statistics to hand, sorry.) So the military dance is the obvious place to go and meet guys. And from my readings on various units, dances were more often set up by private organizations (churches, Rotary/Kiwanis, maybe the local government) than the USO/US government. I’m sure that being in uniform was good for the least attractive soldier, who would get dances out of courtesy, but I think the change there was social mores much more than anything the government could do.
1. psmith’s linked article is great.
2. With Title IX and mandatory sexual harassment training for incoming fresh
menpersons at universities, the government is already in the courtship ritual instruction business. It’s mostly incoherent and in the negative (“here’s a list of 500 things not to do!”) but the government and schools are already all over this.Bad courtship instruction pushed by malevolent actors is almost certainly worse than none at all. (waves in the general direction of “Untitled”)
Great; if the government’s providing incoherent negative courtship instruction, there shouldn’t be so many objections to its providing somewhat-coherent positive instruction too, right?
Let me channel my inner left-wing tweetstormer:
“Why should anyone help them? They’re a terrorist movement responsible for two mass killings. They need to be destroyed and the earth they grew from salted so they can never spring up again.”
Now I think in practice, since nobody is going to bother rounding up these losers and sending them to Gitmo to be waterboarded, this amounts to option 2. Sure it’s “mean” but the nice options amount to giving in to terrorist demands, so meanness is justified here.
(I’ll also note that most feminists don’t bother distinguishing incels from the rest of the manosphere, for much the same reason that we don’t bother distinguishing Stalinists from Trotskyites. It’s not outgroup homogeneity bias so much as that the differences are irrelevant.)
How is giving someone advice on fitness, fashion, or flirting giving in to a terrorist’s demands?
I think you may be stuck down the rabbit hole of social activism if you think that the only possible remedies are on the policy level. What about personal responsibility?
One of the biggest problems these guys have is their external locus of control. They feel helpless and don’t think that anything they do could possibly fix their situation. You’re like the mirror image of an incel: you agree with all of their premises but come to the conclusion that they’re dangerous sub-humans. Those premises are wrong and therefore so are you and they.
Couldn’t the exact same thing be said about islamic terrorism and how it supposedly is caused by Islamophobia? “We shouldn’t do anything to make life easier for muslims. That would be giving in to them. The appropriate reaction is to be as Islamophobic as possible until the attacks stop.”
No, because leftists like Muslims and hate incels.
(Remember to assume that all incels are white. Don’t think about the possibility that a male Muslim might be willing to kill himself not because mean white people drive him to terrorism but because he can’t get laid and feels certain that those who die for Islam get a mansion in Paradise with 72 virgins. That would be Islamophobic!)
Le Maistre Chat:
Bashing the outgroup != advancing the conversation. Less like that, please.
Perhaps the leftists might be slightly more sympathetic to the plight of American incels if we swapped the color palette.
@Conrad Honcho
I read that same article in the Washington Post. Then I read the comments. And no, there was not much sympathy to go around.
To be fair, a lot of the unsympathetic comments from feminists were more about the traditional patriarchal norms that led to all the sex-selective abortions and female infanticide that caused this problem in the first place, and are arguably exacerbating it by setting very inflexible expectations around how marital relations are supposed to work. I think there’s a further reason for the lack of sympathy beyond that, though, which is that people have a psychological defense against sympathizing too much with the less fortunate, by rationalizing how they must have brought it upon themselves somehow. That way they can reassure themselves that they will be safe from similar misfortune.
And yeah, there’s probably also some element of male incels just being inherently low-status, and male suffering being inherently unsympathetic.
Thanks. FWIW, I agree with you that a lot of what seems to be the incel worldview is really counterproductive and harmful to themselves and others.
That said,
(1) it seems to me that bullying some kid because some other kid killed people smacks of group punishment. I don’t hold the Dallas shootings against Black Lives Matter, or the Family Resources Council attack against whatever group shares that losers beliefs.
(2) More importantly, I don’t think shaming these guys would work. Frankly, it would be good for them to change their model of courtship and move on, so if I thought yelling at them would work, I would support it as in their interest as well as everyone else. Instead, I bet it feed their sense of victimization and also has a problem because the model used by their critics (that their error is entitlement to women as property) doesn’t meet incels’ model of their own mentality, so they’re likely to tune it out.
Looks like your point flew over a lot of heads.
Whoops.
Yeah, that’ll teach me.
From a left-wing perspective that I mostly agree with, the problem with incels isn’t that they can’t get laid, it’s that they murder people because they can’t get laid. #2 is meant to address the murders.
Now I don’t think #2 is likely to work. Just telling the incels that their ideas are bad and they should feel bad is not going to convince them, even though their ideas are bad and they should feel bad. Besides which, even people who can get laid commit mass murders, so even if shaming could shut down one sick ideology there are still so many others to deal with.
But the point is, if some men can’t get any, that’s their problem. If they start murdering people because of it, then it becomes everyone’s problem.
(Also, the equivocation between incels as including all involuntarily celibate people versus just the ones who inhabit bizarre misogynistic echo chambers online is really not helpful to this discussion. I’m kindof one of the former, talking about the latter.)
The left-wing perspective has zero concern about their happiness????
This seems like a similar sort of thing as a humblebrag, but then an agreeattack.
Mumble, mumble, superweapons.
I’m pretty left wing, and my first response when looking at a group like the Incels is to, to use leftist jargon, “Eliminate the dangerous aspects of their false consciousness and critique their position from a position of solidarity against the societal forces of alienation that have caused their distress.”
“The left-wing perspective has zero concern about their happiness????”
Abso-goddamn-lutely.
The left isn’t a monolith, of course, but I’ve seen all too much boasting of having no empathy with incels.
They’ve got many of the risk factors for low sympathy:
– White men or what looks like white men if you squint your eyes (Asians)
– Nerdy or at least low in social ability
– Men who are asking for societal change for men’s benefits
– Complaining about what women do
– Complaining about female sexual behavior
Why does it have to be a problem? It could be an opportunity.
All two of them?
Seriously, I’m going to ask for evidence that incels represent more of a murder risk than e.g. cardiologists, or I’m going to maintain my current lack of respect for the left-wing perspective in this as so many other issues. If your concern is that there’s a clearly-identifiable group of people that treats women with open contempt and frequently murders them, and your target of choice is “incels”, those are positively telescopic blinders you are wearing.
Two murderers (that we are certain of, it seems pretty plausible that e.g. the other man mentioned here should be included too), sixteen murders actually. Now, I doubt that the disturbed young men who identify as incels are significantly more likely to be (mass) murderers than similar disturbed young men who don’t, but it seems pretty likely that they are more commonly murderers than the population at large (by virtue of being disturbed young men), and than the group you are insinuating at.
Let’s run the numbers. Wikipedia says r/incels had 40,000 readers when it was shut down. Counting the two men you identify gives a terrorist-murderer rate of 5 * 10^-3%. Technically that’s being somewhat unfair, as it is well-known in certain circles that Elliot Rodger was never an incel in that sense (he hung around in a different forum). So let’s double and round the reader count to 100,000. I’m pretty sure this is extremely generous, some sleuthing reveals that Rodger’s preferred forum PUAHate.com had 12,000 members (1,100 active) in March 2013. Likewise, the estimate of two perpetrators is surely an underestimate too. But I’ll stick with the rough figure of ~2 * 10^-3% for the moment.
Moving onto Muslim terrorists: from Wikipedia’s list of terrorist attacks I get 9 terrorist Muslim murderers from 2010 to now. However, there are 3.3 million Muslims in the US, giving a rate of 0.3 * 10^-3%. If we included Canadians because the recent incel murderer was such then that rate will be lower. So even with very generous assumptions an incel is about an order of magnitude more likely than an American Muslim to go on a murderous rampage.
@rlms: Aren’t your denominators non-comparable? You’re using forum usage as a proxy for “identify as incel.” I would expect then to use as denominator for Muslims, say, participants on certain specified activist Islamic forum spaces where “Muslim identity” is a bigger deal. Otherwise I would think you’d either be over-counting the Muslim denominator or under-counting the incel denominator significantly.
On the other hand, I agree that, statistically, I would expect incels to have a higher-than-background rate of violence, especially spree violence, since they are by definition single men, almost all young.
Somewhat more than “technically”, I think. Even if /r/incels is the main hub for the… movement? identity? complaint?… on the Internet, which I’m not sure of, counting subscribers doesn’t necessarily give us a good estimate of how many people are involved in it. /r/The_Donald has about 0.6 million subscribers; more than a hundred times that many people voted for said Donald.
@hsls2003
I’m not aware of evidence that any Muslim terrorists participated in activist Islamic forum spaces in the sense you are referring to, and I don’t think anyone points at participants in such as a group with a disproportionate number of terrorists. So I don’t think it does make sense to use that as the denominator. You could use “reads ISIS propaganda” or something, but “incels less likely to be terrorists than ISIS supporters” is damning with rather faint praise.
@Nornagest
The difference is that the incel movement is AFAIK pretty much internet-only, whereas supporters of the Republican candidate for president are not.
Wouldn’t the comparable case be honor killings, not terrorism?
@rlms: Google for “islam internet forum” returns http://www.islamicity.org/forum/ , https://www.ummah.com/forum , https://www.islamicboard.com/ , and https://www.muftisays.com/forums/ in the top 7 results. So I think the burden would be on you to provide some evidence that Muslim terrorists have never participated in internet fora.
But that’s ancillary. The point is that comparing a small subgroup self-selected for intensity to an undifferentiated national population number is not valid. In that sense, yes – Isis forum participants would be a better comparison, at least in the sense that it would give you the ability to say “incel forum users have a greater/lesser/equivalent violence rate to Isis forum users.” But for either subset, you can’t use those rate statistics to generalize to the Muslim population as a whole or to the involuntarily celibate population as a whole. The chosen methodology simply doesn’t work.
I’m not sure what the point would be anyway. I assume, or at least would hope, that somewhere in the US intelligence apparatus they could spare a couple people to monitor traffic on Islamist web fora – because I expect them to be self-selected for higher risk. I have no problem at all if they want to assign someone to do the same on the incel reddit or whatever the equivalent would be, for exactly the same reason.
Granted, but I think the basic point holds. As a rule of thumb you usually get ten readers to every subscriber for most online services, and /r/incels isn’t the only one in the space.
ISIS gets/got a lot of attention in infosec circles for having a sophisticated online presence: they use online services as a vector for propaganda, radicalization, recruitment, and plain old terror.
YouTube beheading videos probably got the most attention outside those circles, but it goes well beyond that. I would be astonished if all the people that’ve killed in its name over the last few years didn’t participate in it.
@Gobbobobble
Possibly. In that case we can’t compare like-for-like in the same way. Honour killers/Muslims is probably about the same number as incel rampagers/incels, but that’s irrelevant because domestic murders are vastly more common than mass murders. Domestic murders/Muslims is way higher than incel rampagers/incels, but so is domestic murders/straight white cis men. But honour killings are a small fraction of all domestic murders (I make it about 1% from Wikipedia on American crime plus this article), so I don’t think the claim about telescopic blinders stands up here either.
@Nornagest
Firstly, there are the opposing factors that some number of subscribers won’t be active, and there will be some overlap in the readerships of different incel sites. But secondly, I don’t think the classic 1-9-90 rule is applicable here. It is generally applied to lurkers-participants, not lurkers-subscribers — subscribing to a reddit requires a lot less effort than engaging; some people who occasionally read /r/incels but don’t subscribe let alone participate probably should’t be included in our total of incels (as in members of the online community, not the involuntarily celibate); and there is doubt about how correct the 1-9-90 rule is even when it is relevant anyway.
I certainly agree that plenty of Muslim terrorists probably read ISIS materials online etc.. As I said before, I don’t think “incels are less likely to be terrorists than literal ISIS supporters” is a particularly bold claim. But hls2003 linked random not-at-all-terroristy Muslim fora that I don’t believe there is any reason to think any terrorists used. More importantly “we need to keep a close eye on people-who-visit-https://www.muftisays.com/forums/ because they’re disproportionately terrorists” isn’t something anyone has ever said.
No, his point was just stupid.
And this whole subthread rapidly degenerated into more stupid. Something something comparing Islamic terrorism to incel terrorism.
The response of punishing random people who might be vaguely associated is stupid either way. And if that’s BBA’s point, he shouldn’t skirt Poe’s law, because there’s no way to tell if he’s serious or not. His serious paragraphs below his left-wing twitter imitation and his past posts do not encourage me about the likelihood he doesn’t basically mean what he says.
Fine, I’ll talk straight.
The only reason why anyone is talking about “incels” right now is that one of them rented a van and ran over a bunch of people in Toronto last week. I, being just as lonely as the perpetrator but who wouldn’t consider killing anyone in a thousand years, am baffled and offended that this is what triggers sympathetic reactions among the populace here. And then when I point this out, and note that between this and the general hatefulness of the incel “community” the scorn being heaped upon them is totally explicable, you all tell me that it isn’t about the murders – WHICH IT ABSOLUTELY IS.
Meanwhile, my political “allies” are now telling me that because I don’t fuck, I must be a violent shithead like the one in Toronto, and I wonder why I bother getting up in the morning.
This is all deeply personal for me. Even here I feel uncomfortable saying “Yes, I’m a 33-year-old virgin, go on, point and laugh” but that’s really what’s driving me here.
As a group, sure–emphasis on right now. But here we’ve had many people in the past request advice on personal romantic matters, some who may be adjacent to this identification (to put it delicately). We’ve had threads on PUA, ethics and technique. I’m sure at some point medieval Icelandic dating customs on battleships have been raised. And we’ve had plenty of discussion of helping various groups that aren’t murder related, like asexuals and autistics.
If you mean the wider world… probably the same replay. Incel as a group may not be a common topic of conversation, because most people are familiar with them, but “lonely guys/gals” or “dating advice” are common topics.
(It has come up here before, often as a hobby horse of a banned poster; here’s a different instance, though.
Hey BBA, thanks.
1) Let us know if you need advice, assistance, whatever. We probably can’t do much for you, but we can probably do more than we can for incels, because you’re engaged. If it’s embarassing, but you want to change things, maybe pick up a new screenname and ask for advice once things cool down.
2) As the OP on this thread, let me explain where I’m coming from.
2.1) As rationalist adjacent type, it makes me sad that the incels have adopted a model of courtship and women that I think is probably harmful to them and to the community at large. I’d love a way to get them to stop thinking like that. But as far as I can tell, they’re even more unlikely to change their priors as a result of external efforts than most groups. So I’m interested if there’s something that can be done. If we found something that works for incels, I bet it often would work for decent, lonely, non-hateful people as well, which would be good.
2.2) I get some lefty twitter as a result of other interests, and all of the “see, I told you these incels must be stamped out” has me a little engaged.
2.3) I’m not a big believer in demanding just punishments, even if I were to believe that having the same priors as a murderer makes you worthy of punishment. (Which I also don’t.) If there were a way to convince drug dealers and torturing sadists to stop doing those things, I would be motivated to find it, on some mix of utilitarian grounds and the hope that everyone can be redeemed.
@ BBA
Thank you. That’s a much preferable way of engaging.
First, I’m sorry.
Second, lame excuses for my behavior. I don’t pay close attention to the news on a short timespan, and there’s been discussion about men trying to find women etc. here in the past. I don’t sync to which thing happened each week. I have a vague idea, but I’m not making the connections.
I’m probably just randomly lashing in the subthreads here because a lot of the points are frustrating. And my vague feeling is that in the last year, culture war discussions have actually been getting worse here rather than better.
.
Right, and when a Muslim rented a truck and ran over a much larger bunch of people in Nice, we spent some time talking about Muslims. But what virtually all of Team Social Justice was saying, and what I am willing to bet you yourself were saying at the time, is that we should be very careful not to blame all Muslims for the actions of a few, that most Muslims were good and decent people whose help we were going to need to deal with the few bad ones.
AND THEY WERE RIGHT TO DO SO.
Just like they were right on 9/11 to point out that we shouldn’t be planning to wage war against Islam generally, that there was no urgent need to “do something” about all the Muslims running around in the United States. Just like they are right, every time the huge disparity in crime rates by white vs. black Americans comes up, to point out that the answer is not to marginalize Blacks in general on account of their criminality.
So when the people who get it right in almost every other context – because this is something Social Justice is usually pretty good at – respond to this attack with “what a bunch of pathetic losers; we should ridicule and marginalize them all because they’re basically all violent misogynists or cowardly apologists for violent misogynists”, I do not for one minute believe that this is motivated by their best judgement as to how to respond to rare incidents of terrorism. That’s just the excuse.
Yeah, well, you know who else was a 33-year-old virgin and got pointed and laughed at? Jesus Christ.
Have you considered the possibility that people generally despise weak males and sympathize with strong males, and that violent action implies strength?
Or, to paraphrase our recently returned Dr. Beat, the bullied are targeted due to their inability to defend themselves from bullying. Violence is a costly signal of some ability to defend oneself from bullying.
Consider another recent example of an incel who began receiving sympathetic (including sexual) reactions after engaging in violence.
Then why do you consider them allies, quotation marks or no?
My problem with this argument is that it proves too much. Everyone seems to have their own favorite topic, and I keep hearing arguments that schools are organized wrong because they teach so much useless material, but they don’t cover the one really important thing the debater cares about at the moment. This applies at all middle school and all levels above that. There are so many useful skills that someone thinks should be taught in school that they really can’t all fit into any school agenda.
A part time job doing various types of construction or even customer service may be quite educational, but a part time job in Food service, janatorial, or in the vastly dwindling manufacturing realm vs school? Im not sure about that. Do you mind divulging if this opinion was at all based on your own school days?
You list 3 possibilities, but I think you’re leaving out another big possibliity:
4) Incels get prescribed hormones that lower their sex drive.
We have drugs that would alleviate their suffering; why shouldn’t we use them?
Finasteride lowers sex drive. People are prescribed finasteride all the time for male pattern baldness. People are prescribed psychiatric drugs all the time for other conditions. It doesn’t seem outlandish to me. It seems like we could treat incels so easily if we were just willing to prescribe them the drugs.
Drugs have a pretty good likelihood of having negative side effects and depending on the specific drugs can be quite expensive. While for extreme circumstances I would say OK maybe an attempt can be made to see results, first should definitely be to try approaches that aren’t messing with the complex system of human body chemistry. OP’s approach one, get more fit and develop more social skills, actually has known beneficial side effects so unless there’s strong evidence a person can’t do that or the problems persist after doing that, drugs shouldn’t really be a serious suggestion.
The problem of incels has very little to do with sex drives. Unless you have a drug that permanently raises their self-esteem, it’s not going to work.
Cocaine? It’s not permanent, but you can just keep taking it, as the record industry proves.
Broke: can’t get laid
Woke: can’t stop using coke
Can confirm.
Frankly this is a terrible idea. Im sorry, but unlike treating depression, schizophrenia, etc.. a valid sex drive is not an evolutionary trait that is vastly out of step or mis-aligned with the modern world as I look at it. Sex has many positive benefits and in the case of mood disorders, can help alleviate symptoms. Why in the world would you suppress that?
Palliative care is supposed to be the last thing you turn to, not the first.
It’s not just a desire for sex. It’s a desire for the social status and self-esteem that comes with being able to say “I have a girlfriend” or “I love someone who loves me back.” Those sounds like really basic things because they are. It’s easy to mock them as unimportant when you have them met.
Yeah, it’s definitely weird to me that comments such as “Poor people who can’t afford food need to just accept that they are not entitled to anyone else’s food, and if they can’t get their own food – they will starve to death and they will deserve it.” are considered evil and immoral and beyond the pale – but if you replace “food” with “sex” suddenly that’s the exact right attitude to have and the only problem we have with society is that too many people disagree with it…
c/sex/companionship/
I’m just spitballing here, but I suspect the crucial difference is that you don’t need to rape anyone to redistribute food.
No, but you do need to steal from them. Which is also normally immoral but magically stops becoming so if the government is involved.
No, but you generally do need to either enslave farmers or offer them money. And in the latter case, more money than your social safety net would provide if they did basically the same things except not produce and distribute food to people they don’t otherwise feel like feeding.
Money is a claim on society’s finite resources. You exchange it for goods and services. If we redistribute your money — say, to buy food for the starving — you now have a slightly smaller claim on those goods and services.
Sex is an intimate physical activity between two people. If we redistribute sex, you are now required to penetrate or be penetrated by a stranger against your will.
Emotional companionship, which is the thing that the sympathetic brand of incels actually want, is even more intimate than that. If we redistribute emotional companionship, you are now required to — convincingly fake long-term affection for somebody you don’t actually like, I guess? Not exactly sure how this is supposed to work.
It’s so weird that people have different opinions on the redistribution of these essentially identical commodities!
I deleted my last post because it was needlessly dickish and Iain said it much better.
Also, would you rather never have food or never have sex?
And if we redistribute food, you are now required to plow and plant and reap a field against your will?
Once upon a time, people believed that we did. People who put as little thought into that matter as you did to this one, said “Obviously people won’t work the fields without whips and chains being involved, so since we need food I guess we are just going to have to have slavery as well”. Eventually, they put some thought into finding a better and it turned out slavery wasn’t inevitable after all.
But if you’re uncomfortable with food as an analogy, what about health care? Which I am told is an absolute human right that only the most monstrous of societies would fail to provide to absolutely everyone. But which cannot be commoditized, which requires an intimate one-on-one interaction between a doctor and a patient, some of whom will be as odious to deal with as any ill-socialized incel.
Education seems similar, and we’ve recently had the discussion about how having to accommodate a few particularly obnoxious students can degrade the process for everyone else. But, universal human right, must be made available to everyone.
And yet I am told that there are enlightened societies that have managed to redistribute food and health care and education so that even the odious get their share, and if they are doing it by enslaving farmers or doctors or teachers they are doing a fair job of keeping that out of view. So I can’t help but think you might be a bit hasty with your judgement that anyone who suggests redistribution of sex must be openly advocating rape.
@rlms
Well, if a guy only gets to have sex, he can just eat out 😛
@John Schilling
We also coerce people towards jobs, which means that we do coerce people to washing naked people and other such things, which are part of caring for the infirm.
Of course, one can reasonably argue that it is the step between coercing people to wash naked old people and coercing people to have sex where the burden becomes too odious.
Aapje:
In the US, we don’t coerce people into particular jobs. We do make it hard to live very well without having some kind of job, and some of the jobs people do in order to make a living are unpleasant things like being assistants at nursing homes. But we’re several decades from the last time we actually drafted anyone and gave them some shitty job they couldn’t refuse without going to jail or being shot.
John Schilling:
Prostitution vouchers? (As opposed to some kind of system of public whorehouses where you get a really nice one if you live in an expensive neighborhood, and a really nasty one with lots of disruptive clients if you live in a poor neighborhood?)
@John Schilling:
Before we had publicly funded healthcare, we had private doctors who performed surgery for money. Before we had publicly funded education, we had private teachers who taught classes for money. Before we had food stamps, we had farmers who grew crops and sold them for money.
All of those jobs were respectable and uncontroversially legal.
Prostitution is illegal in most jurisdictions, and disreputable pretty much everywhere. (There’s also no sign that publicly funded prostitutes would help anything – it’s not like Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian couldn’t afford a handjob.)
Providing genuine companionship and affection for money is not a job anywhere — and it can’t be, because paying for it would invalidate the entire point.
But apparently my reasoning on this point is as poorly thought-out as the logic behind slavery. So enlighten me, o wise and noble one — what’s your brilliant plan?
Actually, this makes me wonder–*could* some kind of business provide companionship in a way that it would actually meet the needs of people who were involuntarily alone (celibate, touch-starved, lonely, etc.)? Or would it always fail because the person paying for the service knew it was insincere? The answer isn’t obvious to me.
One model here is therapists–people pay a stranger to listen to their problems and offer advice and help. Your therapist isn’t a friend, exactly, but he may fill some of the same role. A good therapist genuinely cares about your well-being. But you are totally paying him by the hour, and modulo some level of willingness to take charity cases in special circumstances, he’s only going to spend time with you when he’s on the clock. And I suspect a lot of people do, in fact, get some of the social contact they need via talking to their therapist (doctor, masseuse, physical therapist, home healthcare nurse).
While I’ve argued already that incels aren’t all about getting laid, anecdotal evidence of experience with some is that if they do get laid, even by a hooker, they . . I don’t know the best phrase for this, so I’ll say “stop putting the pussy on a pedestal.” They mark it off their bucket list and still want companionship, but they don’t feel so bad or disrespected about it. Getting them to go through with it may be difficult. (See the story about ER’s dad elsewhere on this page.)
Prostitution is legal in most western countries. You’re Canadian, aren’t you? Prostitution is legal in Canada. There is a hypothesis that people get their beliefs about the world from Hollywood. This is the clearest example. (There are also examples about Americans believing that every state is like CA.)
albatross11
No, you just deny federal aid completely to able-bodied adults with no children. Local aid that may be available to these people is often time-limited. That’s very coercive.
While this indeed does not force people into specific jobs in the sense that people truly have no options, it on the group-level result in people doing these jobs even if they would strongly prefer not to.
PS. Note that this policy also seems to result in women avoiding relationships with poor men.
@Douglas Knight:
It is legal to sell sex in Canada, but not legal to buy it. That pretty clearly doesn’t count.
The other standard trick is to keep prostitution legal, but ban as many associated activities as possible. (See, for example, the UK, which prohibits “soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, owning or managing a brothel, pimping and pandering”.
If prostitution is fully legal and at least semi-respectable, you don’t need vouchers but you might want to factor the cost of prostitutes and/or dating into your cost-of-living estimates for deciding who needs financial assistance generally.
Somewhat more speculatively, if prostitution is fully legal and at least semi-respectable, it might be easier to fold it into a more generalized spectrum of paid companionship, overlapping some of the niches already mentioned like therapists, barbers/stylists, bartenders, etc. See e.g. geishas and hetaerae.
If prostitution is not legal, or barely legal but heavily stigmatized, then of course prostitution vouchers are right out. You might be able to approach the same end result from the other direction by expanding some of the other paid-companionship professions to include sex that people very carefully don’t talk about and that the police don’t try to find out about.
Either way, the incels who up their game by going to the gym, etc, are still going to have an edge because dating is almost always cheaper than hiring a prostitute and the more mercenary members of the dating pool are better at camouflaging their lack of true affection or respect.
Probably only room for marginal improvements here, but I expect that’s true of every plausible approach.
Is this true? Free events and workplaces tend to be imbalanced by age and gender and seem not to facilitate dating as much as people say they do. I understand the “get out of the house and do something,” advice, but I think it’s meant as a starting point dressed up as a guarantee.
If you’re looking at things that sort people into datable demographics, those do cost money. Online dating can run you $40 a month. Attending university will run you a few hundred dollars a month.
And those methods are only less expensive than a sex worker if they prove to be successful and the relationship lasts — if you go through several relationships, you have to keep attending university or keep paying for a subscription.
Hiring an escort, in developed nations where prostitution is legal and prices are openly advertised, seems to start at about $200 an hour.
That would probably come down if prostitution were less stigmatized, or if we postulate a socially camouflaged version with a higher companionship:sex ratio, but I’m fairly certain the economic fundamentals are going to keep dating at least somewhat cheaper than hiring prostitutes.
Aapje:
Yep, that’s pretty much what I said. We don’t coerce you into any particular job, but we also don’t promise to support you if you won’t work, and we don’t promise you a job that you’d like.
Refusing to support you is very different from coercing you into some job you don’t like. Coercing you into some job you don’t want to do would involve assigning you that job and putting you in jail or beating you up or something if you didn’t do as you were told. We have done that in the past–we used to have a draft. Plenty of people who absolutely didn’t want to be soldiers found themselves carrying rifles in various unpleasant places as a result.
@albatross11
You can hire actors to be friends and family in Japan:
Money may not be able to buy love, but here in Japan, it can certainly buy the appearance of love—and appearance, as the dapper Ishii Yuichi insists, is everything. As a man whose business involves becoming other people, Yuichi would know. The handsome and charming 36-year-old is on call to be your best friend, your husband, your father, or even a mourner at your funeral.
His 8-year-old company, Family Romance, provides professional actors to fill any role in the personal lives of clients. With a burgeoning staff of 800 or so actors, ranging from infants to the elderly, the organization prides itself on being able to provide a surrogate for almost any conceivable situation.
Yuichi believes that Family Romance helps people cope with unbearable absences or perceived deficiencies in their lives. In an increasingly isolated and entitled society, the CEO predicts the exponential growth of his business and others like it, as à la carte human interaction becomes the new norm.
if we postulate a socially camouflaged version with a higher companionship:sex ratio
No, if you want a girlfriend experience, this is going to cost more since it involves a lot more work and acting and time than “a handjob costs X, a blowjob Y, and full intercourse is Z. Any kinks or fetishes are negotiable but will cost more”. A prostitute is going to lose time on “one client wants five hours of a date with full ‘hi honey how was your day at the office?’ conversation” than “I can fit six clients in to that block of time” and will need to be compensated accordingly, just like any other professional. A consultant costs more than the ordinary doctor, after all! 🙂
More work and time, but less of that work and time will be devoted to sex, which I understand women place a premium on. There will be substantially less risk, because fewer and better-known customers. And any social camouflage will reduce the reputational penalty to the woman, which is presently substantial and not likely to go to zero even in a more tolerant society.
My admittedly limited understanding is that the women who advertise on sugar daddy websites could earn far more $$$/hr as outright escorts, but choose not to for the above-noted reasons. The same would probably apply to any social-support profession that includes occasional sex as a secondary element.
My dance teacher charges me $70/hour to learn zouk, but she does not make 145K a year. Escorting might pay more than sugaring per hour, sure, but sugar daddies, as I understand it, pay a fixed salary for semi-full-time employment, and it’s damn hard to make 40 billable hours a week at anything; I doubt prostitutes are different there. In addition to the different mix of romance vs. sex and safety, sugar babies are at least a bit closer to employees (instead of contractors) compared to escorts.
1. If it were optimal for such a service to exist, an efficient market would provide it.
2. Markets are efficient.
Therefore 3. It is not optimal for such a service to exist.
I cannot think of any historical society that fits that pattern. Lots of them had slavery, but I don’t know of any where there was not also farming by free men.
Which ones were you thinking of?
What are the Mormons doing about this? They have a high marriage rate compared to the rest of us. They must be doing something right.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/22/mormons-more-likely-to-marry-have-more-children-than-other-u-s-religious-groups/
I’m guessing they live in a culture that puts much more emphasis on marriage, and less on sex. They also probably have stronger family units that support (and push) young singles into matches.
This. The Mormons don’t have any secret tricks; they just apply a lot of social pressure to people to get married young and start pumping out babies.
My girlfriend’s family is all Mormon — her mother was the only one of the six kids to leave the church. She has thirty-something first cousins, including multiple families with eight kids, and a lot of those cousins are already married and pumping out babies of their own.
If your goal is just to maximize the number of marriages, the Mormons are doing pretty well. If you want to maximize human happiness, it’s a little less clear. One of the aunts spent years in an abusive marriage, finally managed to get a divorce, and is now estranged from her six sons (because it is a wife’s duty to obey her husband). Another aunt, who would clearly have been happier as a career woman with 1.5 kids, swore after two kids that she was done but just gave birth to her sixth kid last year. One cousin is mildly autistic and soul-crushed by reaching her mid twenties without being able to find a man and start a family like a good Mormon.
If you fit into the Mormon box, or can cram yourself into the Mormon box, it seems pretty nice. That doesn’t necessarily make it a good model for society at large.
I suspect one of the interesting problems we run into as a society is that there’s a strategy for life happiness that works pretty well for most people (probably something like “marry, have kids, buy a house, have a full-time job, maybe join a church or get involved in Scouts or something”), but it works really badly for a smallish subset of people.
It seems like, as a society, we have had many decades of weakening the push toward that strategy, and sometimes actively attacking it as bad/evil/wrongheaded. And we’ve had a consistent undermining of a lot of the legal and social pressures/structures that re-enforced it. And that’s probably made life better for the smallish subset of people who would have been miserable following that strategy, but at the cost of a lot of people who would have been happy following that strategy ending up unhappy.
“It” is ambiguous here. Do you mean that people have attacked the strategy as bad/evil/wrongheaded, or attacked the push towards the strategy?
At most, I think we have moved from a society where that strategy is socially mandated to a society where it is socially encouraged. The number of people who argue that marriages, kids, and jobs are actively bad is negligible.
The real change has been a shift in the ability of women to access that strategy. “Many decades” ago, women were mostly expected to stay at home and take care of the kids. In a lot of Mormon families, that’s still the case. If that’s what you’re talking about, then I dispute its description as “a strategy for life happiness that works pretty well for most people”. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my list of unhappy Mormons was three women.
Iain:
It seems like there used to be a lot more social pressure and support pushing people toward that life strategy. And now there’s much less, and that leads to both:
a. Fewer people for whom the strategy would have made them miserable ending up following it.
b. Fewer people for whom the strategy would have made them happy ending up following it.
I have zero interest in forcing anyone into my favored strategy for life satisfaction. But it sure seems plausible that (b) has done more harm than (a) has done good. That seems like it’s ultimately an empirical question.
Some parts of the breakdown of social pressure/support for the traditional happiness strategy seem like unambiguously bad things. For example, the huge increase in single mothers raising their kids without the fathers around seems pretty awful overall.
It looks to me like as social pressure/support toward a particular standard of how to live decreased in the US, people on the high end of intelligence, education, and income did better–the ones who wanted a traditional life mostly managed to get it, and the ones who would have been miserable in a traditional life found something different that suited them better. But the people at the low end of intelligence, education, and income mostly did worse–thus the Coming Apart phenomenon.
Mormon checking in. I think “no secret tricks” is a fair summary, but also “just a lot of social pressure” is under-selling what’s going on in several ways.
It’s important to remember that the Mormons aren’t just a culture but a highly structured church that meets three hours every week to (among other things) discuss topics from a unified curriculum. They also have a top-down leadership that is very active, constantly sending out talks and broadcasts and essays and magazines that are widely read and listened to.
And in all of this they talk about marriage incessantly. About how important it is and how great, and how much fun, and how happy it is, but also about how to be a good husband and a good wife and how to be a good parent and how terrible abuse is and how tragic divorce is. For a while it was common for church leaders at the highest level to encourage, over the pulpit, married couples to set aside regular time to go on “date night” and to engage in “continuing courtship.” You can call that “social pressure” but it’s more than just southern grandmas asking questions at Thanksgiving.
As Subject4056 points out, there are “singles wards” which are whole congregations specially organized for and populated by young single adults. You go to church and do all your church social activities with other single adults. The point is to get you meeting people and married, and everyone knows this. It’s also not rare; there’s at least one singles ward in pretty much every place there’s enough church members for it.
There are also, I believe, large effects from already having a culture with happy, stable marriages. I see a lot of general anxiety about marriage and divorce in my non-Mormon friends. My Mormon friends by and large simply assume that most marriages will be mostly happy, as long as they put in effort. And I think largely they are correct — they grew up surrounded by evidence for it. Even my Mormon friends who had experienced divorce as a kid were pretty rosy on the possibility of happy, stable marriage. And those kids who aren’t born Mormon go to church every week surrounded by other adult role models with happy marriages.
When I was in a singles ward the Bishop would give spiels to the men about how important it was to go on dates with the women, and to kiss them, but we could also see day to day how much he and his wife loved each other and how happy they were with each other. That kind of thing is powerful. (In the year and a half I was in that ward about 20% of the members met and got married, myself included)
So yeah, there’s no secret sauce besides using the huge infrastructure of the church to talk about marriage constantly to encourage people to form and maintain happy marriages. (I expect they actually are happy too, but that’s a separate question)
To any male incels, join up with Mormonism! The demographics are in your favor right now with the female-male percentages being 56% to 44%. And as above shows you’ll still be able to read SSC! Disclaimer though, this probably only helps the “wants a real relationship” incel and not so much the “I just need to get laid” type.
But that actually does make me curious, does the Mormon church right now worry about people joining for such less-than-spiritual reasons? Or does it seem that there are sufficient hurdles to joining that there isn’t a significant problem with insincere conversions? Or maybe even is there a “fake it til you make it” attitude that initially bad reasons to join will grow into real faith?
I’m having trouble imagining a minister commiserating with his fellows and saying, “People keep joining my congregation, but they’re not really believers. They’re just there for a chance to get laid. I don’t know what to do with these scoundrels.”
It sounds like one of those good problems to have.
Purely anecdotal, but I work with more than one young, male, mormons who seem to me to be attractive, athletic, nice guys with degrees from great schools who have elite level jobs – and who seem to be struggling to find mormon females to date.
I can’t speak for Mormons (I’m a Catholic), but I think it’s pretty common for people to start coming to a church largely for the social interactions (meeting other single people, meeting other young families) and to find themselves becoming more involved over time for deeper reasons.
@christhenottopher
We welcome everyone, but there are definitely barriers to entry. It’s not like you can walk in and find Mormon girls desperate to marry you.
The first one is baptism, which requires sitting through lessons with missionaries, and then sitting in an interview with a missionary about your commitment to certain religious principles and practices, including giving up alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee, paying a tithe, and going to church every week.
In my post above I left off discussion of the concept of temple marriage, which is huge. Marriage in a temple (as opposed to in a chapel or elsewhere) is seen as the ultimate goal for a variety of reasons. Being allowed in the temple requires passing additional barriers including more interviews, being a member of the church for at least a year, and receiving the priesthood for men (which is easier and less of a commitment than becoming a Catholic priest or full-time pastor; basically every active Mormon man does it)
And in the course of all this there’s the unofficial barrier of being involved. Being an active Mormon of the kind Mormon girls will want to marry is a significant commitment in time and energy. But you don’t have to act like a Chad, and that’s a huge plus.
And you do have to actually date. I got married in a singles ward, but only after I forced myself to start asking girls out even when it was awkward.
Again, the only secret sauce is a huge amounts of effort and commitment. I suppose you might say the secret sauce is self-selection.
So yes, incels, join up with Mormonism! It will take as much or more effort as “hit the gym, get a haircut, etc.” but it works pretty darn well.
@christhenottopher
I was a member of the Mormon church for several years (converted from Catholicism); I do not believe that would work, especially in the US. But — if incels are looking for serious relationships, they could try international dating. When I was younger and lived in Brazil, I had many friends (conservative women) who wanted to marry and never found anyone there. I registered some of them in American dating websites, and in one case, translated all the love letters because he didn’t speak any Portuguese, and she didn’t speak much English. They met a few months later and are happily married today. Other friends found American husbands without my cupid help, and they are still married, and none of them ran away once they arrived here.
@Telminha
Why do you think these women are so happy with American men and/or unhappy with Brazilian men? Is it for the reasons described here*?
* That Brazilian men tend to be macho and in want of a ‘mommy’ girlfriend who takes extreme care of them, while being prone to cheat.
@Aapje
I would agree with some of the things she mentions in her article, but my social circle in Brazil was made of very conservative people, and some of our experiences differ.
In the case of my friends, they were mostly Mormons, and the reason they were also interested in American men was that there were no single men available in our local church (ward). The problem was severe enough that the church authorities temporarily changed some rules about baptism: Missionaries could no longer baptize families if there weren’t at least one (young) single man included.
My friends were happy with dating Brazilian men, as long as they were Mormon or religious — they believe these were less likely to be alcoholics and to cheat. Alcoholism and domestic abuse were rampant in our area.
Interesting, thank you.
While on the whole Mormonism’s retention numbers are good, this masks the gender imbalance – many more men leave the church than do women. This imbalance and the taboo against out-of-group partnerships make it a lot easier for (observant) Mormon men to find dates.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283733702_Increasing_Sex_Ratio_Imbalance_Among_Utah_Mormons_Sources_and_Implications
The church also facilitates meeting eligible partners through “singles ward”, which is basically an extra hour or so after normal church services in which the single members of the congregation are expected to mingle. If you’re observant, single, and not meeting anyone, your bishop will know about it, and in theory try to get you back on the path to marriage.
I’m not incel, but I know a lot of them because I participate in the chan and twitter subcultures where they’re common. Inceldom has almost nothing to do with sex. Nothing. For the vast majority it’s about touch starvation, loneliness, and self image. Here’s a sad thread where a bunch of incels talk about what they’d like to do with a gf. A lot of incels outright admit the idea of sex terrifies them and they just want a woman who is nice to them to cuddle and watch anime with.
Unfortunately there are incentives on both sides for people to publicly behave as if inceldom is about benis in bagina and nothing else. On the social justice side, because it makes incels less sympathetic and easier to mock and denigrate. On the incel side, because it’s less humiliating and more socially acceptable for a male to talk about sexual frustration than to talk about how he wants someone to hold him and run her fingers through his hair and tell him he is loved.
It’s weird to me that so many people apparently genuinely believe that the incel phenomenon is about fucking, like that guy above suggesting that using finasteride to eliminate sex drive might help. It wouldn’t do anything.
Thank you. Almost everything that has been said about incels here has been almost totally incorrect, missing the point to the extent that a literal 5 second glance at any of their communities would show that they’re wildly wrong. Particularly the idea that they have extremely high standards and blame everyone else for their failures, when almost the defining feature is absolute desperation, the belief that they’re so totally, absolutely unlovable that they want literally any affection from literally anyone. It worries me to see people immediately take the surface level obviously bullshit culture war take that perfectly conforms to Jezebel strawmen seriously.
How does that square with the part where they idolize mass murderer Elliot Rodger? I get that they aren’t a monolith, but according to one observer they’ve recently taken a very dark turn.
Is there actually main hangout of theirs where they view him in a favourable light? /r9k/ mostly mocked him endlessly.
And if it is true that they’ve taken a dark turn recently, I would suggest that it was via the process of the media painting them as terrible misanthropes instead of self hating loners which in turn has actually attracted terrible misanthropes to them.
There’s a popular perception that redpill is radicalizing incels – that greater proportions of them are beginning to believe not only that they are miserable, but that society is organized in a way that unfairly impacts them.
I haven’t seen a good systematic way to measure this – like the dispute some time ago regarding ethics in gaming journalism and/or oppressing women, you can pick various postings that reflect one side or the other.
To the extent that incels believe either (a) that their life is doomed to incurable misery or (b) it’s society’s fault, I suspect those ideas are harmful to them. I’d love to have some kind of philosophical evangalization program, or to invent a useful medication – maybe someone will come up with one or both.
The Daily Beast’s “Sympathy for Incels” article did just casually toss off in their interview with an incel Youtuber that there are pretty common references to “going ER” as an option of last resort. The interviewee suggests that’s just blowing off steam and not meant to be taken seriously, but there’s only so many mass shootings that can come out of a very small, insular community before theoretically-joking references like that stop being plausible as jokes.
@MrApophenia – thanks, that Daily Beast article was really informative.
A couple of points of clarification and/or interest:
I’ve been in all the places where this idolization would surface, but my findings are the exact opposite. Elliot Rodger is a joke and a sick, sad one at that. Cringe and pity are the responses. I would also add that ER is not often regarded as a ‘mass murderer’, which leads me to my second point…
If you’re looking for examples of pathologically resentful young men who acted out their beliefs, and *did* get idolized, then better examples are Anders Breivik or Dylann Roof. Both of these actually were mass shooters and were at least in part motivated by white supremacy.
Do you believe that participants on anorexic forums are correct about their impression of how fat or thin they are?
I readily agree with your viewpoint here. I hate to say it also, but it would seem to me that the type of fantasy-based media consumed by these groups does little to help their cause either.
I’m a little bemused by the notion that women have it so easy on the dating market and have all the advantages over these poor guys, because come on, there are such things as female incels and have been, as long and as much as male incels.
Janis Ian’s At Seventeen was the ugly/socially awkward girl’s song of the 70s and the lyrics seem to be equally applicable:
It’s apparently an article of faith among male incels that all women in the 21st century can find a mate. Certainly the system would have to change if there were a bunch of straight women on the incel boards.
If only by being at a Country and Western bar at closing time. (It’s a cliche, but I actually first heard it from a woman)
When pressed, most self-described female incels will admit to having had sexual and romantic relationships in the past. No doubt their situation is pretty lousy but I think it’s qualitatively different from that of someone who has literally never had any kind of sexual or romantic relationship.
Sure, some answers on that thread are things like
but others are
and
which don’t exactly cause pangs of sympathy for me at least.
Why do they call some women “roasties”? A cannibalism fetish?
From Encyclopedia Dramatica, which is probably the appropriate source for this sort of thing:
The more staid Urban Dictionary simply says
It’s worth mentioning that you quoted basically every bad example from that thread, while the majority were in line with that first one and that an equal number were being very depressed over how outlandish the suggestion even was.
I count ~7/56 bad ones and ~13 nice ones. The remainder are things like
and
.
I almost counted an extra nice one, but noticed the Elliot Rodgers idolisation in
just in time.
But that would require us to feel sympathy instead of stomping on the throats of the weak just for being weak, and to stop using “male virgin” as a synonym for “freak who will never be loved and should be punished and degraded until nothing of him remains but his ability to feel shame”.
We have an epidemic of male loneliness and isolation. It will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be cured or even addressed. Because lonely men are weak, and nobody will ever stop punishing the weak for being weak, and nobody will ever notice a single thing that might motivate them to feel sympathy for the weak.
Hey, nice to have you back! I hadn’t seen you post in a while.
The Shamalan twists that DrBeat was here the whole time, we just didn’t notice until he spoke words of despair.
Nope, first comment this year. Last comment was in OT 90.5.
DrBeat: I assume you’ve seen this (posted elsewhere here)?
https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496
I think Ms. Pao may be contending for Ms. Marcotte’s title.
@The Nybbler, is there a way to see people’s SSC post histories?
@j1000000
They’re in the archives. Not indexed by author, but despite the, lets us say, loquaciousness, of our host and some of our commenters, it’s only about a gigabyte total.
@The Nybbler — So to find his last post, you just click on each post and Ctrl+F’ed DrBeat?
Sometimes when someone says something interesting on here I want to see what else they’ve written, I guess that’s the only method.
@j1000000
Some well-chosen googling on a poster with a reasonable rare name is faster. It would be nice if someone could compress the comment archives into something we could search on our own, though. That method doesn’t work all that well if you want something more complex.
@bean
I’d be a bit concerned about the abuse potential of making such a thing generally available. A lot of witch-hunters around, but fortunately a lot of them are lazy.
I usually manage fine with site:slatestarcodex.com on Google.
it’s only about a gigabyte total
Dammit! Must try harder! 🙂
Have there been any demographic studies of “incels”? I wonder if there’s anything common to their backgrounds that’s unusual in the backgrounds of others.
I would be very interested in this as well. Namely conservative vs whatever else family background…
As mentioned in the other thread, academia is unlikely to touch this subject with a ten-foot pole, and if they did, the culture war would likely color its results.
Anecdotally, however, my substantial professional experience in working with young adults suggests that the single largest predictor would be absent fathers. Traditionally, young men learn appropriate sexual behavior from older male role models. Given the rise of single mother households, female domination of primary education, and entryism into formerly male spaces, it should not be surprising that a greater number of men are left to learn how to achieve sexual success on their own, with some failing completely.
Similarly, men with fathers who navigated very different (typically patriarchal) sexual marketplaces (e.g. East or South Asian immigrants) are often provided inadequate or improper strategies for the modern sexual marketplace in Western societies, and thus run a higher risk of failing to pick this up on their own and end up as incels.
How does the presence of a father help? The father in a traditional monogamous relationship has presumably done the courtship work long before the son is aware of such things (or indeed even born). A dysfunctional single-mother family with a series of boyfriends actually provides more role models — at least for the son to obtain similarly-dysfunctional relationships, which I believe is a common outcome.
By providing a role model of how to interact with a woman in a relationship. It’s unlikely my son watching me interact with my wife is going to learn unsuccessful behavior. My wife and I respect each other and care for each other in mutually supportive ways. I do manly stuff around the house (as my mother called them, “hairy leg jobs”) like take out the trash, deal with the lawn, knock down the wasp nests, crawl through the attic, fix things that break. Oh and go to work to support the family. And my wife does traditional female things like cooking and cleaning and childcare. Neither of us is abusive to the other, nor is either of us obsequious towards the other. If the lesson on how to act my son receives by watching his parents is “do useful masculine things while being neither mean to nor fawning towards the woman” he’ll be halfway along the successful courtship path before he even realizes he wants a girlfriend.
It seems to me the thrust of the government / culture approved instruction for young men is mainly about avoiding being the bad type of man (the rapist, abuser, harasser, etc). This leaves them paranoid, without useful positive instruction, and then extremely suspicious of women and the institutions because as they observe the world they see men who behave exactly in the ways they were told was The Worst Things You Can Do have high levels of sexual/romantic success.
@Conrad Honcho
That’s all great for the steady state of two people in a monogamous relationship, but it does nothing to provide a role model for how to get into such a relationship in the first place. Getting a job and doing chores is not going to get him a date.
@Conrad Honcho: that’s about how to *stay* in a relationship, not about how to *enter* one.
And I’m saying they’re very closely related. “Be the sort of guy who’s gainfully employed or has good employment prospects, is competent in masculine things, bathes after performing them, and is neither abusive towards nor subservient to his love interest” gets you halfway towards getting a girlfriend/wife. A young man without a male role model around doesn’t get that instruction. He’s starting at the origin without even a unit vector.
@Nybbler
I dunno. On my first date with my wife she was running 20 minutes late so I was hanging out with her roommate. Their landline phone “rang” but made no noise. The roommate told me it was broken. So I took it apart and fixed it (the wire on the ringer had come loose). Oh, and then I changed the filter in their air handler, because they didn’t know those needed to be changed and had never done so. Basic man stuff but it was impressive to her.
And the first thing her mom asked when she told her she met a guy was “does he have a job?”
isn’t just a template for committed monogamous men, but a template for how to become a committed monogamous man. It means he is going to be a confident Boy Scout doing car work and wood-working on the side and isn’t just going to put women on a pedestal, which is indeed half-way to where he needs to be.
EDIT: Conrad ninja’d me.
“Be the sort of guy who’s gainfully employed or has good employment prospects, is competent in masculine things, bathes after performing them, and is neither abusive towards nor subservient to his love interest” gets you halfway towards getting a girlfriend/wife
Halfway isn’t all the way there. And the incels watch as the Henrys with no job prospects get more.
It’s vastly harder to get into a relationship than to maintain one. Like getting a job, you need to be much more impressive when you are hired than you do to keep the job.
I went through the painfully cliché phase of “why do women like jerks?” in my 20s. When I acted to women like my father acted to my mother. Like I act now to my wife. When you are in your 30s and dating a more mature group of people, it will pay off, but it can be tough to wait that out while watching the Henrys in your 20s.
(My BIL is a Henry. Drug-using, jobless, layabout slob. Has a girlfriend. I would point out to any incels observing him ruefully that his girlfriend has no teeth, and it’s not because they got knocked out playing polo. The Henrys gets lots of women but you don’t want those women. That last sentence works whether it is normative or descriptive.)
If you are asking why women like jerks, it generally means that you need to be more jerkish. Some guys interpret behavior as “jerkish” when the default person or interested woman interprets it as something entirely different.
Sort of like the introverted job seeker not asking for more money, because that’s “greedy,” when no normal person would think that.
Obviously the internet hates that line of advice, but it’s only meant for certain guys who need to hear that message. And to give women credit, the WOMEN in the lives of these unassertive men generally recognize the flaw: I had a friend who was extremely unsuccessful with women, and his mother told him “you need to be an asshole.” He was way, way, way too nice. And is still way, way, way too nice.
One of my friends told me basically the same thing one day.
It does not mean that all men or men in general need to be more jerkish. There are plenty of men out there that are absolute assholes and need to be a lot nicer.
I did get over the “women like jerks” stuff; I described it as cliché. And there was not just the women in my life desiring more mature things; it was also me becoming more mature and desiring more mature things. If I had gotten my dream girl in my 20s I would have fucked it up royally because I had immature ideas about relationships. (But doesn’t everyone in their 20s? Part of having relationships is working all those things out.)
Yes, this is the “All Debates are Bravery Debates” thing where it’s good Atlas Shrugged exists because some people are complete doormats and need to hear “it’s okay to be selfish.” People who are assholes don’t need to hear that. Maybe they need a little more A Christmas Carol. Some guys do need to be told they’re too nice. Not Henry though.
I’m saying “halfway there is better than none” and people keep responding “but halfway isn’t all the way!” I know it’s not. All I’m saying is it’s better than none. I was halfway there at the beginning of college. I went on a few dates in high school but did not have a girlfriend. Then when I got to college I went the other half way there: I hit the gym, bought trendy clothes at the mall, found a homosexual to style my hair, and hung out with guys who occasionally got laid, and then shockingly enough I got laid too.
Strongly disagree. Relationships are hard work, and it’s easy to take a partner for granted, or fall into destructive habits, etc. For many/most people, a lifetime includes several started relationships and 0-1 maintained one.
@andrewflicker
Yeah, but it’s extremely common that people put high to unsustainable effort into the dating phase and then reduce the effort later on.
So it could both be true that dating is harder, but also that many relationships fail because people put in too little effort to satisfy their partner.
It seems pretty clear to me that initiating a relationship and sustaining a relationship are two separate skill sets, and their relative difficulty varies between people.
I hear this a lot, but I don’t really believe it. I am just picturing my brother-in-law. He is 6’2, built like Thor, has Lassie for a dog, and is really funny. He also makes crappy relationships choices and is really irresponsible (basically a human version of a puppy), so of course maintaining relationships is harder for him than starting relationships.
EDIT: Iain beat me to it.
In addition to the points covered by Conrad Honcho and ADBG, I’d like to approach this from a different angle:
How does the presence of a father reduce the risk of sons becoming criminals, given that fathers presumably turn down criminal opportunities in their youth before their sons were born?
Any overlap at all? Or are they completely orthogonal skill sets?
Overlap, obviously. But the things you were talking about — manly tasks around the house, working to support a family — are much more valuable in sustaining a relationship, not starting one. You had a chance to impress your wife with your handiness on your first date because you had already arranged a first date.
(Also, your described goal of making your sons good at “masculine things” is too narrow. Childcare might not be an easy way to show off, but a man who can cook a nice dinner for two has a distinct edge in the dating department, and knowing how to keep a house clean certainly won’t hurt either. Teach your sons general competence, not just masculine competence.)
Absolutely. I’ve been cooking since a young age, and have an extensive collection of antique cast iron cookware. I have always been able to impress dates by cooking for them. I consider cooking part of “masculine competence.” Not so much needlepoint, though.
I also recommend firearms proficiency. When you’re discussing hobbies and you mention sport shooting and hunting that immediately conjures images of both danger and protecting/providing virtues. If you’re lucky, she’s into shooting, too. If not, you get to do the whole “what do you mean you’ve never shot a gun before? How about I take you to the range and teach you how to shoot? You’ll see it’s no big deal!” Great ~3rd date. Gets that whole sex and violence thing working together too. (Note, this may only work in red states. Dunno.)
Iain:
+1
Knowing how to cook a decent meal (at least well enough to follow a recipe from a cookbook), keep a reasonably clean house, maintain a budget, etc., are life skills that will be very valuable to your sons both before they’re married and after. It would be as silly to refrain from teaching them those things as it would to refrain from teaching a girl how to do simple household repairs or check her own oil.
Even if you have a pretty traditional marriage where your wife does most of the cooking and cleaning and you do most of the house and car maintenance, life is a lot better when each of you can cover at least the basics for each other. Actual traditional married life involves a lot of times when your wife is sick or nursing the baby or on bedrest while pregnant or at a parent-teacher conference or whatever, and you’ll be a lot happier if you can do something better for the kids than opening a box of mac and cheese and a bag of frozen french fries.
cosigned
@Education Hero:
I wonder how much that just has to do with the language used to talk about it. “Incel” isn’t a term I had heard of before the thread in which it was discussed, and my underlying gut feeling was (and still is) that normalizing this term, even unpacked as “the involuntarily celibate”, is probably a bad idea, though I’m not sure I can explain exactly why. In the past it seems like we’ve managed to talk about guys who chronically strike out with the ladies without it being controversial.
Anyway, your anecdote fits the hypothesis I had formed in my head when I asked the question.
Graph, dunno the underlying data:
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/992105680000749570
And because fuck it
https://twitter.com/ekp/status/991817194987114496
I’m not sure about that.
Relative to its exposure, Radicalizing the Romanceless was quite controversial without using the term “incel”.
By “we” I meant something more general than the SSC peanut gallery.
It’s a shame incels don’t have a habit of talking about their families and early lives.
Pure hypothesis here, but my bet is that incels grew up with emotional abuse, and their fathers were probably present.
First, remember than incels aren’t typical men– heterosexual men who are that bad at attracting women aren’t common, though they aren’t extremely rare either.
I get the impression that most men who haven’t attracted any women by their twenties wait it out and do better in their thirties.
Incels chose despair and rage.
I suspect part of the pattern is having parents who default to anger, which might be partly genetic.
This is purely a guess, but I think some parents see their children as rivals for status, including sexually– it’s possible that incels have fathers who were flattening their self-assurance from childhood.
It’s possible that incels started out as family scapegoats.
I’ve seen SJW claims that incels tend to be white and from well-off families and expect to get what they want with no effort. Anyone have information?
I’m going to be radically agnostic on this and claim “I don’t know and they don’t either”. Incel forums, for obvious reasons, tend to be anonymous or pseudonymous.
To the extent an imbalance of too many men chasing too few women accounts for any of this (I have no idea how much), I think you should see:
a. Few incel men among blacks who aren’t in prison, because the large fraction of the black male population in prison has led to a large gender imbalance (more women than men) in the outside world.
b. More incel men among Asians, because Asian women seem to outmarry (to whites, usually) way more often in the US than the other way around. (The opposite pattern happens among blacks–way more black men outmarry, mostly to whites. Which probably makes the women/men ratio among black singles even more one-sided.)
ETA: The claim I’ve often read (which is consistent with the interracial stats I’ve seen) is that you get a kind of racial hierarchy of attractiveness that’s different for women than men.
For women, Asians seem to get an attractiveness boost relative to everyone else, and blacks seem to pay an attractiveness penalty.
For men, blacks seem to get an attractiveness boost, and Asians seem to pay a penalty.
This would predict more unhappily alone black women and Asian men, and more sexually/romantically successful black men and Asian women. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is at least plausibly consistent with what I can observe day to day.
Would it be controversial to suggest that Asians tend to be less masculine relative to Europeans, and Blacks moreso, at least as far as secondary sexual characteristics go? Think amount of facial hair, height, musculature, and so on. One obvious counter-example, though.
@albatross11
OKCupid has pretty solid information about this and you are basically correct. People dislike Asian men and all black people.
Steve Sailer had an interesting piece about the romantic problems of Asian men and Black women.
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/color/articles/sailer.html
The other interesting bit about that is that marriages between black women and white men were more stable than any others, including white/white and Asian/Asian marriages. I am not sure why.
@albatross11
Women initiate most divorces & black women are the women with the least chance to end up with a better partner if they divorce.
Mystery solved?
So shouldn’t the divorce rate among black/black couples be low, too?
@albatross11
No, because the woman is much more likely to find a higher status man than her black partner, than if she had a white partner.
Also, since black people have low income, partnering with black men will on average be less of an improvement compared to being a single mom.
I would leave the possibility open that black men are less willing to admit they’re incels and/or are put off by majority white incel groups.
I predict that being an incel is strongly inversely correlated with having at least one sister, especially a sister close in age.
To be clear, this is not some kind of obscure incest joke. I think a key factor is seeing women/girls as a radically different, even alien, class of people. Years of inevitable closeness with one or more examples of the genre will tend to preclude that.
I would also expect a much weaker correlation with single sex education, for much the same reason, but there are almost certainly a ton of confounders there, so it might be difficult to tease out.
I would cosign on that not-having-a-close-in-age-sister hypothesis.
There must be some data that would let you answer this question….
I would cosign this as well, and further suggest that being an incel is even more strongly correlated with having a younger sister close in age.
Talking to men, apparently dating suddenly becomes easy once you hit your 30’s. And it suddenly becomes difficult for women.
Likewise, dating is apparently relatively easy for men in New York City, but is, I guess, difficult for women.
So, setting aside the much more general problem that it is against gender norms for men to complain – including about the fact that it is against gender norms for them to complain – if you are in this boat, there are two simple steps you can take.
First, ensure you aren’t living in an area with 10% more men than women. Small shifts in the dating pools can have major effects on the dating market. Because men and women apparently have different preferences for where they live, I expect this particular problem to get worse, not better, over time.
Second, and here is where the real problem comes in: Women, on average, tend to prefer dating men who are the same age or older, whereas men, on average, tend to prefer dating women who are the same age or younger. A 20 year old woman has about 15 years spread of people she prefers to date, pretty much all of whom would equally prefer to date her; a 20 year old man has, effectively, a 5 year spread, and only a 3 year spread of mutual attraction. So a 20 year old woman will generally have five times as many potential suitors as a 20 year old man has potential interests. (I offer no evidence for this except to gesture emphatically at society and conclude anyone who disagrees is an alien who hasn’t interacted with our society.)
From a feminist framework, the argument is that it is sexist or ageist or whatever that women are only considered attractive when they are young. This is, indeed, part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that men are only considered attractive when they are experienced. (This is commonly framed as “maturity”)
This is true, however I do see growing numbers of older women/younger men pairing up, and not a cougar stalking type scenario…
The other part of the problem is that men are only considered attractive when they are experienced. (This is commonly framed as “maturity”)
Or even “stopped whining about what women owed him, grew the hell up and started thinking about how to interact with other people instead of expecting them to share his interests and if they didn’t care about 17th century toadstools but liked pop music and sports and reading about the Kardashians then they were idiots and he let them know he thought they were idiots”.
For some of the incel boys, time really is the only solution. If they never learn “so what do I want with a girlfriend – what can I do for her, not frame this in what can she do for me and what kind of social status that will give me”, then they will always be boys even if they’re forty years old.
Okay that was sharp and mean, but I’m so thankful right now that not alone have I never been interested in this nonsense, I have always been too ugly to attract any interest – how the hell worse would my life have been had I been conventionally attractive and had to fend off the kind of “but you haaaave to give me a chaaaance, you owe that to me!” kind of attention?
Yes, yes, they should “grow the hell up.” It would have been nice, though, if the feminist instruction they received on how to do this were not completely backwards from reality. How they were told to behave in their formative years was counterproductive. It’s like they were raised wrong, as a joke.
Erm, partly. But I’m in my early 30s. I now have a nice car, some great clothes, a suit, a Facebook that shows me doing lots of interesting things on vacations, muscles, etc.
It doesn’t matter what my personality is, 30-year old ADBG is playing on easy mode, 18-22 year old ADBG is playing on Nightmare difficulty. He doesn’t have money, his body hasn’t started filling out, he doesn’t know much about clothes, etc.
Yeah, but it’s kind of pointless by that point, isn’t it?
Did you go to college between ages 18 and 22? A young man who is in college is somewhat insulated from competition from older men.
If I had sons, I would definitely urge them to attend a college which (1) has a favorable male/female ratio; and (2) is not smack dab in the middle of a big city.
Isn’t that what professors are for?
I believe that sort of thing is “frowned upon,” John.
Grad students, then.
Wisdom is earned through pain.
Some refuse to learn from their pains, but many more avoid the pain of mistakes entirely, and never act, never learn, and never grow.
Ill treatment affords the opportunity both to learn rapidly, or, facing more pain than can be borne, to submit to the lure of inaction and never learn at all.
Expectation of reward without action is the latter path. But many pursue the former, now, and I suspect a few decades hence, the common wisdom will be that men mature more quickly, even as the situation again reverses and women have new opportunity to learn more quickly.
Not acting is also learning from pain. If I touch a flame once and learned to stop touching flames, I just learned and grew as a person. It would be stupid to keep touching the flame forever, hoping that one day it will stop hurting.
Trying again and again also has a cost & it is hardly irrational to quit if the chance of success seems too low, based on the available data.
A big problem with dating is that the feedback mechanisms suck for people who are not naturally close to being desirable. In many cases, people only get good feedback if they simultaneously do multiple things right and even then a single test is not enough, since for quite a few people, getting the combination (close to) optimal for that person merely increases the chances to ‘poor’.
So a trial and error approach can then be immensely costly.
Some choices can not even realistically be changed to do testing. Is a person going to give up being a programmer and spend years learning a different profession, just to see if it increases their attraction? Surely that is too much to ask.
In such conditions, good advice is immensely valuable, because it can lead people to doing the right things without such an immensely costly trial and error approach & without ending up doing something very costly that greatly harms their chances with women & that they can’t just undo. However, we seem to be doing worse at giving good advice than in the past.
This depends very strongly on the quality of the advice, the quality of feedback and the cost/reward ratio. Increasing the cost/pain that men experience, while not improving the rewards, logically leads to more men concluding that the rewards are not worth it.
We seem to be giving worse advice to men, partially based on wishful thinking and partially based on obsolete norms. This logically increases the costs for men and makes it harder for them to actually make progress toward the goal, rather than trying things that are hopeless. Again, this logically leads more men to conclude that they have no realistic shot, since they don’t see any progress; or correctly concluding that the costs have increased and deciding that it is not worth it.
Greater atomization of society probably resulted in greater diversity in what women demand, which makes advice even more useless. If you are attracted to blue-haired feminists who like X, but you get advice by those who are attracted to blonde-dyed conservatives who like Y, you can end up spending loads of effort to do Y, seeing other men do Y successfully for the women that they like & yet strike out completely yourself. It’s not strange that such a man would then conclude that he has done everything in his power & that the thing that puts off the women he likes is an unchangeable trait, like his looks.
So in short, I think that your analysis is way too simplistic, merely recognizes one way in which people can learn or ‘grow’ and most importantly, fails to recognize that trial and error is not a good solution for all problems.
Aapje –
Starving to death for fear of touching the stove to cook isn’t wisdom earned at the flame’s touch.
Learning from pain and fleeing from pain are not the same, even if the behaviors can resemble each other superficially.
And at a certain point, I lose patience with the idea that society has taught people wrong. Of course it has. That is what society does, and the whole history of progress has required throwing aside society’s incorrect teachings. This isn’t unique, this isn’t special. Not even is the deliberate ignorance of the pain such teachings provoke, for that is the heart of all such misinformation.
The world is full of unhappy people choosing one thing to blame their unhappiness on.
I have never been unhappy, any more than I have ever been happy. I have no idea what those words truly mean. But I do see people blaming their misery and pain on their circumstance; it takes misery and pain, however, to learn a far more important lesson: Misery and pain are a choice.
Wisdom isn’t the knowledge that fire is hot, that is knowledge. Wisdom is closer to knowing that the pain of a burn is a transitory thing just as much as the pleasure of the food that might be cooked.
There is relevance to the topic, but I have trouble condensing the idea into words, and am forced to wave my hands and gesture in a direction.
Unless it is a 3rd degree burn. And if you have leprosy, it may be better to never try to cook anything, if you can eat well enough to survive without it (although they may then miss out on a lot).
Plenty of people do end up with permanent damage due to their experiences in life. Trial and error doesn’t have merely upsides. There are real costs, beyond just the effort that people put in.
I agree with you that just blaming others can prohibit people from taking the opportunities that they do have. However, there are also plenty of things that we could improve to make this far easier or even merely possible, for some people.
Furthermore, it is frequently those who have it easy, due to the luck of the genes, who make things harder for those less fortunate. Pretending that this is not the case and letting these people get away with abusive behavior is wrong.
From my perspective, the balance between sympathy & support and pressure for single men to solve the problem by themselves is severely out of whack. Furthermore, at a certain level of pressure, people don’t try harder, they simply give up and become miserable.
Balderdash. There is a limit to stoicism for most people.
For the people who are recommending option one, I mostly agree, but with the caveat that this is much harder than it used to be.
1. Social atomization means it is harder to just “go to the gym” because you don’t know anyone there. People have fewer and weaker personal relationships. There is less incentive to get a haircut. There are fewer people in day to day life to comfortably practice talking to.
2. Single moms, deadbeat dads, and divorce combined with a female supermajority of K-12 teachers means more boys growing up with zero male role models. Male only spaces and clubs are basically dead. Worse, the boys that do have fathers often have absentee fathers that never care to provide any discipline. The problem incels face is not women-trouble specifically, but incredible feelings of worthlessness and loneliness. They need an older male figure for guidance, frequent goals to work towards, and praise for accomplishments. The closest thing I can think of is a high school coach or drill sergeant.
You’re only going to get a few takers for Option 1. And most of them are going to get even more blackpilled once they get in shape, cut their hair, improve their grooming in general, and find themselves still alone.
This is because they lack the skills to do anything about it and are no longer in a situation where it’s possible for them to learn. They don’t know how to ask a woman on a date without being painfully awkward, nor to do any of the follow-on, and they’re not teenagers any more: most women are not going to put up with fumbling advances.
It sounds like you’re endorsing a critical period hypothesis for the acquisition of courtship skills in adolescence. Maybe there’s a tiny kernel of truth there, but I think that’s much too pessimistic. More likely, if you notice that most of the poorly groomed out-of-shape virgins who manage to get their act together later in life still fail to find girlfriends, it’s because they also had and continue to have psychological problems getting in their way. (After all, plenty of poorly groomed out-of-shape people do manage to find mates.)
In other words, it’s survivorship bias: The guys who didn’t have those psychological problems started dating in adolescence because that’s the earliest they were able to, but if they had been prevented from doing so until later in adulthood for some reason, they’d still figure it out without all that much more difficulty and awkwardness than a typical teenager.
Of course, this explanation isn’t much comfort to those of us who can’t find love due to psychological problems.
Not a critical period in the biological sense but in a social one. If the only way to learn to play baseball at a higher level than beginner is to actually play baseball, and nobody will play baseball with a beginner over the age of 20, then if you’re over 20 and haven’t played baseball, you aren’t going to. Even if you’re physically capable of learning.
I’m not sure how you’d distinguish this from survivorship bias, which implies that some people are just innately unable to participate in courtship. I imagine one distinction might be the presence of well-groomed in-shape virgins (who don’t want to be) during adolescence. But I doubt anyone’s done the study.
Either way’s a black pill.
I don’t want to get into too much detail about my own sad biography here, but I’ll say this: while I’ve never exactly been a dashing Adonis, I have good reason to believe that neither my grooming nor my physical fitness level ever presented significant obstacles to me losing my virginity. Not in adolescence, and not now (late 30’s, alas). In my case, at least, it’s always been about my psychological problems. I did finally pull myself together enough to go on a few first dates within the last couple of years (by a Herculean and unsustainable effort). My complete lack of prior dating experience certainly made me feel even more insecure, but beyond that, it didn’t seem to present any obstacle to getting and learning from the experience I missed out on as a youth. (The one woman who brought up the question of prior relationship experience reacted quite well when I told her the truth, and continued to show interest in me for long enough that I don’t think it was a major factor in why she eventually lost interest.)
Having said all that, I don’t think I’m a central example of an older male involuntary celibate. It’s hard to say for sure, though, because it’s so hard to talk openly about it. (I learned not long ago that an acquaintance of mine only a few years younger than me was also a virgin, and he also has always been, not super-handsome, but a normal looking, presentable guy. I was really surprised, actually, since he’s also much more socially adept and generally better functioning than me. Not sure what’s going on there.)
1. What’s all this “go to the gym” stuff? I did prison workouts (i.e. using bodyweight as resistance; household or “found” fixtures as equipment) at home for years.
2. Computer programming meetup groups are pretty much de facto male spaces. Likely to be some decent male role models there too as many programmers seem to have great careers and smoothly functioning family lives. If computer programming isn’t your thing, go for basically anything else remotely masculine that one might nerd out about and that attracts more grown-ups than children (so, not video games): history, heavy metal music, math, chess, serious RC car racing, etc.
I like bodyweight exercises as well but there’s a real trade-off between bodyweight and free weights.
Bodyweight is more like cardio and it takes a longer time to build up visible muscles. You’ll definitely get in excellent shape but you won’t get huge right away. Not to mention that adding on another plate is just hands-down a lot more satisfying than going from push-ups to pike push-ups.
Women care about percent body fat but less than you would imagine. Having developed arms, chest and back muscles plus a gut versus being toned and less muscular isn’t an obvious choice. It’s not just gay men who like bears; a lot of women share that preference.
Getting huge isn’t that important, either to (most) women or to (most) men’s confidence. Neither, as you said, is % body fat. Looking healthy and strong is much more important. A “gut” is not how I’d describe the abdomen of a man who is in good shape but doesn’t have a 6-pack.
Think soccer or tennis player vs. bodybuilder.
This is probably the best advice. The cards you were dealt are shit, so you have to play better.
This is basically just telling them they are fit only to be culled from the population. Pretty nasty. FWIW, there is a right to sex – it’s called “marital debt”.
This may alleviate some symptoms, but won’t cure the disease.
So long as those values are indissolubility of monogamous marriage and legal punishments for fornication and adultery (especially severe for the latter), which I would expect from Christendom, rather than the Islamic tradition of converting incels into jihadis. But overall, this is just whining at power to do something about it. Ineffective.
Well, how realistic are we talking here? As far as I’m aware, the sexbots haven’t managed to clamber up the near slope of the Uncanny Valley yet, and yet there are still presumably some takers. Assuming that the craft of … I want to say ‘sexbotology’ here, but maybe the industry has a less silly term … doesn’t stall out, eventually at the margin there are going to be an increasing number of guys for whom a shapely and somewhat responsive droid is a more attractive prospect than the best human partner they could get.
I’m using the proper definition of celibacy in this context – lacking in marriage. A futuristic sexbot may provide companionship and sex, but it can’t provide the full goods of marriage… unless we’re talking literal androids with functional babymakers.
I suspect very few incels are married.
It’s not unheard of. E.g. it can happen when a married couple can’t have sex for medical reasons. I recall seeing someone in this situation described as an “incel” years ago, when I first heard the term. Since then the connotation seems to have shifted to more specifically being about angry, bitter, mostly very young men who wax misogynistic on dedicated incel internet forums, and yeah, few if any of them are married.
Tangentially relevant: Female celibacy rate is apparently zero.
That’s not a good conclusion to draw from what was presented. Error bars are too large.
That seems a bit of a mess; various graphs and nobody defining what do they mean by celibacy: do they mean “never marrried (but has been/is currently sexually active)” or do they mean “not having sex now (but did at least once in past)” or “never, ever had sex”? Because if some of your respondents are answering “not married but I’m banging hot studs/chicks every weekend” and some are answering “never even had a kiss under the June moon”, you are going to get weird results where “there are no female celibates”. Also, it’s entirely possible some people think “celibate? you mean, like a nun? I’m not a nun, I’ll put down ‘no’ for that one” even if they otherwise fit whatever criteria you’re using.
I mean – I’m one of the non-existent female celibates! Female! Unmarried and never been married! Alive and typing this right now!
If I understand correctly, they mean people who answered “zero” when asked how many times they had sex in the past 12 months.
So they are saying no women at all answered “yes, I have not had sex at all in the past twelve months”?
That would be a very strange answer and I see why it’s puzzling. I don’t have an answer save that I’d like to know more about the population they were sampling to see what the disparity could be.
The number of women surveyed for each age group seems to be ~20. It doesn’t seem that puzzling that none of those would be celibate, if the actual rate is a couple of percent. The number of surveyed people is too low to accurately see incidence rates that small.
Also, there may be a correlation between celibacy and the willingness to take this survey.
@Deiseach
The rates were only zero for the sampled women who were aged 22-40 in 2014 and 2016. If I’m not mistaken, you are too old to be part of that group.
If I’m not mistaken, you are too old to be part of that group.
Aapje, a gentleman never comments on a lady’s age 😉 I suppose the fact that “not even living in the same country much less took the survey” might also have something to do with it!
@Deiseach
The twitter statistics guy tried to figure out whether incel theory is consistent with the data, in part by looking whether male celibacy is going up and female celibacy is going down. He specifically noted that the youngest generation reported no celibacy, although as I said, he also noted that the error bars are very large.
“clear and formal instruction in the process of successfully courting a mate.”
I wonder if courtship might be one of those anti-inductive things? (Not sure if I’m using that term right.) As in, if you had clear and formal instruction in it then the nature of it would change such that your instruction was useless. “Oh look, he’s doing the formal-instruction-method of trying to hit on me. What a loser!”
Yep.
If so, that seems like an important thing to include in the instructions:
“(Some|most) people don’t like being asked out the same way as everyone else; it’s still okay to ask them out, but they’ll probably say no if you don’t get creative.”
Yeah, that’s probably true. I guess such an education could establish useful guidelines (and perhaps rule out some things that are definitely mistakes) even if it couldn’t be too detailed.
Haha, after writing my “arms race” comment in reply to Atlas, I just had the same thought here. What if people start valuing “creativity in the asking-out method” too much and all of a sudden it’s no longer enough to drop out of a tree in front of them to dangle upside-down playing “I want to hold your hand” on the soprano saxophone while dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Girls like a guy who does something a little special, you know?
“(Some|most) people don’t like being asked out the same way as everyone else; it’s still okay to ask them out, but they’ll probably say no if you don’t get creative.”
Don’t we already have this in the form of “cheesy pick-up lines that don’t work”?
I think this works better in a gender-reversed sense. If women were told that certain waist-to-hip ratios seem to be more attractive, men would probably still find it attractive.
But if women are attracted to guys who are “just different” and “have enough confidence to go off-script,” then teaching guys a literal script might in fact backfire as suggested above. Unless there is some sort of societal compulsion that mitigates the element of choice and instead says, for both parties, “You will do X and upon completing it you will be married to Y.” The most literal version would be something like arranged marriages. The less literal version would be some version of socially enforced cultural expectations. Both have problems because they only work by mitigating pure-preference choices.
ISTM you’re basically talking about the difference between a kind of tournament (where the top 80% of men get wives and the bottom 20% don’t) and some kind of good-enough-is-enough situation (where improving the social skills and approach of men at the bottom can raise the fraction who get married).
Sure, but their standards would be higher. Right now most men don’t have very much upper body strength, and a moderately strong man is attractive. If all teenagers were hitting the gym then our moderately strong man would all-of-a-sudden seem a bit scrawny.
I accept that this scenario doesn’t fit my “anti-inductive” worry above, but I still think it doesn’t do any good for helping humans pair up.
As someone who has “gotten through it” I’d strongly lean towards 1, with a bit of a caveat.
I think “You can overcome this” is generally right, but that there are three main “levers” one can pull, and depending on an individuals circumstance, you might need to pull all three fairly hard.
1. Make yourself more attractive. This is the conventional “hit the gym, practice talking to people, etc.” advice. While it might not “solve” the problem – it certainly can’t hut.
2. Lower your standards. Every incel already thinks they’ve done this – but there’s always room to do more of it. And I mean actively lower your standards. Which is less “Sure, I’d be willing to sleep with an ugly person if they came on to me,” and more “Actively pursue ugly people.”
3. Have some patience. “It gets better.” It is factually true that generally speaking, older women are less concerned with looks and charisma and are more concerned with intelligence, personality, economics, etc. than younger ones. The things that make you “boring” at 20 might make you considered a catch at 30.
I think 2 is 100% backwards by the way.
If we need any societal changes, it’s less “teach these people that they aren’t so entitled” and more “teach these people that not having sex doesn’t make them some subhuman swine.”
Improving the culture to not be so rough on these guys is probably a very good idea.
If I remember right, you and I have tended to disagree on this kind of topic in the past, but I think what you said here is pretty true.
I agree, but I think there’s a problem with that. If we start from the premise that “being an incel doesn’t mean you are subhuman swine,” it follows that women regularly pass on otherwise decent men for somewhat shallow reasons such as physical attractiveness; race; wealth; social status; etc.
Which is of course true, but society is uncomfortable with the idea that women are not Wonderful. And for the most part women enjoy being the arbiters of male value and are resistant to anything which undermines such power.
As an example, consider the situation where a man tries to strike up a conversation with a woman in a public space. It’s well known that the reaction he gets will have much more to do with his physical attractiveness than his actual behavior. And yet if the man is unattractive, most women will fault him for some aspect of his behavior (e.g. “How dare he approach me while I was wearing headphones!”).
Women don’t like to think of themselves as being so driven by a man’s looks, money, and status. So publicly proclaiming that incels are striking out due to their shortcomings in these areas and not some moral failing is very threatening to women. And in our gynocentric world, it’s women’s concerns and needs and feelings which drive public discourse.
I honestly think a lot of social ill-will could be negated by admitting that women are as awful as men are.
The key term, of course, being as awful. Any time I hear some chauvinist go on a rant about how women are irrational and insane, unlike us practical, common-sense-following guys, I roll my eyes so hard that they almost fall out of my head. I mean, seriously? Men do stupid shit all the time. We make so many bad choices that violent crime statistics are full of us. No one has any excuses to deny the existence of testosterone-fueled idiocy!
But most people who aren’t chauvinists are perfectly willing to admit that. It’s a solid part of conventional wisdom. Ask the average person if men do a lot of stupid shit, and the answer will be, “uhm, duh!” But if you ask them if women do a lot of stupid shit, they’ll start squirming. That’s MISOGYNY, after all!
I really think that equality and understanding between the sexes is only going to come after we all accept that we’re all fundamentally gross, stupid and selfish. Just for one thing, if we just admitted that? Then we’d already have three things in common! :p
There’s a similar problem with hypocrisy — a lot of people think it;s a rather rare thing, which only their opponents display. As opposed to : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ufBXmcpxC9kLDeELz/hufflepuff-cynicism
fortaleza:
I guess it seems like a really obvious statement that both men and women often judge potential mates on surface-level stuff like appearance, wealth, dress, social status, etc., and that that stuff often doesn’t track too well with more fundamental things like how good a person you are or how smart you are or how reliable you are in a crisis or something.
That seems like something you could get from any Disney movie.
@albatross11
It is obvious, yet it is also something that you have to say a LOT more carefully and nicely when you say it about women than about men.
And it’s also one of these things where motte-and-bailey games are often played, where if you address it directly, people acknowledge it, but in larger arguments, they act like it doesn’t play a role.
I think that in the abstract, most people will agree.
But, for example, if an incel complains online that he is a virgin because he is physically unattractive and women all want Chad, frequently a few women or white knights will show up and insist that it’s actually his misogyny which is preventing him from getting a girlfriend. Or that if he would only take a shower, girls would not be repulsed by him.
Scott actually made a good point about this a few years back. We all know examples of handsome/charismatic men who mistreat women but still get lots of romantic/sexual attention. But try complaining about this publicly and watch women freak out.
I agree, and in fact the formulation offered by albatross — “women often judge potential mates on surface-level stuff like appearance, wealth, dress, social status, etc.,” — is a pretty mild way of putting it and doesn’t really capture the reality — that women are primarily driven by looks, money, and status in selecting potential mates.
Yes, I think this is a good way of putting it. Suppose an incel man complains that he is lacking in looks, money, and status and it seems to him unfair that men with these attributes get a lot of sexual/romantic attention even when those men regularly mistreat women. It’s unusual for women to agree with him even though everything he said is literally correct and consistent with the abstract premise. Instead, he can expect to be attacked.
It’s unusual for women to agree with him even though everything he said is literally correct and consistent with the abstract premise.
Because the correct conclusion is “yes, it’s unfair that men who mistreat women manage to attract some women”, not “yes, it’s unfair that you can’t get the kind of high-status women you find attractive even though you are ugly, poor and low-status”.
“I don’t beat women so why can’t I get a girlfriend?” is not by itself a sufficient reason, anymore than “I don’t go up to random strangers in the street and stab them, I should get a medal and public acclamation for my restraint!” Basic levels of human decency are assumed to be the lowest common denominator of behaviour in a civilised society.
Unless you say and really mean “I’d be quite happy to have an ugly, poor, weird girlfriend!”, then saying “women like handsome successful men, the shallow bitches!” is not an argument, it’s sour grapes.
fortaleza84:
How would you phrase it, then? And how would you test whether you were right, in a world where it’s clearly true that a lot of non-asshole, not all that handsome or wealthy or fit guys do, in fact, have girlfriends, get married, and have kids?
We had this discussion on the last thread, and (while I am a man) I similarly objected.
My objection was not to saying “women prefer handsome and charismatic men”, that’s obvious. Being handsome and charismatic is the easiest route to popularity, whether among men or women, whether in romantic or platonic or business relationships. I specifically had a problem with the implicit or explicit idea that handsome and charismatic but abusive men got women *because* they were abusive, instead of *despite*. Everything I’ve seen in life points towards the ideal man (for women) being Handsome, Charismatic, Has Money, Not Abusive, Shared Interests. Sometimes abusive men have enough of the other qualities to hide that they’re abusive, but I’d need a lot of evidence to believe that, holding the other traits constant, abusive men do better than non-abusive men. Any woman for whom that is true probably has psychological problems of her own.
There’s an empirical question here: Are some jerkish behaviors beneficial for men in trying to get a girl to go out with/sleep with/marry them?
I suspect the answer is yes, because it’s often the case that bad behavior pays off. (One reason we end up with social pressure against bad behaviors is probably to limit them when they’re paying off.)
How could we find data that would tell us who’s right, rather than just anecdotes?
This is a good example of the sort of attacks I am referring to. The implication that “You’re aiming for women who are out of your league” is a typical response to a an incel who complains about women’s focus on looks, money, and status.
This is another good example of the sort of attacks I am referring to.
Actually I think most incels would be ecstatic to have such a girlfriend. But women date up which means that there are inevitably men at the bottom who get nobody.
This is still in the realm of anecdote but one thing I said in the last thread was that being *somewhat* of an asshole probably correlates with “engages in risky behavior”, and “engages in risky behavior” correlates with “has casual sex”, since casual sex is risky. But I’d expect diminishing returns as the degree of jerkishness rises past “snarky, sarcastic, sometimes rude” to “mistreatment and abuse”.
@fortaleza
There seems to be a hypothesis here, I’ve seen it a few times, that the men at the top are monopolizing large numbers of women and leaving few for the men at the bottom. It doesn’t sound plausible to me that high status men have *so many* girlfriends so consistently that those at the bottom are actively deprived. Is there more than anecdotal evidence for this? (I don’t have more than anecdote for my claims so it’s fine if you don’t)
Edit: Like in your comment just below where you state that women “settle”, as if men don’t also have high standards and desire the most attractive women. Where are we ruling out “Both men and women desire attractiveness and charisma, and people eventually get someone with comparable status to themselves”?
Yeah, what’s kind of bothering me isn’t your assertions that attractive, high status, wealthy men do well, which I don’t think anyone disputes. It’s that it sounds like you’re saying that women collectively have standards for men that are both ridiculously high and ridiculously shallow, as if men don’t have similar attitudes. Apologies if I’m reading you wrong.
Just like I said — women are primarily driven by looks, money, and status in selecting mates.
I don’t know, I’m satisfied that I’m right based on simple observations of the world. I do recall that OKCupid has done some informal studies based on responses to personal ads. I’m pretty confident that if you look at those studies, you would find that men’s success in terms of responses from women is highly correlated with (1) their degree of physical attractiveness; (2) their income/wealth; and (3) the status of their occupation. What do you think?
Yes, it’s fortunate that a lot of women settle.
I saw a study once which computed ratios of marriageable men to marriageable women using different definitions of the word “marriageable.” As I recall, if one requires that a person be childless to be marriageable, the ratio is very unfavorable to men.
In general (as I recall) there are significantly more childless men than childless women. Which is only possible if some men are impregnating multiple women i.e. monopolizing women.
I believe there are also genetic studies which confirm that historically, the percentage of women which reproduced was higher — sometimes a lot higher — than the percentage of men.
All of this confirms the common sense observation that men are naturally polygynous and women are naturally hypergamous; that to the extent people are free to follow their natural instincts, men at the top will tend to have multiple women leaving men at the bottom with nothing.
@Deiseach
Imagine that you want a passport from the government. You go there and they tell you to climb Mount Vesuvius and get a permit from an office at the top of the mountain. Everyone else you ask says the same thing.
You climb the mountain, get the permit and go back to the government. They now tell you that the permit is actually not enough, you need something else, but they can’t tell you what.
You walk away dejected and ask the first person you meet (Bob):
You: Do you have a passport?
Bob: Yes.
You: What did you have to do to get it?
Bob: I just walked up and they gave it to me.
You: Did you climb Mount Vesuvius?
Bob: Mount Vesuviwhat?
You go back into the government:
You: why did you give a passport to Bob, who didn’t even climb Mount Vesuvius?
Gov: Ah yes, we broke the rules, because we have the right to.
You: Can you break the rules for me, whatever they are?
Gov: No, we won’t, you entitled prick.
You: I noticed that people with passports tend to be prettier than those who don’t get one. Are you discriminating by looks?
Gov: Go away, you entitled prick.
Imagine that you then (incorrectly) conclude that they are only discriminating by looks & that since you can’t change your looks, you have no chance at all to get a passport.
Do you agree that regardless of the validity of this, it is reasonable to get upset over the deception and the lack of empathy? Do you agree that there is a basic level of human decency that is missing in how you were treated in this scenario?
Note that the above scenario is not a legitimate reason to be abusive to others in turn, but people can both be severely harmed by others and do/wish harm to others. These are not exclusive.
IMO, we should seek to reduce suffering, also if that means making the lives better of nasty people, especially when the suffering likely made them more nasty (and we would not just be helping nasty people).
—
I personally think it would be far more helpful if we would recognize the unfairness inherent in reality & also give realistic advice how people can improve their odds & also tell them early on that this offers no guarantee.
This would surely damage fewer people and probably also cause fewer damaged people to strike out angrily in turn.
@mdet & fortaleza84
I would expect that such sharing would generally take the form of serial monogamy, where some men have long term relationships* with several women, while those women would tend to have fewer relationships with men; while other men would have zero long term relationships.
So the pattern I would expect, would be that you’d have more men with many long term relationships and more men with zero long term relationships; while women would be in between far more often (the basic pattern that you see in studies about gender a lot, with women ending up closer to the average and men having more outliers in both directions). I looked on Google scholar, but I can’t find such studies. It seems that the studies tend to count sexual partners, not relationships.
So no data :/
* Let’s define that as a 1 year relationship or longer
I can’t speak for all incel guys, but I know plenty of nerdy guys who date and are happy with women best described as horse-faced and obsessed with (insert hobby here). They aren’t particularly wealthy.
I don’t know how far down we consider “ugly, poor, and weird.” I saw such girls in high school getting boyfriends, with similar guys.
Ugly people are still with us, so clearly humans can settle for ugly people.
The purpose of marriage is to get people paired off at equal rates. To the extent that high status people are MORE likely to get married than low status people, that would imply that LOW status men are monopolizing women. Maybe we’re defining status differently. “I want to be like the guys with multiple baby-mommas” doesn’t strike me as sympathetic.
I also feel like this is directly contradicting the stereotype / tendency for women to be less interested in casual sex and more interested in long-term relationships than men.
I don’t dispute anything you said there, but it just feels incorrect at the moment.
Edit: Aapje’s comment makes a little more sense
Only to the extent that the difference in marriage rates is driven by monopolization. I can imagine cultural differences which make people with lower-class backgrounds more skeptical of marriage. Or even purely practical ones: there’s a link to an article somewhere around here which described how having a man present disqualifies the poorest households from a variety of welfare programs. Not much of a surprise, then, that they tend not to have men present.
Also, I think you’re using “status” differently than the people you’re talking to: to guys in the manosphere, an “alpha” or a “high-status male” could easily be a dude with eighteen-inch biceps, a motorcycle, and a criminal record. YMMV on how appealing that actually is, but that package probably isn’t going to come with high SES.
I guess the reason why I’m not really groking this framing is that my framing is “Men are more likely to prefer casual sex, women are more likely to prefer long-term relationships”. Since a man in a relationship is off the market, but a woman who has casual sex is still available, my inclination is to believe that women are the ones monopolizing men. (No offense women, since I don’t consider “How am I gonna get laid when all these women are married???” to be a sympathetic problem)
If the complaint is that *within* the casual sex market, a small number of men are getting most of the women, then I’ll believe that, but again, I’m not very sympathetic.
Roughly 80% of single parents are single mothers. If you arbitrarily rule out a disproportionately female segment of the population, you shouldn’t be surprised that the remaining group is disproportionately male.
Umm, your source is talking about single-parent families, it’s not the same thing.
Of course it’s far more common for children born out of wedlock to reside with the mother than the father. But that’s not the same thing as asking how many fathers there are out there of all these children living with single mothers.
That said, it is true that in general people who are parents are disproportionately female. But the distinction between “parent” and “childless” is anything but arbitrary in the context of this discussion.
Which is only possible if some men are impregnating multiple women i.e. monopolizing women.
I’d agree with this to a degree, but it depends very heavily how you define your terms.
Donald Trump has been married three times (never mind any alleged affairs). Is he monopolizing women? Are you really arguing “Damn that man, I would have had a real chance at Marla Maples otherwise?” While Trump has moved on to his third wife, Ms Maples appears to still be single (whether she’s in a current relationship or not I have no idea). Any suggestions as to why she isn’t on marriage #2 right now?
So “rich high-status guys get to have their pick of women” which is a revelation to exactly no-one since we knew this already.
Then there are the other men who have multiple relationships with women and are not childless. Are these the men our incels are competing with? Because a lot of them are not high-status in any way, unless ‘local petty criminal with a drug habit’ counts as high-status in your neck of the woods. This kind of “fewer men impregnating more women” relationship (if it can be called that) generally goes like this: Joe knocks up Sue, they may or may not move in together, they may or may not be together after the birth of the child. Eventually they split up; Joe may or may not have been involved with another woman who is now pregnant by him, or Sue may have kicked him out and later moves another boyfriend in, by whom she becomes pregnant. And new boyfriend is quite likely to have a kid or kids by former girlfriend(s) already, and the merry-go-round goes for another spin.
The women get pregnant because they think (this time) it’s true love, or they’re careless about contraception, or they already have one child out of wedlock so any stigma is no longer a fear to them. There’s a lot of short-term thinking going on here, and while to an outsider it’s very plain that Sue and Phil are going to split up just the same as Sue and Joe did, you cannot convince Sue of that (and Phil is just a slob going along to get along and not making any plans one way or the other about being a father).
If your incel example is wanting to compete with guys like that for women like that and relationships like that, well, good luck to them (they’re going to need it).
But being envious about “Joe has three kids by three different women, I can’t even get a woman to talk to me” – just like talking to Sue about how she should not be shacking up with guys like Joe and Phil in the first place, it’s plain that any advice about “no you really don’t want a disaster life like that” is not going to be listened to.
“there are significantly more childless men than childless women. Which is only possible if some men are impregnating multiple women”
It seems to me that the easier explanation is that a child mother can almost always be identified, but not the father. The data is perfectly consistent with many men who have one unacknowledged child (and no acknowledged ones).
@David Speyer
I’ll totally believe that a man who has a child by a woman and doesn’t acknowledge it is likely to have children by multiple women.
But I’m with Deiseach again on “…is this really the market you’re trying to be successful in?” Among the people who are trying to settle down into real relationships and eventually marriage, I’d think there are more women than men, and any decently attractive and personable guy should be able to find a girlfriend if he knows how to put himself out there.
Edit: I guess I’ll also say that, since more women are going to college than men, and a highly educated woman seems unlikely to date a man who isn’t similarly educated, men without a college degree might find themselves in a position where they’re stuck competing against “guy with three baby-mommas” for dates and can’t get into the ”professional women” market because they don’t meet those women’s standards. I don’t have demographic data on incels, and this doesn’t quite sound like the narrative of them that this thread has provided so far, but I do have sympathy for this group.
@Deiseach
My point is not that it is reasonable for lonely people to feel upset at not having the results of the top tier men, but rather that they can legitimately feel upset at having it worse than the average woman.
I think that the quality of life gap between being in a relationship for most of your life compared to having a long period singlehood after already having had a relationship, is generally far less than the gap between having a long period singlehood after already having had a relationship and never having had a (decent) relationship at all.
Or as Alfred Tennyson put it more succinctly:
@mdet
This is always going to be true, if you just define “decently attractive and personable” strictly enough. So it is a pretty meaningless statement.
It’s like saying that anyone who actually wants to win an Olympic medal, rather than just do sports leisurely, can win one, if they are just athletic enough.
This is true and yet loads of people who really try to win an Olympic medal, never do.
Just like I said — women are primarily driven by looks, money, and status in selecting mates.
And what are men driven by in selecting mates? I think looks come into it there, too.
What annoys me is that a lot of this arguing seems to presume that there have never been spinsters or women who were deemed unmarriageable, there have never been women who wanted to marry and have families but couldn’t find or attract a husband; that any woman can have any man and as many men as she wants but a guy who isn’t a 10 in looks, wealth and what passes for status in his particular social circle has no chance at all.
If men are primarily and only interested in “a warm body I can stick my dick in” and therefore will be sexually available even to less desirable women, how is that the fault of women? This reminds me all too much of the poems about “she’s a frigid bitch if she won’t sleep with me, at the same time I don’t want her to be willing to sleep with another guy because that would mean she’s a slut”.
The brutal truth is that there are some guys who will never get a woman because they have some quirk of personality or behaviour or mental/behavioural/emotional problems; guys who are just plain weird and who can come across as creepy. This may be horrible, but it’s true*. And I think we have to acknowledge it. For every guy who is helped by the advice to “smarten yourself up, find a topic of conversation that isn’t your niche interest even if you have to hold your nose about talking about dumb stuff normies like, and go out there and try, try, try again and don’t be put off by rejection”, there are men who can’t be helped.
Even prostitutes reject some potential clients because they’re too odd or strike them as possibly dangerous.
And yes, that’s dreadful. But you can’t make people like you, and even a government-mandated sex and companionship provider will only be doing it as a job, not as “if I wasn’t getting paid I’d still spend time with you”.
So the real problem is trying to disentangle the absolute no-hoper guys from the guys whose main problem is that they are too damn immature and need to get older and wise up and then they’ll realise that adjusting their standards and not being self-involved in their misery will get them further. Also, not believing every damn thing they read/hear about guys boasting they lost their virginity at twelve, they have a sixteen inch cock, they’re so good in bed prostitutes pay them and they can seduce even a nun with just a snap of their fingers. Men lie about their sexual conquests! Especially when trying to score status points about being a real manly guy! Exercise some discrimination in evaluating “is this story full of shit”!
What can be done about/for the guys who will never have a chance? I don’t know. I do know that saying “it’s not fair women don’t like weirdoes” is as unreasonable as saying “it’s not fair men don’t like women who are only 3s not 10s”. Yeah, it may not be fair, but life is not fair. You can’t make that hot popular socially desirable person want to be with you and fall in real love with you just because your heart hurts.
And no, “Curtis is a cad who mistreats women but because he’s good looking and rich and well-connected he can still get women” does not translate to “therefore what women really want is a guy who is mean to them because that signals Alpha Maleness, all that stuff about niceness and being a good provider and a sense of humour is only a smokescreen so they can hook a victim once the Alphas have dumped them”.
Some guys getting women despite being a boor does not entitle you to say “my problem is that I’m too nice!” If the secret to sexual success is “be deceitful and awful”, then you shouldn’t object to women “cucking” you, they’re just pursuing a winning strategy!
*I’m a female version of this; I’ve been very lucky in whatever genetic quirk made me asexual/aromantic because even from a very early age I knew it would be a disaster if I tried to reproduce and that I could never have a relationship with another person the way society tries to push everyone into couples. So I’m not picking on the creepy guys, but saying as a fellow creep – you have to admit and accept it.
You’re right, but my point was that if you can’t get a date here, it’s not because there aren’t enough women / some men have harems. The “aspiring towards marriage” pool is by definition the “no harems allowed” pool.
Well, in some respects. Young women have more options than young men. You can feel upset about it, sure. Do whatever the hell you want. There are other arenas where young men have more advantages over young women, and somewhat older men have advantages over somewhat older women.
The same market forces that give younger women such a huge premium create more opportunities for somewhat older men to enjoy themselves. Like I said above, in my early 30s, I have nice clothing, money, a decent body, a car, and I can date younger girls. I have a friend or two that suffered throughout college but are raking in girls now, because the market has shifted and they have turned themselves into premium dating options.
Of course, again, the social response to this is “where have all the good men gone” and “Peter Pans” and other bologna.
@fortaleza84:
You were talking about marriageability. I assumed that “childless” in that context meant “is not responsible for a child” — while I don’t see that as a necessary prerequisite for marriage, I am aware that some people disagree. If “childless” instead means “has never procreated”, then I’m even more confused about why childlessness is at all relevant to marriageability.
This discussion is disappointing because people don’t seem to understand how margins work.
My hometown, New York City, is considered one of the best places in the country for men to date because we have a 53:47 ratio of women to men. That’s just five percentage points off from the national average but it’s enough to transform the dating scene.
If a small number of sexually successful sociopaths, whatever we want to call them, can impregnate a few women each they could have an outsized effect on the dating market. Even men who they aren’t directly competing with would feel the pressure of a shrunken dating pool.
Absolutely.
Not me (I am married) but Donald Trump’s behavior is not in any way unique. It’s pretty common for men who are elite in terms of desirability to engage in this type of polygamy (often referred to as “serial monogamy”).
If men in the top 10-20% of romantic market value engage in this sort of behavior, you don’t need to be a mathematician to see that men at the bottom will be screwed.
I don’t know about her in particular, but for obvious reasons, a person’s desirability for marriage depends a good deal on their fertility. Further, if a woman already has children, she is far less desirable as a marriage partner.
Of course women have a much shorter fertility window than men, so a man who marries; has children; leaves his wife for a younger women; has more children; etc., is — in effect — monopolizing women even if he is married to only one woman at a time.
I suppose one could say that a 25-year-old incel male should be happy to date and marry an alpha widow in her 50s or 60s but I think in practice, it doesn’t work out like that. From my observation, such a woman would rather be alone than do what she perceives as dating down.
Sure, but so what? Society has no problem admitting that men are driven primarily by looks (including youth) in selecting potential mates. We don’t insist that Men are Wonderful. In short, this is just more feminist deflection.
Would you mind providing a few quotes of this? Because I didn’t notice anything like that in the comments. Obviously there have been times and places where there were big shortages of men.
Again, can you provide a quote? This seems like a strawman to me.
This is just more feminist deflection and victim-blaming. The vast majority of incels would not be incels if they were physically attractive or if they lived in a time when there was a surplus of women.
Moreover, even if every last “creepy” man could be turned into Rico Suave, it still wouldn’t change the basic mathematics of the situation which necessarily result in men at the bottom getting left out.
Perhaps it’s not. The people who authored the study took various factors into (and out of) account. For example, they looked at “being employed” as a factor in whether a man is marriageable. In fact, the traditional definition of a marriageable man (according to the study) was that he was single, non-incarcerated, and employed.
But anyway, I was using the study as evidence of elite men monopolizing women. If more men than women are childless, it supports my position.
Are you suggesting that 10-20% of men will have three or more wives over the course of their life, all of whom will be in their 20s-30s at marriage? That’s… a much larger percentage than I’d estimate off the top of my head. I’m only in my mid-twenties, but neither me nor anyone I know have ever had the problem of wanting to date someone but having them get married to someone twice our age.
Maybe Nabil is right, but I stand by my point that just moving from the “trying to get laid” market to the “steady relationship” market is already enough to give you a women to men ratio higher than 53:47, as well as providing much stronger norms against harems and slightly decreasing the emphasis on physical attractiveness (although that obviously still plays a large role)
It’s certainly an alternative explanation, but let me ask you this:
1. Do you agree that it’s more common for men to divorce, remarry, and have more children than it is for women?
2. Do you agree that DNA analysis suggests that in the past, far more women than men successfully reproduced?
3. Do you agree that from the perspective of evolutionary biology, it’s far more effective for a high-status man to reproduce with multiple women than it is for a high-status woman to reproduce with multiple men?
10-20% is probably a serious overestimate. Even in cultures where actual polygyny is legal and religiously sanctioned, we usually only see it in small percentages of the male population — less than 5%, often much less.
But if 2% of the men have four wives each, that’s empirically enough to change the marriage market significantly. Our customs are less binary, less codified, and therefore harder to study, but it’s not totally unreasonable that something similar might be going on.
No, if I had to guess I would say it’s more like 5-10% of men having 2 or more wives, with the second wife being considerably younger. Even that is enough to make life pretty bad for young men at the bottom who want a mate in their age range.
Is a guy who has 6 “girlfriends” in 3 months in the steady relationship market or the getting laid market? How about those girls?
Because they can all say they are in the steady relationship market. And we all know they are lying.
We may have completely different conceptions of what problem we’re talking about.
I’m thinking of guys in their early to mid 20s who are virgins and never had a real girlfriend. For the guys I’m thinking of, saying “Work on your confidence & social skills, find some club or social group where you can put yourself out there, and maybe get in shape and build some muscle” is probably enough to get them a date. Maybe they need to be told “Look in the ‘steady relationship’ market, not the ‘casual sex’ market, there will be less competition”. The problem is definitely not that there’s some huge shortage of women, they KNOW single ladies, they’re just not successful / too shy to try.
It sounds like y’all are talking about some incredibly marginal group out there who don’t know any single women at all / would be incapable of dating any under any circumstances. That’s not a problem I’ve ever seen, and maybe you have, but I’ve been reading this whole thread with not-that group in mind.
Edit: I cannot conceive of a situation like albatross describes below, where a 50 year old man gets remarried to his 25 year old assistant, being so common that 25 year old guys who are somewhat dateable, if not exactly top desirability, simply cannot find enough single women. I also don’t think single motherhood is quite so rampant that a high number of the single women they know already have kids. Maybe there are some neighborhoods where a sizeable number of women are married and/or have kids by 25, but not where I’m from
An obvious complication here is that women also remarry after a divorce pretty often. I know a fair number of apparently happy couples where both the man and woman are remarried. This doesn’t play so well with the Catholic Church’s teachings, but it does decrease some of the effect that high-end serial monogamy has, assuming that the ex-wife of the top-5%-er gets remarried.
Where that’s probably *not* the case is when the top 5%er divorces his wife at 50 and marries his 25-year-old assistant. His upper-middle-class 50 year old wife is quite likely to stay single, and the 25-year-old woman he has married won’t be marrying a 25-year-old man if they stay together.
Your advice is fine, it’s the market analysis that’s off. Your advice is true REGARDLESS of market conditions. Even if EVERY guy was Brad Pitt looking, you could say the same exact thing: try to be more attractive, and don’t expect girls to just sleep with you because you aren’t hot enough to justify that (because EVERY guy looks like Brad Pitt, YOU aren’t that special).
So you can’t use the advice as evidence of market conditions, even if it works, because it would work, again, regardless of market conditions.
First of all, advice like “Work on your confidence and social skills” isn’t actually actionable. Second, even if this advice could work for some, it can’t work for all — that 115 to 100 ratio again. Third, it’s quite possible they don’t know any single women; they may not be in social situations where single women are present. And I don’t know if this is still true, but when I was that age, women tended to go from one relationship to another without a visible gap between them.
Ok, so my understanding of what Fortaleza and Nabil are arguing is that the reason for the uptick in young men who are virgins is that so many women are married and/or have kids by 25 that there are hardly any single women left for any guy who isn’t at least middling in attractiveness, charisma, and/or wealth.
Either I live in a tightly sealed bubble, or this is objectively false. I’m pretty sure that there’s an order of magnitude more 24-year-old virgins in the “spends more time playing video games than talking to girls” category than the “literally cannot find single ladies because they’re all off with Chad (or his 50 year old father)” category.
Aaaand I’m just now seeing the “115 single men : 100 single women”. But googling for it, I can’t find a source. Literally everything on google is claiming the opposite problem — that single women are struggling to find single men. This site looked at the US Census data for unmarried people over age 21 and found that the national average was 85 men : 100 women, and the metro area with the highest men-to-women skew was Bakersfield, CA with 102 men : 100 women. I acknowledge that this is single-as-in-unmarried rather than single-single.
Source for the 115 : 100 men to women ratio?
Edit: Ok, This clarifies that when you break it down by age, there are more single men than women under age 35, but many more women than men over 35. This sort of supports the “50 year old man remarries to 22 year old woman” hypothesis, but I’m still having a hard time believing that there are *so many* men who are polygamous / serially monogamous as to deprive young men of dating opportunities, even after accounting for the number of guys who could reasonably get girls but are playing Fortnite instead, or are incarcerated
My comment disappeared, so TLDR repost:
I didn’t know/believe there were 1.15 : 1 single men to women until I found this. It’s a little difficult to interpret because it doesn’t give clean ratios like the above, but it basically says there are more unmarried men than women in each age bracket under age 35, and more unmarried women the older you get. The best rebuttal I can come up with at the moment is that, since women tend to marry men slightly older than themselves, we don’t need to have a bunch of 50 year old men remarrying 25 year old women to get this effect, just a 30 year old man marrying a 29 year old woman, and a 35 year old man with a 34 year old woman. That would give an extra single man in the 18-29 age bracket, but an extra single woman in the 35-49 age bracket. Men’s higher mortality rate explains the jump in older single women.
If the large ratio of single men to single women is real, and not an artifact of looking at age by bucket + women marrying men who are a few years older than themselves, then fortaleza & Nabil’s arguments make much more sense, and no amount of “Get off Fortnite and go join some club where you can socialize in person” is going to fix the problem.
I think this is a key point. At a societal level, the problem of inceldom is NOT because such men are “creepy” or out-of-shape or are too picky. At an individual level, all these things are important, but at a societal level there is a shortage of women combined with the female hypergamy instinct which will result in an inceldom problem regardless of the creepiness/fitnes/pickiness of men.
I think from now on every time I see something like this I will try to speak up because I think this is counterproductive, not true, and casts an unfair light on women.
It is in fact the other way around. How a man approaches a woman has way more impact than his physical appearances. It is in fact the most important factor wrt to results.
Some disclaimers. I am not in a relationship and has been single for a long time, but that has to do a lot more with my own hang ups over sexual intimacy than anything else.
For the past two years I have been working on myself. Approaching people on the streets, which is about as public as it can get, both men and women. In this time I can count on one hand the number of times my approaches had been rejected, which is twice.
(I don’t have successful dates after that, but the topic in question is just making an approach and having a conversation after)
It is literally all in how we approach. Approaching from the front, a slight smile, and direct eye contact. A funny opner if I can manage it, but a straight open ended question works like a charm just as well.
I really want to put to rest about the male physical attractiveness thing. It’s important to women, but not does not have nearly the same level of impact as confidence, a sense of humour, having our shit together, and the ability to listen and handle rejections.
The importance of physical appearances go about as far as not looking like a creep. (Which generally comes down to body language)
I have known short guys that have hot girlfriends, and height is just about the one thing that no one can do anything about. An overweight person still has some realistic way of loosing weight, but what treatment is there for being short that doesn’t involve really drastic surgery?
My comment seems to have been eaten a few times, so I’m going to try again with no hyperlinks.
All of my arguments were made under the assumption of an essentially 1:1 male female ratio (I’d heard that there are very slightly more men at birth, but that it evens out pretty quickly with men’s higher mortality rate). I cannot find a citation for the 115 single men : women. Everything I know points to the opposite: Googling for single men vs women ratio, nearly all the results are about single women who are struggling to find men. Men have higher mortality rates and much higher incarceration rates, both of which would take them out the dating pool. The majority of the single and virgin men I know are entirely dateable guys who just spend more time playing video games than face-to-face socializing, and most of the rest are guys who could be dateable if they got a little more confidence to put themselves out there, or had better social skills, or maybe got in better shape as well. The idea that there are so many cheating & polygamous men, or so many women dating men twice their age as to make it literally impossible for large numbers of single guys to pair up just sounds outlandish, especially since the kind of men who get around like that are generally with women who aren’t so faithful themselves either.
Now I did find the 2010 Census data, suggesting that for people under 20, there are 105 total men : 100 women, and that this doesn’t reach 1:1 until age 30. I’m not saying it’s impossible that other factors couldn’t skew this further, but I just… still feel skeptical. I definitely cannot conceive of polygamous, etc. men playing so large a role that they outweigh video games & the internet for the reason why so many men are single compared to a generation ago. Yall have definitely swayed me from “inconceivable” to “hesitant” though.
Edit: I guess the Pew Social Trends 2014 for “Record Share of Americans Have Never Married” lays it out explicitly enough, with somehow a 118 single men : 100 women at age 25. I concede.
5-10% of men having 2 or more wives, with the second wife being considerably younger. Even that is enough to make life pretty bad for young men at the bottom who want a mate in their age range.
But you are still not comparing like with like there; if there’s a small percentage of older (better off, higher status) men trading in their first wife for a younger version, that does not mean that if Thomas Bigbucks stayed married to his first wife, Joe Loner would have been able to date Mellie Newwife instead.
Rich older guys are not, in the main, marrying plain dumpy average young second wives. If Joe is “at the bottom”, Mellie as Potential Second Mrs Bigbucks is probably still out of his league, even if she can’t snare Thomas. Unless you’re arguing that Joe is actually young, handsome, virile, of the same general social background as Thomas and only hampered by working as his assistant instead of being the owner and principal shareholder of Bigbucks Multinational – so we’ve got yer basic rom-com where the choice is between love or money, but that’s not real life.
If Joe from the bottom really is looking for a date, he will not be looking for one in the same circles as Thomas from the 5% is looking when shopping for new arm-candy (for long-term relationship/marriage purposes; looking for an attractive fling is a different matter and can mean ‘shop girl or porn actress’).
EDIT: Let’s take the forthcoming Royal Wedding (God save us all). It’s pretty clear Meghan Markle is marrying way above her station. But suppose Queen Elizabeth had put her foot down and demanded that no, her grandson would only marry at the very least the granddaughter of a duke – do you really think Joe from the bottom would have had a chance with her? Her first husband was this guy, so even if we shake our fists at all those dirty rotten rich older men marrying pretty young second wives, there’s no real reason to think that forcing them to remain married to their first wife or remain single would ease up the supply for less desirable men down the chain – unless there’s some kind of supposed knock-on effect where better status older guy can’t marry slightly lower status younger woman who then has to settle for same as her status younger man who won’t then marry/live with slightly lower status than him woman and so on down until we get the natural balancing of Wayne and Waynetta paired off?
That’s funny, because I think it’s useful to know; correct; and casts an unflattering (but accurate) light on women.
Let me ask you this: Do you agree that women sometimes complain about men approaching them under certain circumstances, for example while they are wearing headphones; or while they are on the elevator; or while they are working out at the gym?
And if your answer is “yes,” do you think those same women would complain if a very handsome man approached them under similar circumstances, e.g. while they were working out at the gym?
Sure, but that’s not how markets work. If Mellie doesn’t marry Thomas, chances are she will end up with someone slightly less desirable to her than Thomas was. “Jim Mediumbucks” And since Jim Mediumbucks is with Mellie, he’s not going to be with someone he would have found slightly less desirable — call her “Plain Jane.” So now Plain Jain is free to be with Joe Loner.
Actually, there are probably a lot more than 2 or 3 intermediate steps. But the point is that the actions of people in one part of a market can and do indirectly affect people in other parts of the market.
You can think of it like a game of musical chairs. If a person sits down and takes up 2 chairs, it means that an extra person is going to be left standing somewhere else, even if it’s not the person who would have sat in those particular chairs.
If it’s common for a man who is 10/10 in terms of desirability to marry 2 or 3 women, those women cannot all be 10/10s — the mathematics won’t allow it. Some of them will have to be 9/10s.
So where does that leave men who are 9/10? Chances are they will be with 2 or 3 girls who are 8/10. And so on down the line. Women date up and men date down.
Anyway, this is all very simple mathematics that any literate person can and should be able to understand. The problem is the implication — that male incels are for the most part not subhuman swine. Which in turn implies that Women are not the Wonderful creatures that they (and society) like to think that they are.
By the way, I’m still waiting for you to provide examples of your earlier claims regarding views of spinsterhood and the sexual marketplace.
I think that has more to do with female narcissism and societal gynocentrism than reality. Generally speaking, those types of articles are by women in their late 30s and 40s who refuse to accept that women suffer a dramatic decline in sexual marketplace value around age 35. Chad has lost interest in them and other men are sexually invisible to them.
I’m pretty confident that even in NYC which has one of the best dating markets for men in the entire United States, there are more single men under 30 than single women. And that if you add the requirement of childlessness, the ratio becomes even more skewed.
In terms of shallowness, there’s no question that men are at least as shallow as women. The difference is that society does not have a Men are Wonderful bias. Men regularly chastise each other and themselves for “thinking with their d*ck.” By contrast, when you point out that women are shallow, women (and White Knights) tend to freak out about it, deflect, attack you, and generally try to shame you for questioning the Women are Wonderful Party Line. Generally, you can get away with it only if you state it in abstract terms and are careful to emphasize that men too are shallow.
In terms of standards, it’s true that “ridiculously high standards” is more of a female problem than a male problem, presumably due to the female hypergamy instinct. In fact, I saw a couple fascinating studies in which women consistently rated 80-90% of men as below average in looks.
I actually know a couple like this in my neighborhood. The husband and wife are successful doctors with children. At age 55, the husband met a 28-year-old girl, left his wife for her, and had more children. The wife has tried to date, but the men she meets are pretty unappealing to her.
My own wife is mystified that a woman who is a physically fit, successful professional in her 50s is having such trouble meeting a man. She has trouble accepting that career success + middle age has a vastly different impact on a woman’s romantic market value compared to a man’s.
Anyway, situations like this are not uncommon; men have a strong instinct to engage in polgynous behavior if they can get away with it (and even if they can’t). Probably a lot more men would do it if the financial and social consequences were not so severe. And one of the obvious net effects of this type of behavior is to make life difficult for men at the bottom in terms of sexual marketplace value.
@Deisach:
It doesn’t matter that the rich old divorcees are marrying younger women that the low-status younger men wouldn’t have a chance with. Every young hot wife they take out of the dating pool results in a young high-status man who formerly had a chance with her, dating someone else instead. And the not-quite-as-high-status guy who would have been dating his new pick then picks someone else, and so on down the line, until you get one more guy who pairs with no one.
Obviously it’s not exactly linear like that, but the pigeonhole principle holds: Since there’s already a shortage of women in the younger age brackets, then for every woman who marries up in age bracket, there’s a guy in the younger age bracket who will not be able to pair up with a woman in his age bracket.
@Nybbler
Thank you for putting it succinctly. What’s fascinating is that anyone would have difficulty understanding such a basic, common-sense concept.
And I think it comes back to my original point. If we accept that in a general sense, incels are the victims of circumstance, the ugly conclusion is that there are innocent people who are suffering as a result of women’s shallow nature.
People like to believe that the world is just; they also like to believe that Women are Wonderful. When evidence and arguments emerge that challenge these assumptions, it creates cognitive dissonance and many people suddenly have difficulty understanding the arguments, no matter how simple and logical they are.
(To be sure, men are shallow as well, which also causes a lot of suffering. For example the man who becomes successful and dumps his loyal first wife in favor of some young hottie. The difference is that society can accept this negative aspect of the male personality and deal with it. By contrast, people tend to freak out when you suggest negative things about women.)
that there are innocent people who are suffering as a result of women’s shallow nature
Let’s see, there are a couple people on here maintaining that part of the problem of “not enough women to go round” is because some men are getting more than their fair share. Men who are between the ages of twenty and sixty are all trying to get twenty year old women, but it’s women who are shallow? Tell you what, how about you try convincing that “young high status guy” who can’t get the hot high-status girl he would otherwise have got because she’s the second wife of an older high-status guy to try courting the discarded wife? She may be forty but she’s available! What, you think that’s too old and not pretty enough? How shallow!
If men are not shallow for having a limited notion of what is attractive in a potential mate, I don’t think you can say a woman is shallow for choosing between two potential husbands on the grounds of “oh both high status guys, one older and one younger, how do I choose – okay, older guy is more financially secure and established and can help me in my career”. If that’s shallow, so is “I should marry younger guy because he likes young blondes and luckily I just fit age-wise inside the window of nineteen to twenty-three that he will tolerate!”
This is that rom-com notion I mentioned of “girl has two suitors, both high-status guys but one is younger and poorer; should she choose love or money; yeah we all say love because society has built up romantic love as the greatest good”.
Okay, guys, then let’s put it in these terms: no no, you shouldn’t apply for that promotion/better job! You’re taking it away from someone who needs and wants it! Stick to your own level, or else we’ll have a lopsided chain reaction where at the very bottom Daryl can’t get a job flipping burgers because somebody who didn’t get that promotion they expected had to take it because you selfishly jumped over their head with your ‘better qualifications and experience’ than their ‘time-serving and waiting my turn’!
Or maybe you could try “hey thirty-five year old guy, instead of trying to hook that twenty year old, here’s a thirty-five year old woman just divorced by her husband who traded her in for a twenty year old”. Men sticking to women their own age, wow what a revolutionary concept (because since reproduction is no longer the point of marriage – as same-sex marriage has told us – then ‘but men want young fertile women so they can have kids’ is an outmoded notion we should drop).
@Deiseach
Fortaleza84 explicitly recognized that men are shallow too. His complaint is not that only women are shallow, but that it is not within the Overton Window to point it out and to tell women to cut it out, while making similar statements about men is within the Overton Window.
This statement – and Deiseach’s general attitude — is a good example of the type of nutty gynocentrism I am complaining about. Men and women are both shallow, but if you point out that women are shallow, the feminist freakout ensues. And in fact any evidence or argument which puts women in a negative light is immediately attacked.
Thanks, that’s correct. But for people like Deiseach, it’s almost literally unthinkable that women are not Wonderful.
The two cases are not analogous. There is a fixed supply of women available for some man to marry. There is not a fixed supply of good jobs. If lots of men develop the abilities that get them good jobs—improved education, a work ethic, …—the number of good jobs increases.
Which suggests that competition for mates may be the reason men are as concerned as they are with relative income rather than absolute income.
That may be so, but I think there is a more fundamental flaw in Deiseach’s thinking (or lack thereof) which is that there is a difference between normative and prescriptive arguments. It’s one thing to observe the female hypergamy instinct (and the male polygyny instinct) and their consequences. It’s something else entirely to exhort people to behave in a certain way.
Should people exhort successful/attractive men not to “trade in” their aging wives for someone younger? It’s an important question, but whatever the answer is, we need to face the reality that (1) men have this instinct; and (2) there are certain negative consequences from men acting on this instinct, in order to address the problem. And in fact there are rather severe social and financial consequences for a man who pulls this kind of stunt.
The key point here is that just like men, women have certain instincts which can be destructive if acted upon. But unlike with men, society is reluctant to acknowledge and confront the darker side of female nature. No, people (especially women) insist that Women are Wonderful, and spin and deflect and dance around and attack anyone who observes this reality.
Ironically, it would be difficult to come up with a better example of these sorts of antics than Deiseach’s postings in this thread.
@fortaleza84
Please cut out the jabs at Deiseach.
(A) person’s desirability for marriage depends a good deal on their fertility. Further, if a woman already has children, she is far less desirable as a marriage partner.
Which if we’re talking about basic evolutionary drives should not be off-putting; a woman with children has demonstrated that she is fertile, can carry a pregnancy to term, and produce healthy children that will survive infancy.
But yeah, we’ve had this conversation about men not wanting to raise another man’s child. Tough on divorced women and widows, I guess. But again, if the changing circumstances mean that your only available choices for women your own age are women with kids, then you had better settle for one of them. Otherwise you’re competing with all the other men for one of the twenty year old virgins and since there are going to be way more of you than of them, your chances are less.
Half a loaf is better than no bread.
@Deiseach
Widows don’t rank all that low. The ranking is something like (in descending order of appeal):
Never married, childless
Widow, childless
Widow, with children
Divorced, childless
Divorced, with children
Never married, with children
(This is just two dimensions, obviously.)
This is wrong, but you are ignoring a more important question.
Please quote me where I stated or implied (or assumed) that:
(1) there have never been spinsters or women who were deemed unmarriageable,
(2) there have never been women who wanted to marry and have families but couldn’t find or attract a husband; and
(3) that any woman can have any man and as many men as she wants but a guy who isn’t a 10 in looks, wealth and what passes for status in his particular social circle has no chance at all.
Failing that, please admit that I stated or implied no such thing and apologize for misrepresenting my position.
This is the last time I will ask.
Posted before catching up on the comments.
Liquidpotato, I think you’re pointing at something where the incel statistics look fishy.
In a culture which permits informal relationships (including sex) between men and women (that is, not those parts of China and India where it’s pretty much marriage or nothing), “women” is isn’t the right unit. Let’s talk about women-weeks, or even women-hours.
Even if you assume that women only want long term relationships with higher value men, a man who never has sex with a woman, or has never been kissed is not attracting women who want a short fling. women who want a little fun while their main partner is away, or are on the rebound, or who just want something different for a while, or revenge sex.
Never is really different from “only adds up to one month per year”.
It’s possible that incels started out not knowing how to make an approach. I don’t think they necessarily start out as awful people. Rodgers did, but there’s no reason to think he’s typical.
****
Women Going Their Own Way are part of the situation, but I don’t know how large a part. There are definitely women on metafilter who are sick of men, and a lot of it seems to be housework/emotional labor issues. I on’t know whether WGTOW is in common use, I’ve seen them talk about Crone Island.
fortaleza84:
“And if your answer is “yes,” do you think those same women would complain if a very handsome man approached them under similar circumstances, e.g. while they were working out at the gym?”
This is a hypothetical. I can imagine it being true, but I’m uncertain how common it is. And shouldn’t it be about men who are better-looking than what the woman usually attracts?
As a general point, being a woman can be astonishingly much like dealing with telemarketers. Frequently in person. Some of whom are scary.
@Nancy Lebovitz
I would imagine that a woman’s openness to being approached fluctuates, based on her mood. It seems likely that even in a bad mood, she would be unlikely to be rude to Brad Pitt.
—
I would argue that the world would be a better place if women approached more often and men less, where more of the former would automatically result in the latter.
Fortaleza says that society has a bias towards thinking Men Are Shallow, and Women Are Wonderful. Sure, ok, but in my book, the way to correct a bias like this isn’t to say “Actually, WOMEN are the shallow ones”, as you appear to be doing (ok, you criticize men in tiny parentheticals). The proper response is “People are complex, nuanced, and multifaceted, constantly struggling to balance a number of virtues and flaws”.
I’m sure you’re aware of how a lot of people find that social justice arguments sound like they’re 95% personal grievance, 5% content, and that this only pushes people to automatically disagree with them, if only for superweapon reasons. You’re doing this exact thing, and then when Deiseach, myself, or others ask you to fix your tone, just dismissing it with “This just proves my claims about
white privilegeWomen Are Wonderful, you can’t ever criticizewhite menwomen without people coming out the woodwork to attack you”. I’d probably have been much more receptive to your arguments if you weren’t basically saying things like “[Category that contains literally billions of human beings] are only defined by a few traits, they all only really care about a handful of things.”By the way, I’m still waiting for you to provide examples of your earlier claims regarding views of spinsterhood and the sexual marketplace.
fortaleza84, are you asking me to prove that there have been unmarried women in the past? I’d like to be entirely sure I’m understanding you, because otherwise you seem to be expecting me to go “Snap, your tenacious grasp of logic and bulldog determination has caught me out, yes I admit it – I lied! Never ever in the entire history of the human race since we became what could be defined as human has a woman ever been unmarried or considered sexually undesirable, any woman who remained single did so because she had too many choices and didn’t want to stop banging all the hot young studs throwing themselves at her fifty year old feet, whereas those poor, exploited young men were left pining and lonely to die as unkissed virgins while the cruel matriarchs who ruled the tribe laughed and mocked them”.
Lol, no. Here’s what you said before:
I’m simply asking you to provide quotes demonstrating that posters are actually making these presumptions and it’s not simply a bunch of straw man you invented.
I’m waiting.
By the way, if any lurkers are reading this exchange, I don’t seriously expect Deseiach to back up what she is saying.
The key point here is she (honestly) is annoyed but is unable to articulate the source of her annoyance. So she must rationalize her annoyance by inventing claims that nobody actually made.
As someone who regularly discusses male/female relationship issues online, it’s pretty obvious what’s going on here. Almost all women — and a lot of men as well — have a a “Woman are Wonderful” bias. They react emotionally to any evidence or argument which puts women in a negative light.
And that’s exactly the problem. Any evidence or argument that incels are for the most part decent guys who are victims of circumstances reflects negatively on women as a group and is therefore rejected. In a gynocentric society such as ours, it’s just really difficult to address predominantly male problems.
I’m simply asking you to provide quotes demonstrating that posters are actually making these presumptions and it’s not simply a bunch of straw man you invented
How about every damn post you make about “innocent men suffering because women insist on being hypergamous”? After wading through as much of Elliot Rodger’s manifesto as I could stand, your comments sound very much in that vein.
incels are for the most part decent guys who are victims of circumstances
Define these circumstances. Some of these circumstances are “they need some practical advice on how to present themselves” which I think nobody is trying to deny as an attack on women to say that. Some of these circumstances are “guys with mental problems who need a lot more help and support before even trying to get a girlfriend because they can’t even manage their own lives”, and if that’s gynocentric then welcome to how it used to be for women in a man’s world.
And some of the circumstances, to be blunt, are “you’re ugly and poor and boring and no, you won’t get the level of woman you want so you have to either settle or go without” and yes, some women have the same problem.
What is your argument? Women should forget romantic notions and settle for “good enough, at least he doesn’t beat me”? Okay, sure! And men should also settle for “good enough, at least she’s not sleeping with the milkman”. But if you have an exaggerated notion of “if I only get the popular girl then my life will be like the movies where I get unconditional love and esteem and suddenly I’ll be so happy and fulfilled” – sorry, life is not like that and a lot – indeed, most – married or partnered people are going along with “yeah good enough, it’s okay, we’re doing fine, it’s not constant ecstasy but it’s normal”.
How about you actually quote me instead of just making stuff up?
Just quote me where I stated or implied that
(1) there have never been spinsters or women who were deemed unmarriageable,
(2) there have never been women who wanted to marry and have families but couldn’t find or attract a husband; and
(3) that any woman can have any man and as many men as she wants but a guy who isn’t a 10 in looks, wealth and what passes for status in his particular social circle has no chance at all.
Failing that, please admit that I stated or implied no such thing and apologize for misrepresenting my position.
I would like to add a thought to this discussion partly in response to multiple sub-threads:
There has been a lot of talk about how more “traditional” cultures (both ours in the past, and others in the present) handle this problem better, but I rarely see attempts to generalize about what’s going on in those cultures vs what’s going on with ours. It seems like getting at the general underlying phenomenon might help in thinking about what we might do, as opposed to just adverting to this or that particular strategy.
I take the common thread to be: When some effort (perhaps by third parties) is put into identifying pairs that are basically compatible, and the members of the pair face social pressure to enter a relationship, they often eventually get to a point where they have a strong meaningful relationship — perhaps as strong on average as relationships that start out with passion.
What seems to characterize the contemporary U.S. and many other western countries is the combination of: 1) not much pressure when it comes to particular couples (even if there is still quite a bit of pressure on people to couple generally), and 2) a media landscape saturated with depictions of very attractive (in all senses) people of both genders, which both partly satisfies sexual needs and implicitly sets an unrealistic standard. The result is an environment in which “settling” seems like failure, and many people who would eventually wind up in happy relationships either on their own initiative, or as a result of external pressure, don’t even attempt one.
Heterosexuality — that is, the sexual dichotomy that characterizes the vast majority of potentially compatible couples — complicates this dynamic because on average straight men and women 1) find different kinds characteristics attractive or not, and 2) often take the different preferences of the opposite gender very personally. If attraction in both genders was primarily driven by physical characteristics, for example, “settling” could be more symmetric. But at least in our culture, the average preferences of the opposite sex have become extremely moralized. The failure to be self-perceived as attractive by the opposite standards develops into anger about those standards and the view that Things Shouldn’t Be That Way.
I don’t have anything particularly helpful to suggest in response to the underlying problem right now, but this is the issue in a nutshell as I see it.
I think this is generally right on all points (and makes me sympathetic to feminist complaints about depictions of women as unrealistically beautiful, esp via photographic effects).
Sexual differences complicate it, but don’t necessarily make it worse; it’s possible for both parties to convince themselves that they are getting a good deal if the rate of exchange is a bit fuzzy, even if that makes “fair” sorting a bit more difficult. It helps that there are multiple factors involved, even if they aren’t uncorrelated, and people value them slightly differently. Not to say some people don’t have it all, but in the middle most people should be able to be satisfied on some criteria, though of course human nature and our culture can increase the dissatisfaction.
True, although surely women are also presented with images of men that are unrealistic.
I don’t think it’s just the media landscape.
Suppose you are hiring a woman for a position where she will be very visible to your customers—reception clerk at a hotel, for example. There is an obvious incentive to prefer an attractive woman. If everyone is doing that, high visibility positions will be selectively occupied by more attractive than average women, creating the illusion of a higher level of average female attractiveness than actually exists.
1. Reduce the stigma on masturbation
2. Legalize prostitution
Are the incels really afraid of masturbation?
No – but its still low status.
I don’t see how you could possibly make it high status. It’s trivially easy and does nothing for anyone else. It’s like making eating free donuts high status. Maybe you don’t think too poorly of the guy who takes a free crispy creme every day, but it’s hard to think well of it.
Neutral status would be an upgrade.
It should be no status, like using the bathroom. Almost everyone does it, and does it in private there is no reason for it to be low status.
Pretty sure it’s already no status. In that Seinfeld episode, “The Contest”, Jerry said it’s part of the male lifestyle. Elaine did not contest the point. That aired in 1992.
1. ‘Stigma on masturbation’ — This feels conceptually unsound. I can’t help but assume that pretty much everyone knows that masturbation is almost a universal at least for males and particularly those that don’t have partners.
The stigma is more indirect, partnership is understood as being more of an accomplishment (and is generally regarded as being more fulfilling) and it naturally follows that there’s going to be a stigma around the sort of person that can *only* rely on masturbation. The only way to elevate masturbation is to somehow make it as socially and mentally elevating as the experience and capacity for actual partnerships which seems less plausible then fat acceptance.
2. Elliot Rodger’s father claims that he actually offered to take him [the would-be shooter] to a Brothel, and Elliot was supposedly disgusted by the idea. As others have pointed out the Inceldom =/= orgasm deprivation. It’s more psychological than
This is also why people that advocate drugging people into becoming disinterested in sex are risking throwing gasoline on a fire. (unless the idea is to solve the incel problem by drugging people into becoming suicidal rather than homicidal) Self confidence and Sex drive often go together.
This is a bad assumption, even for people who eventually find out there are tons of people who spend years not knowing. Someone who comes to the realization in college that everyone does it might have 5-7 years worth of guilt and shame stacked up for no reason.
There is almost nothing that ‘society’ can do for the more difficult cases, but what can reasonably be done is not to structure things so that more marginal cases get pushed in that direction.
I think there’s still some stigma on masturbation in the sense of “that’s just masturbation” is still a live insult– some activity done alone is compared to doing it with other people.
I never saw calling an activity masturbatory as just an insult, usually it’s invoked as a metaphor; “you’re doing that just to relieve the symptoms of not ____ / give the appearance/feeling of ____ rather than actually ____.”
It seems to me there is a difference between what will work on an individual level and what will work on a societal level.
At an individual level, the idea of getting in shape, getting some good clothing, learning a little “game,” etc. is probably a good idea and will rescue a lot of guys who otherwise would have been incel. But none of this will change the fact that there is a shortage of young women; nor will it change the female hypergamy instinct. As a result, there will always be a lot of young men who will never ever find a young woman to be their girlfriend/wife.
It’s kind of like advising a PhD student to start working immediately on publications; to network aggressively; to choose sexy, trendy topics for his work, etc. It’s good advice but it won’t fix the basic problem that there are too many PhD’s chasing too few academic jobs.
I fully believe in the core of 2) insomuch as no-one has a right to sex or an obligation to provide it. I don’t think it would achieve anything positive by going out to their forums and shoving that in their faces though, but if it comes to a vote on whether there should be a “right to sex” I’m happy to be known to be on the “no” side. But 2) doesn’t exclude some form of 1) – if there are things you can do that make it more likely you’ll get consensual sex, by all means do them.
3) I’m pessimistic about – traditional values won’t suddenly bring back all the factory jobs.
My real suggestion is 5) though (because 4 is already taken in another post):
There are different kinds of relationships, all of which I’d assume are basic human needs – community, friendship, really close friendship and (reminder that asexuals exist, but I concede that most of us are not) romantic and sexual relationships. Recognise that you’re optimising for overall happiness, and the best way to do that is not to focus exclusively on one potential contributing factor over which you have limited control in the first place. (Though perhaps don’t word it quite like this if you’re talking to the general public.)
If you’re not gay then might not be able to satisfy your sexual desires with other men. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be friends, even close friends with other men, and if there’s something society can do it’s perhaps push back against the idea that close non-sexual friendships can’t exist between men or that hugging another man “makes you gay”. If we can somehow achieve this then there might be an almost limitless supply of cuddle for men. I’m happy to be corrected if this is wrong but I think I read somewhere online that touching and hugging among men was absolutely normal until around Victorian times.
If someone has neither close friends nor any luck with dating, I’d advise working on the friends thing first. Not only in the sense of 1) but as a terminal value of its own – even married people are allowed to have friends! At the very least, you won’t be completely lonely in your search for true love or whatever. At best, it’ll improve your mood and social life to the point where you’ll be in a much better place than even Dan Savage could coach you to.
I might be the bringer of happiness. I think I remember learning it was normal until the emergence of a homosexual counterculture in the 1920s or so. At that point straight men didn’t want to be confused for gay in a society that suddenly realized there were lots of gay guys walking around.
From what I’ve heard it’s still normal for men to hold hands in parts of the Arab world, where being gay is a crime.
How so? Acceptance of gays is not going away. The desire of heterosexual men to be seen as potential partners by women is not going away. So is this going to change again?
Perhaps women will stop assuming that intimate men are gay & dismiss them as potential partners in the future. However, I’m not seeing much change towards this at the moment.
In general, men seem to be in limbo, being required to simultaneously be masculine and not masculine, like a superposed quantum state. Behavior that is strongly coded as non-masculine/gay, like cuddling other men, seems like a hard sell if it strongly reduces the chances of a more desirable kind of relationship (with a woman).
Because dark orchid said he’d be happy to be corrected about men holding hands being normal up until Victorian times, and I provided this correction by saying I thought it was normal through about the first quarter of the 20th century.
The “happiness” thing was sorta tongue-in-cheek, playing on a figure of speech.
When I grew up in Korea in the early 90s, it was normal for boys to hold hands with their male friends. The last time I went back to Korea about 4 years ago, I recall occasionally seeing what looked to me were adult male friends walking with their arms linked.
Korea has tended to be quite behind the USA in accepting homosexuals, but given the rapid pace of change these days, I don’t know if they’ve caught up by now. Regardless of whether it’s caught up yet, as it continues to progress, I wonder if that has led to stigmatization of male-male contact recently between friends as is normal in the USA, or if the norm of holding hands and the like continues to be strong.
It’s interesting to look at the actual numbers as context for this discussion:
I don’t have access to the full article to see how it breaks down by age, though.
paper
raw data
Under 25, 50% more men are sexless (1y or 5y, same ratios). 25-35, it’s about equal. 35-55, 50% more women are sexless. 55-65, 3x.
@Iain
It seems extremely obvious that much of the long term sexlessness is at advanced age and mostly among women, who tend to outlive men, of course. Presumably the (very) elderly also tend to have lower libidos and also don’t suffer from status loss or an inability to have children due to a lack of partner, so many might not care that much.
The solutions for the elderly who do want sex also seems fundamentally different in many cases than for younger people.
As Douglas Knight says in the post above yours, men only have less sex than women until they’re ~25. I certainly hope that doesn’t count as advanced age.
That’s an advanced age relative to the typical dating market exit.
@Iain
At 25 it is equal until 35, so it is definitely wrong to interpret my post as arguing that 25 is advanced age. However, I didn’t make my comment to argue about the flipping point at all.
What I was pointing out is that the overall percentages are pretty meaningless to the discussion we are having, IMO.
@A Definite Beta Guy:
The median age at first marriage is 27 for women and 29 for men.
Interesting thread.
Have to say I am really skeptical of your #1 there and many of the related replies. It just reminds me of the stereotypical movie scene associated with 80s/90s movies where the “ugly” girl takes off her glasses and lets her hair down and is all of a sudden “hot” and the guys can’t figure out what happened. My experience has just not borne out that attractiveness works like that. Is there really a large population of guys who would be at least averagely attractive if only they didn’t have a bad haircut or whatever? I mean a nice haircut doesn’t hurt, but it’s unlikely that that’s what’s holding you back..?
Also as someone who didn’t get any dating advice when I was young, but managed to blunder into a relationship anyway, I am wondering how to give advice to my kids. It’s not all that far away for my oldest, so it’s something I want to figure out.
I think the most common mistake related to #1 is that men, giving advice to other men, suffer the typical mind fallacy. If you postulate that attraction is significantly visual, as with most men, then making yourself more good-looking is the obvious step. And it’s not a bad idea! But if you postulate that women are less visually motivated, then the advice is more properly interpreted as doing things – not necessarily visual or physical things – that make you more precisely match women’s preferences. Some of those will be physical; it’s never a good idea to be the “smelly guy” so deodorant and hygiene are no-brainers; you can’t make yourself taller but you can make yourself fitter; you can’t make yourself handsome but you can become more content with and secure in your own looks (admittedly this is often harder than the physical stuff).
So #1, in my mind, is less about lifting weights and using a particular brand of hair gel (though it probably won’t hurt on the margins), and more about being a person higher in the criteria that women like – which I tend to define as something like confident, secure, and competent, and which traits tend to reinforce each other as you become, e.g., more secure due to your competence, and more confident due to some success, and more competent as your more confident approach gets you more practice.
It won’t get you any girl you want, but it might get you a girl.
Speaking as someone whose adult weight has been as low as 11 stone 7 and as high as 18 7, I can assure you that, at least based on my experience, that kind of change can make a large difference.
Caveat: at the risk of sounding like a twat, I’m fairly handsome. It may be that weight loss has more leverage for those with reasonably attractive facial features.
I don’t disagree. As far as I can tell, improving fitness is never going to be a hindrance, and may be a help. Certainly the less fit one is to begin, the greater benefit (including in dating) they will obtain from reversing the condition. Morbid obesity would fall pretty close on the spectrum to deodorant and bad hygiene, as a substantial pool-shrinker, and should be reversed if possible.
The worst typical mind fallacy in all this is telling incels that they’d be better at attracting women if they were more respectful of women.
This bumps up against the clear fact that there are a lot of men who despise and mistreat women while still being quite well able to attract women.
Just guessing, but it may be that hating women from a one-down position (“poor me, it’s so unfair that women don’t like me”) drives women away, while hating women from a one-up position (“bitch, you can’t prove you’re good enough for me but keep trying”) can actually be effective at attracting women.
It’s probably more complicated than that– a lot of abusive relationships start with enthusiastic courtship by the person who will become abusive.
Yes, this right here is the “raising them wrong” thing I’ve been talking about. Young men are taught by their single mothers and their female teachers that the most important thing is to “respect women.” If you respect women and treat them well, they’ll like you, including romantically. And this is not true. “Respecting women” isn’t in the top 5 for mate selection.
What men need to do to attract women is to compete with other men and win. Look good and win the attractiveness competition. Acquire currency and win the wealth competition. Do sports and win the athletics competition. Play the guitar and win the coolness competition. Those things will get you laid. Winning the “respects women” competition will not*.
I think part of the problem is that girls tend to prefer cooperative environments to competitive environments. As the schools are dominated by women, and society has put a massive focus on educating girls well, they have been suppressing male competitiveness in schools. So I don’t think the schools are going to be telling boys the truth any time soon. You can’t both suppress and encourage competitiveness at the same time.
* Now, one should treat women well because one should treat other people well in a civilized society. But “respecter of women” does not add to a man’s sexual market value. “Disrespecter of women” doesn’t necessarily either, but the ding a man’s SMV takes for disrespecting women is much, much smaller than popular culture would have one believe.
Consider that the word “respect” can have multiple meanings. When you think of a man who describes himself as a “respecter of women” or whatever – what forms might that take?
To me, a man who describes himself as a “respecter of women” pattern matches to Supreme Gentleman. That is, incel, or perhaps some sort of “male feminist beta orbiter” who is hoping that by being a good feminist ally he will get laid.
Or, someone not using those precise words. Imagine a guy who thinks it is super important for men to respect women, is full of venom for men who don’t, and is vocal about this. This hypothetical guy could fit several archetypes, each of which treats women differently.
What I’m trying to say – I’m being kind of vague; it’s one of those “I definitely know what I’m trying to say” situations – is, this could happen: you tell a guy “respect women” and you mean “take women seriously, treat them like moral beings with agency”. Just from the words “respect women” he could run in several different directions. And some of those directions aren’t going to make women feel respected – but in different ways.
As an example – there are guys who think of themselves as “respecting women” but their respect is entirely in the form of protecting women’s feelings; they are really treating women like children. (There are, to be fair, also women who demand to be treated in this fashion, while insisting they are in fact demanding something else)
Or, for another example, look at all the guys who heard that women want “nice” and read “nice” as “spineless and passive” – then, when being spineless and passive turns out not to be attractive, they think “wtf? I’m being nice.”
Sure, but whatever form “respect women” takes, it’s not high up on the list of things women find attractive.
Also, criticisms of “he disrespects women” will only be applied to men a woman doesn’t like or doesn’t find attractive for other reasons. Young men hear this and think “oh, I need to respect women and then I’ll be liked by women!” When no, you need to
1. Be attractive.
2. Don’t be unattractive.
And then your “respecter of women” status is irrelevant, as attractive misogynists get laid while unattractive Supreme Gentlemen do not.
Regardless, advice that could be interpreted several different ways, some of which will make things worse, is terrible advice. Every “school” of dating advice has some element that is dreadfully wrong and counterproductive, in some cases toxic; because each school follows from a different worldview and set of assumptions, it’s hard to integrate them together.
This isn’t just schools of dating advice that are addressed to men, either; there’s dating advice that women get, and a lot of it is really horrible too.
Socially inexperienced nerds often do this thing where they look at a confusing mess of stuff that society considers virtuous, pick one virtue that looks attainable, and resolve to embody it as hard as they can. Honesty’s a common one: everyone wants to be honest, but only nerds try to be the most honest person ever. This usually ends up looking kind of off-putting and self-destructive in practice, because the virtue’s come unmoored from the social context that makes it virtuous; then when the inevitable disaster happens, the nerd looks at the wreckage and concludes that the problem must be society’s lies, because honesty’s a virtue, right?
Seems to me that your Supreme Gentleman is doing basically the same thing, just with “respect for women” substituted for “honesty”.
What are we using “Supreme Gentleman” as shorthand for? I mean, the originator, he hardly seems to have been a guy who embodied actual respect for women.
A guy who respected women in the same way a guy with his shit more or less together respects men (or, a woman, a man) – taking them seriously if they’re someone to be taken seriously, speaking with them like an adult who can handle their shit, not tiptoeing around them, not assuming they don’t know what they’re doing them, overall, respecting a given individual or a group insofar as they’ve shown themselves worthy of that respect (and starting off erring towards respect with unknown people/groups)…
Is that going to hurt his chances of success with women? Well, with some women, sure. Depending on what he’s looking for, maybe he’d be better off behaving differently. But I personally would rather limit my interactions with women who react badly to being taken seriously; I certainly wouldn’t want romantic interactions with a woman I can’t deal with as a real-deal equal.
It’s just as true that some men react badly if you take them seriously – some guys prefer for you to kiss their ass to their face (imagine that’s physiologically possible) and route around their childishness when they’re not around, or whatever. You’re probably better off not getting involved with those guys, either – you wouldn’t want one as your business partner, say.
Some people, regardless of gender, like being treated as though they’re little child-emperors: appease them, defer to them, but don’t take them seriously, and figure out where the vizier who actually knows what’s going on is. I don’t think treating people like this is legitimately respecting them.
I’m saying it doesn’t matter what “respects women” looks like. As soon as you’re measuring your sexual market value based on your “respect for women,” however you define it, you’ve lost.
Conan O’Brien used to have a recurring character on his show called “The Loser,” and one appearance featured “The Loser on the Beach.” The Loser had brought a bag of hard boiled eggs with him to share, because, you know, everybody loves hard boiled eggs at the beach. “Respecting women” in order to find a sexual partner or girlfriend is the bag of hard boiled eggs on the beach. Nobody cares.
If you’re looking for a long-term relationship with someone you respect – if that’s an element of a quality relationship to you – tautologically, you’re not going to respect them unless you respect them (in the real sense, not child-emperor sense). Being in a relationship with someone where you’re constantly scaling stuff down to deal with them, so to speak, is best avoided.
It might not make one better at attracting the women in the first place, and if you want to pick up lots of women in bars, who cares? Still – a good form of the advice can be helpful advice for a guy in his long-term relationship success; a bad form of the advice can be considerably detrimental.
I think that the word ‘respect’ should be banned from this discussion.
These types of ‘respecting’ exist:
1. benevolent sexism
2. treating women just like men (but with vagina’s)
3. acceding to the demands of a woman (or of women)
4. recognizing that the other person is not great at demanding or verbalizing what they need & treating them in a way (that you think) is good for them
5. standing up for yourself and making demands of your own
Of course these are still merely categories, where the actual details can vary greatly. People can define the ‘correct’ level and type of benevolent sexism very differently.
In general, both men and women can have very different personal definitions & can get very angry at people who operate based on other definitions, as they tend to consider their own definition to be unquestionably correct.
I would argue that the culture and women themselves tend to teach to and demand from men that they do 1 & 2 & 3, but that women actually tend to respond a lot better to also doing a healthy amount of 4 & 5.
Typically there isn’t one issue, its not like you are a haircut away from being Brad Pitt, but if it knocks a few percentage points off the dating pool right off the bat and you have several features like this that could be addressed you could go from being a “no” to 99% of the women and a “maybe” to 1% to a “no” to 90% and a “maybe” to 10%. When you are talking about guys who might feel a huge amount better with sex once or twice a year that is a huge change.
The advice isn’t so much, “cut your hair, exercise a little, and learn to wear deodorant more regularly and you’ll be swimming in women,” it’s “cut your hair, exercise a little, and learn to wear deodorant more regularly so you’ll have any chance with anybody you might be attracted too, assuming your standards aren’t completely out of wack.”
But this advice is indistinguishable from “Just be yourself; the right girl will come along eventually”.
It is completely unfalsifiable on any timescale shorter than years, it immediately deflects any question or claim to anything more to a token level or sympathy, it implies that it’s basically all the incel’s fault for not implementing the simple obvious fix and waiting for the result, and it allows the speaker giving advice to smugly disengage and spend the rest of their life believing they’ve done a good deed without having to actually do any work or confront their ultimate failure.
Possibly “exercise a little…” is in fact marginally more effective than “just be yourself…”, but A: I’m going to guess that you haven’t done the sort of inquiry that would let you justify such claims at the margin(*) and more importantly B: I hope you can understand why the recipients of the advice will take it as little more than a blow-off.
Offering to take them to the gym, would at least signal serious interest or concern.
* Yes, it’s intuitively obvious to you that “exercise a little” works at the margin, so much so that only a fool would think it needs to be investigated. The “just be yourself” crowd feels the same about their advice
Some thoughts about helping incels, and I admit I haven’t read the whole thread.
It strikes me that their problem isn’t just their lack of sex/relationships, it’s that they react to their problems with hatred, despair, and resentment rather than looking into having the best life they can. This is a much more general problem than not having sexual/romantic relationships, and it was looking at incels which made me realize how much I’ve got the problem myself, even if it’s about somewhat different issues. I don’t think I’m the only person at ssc with a similar pattern.
Related: Encourage people to look at how their online groups are effecting their lives.
I’ve wondered whether there should be public service announcements along the lines of “Anyone who’s trying to get you killed is your enemy, even if it’s your commanding officer. Or your imam. Or the voices in your head.”
Societal and long term: man who who don’t have a history of relationships with women are not a separate category of humans. Stop despising them. I really think being assigned low status has a lot to do with why some men identify as incels. If this change could be managed, I don’t know that if would do much for men who already identify as incels.
Good point. Given that we’re living in a society where assertiveness is more important than in the past, also for women, women (and men) may strike out in ways that are different, but that have a very similar cause.
Perhaps a lack of assertiveness when asking for promotions, raises and such; or even more in general, a way of presenting that makes employers less likely to promote you or give you raises. Some people may naturally act in ways that make it attractive to put the person in a higher position and to give them more salary, others may learn it and some may fail to understand why they get passed by and get resentful.
Perhaps some of the people who go on a shooting rampage at their office do it out of these kinds of resentments.
Sometimes I think it’s impossible to have such a thing as a healthy online support group. No matter how much I sympathise with the starting point of one, it invariably seems to turn rancid and all about hating outsiders. I’ve seen it again and again.
Yes. This.
In fact, “don’t shame people” is a pretty good principle in general. It never seems to do anything other than make the shamed people behave even worse.
I think I agree that shaming people is net negative, but I’m not convinced it has no positive social effects. For example, I suspect that a large part of the reason women are, on average, less overweight than men is that they are more shamed for being so. More-or-less by definition, the people who are harmed by fat-shaming are the ones who are fat in spite of the social stigma. The ones who would be fat were it not for said stigma are hard or impossible to identify, but they are at least plausibly benefitting from its existence.
Is there any data that could let us know whether that’s true or not?
You’re ignoring the cost, certainly in attention and effort and probably in money, in maintaining a lower weight than one’s default. Also, there are some risks associated with attempting to lose weight.
More shamed, or more materially affected, because physical attractiveness is more of an asset to women than men*?
(*whether it be because people value women less for other things, or just because being pretty is equally good for everyone but women are usually prettier than men can be)
@Baeraad
The people who are most active tend to be the most upset/angry/resentful, because those emotions cause them to have much need for validation and such. So unless there is strict moderation by people who are very active, but not upset/angry/resentful, you’d expect the unhealthy discourse to dominate.
I disagree that it doesn’t do anything. People clearly often adapt their behavior so to not be/feel shamed. Of course, that isn’t the same as acting how the shamers want them to behave. Quite often people still do the thing that they are being shamed for, but then in secret.
My mother in law (a retired psychologist) once quipped that the problem with group therapy was that the group was only as healthy as its least-healthy member. It strikes me that you’re describing a similar phenomenon.
So you’re not big on Confucius’s claim that we should shame people’s bad behavior rather than criminalizing it?
With all due respect to Confucius, yes, I must disagree with him there. I would prefer for it to go like this:
Minor bad behaviour: tolerate it.
Moderate bad behaviour: avoid the people who engage in it.
Major bad behaviour: outlaw it.
Shaming should never enter into it, except insofar as having people avoid you count as shaming.
ETA: Actually, as far as philosophers go, on this one I refer you to my favourite Nietzsche quote: “Where one can no longer love, there one should pass by.”
I suspect support groups of any kind really only work while they maintain positive momentum focused on self-improvement. Once that momentum is lost, they turn into commiserating and then wallowing in despair, resentment, etc.
Online groups are particularly bad because they will be dominated by the loudest most negative voices.
I think there’s a very good reason support groups for things like addiction are led by sober addicts, and often assign sponsors who are former participants. You need that sort of strict moderation to keep the eyes on the prize.
I imagine an addiction support group that was just a bunch of addicts talking about whatever they wanted would degrade pretty damn quick, and that’s what most incel forums are.
“Sometimes I think it’s impossible to have such a thing as a healthy online support group.”
I think I’m in a couple of them, but they’re more like “I’m having a hard time, say nice things to me” than “support my grudge against the world”.
In her series on estranged parents forums, Issendai contrasts them with the culture of estranged adult children forums. I think it’s a good illustration of how one community can be simply reinforce all the worst habits and tendencies of its members, while another can be supportive while pushing for its members to actually improve their situations.
@Nick
Now I really want to know whether those parents forums are more populated by women and those children forums more by men. My theory is that this is the case and that the observed patterns in large part reflect feminine and masculine ways of interacting.
EDIT: My prediction seems correct:
I doubt the adult childrens forums are majority male, although they may be more male than the estranged parents forums. Take a look at this list of quotes from adult children; do those sound to you like they were written by men?
And I’m skeptical it even mostly comes down to gender differences in “ways of interacting.” I’ll give you the first one on that list (emotional support vs problem solving), since it’s my understanding that one does fall on gendered lines. But women are perfectly capable of e.g. noticing patterns of behavior, emphasizing consistency in their own and others’ narratives, and recommending scholarly research. I think the better explanation is that things like consistency, probing attention, and research are inimical to the fantasy worlds these parents construct, so these practices get no encouragement or reinforcement whatsoever. The children have no fantasy world to construct, so they have nothing to fear from others’ probing questions—especially if the advice following those questions is actionable and really helps.
I doubt that the children’s forums are 100% female, so one would expect those to be more masculine in nature.
However, I agree that the differences in narratives probably plays a large role as well.
This goes beyond online groups. Assuming offline groups even exist anymore. One reason I did not fall in to this trap when I was in college was because of the way I picked my social groups. I saw the neckbeards playing Magic: The Gathering at the student union and said “no. I’m not doing that. Nerdy and socially awkward as I am I am not surrounding myself with other people as weird or weirder than I am.” Instead I joined the College Republicans, dated a girl from there, met a guy who became a friend for life (and many years later introduced me to the woman I married), and tagged along with a guy I knew from high school who made cooler friends than I did. I joined their social group, and we went to parties where I met girls, or my friends got girlfriends and then I met the girlfriends’ friends, etc. I was the nerd of a group of normal people instead of one of a group of nerds.
I have no idea how applicable this is after college, but for me, what saved me was I didn’t hang out with other people who had my same problems. I first befriended other men who didn’t have these problems.
My first reaction was “But, but, Magic the Gathering!” and I don’t even like the game. I’m probably too influenced by nerd culture.
For entertainment value, phone up the local department of child and family services and ask them for a family. The puzzlement on the other end is depressingly hilarious.
One thing that’s bothered me about point (2) is that a whole pile of noise in the healthcare debate in the US has been around mandatory contraceptive coverage. If nobody has a right to sex, why shouldn’t people who can’t afford contraception be expected to abstain? (I’m taking about birth control qua birth control, not eg. treatment for endometriosis). Alternatively, sexual intimacy is an essential part of being a human, and thus we should mandate the provision thereof to man who can’t get laid.
I don’t think many people see mandatory contraceptive coverage as being based on (or implying) a right to sexual intimacy that someone else is obliged to provide, anymore than coverage for cholesterol-lowering drugs implies a right to eat fatty foods that someone else is obliged to provide.
@Garrett
One way in which people sidestep that discussion is to talk about medical uses of contraception.
Another way is to make a consequentialist claim (pregnancy is far more expensive than contraception).
I don’t generally see people arguing for a right to have contraception because they have a right to have sex.
I think the mandatory contraceptive coverage is not about the right to sex as such, it’s very political about what is now called reproductive justice. I’m the kind who would say to an unmarried woman “if you don’t want babies, don’t have sex” but you can imagine for yourself the kind of response that would provoke.
And murder, rape, etc. Many also got in relationships with women if they encountered them.
The crew of the Bounty were very happy when they had a long layover on Tahiti and could form relationships with the natives. So much so, that they refused to leave them.
Don’t forget opportunistic homosexuality!
As well as rum and the lash!
The mutineers returned to Tahiti on June 6th, where they took women on board for sex and men for labor.
However, there were too few women, ultimately resulting in the murders on Pitcairn Island.
This will seem creepy to those who think “incel”-dom is about lack of sex, but to others:
Get a pet. Specifically, a dog. Be its best friend: walk it regularly, socialize it, love it. 10-20yr commitment, remember! Still, do it.
This isn’t guaranteed to change your life for the better, but has a vastly better chance of doing so than “hit the gym” (which is great advice too: don’t not try this as well). It also falls into the category of things you absolutely must do for themselves, with no ulterior motive, but might, just by and by, help you meet more people (and in socially easy, ‘optimal’, ways.)
As a related comment: if you have a dog, spend some time in the park with the dog (likely on a leash, per the rules of most parks).
This may require lots of prep before acquiring a dog, as some parks are better than others for this kind of thing.
And it will be much easier if your dog is of a type and personality that doesn’t cause random people in the park to think that dog might attack me if I approach.
A person with a well-behaved dog is more likely to receive friendly attention than a person without any pet… at least, in a public park.
Of course, this is not guaranteed. Random greetings in the park may not turn into anything long-term. And awell-behaved dog is the result of a non-trivial amount of time and effort spent training the dog.
Also, a dog isn’t a human partner, but it will help with some basic emotional needs.
The solution is pretty simple: revolutionary socialism.
The inequities and pathologies that attend the present state of sexual affairs is the inevitable consequence of allowing sexual relations to be governed by the brutal competitive logic of the market economy. Any attempt to help the victims of this “market failure” within the superstructure that necessarily reproduces their suffering as a consequence of its being is futile. Just as the Great October Socialist Revolution negated and completed the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, the abolition of the “incel” requires that we consummate the emancipatory promise of the stillborn sexual revolution by breaching the bourgeois limits in which it was conceived, namely by collectivizing the means of reproduction and imposing rational organization in place of predatory chaos to ensure an egalitarian, scientific distribution in accordance with actual need. Indeed, who better to illuminate the path forward than the Bolsheviks themselves, who gave so much thought to the nature of sexual relations in the new Russia? As the brilliant Soviet psychologist Aron Zalkind wrote in 1924,
Sadly, vast swathes of so-called “progressive” opinion today object to this agenda, having being bribed by the present regime with the spoils of exploitation and with the license to engage in un-Marxist perversions, a privilege especially enjoyed by elite sectors like Hollywood. (Google “Pizzagate”.)
Some may object that “incels” are too defective as individuals to be worthy of companionship. They would do well to remember that just as capitalism degrades the worker, so too does sexual competition degrades its losers. The task of the revolution, or any revolution, is not only to defeat its enemies and achieve victory, but to achieve the inner transformation of its participants into worthy revolutionary subjects.
Incelitarians of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your virginity!
The solution is pretty simple: it’s called revolutionary socialism.
The inequities and pathologies that attend the present state of sexual affairs is the inevitable consequence of allowing sexual relations to be governed by the brutal competitive logic of the market economy. Any attempt to help the victims of this “market failure” within the superstructure that necessarily reproduces their suffering as a consequence of its being is futile. Just as the Great October Socialist Revolution negated and completed the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, the abolition of the “incel” requires that we consummate the emancipatory promise of the stillborn sexual revolution by breaching the bourgeois limits in which it was conceived, namely by collectivizing the means of reproduction and imposing rational organization in place of predatory chaos to ensure an egalitarian, scientific distribution in accordance with actual need. Indeed, who better to illuminate the path forward than the Bolsheviks themselves, who gave so much thought to the nature of sexual relations in the new Russia? As the brilliant Soviet psychologist Aron Zalkind wrote in 1924,
Sadly, vast swathes of so-called “progressive” opinion today object to this agenda, having being bribed by the present regime with the spoils of exploitation and with the license to engage in un-Marxist perversions, a privilege especially enjoyed by elite sectors like Hollywood.
brilliant, simply brilliant, comrade!
I’m tellin ya’, the status thing is a red herring. The problem is that people have a hard-wired need to be around people who like them, and for a lot of people (such as myself) committing to a relationship partner is a hard requirement for life satisfaction, and people in general, especially younger women to less-attractive men, are extremely cruel to lonely people. After a couple years of being told to kill yourself every time you to try to talk to a woman it’s awful hard to not get a little resentful and/or wonder if there’s some kind of weird conspiracy going on.
Sure a lot of these people would feel better if they could master a skill or otherwise accomplish something great, but that’s more because then you still have some small trickle of positive feeling and something approximating a point to your existence. I _have_ mastered a skill and accomplished things that people go “holy shit that’s cool” when they find out about it, and I’m still completely hollow inside. It poisons everything; every victory is hollowed out and every experience is ruined, because, well, what’s the point if it still means that no-one actually gives a shit about you.
You are actually pointing to something that may be far broader than just the problems of some men: meritocracy in general.
Perhaps most people fundamentally have a need to be loved for who they are and not (just) for what they do for others & we are creating self-hatred, anxiety* and such in many, by focusing so much on the latter.
Perhaps this plays a role in both causing high levels of depression and people pretending to be high in the meritocracy, by way of computer/mobile games and such, as the computers are not so demanding**, so it is easier to make them happy than other humans.
* Because you may be doing things of value to others now, but one day you’ll be decrepit and demented. Or you can get a nasty accident tomorrow. Who will love you then if the love you get now is so conditional on your performance?
** Industrialization, the greater role of government and such has resulted in an environment where you get lots of stuff for your money, so it is very hard for people to compete. For example, in the past, upper class women would learn to entertain, by playing music, singing and such. Now it is nigh impossible for a partner to outperform Spotify.
That dichotomy seems to cleave pretty close to a boilerplate observation of sex differences: women are loved for who they are (i.e. human beings with wombs, which is more to say what they are), while men are loved for what they do (i.e. provide provide). This has its downsides for both sides: women can’t do much to much to increase their innate “lovability,” but can’t really lose it through their own actions, either; men are born with no innate lovability, but can work to acquire some.
This also reflects the difference between the archetypal mother’s love (unconditional, but signifying little beyond the maternal relationship) and father’s love (conditional, but lets the child gain self esteem for its behavior). I think people need both kinds of love to feel well-rounded, but that’s a slight insight.
I wonder if the phenomenon of some men pining after their first love for basically ever (which seems to happen more often than old women pining for their first boyfriend? epistemic status here is very shaky) is related to this, as in: my wife loves me, but it’s obvious why; I take care of her and provide for the family, etc. etc. My first love loved me when I was a basically useless layabout, so she must have loved me for my personality or “true self,” not giving me a just reward for services duly offered.
EDIT: Related, I would guess that reports of women’s happiness declining toward that of men is related their entering the meritocratic world outside the home (not that they were previously free of any kind of judgment, obviously). A boon to the ambitious, but rat race to most.
@powerfuller
Reminds me of a saying: “Men are respected, but not valued. Women are valued, but not respected.”
@powerfuller
Indeed, except that it is changing now. Men get less credit for what they do now, from potential mates, because women now have real careers too. Men generally think they deserve more recognition. However, women also get far less return on their sacrifices than they think they deserve, as men don’t value women with careers that much.
So both men and women feel slighted by the other gender for not recognizing their sacrifices, only it happens at different times, because the high sexual desirability of young women deceives a lot of them into overestimating how much men want to be with them for what they do. So if they end up single later in life, when their sexual desirability declines, they get upset, when they figure out that their achievements count for relatively little.
Men are more likely to feel upset earlier in life, when they are ignored despite not being total losers and having a decent job and such.
Enh, everyone goes through shit, some people have trouble living at all rather than thinking of a reason to.
None of it I don’t think. I’ve never liked people or being around people (which is almost certainly part of the problem) and I’ve never had much desire for social validation; I went from being extremely low status (the ‘weird guy’ people all avoided talking to in school, followed by narrowly avoiding full-blown homelessness) to relatively high status (I’m respected by my coworkers at the kind of company where flashing your company ID can get you special treatment and I’m currently looking at buying a BMW…) and the transition hasn’t left me feeling much different aside from optimism about the future.
Thinking about Being in a Band Of Brothers type deal doesn’t feel good. I mean, most of those things you talked about already sort of describe my day job, and I don’t get any fulfillment from work. I have absolutely no “friend drive,” the idea of being around people other than a woman I can be a husband to and children I can take care of just has no valence at all and never did.
Mostly I either fantasize about either building a relationship/family or being a heroic martyr. I really don’t think I’d have a life that I wouldn’t rather have not lived unless I’d either spent my life in a happy marriage or done enough good that I could be satisfied having cared for humanity as a whole instead – and I don’t really care about being remembered, in fact I’d feel a certain sour grapes kind of pleasure in being remembered as a villain when in reality I’d saved the world.
In practice the first scenario is many orders of magnitude more likely from an objective standpoint, but I don’t see any steps I can take that lead me any closer to it, so I’m going for the second one with the understanding that it won’t actually work but you have to pick a move even if your expected utility rounds to zero.
A massive response to everything in this topic.
To be clear, when I refer to incels, I specifically refer to the toxic kind.
the problem
There was some discussion on how women choose their partners based on looks, money, etc. A ridiculous thought. I try to ban sugar from my diet, because I simply do not like what it does to my body. There is a cake shop near me with really high quality design cakes. I have looked at the window in admiration. But I still did not buy a cake. I simply do not want to buy cake. It is like that with girls. Given all the social judgement girls face, they need to be pretty hungry before they want a piece of cake. A friend of mine in the pick up community attributes his success to his clothes. If he gets laid in a red sweater then chicks dig red sweaters. If he gets laid in a blue sweater then the reason he got laid, was the blue sweater. I have tried to talk some sense into him, but he just won’t hear it.
Individual preferences aside, women choose to sleep with men based on one criteria and one criteria only: sexual confidence. I need not explain how this creates vicious reinforcement loops. All other criteria do not come into play unless choosing from an otherwise comparable selection. If you have 0 sexual confidence, then no woman will do you (ignoring prostitures). At sexual confidence 100 a man has a lot of choice. It is of course impossible to prove, since results with women affect your confidence. I know men who are funny, handsome, in shape, well groomed, earn twice the national average and completely frustrated that women do not give them the time of day. So as many people have argued, the real problem is a lack of sexual self worth.
Just reiterating some points I agree with: Being toxic and being unfuckable (as a guy) are not the same thing. Being toxic does not help, but is perfectly combinable with a good sex life, I am sure we all know examples. Yes having a good sex life does help (endorfins and stuff), it is part of the vicious feedback loop.
why the ideas in this thread are beyond bad
1) What is it with this obsession with haircuts and going to the gymn? That is advice you give to guys who are bad, not to those who are hard cases. Even then it is not very good advice. Who here actually thinks the guys in the incel reddit have not at least tried that? It is the first thing you do. Joining the incel reddit is what you do after trying all the advice people give you and realize the problem is not what you do, but who you are. The whole haircut suggestion sounds something like this to me:
A: I want to learn to play the violin, but I get so frustrated that I am not getting any better.
B: What did you try?
A: I read about violins, I bought a couple of violins, I am on internet forums about violins and I subscribed to newsletters on the topic.
B: You should try making a violin!
A: I don’t think that will make me a good violin player.
B: But it won’t hurt!
If you want to get better at the violin, you need to start practicing and take classes. No matter how many concerts you go to, you will not become a maestro if you never touch a violin. Incels haze people who give this advice and although I do not agree with the tone, they are absolutely right. If you want to solve an issue, you need to aim directly for the core of the problem.
To be fair, “practice talking to people” was mentioned and actually works, but for hard cases trying this will result in harsh reactions from girls which confirm their self image. They need a specialized approach that goes far deeper than the actions they take.
2) they don’t have a right to sex => telling them this reinforces their negative self image
3) To be even more unfair, other possibilities seem to be sex robots => reinforces the problem (no woman will voluntarily love you) Any solution that consists of government or social “goodwill” to give these guys sex will fail, because it reinforces the negative feedback loop they have about being unfuckable. Furthermore, you know, many incels actually could go to a prostitute if they wanted to. It is not like this would require government action.
4) forced prescription of drugs that lower their sex drives => once again, it reinforces the problem
Now I am not saying that we should compliment them and have a national holiday “happy incel day!”. If you know an incel personally, then emphasizing with them, confirming that it is not fair and that this does not predict their worth as a human being is a lot better. I will get to the advice that is effective later.
analysis
There is a lot of stereotyping when it comes to incels: incels are fat, ugly, poor, etc. I have spent a lot of time in the pick up community and I hear the exact same stereotypes. Anyone who has been part of the community will tell you that most of the guys there are pretty decent likeable people. They are a little more akward than average and yes, there are a few really weird people there, but they are far and few between.
Incels have too high standards? Probably true, but it does not really start to matter until you actually have at least some options. Also, your standards go down as you overwin your fears of social judgement. Don’t confuse cause and effect. Oh and if you tell an incel “you need to lower your standards”, he will hear “you are not worthy of a good woman”, not recommended. “A lot of incels outright admit the idea of sex terrifies them and they just want a woman who is nice to them to cuddle and watch anime with.” A women to watch anime with? Okay, I take it back, maybe they do have too high standards XD
Regarding the way society is structured. Don’t take the reasons incels quote for their problems seriously:
“a few men take up all the girls”
Don’t focus on this “problem”, I don’t think we make society better by making women so deperate for sex that they sleep with someone they find repulsive. Also, this will make the sex inbalance issue even more problematic (there being more man than women). Lastly, women will rather stay single than sleep with someone so far away from their desires. Yes, sex is currently more attainable for them, but it is not like all women are constantly overexerted by the amount of sex they have.
If we all focus more on celibacy / traditional values, incels would not feel so left out. Yeah and apart from incels everybody would be sacrificing their sex life, fair trade right? How about if we all become celibates? Incels are no longer jealous and all of humanities problems solve themselves. Seriously though, have you thought about how many barriers women throw up when you want to have sex due to fear for social judgement? Saying you want everyone to focus on these things increases these barriers and will make it harder for everyone to have sex, not just incels. A better approach would be stop slut shaming and let women know that expressing their sexuality is appreciated. That way is becomes easier for girls to enjoy guiltless sex and men will have less hoops to jump through. Although this is more likely to benefit merely incompetent guys than hard cases, it does shrink the ravine they need to cross. I even think, without any evidence for the matter, that girls not getting orgasms, is in part related to them suppressing their sex drive. So even though most will blame the man for the problem, they actually have to take responsibility for a part of the problem.
On the flip side, guys tend to ridicule other guys for their partner choices. This increases the social pressure on getting a hottie. I honestly cannot for the life of me approach a girl that is ugly but turns me on, my mind simply will not let me. I have far less inhibitions approaching a girl that is objectively a 9, even though I am not feeling it. I see this in the pick up community too. A lot of long termers are not in it for the girls. They just want to impress other guys.
cropped here due to comment limit
Apart from barriers to sex, how well does having a father work? Depends on the father. Having a dad who is slightly above the sexual confidence cut off will not do much, having a dad with enormous sexual confidence will.
I think what people are missing here is that children pick up on subcommunication. Even though he may be completely monogamous, sexual confidence will certainly shine through. Halfway there is enough to cover the rest with effort. At the very least halfway there does not make you a reddit incel. Yet, this is not very helpful. Are we forcibly going to cohabitate single moms with single men?
Regarding picking up girls and being in a relationship requiring completely distinct skill sets; I would dare say, they are completely at odds with each other. Esther Perel has a nice ted talk on this.
Most dating advise you see is wrong and often reduces your chances rather than increasing them. Effective dating advise is often highly controversial. How the government-mandated courtship rituals suggested are going to circumvent these pitfalls is beyond me. Incels need specialized advice and would not be targeted by government programs.
The societal problem is a long term one. Basically anything that reduces a persons sexual or core confidence is a target. I hypothesize that risk factors are bullying, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, emotional manipulation. Good stuff that you would already want to fix for other reasons.
That does not help current generation incels. I would not even try to engage the group as a whole. It seems pointless to engage them in a place where the social mores are against you, but maybe I am too pessimistic.
If you know an incel personally (hopefully not toxic) then there is a lot you can do (at the risk getting his bad vibes).
1) Emphasize with the problem. Let him know that his value as a person is not determined by the arbitrary and flawed choices of women. Be careful not to be patronizing, they are allergic to this. Saying things like “you have value” is risky, because they might get defensive. A better option is to say that no one deserves to suffer alone as they have done. We were not built to live in isolation and it is unjust punishment. If he is toxic, this would be the moment to make a remark about that… Good luck with that one XD
2) Tell him to stay away from groups of people with powerful convictions that enforce the exact same problem he is trying to solve. It will reinforce his self destructive belief system. (not recommended to post this in the reddit group itself)
3) This is where the harsh and bitter truth needs to be said. You have one of two choices. The first is giving up, resenting yourself and others. How is that working for you? Changing your fate is extremely hard but not impossible. It means taking ownership of your problem and fixing it. You may get support from people, but no one will solve it for you, nor is it their duty. You will need to take a long term perspective and spend years of your life fighting it. Getting a haircut and going to the gym just ain’t gonna cut it, you already know this. You need to go to the depths of your soul and confront the very pain that is getting in your way. You will need to do the exact things that scare you, you will have to face the awkwardness head on. You will need to face girls over and over again and they will tell you over and over again that they simply do not want you. You will need to change the reward structure in your brain. Accept what girls are like and reward yourself merely for putting yourself out there. The reactions of girls are outside of your control. Don’t give your power away and let them decide what you are worth. You be the judge from now on.
You will need to keep trying new things:
+ self help
++ affirmations
++ reframing
+ pick up
+ various forms of coaching
+ different types of therapy
+ ideas you havent even heard of yet
And you will need to keep doing them even when they do not seem to be working. Things will eventually get better, but there will be setbacks that make you fall into despair again. The only way to defeat your inner demons, is by taking up the challange of a lifetime and never giving up. It is a bitter pill to swallow, it is by all means unfair, but these are the choices you have.
Right now your mind if probably telling you that there is 100% certainty that is will not work, but is there really an absolute guarantee? Even if you know that you cannot win, what choice will you make? Give up? Or spend the rest of your life fighting, holding on to a glimmer of hope? What is it going to be?
Even if they “give up”, they will probably think about it for a long time. If you intend to help him then you can tell him you will try to support him if you can, but be warned that he may have unreasonable expectations. He might get really needy for assistance at some point and resent you, if you do not give it. Also do not be too positive when relaying this message. That just alienates you from them and it shows you fail to understand what they are facing.
Most of peoples problems are straightforward and the solution is simple, yet hard to do. Some examples:
alcoholism => just stop drinking
heroine addiction => just stop using
recurring debts problems => stop spending money you do not have
The love, sex and relationship problems are different, because there are so many opinions on what is causing them and like I said, most of them are wrong. For a guy to fix his dating problem, he needs to make a lot of choices that are controversial and counterintuitive. Yet the similarity lies in the fact that you biggest enemy is a part of yourself and it is a very powerful foe indeed.
There is a caveat. The approach hinges on a catalyst. There are only 2 ways I have seen hard cases muster up the courage to walk the path of a man.
1) a total breakdown: This is when someones life falls apart and it hits them so hard they realize they have to choose between either killing themselves or a life of struggle. The decision can go either way.
2) a glimmer of hope: This is when an event takes places that teaches them the following very important lesson: “you can change”. It is sad, but a lot of these guys simple do not have a strong enough reference in their mind that shows them such a thing is possible. It is not surprising they fall into despair if they have simply never seen themselves overcome a deep psychological problem before.
Without either of the two, talking to them is pointless. You will not reach them and they simply do not have enough leverage over themselves.
I think this is all really good advice. One thing I would correct is the whole “haircut and hitting the gym” thing is not simply because women like guys who have nice haircuts and who are fit, but that it is a way of boosting sexual confidence. “I know I look good and am sexually desirable because I have a good haircut, nice clothes, and am in shape.”
Yes, there are men who still succeed via their overwhelming (and perhaps false?) confidence in spite of not having these things, but those are clearly not the people we’re talking about.
ETA: Also, I disagree that anti slut-shaming efforts would help incels. All that would do is give girls more excuses to fuck Chad.
Fair enough, anything that raises your self confidence is a good thing in that situation. I will acknowledge that much. The main point still stands. We need to go deeper.
Just to be clear. I never meant to say that incels will get laid (without improving themselves) if we stop slut shaming. From what I have read, they appear to be among the worst category (which is not helping them). Rather, that they need to solve 2 problems. 1) the way their own mind blocks relationships granting mutual satisfaction 2) the way the womans mind blocks relationships granting mutual satisfaction. If women feel more safe in expressing their sexuality freely, then that is one less problem for any man to solve. In other words their path is shorter and they will start having success sooner. This is important, since their journey means fighting for a long time, before having any real success. The chances are pretty real they give up prematurely because of it.
Good comment.
Ages ago, somebody posted in the SSC comments a link to some very lengthy webcomics – one about evolution following the adventures of an alien sex researcher, and one about many-worlds QM following the adventures of a hero that could talk to his Everett-branch doubles. It was written by a European person, I think Scandinavian or possibly Dutch.
I can’t find them anymore, which is sad because they were great. I would be super super grateful if this rings any bells and somebody can help me find it.
I can help!
http://thorsbysprojects.thecomicseries.com/Mycomics/
Yay, you are wonderful!!
Ah, Thorsby! Yeah, he’s great. I used to know him from a webcomic forum we were both on about ten years ago. He was always a bit of a mysterious presence.
The Accidental Space Spy’s phony evolutionary just-so stories are great fun.
That doesn’t list the brain chip as completed, but I thought I read it before and it had reached its conclusion.
I didn’t know them before, but they really are a ton of fun.
I enjoyed the different evolutionary fantasies a lot. Now, where do I send the bill for the lost three and a half hours of my time?
Naval Gazing wraps up its look at battleship main guns with an examination of the guns of the treaty battleships, and Iowa in particular.
And for Friday, my review of the USS Midway.
Bean, you know about Furashita’s fleet, right?
I’ve seen it, yes. I tend to view most paper fleets with a lot of suspicion. There’s almost inevitably a disconnect between the actual important factors in fleet design and what ends up in places like that.