Anything you read about dating in the legacy media is about weirdo outliers

Normal, reasonable people don’t have the weird, bizarre sex and dating problems that legacy media outlets are continually writing about: the point comes up because of a foolish advice column from a woman to a woman, titled “Why Isn’t Anyone Sliding Into My DMs?!” I’m not going to do a link because however dumb you think the material might be from the title, it’s dumber. I used to write analyses of this class of dumb article but then I was like… “Why?” Why bother? It’s pure entertainment, with no more bearing on reality than novels about dragons and swords.

The media is almost entirely made by people who are abnormally self-aggrandizing, self-regarding, grandiose, entitled, and/or narcissistic people… and those people are trying to make money in a shrinking, shrieking, deranged industry. Almost all of the dumbest stuff comes from NYC, too, I think because of the extreme gender skew there… college-educated women far outnumber men in the NYC metro area, creating an environment in which women have to compete much harder for men than they do elsewhere. The high cost of housing, because of legal constraints imposed by the city on building more housing also means that most people feel they can’t afford to have families, so they might as well f**k around a lot instead.[1] Women get pushed towards spinsterdom, because so few guys can afford the cost of an okay family housing unit. Normal girls in normal places, like Denver or Dallas or wherever, who want boyfriends, get them, and don’t have the constant struggle some NYC chicks do.

The saddest paragraph you’ll read today

A few weeks later, I drove a friend’s rented camper van from New York to Los Angeles, as a favor. I ended up staying in California for six months. Days would pass without anyone asking where I was or what I was doing, and I turned more of my attention to Feeld. It was an old strategy: when life doesn’t deliver on a promised expectation, I look for alternatives, and what I found on this app seemed like an alternative to the fantasy of family I was letting go of. “Feeld is for a new type of human,” Dimo Trifonov, the app’s founder, once wrote. “A human belonging to a new world, one of creativity, openness, respect and exploration.” This was one way to make my unwanted future tolerable, to at least make it interesting for myself: to pretend that there was such a possibility as a new kind of person in a new kind of world.

This is a woman who’s hitting her forties, her fertility dwindling, and the best thing she can think to do is…hook up with random couples on an iPhone app, so she can be their sexual plaything for a bit? She’s totally unmoored and disconnected from human society and doesn’t try to moor herself to anyone, or anything. She drifts, lonesomely, towards old age. The whole article is written like this, and it’s titled, “A Hookup App for the Emotionally Mature: Modern romance can feel cold and alienating.” Ha. “Emotionally mature?” Is she high?

Honey, you are not “emotionally mature,” and Feeld is for horny people to f**k. Emotionally mature people form real relationships and have families. Emotionally stunted women are in their 40s and still can’t form relationships.

Woman is honest: Men being too explicit and asking permission for sex is a turn off

A chick named Jordana, of the “U Up?” podcast, admits what players and all women know: a guy who waits around and doesn’t make any moves isn’t attractive to women. A guy explicitly asking a woman to consent to sex is a turn-off. Women are creatures of indirection and uncertainty, and they live in the land of “maybe,” and they want a story for themselves and others about how whatever happened sexually “just happened.” Women don’t want to take responsibility for their sex lives. They want to get offers and say “yes” or “no” to them in the moment it’s happening, and that’s it. Jordana takes about 35 minutes of beating around the bush while talking to the guy to get to the main point: despite feminism, despite her progressive politics, despite her political beliefs… she wants the guy to make the move. She finds him asking her explicitly for sex to be a turnoff.

The strange thing isn’t that this is true… the strange thing is that she’s willing to admit it, publicly.

What comes after we recognize a dead, boomer ideology?

It’s so weird to see the New York Times do a narrative violation, but it does: check this out,

Predictably, most young Republicans agree with the statement, “Feminism has done more harm than good.” What was astonishing was how many young Democrats agreed as well. While only 4 percent of Democratic men over 50 thought feminism was harmful, 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 did. Nearly a quarter of Democratic women under 50 agreed, compared with only 10 percent of those 50 and older.

I’d have guessed the opposite, that older men would support feminism less, and younger men would support it more… when you find data that contradicts your beliefs, it is worth thinking closely about it. If this kind of polling shows up in a venue committed to “feminism” as an ideology and lifestyle, the citing of the data shows social problems, and cracks in a certain kind of narrative. “Feminism” as defined in the 1950s-1970s, basically won, and this is true whether you or I like it or not (although feminism is now being attacked as somehow excluding transsexuals… a topic for another time). Now what? What comes after victory? Feminism is having a problem because it was against a lot of things, but what was it for? What was its vision of the good life, the good society, etc.?

The online dating expectations mismatch

Online dating optimizes for women considering: 1. men’s looks and 2. their ability to engage in mildly witty banter via text. Not too surprisingly, it’s not obvious that either is a great predictor of long-term relationship formation or success, or of true compatibility. Lots of great guys may not be immediately, obviously, photogenically good looking, and many probably don’t do the witty banter women seem to like over text. For particularly good looking guys, online swipe dating is an extreme force multiplier for success. I think I’m just below the looks threshold for online swipe dating to really work… I’ve also not done much online dating since like 2014 or 2015, apart from some stints on Feeld, but Feeld is different. It seems that many women aren’t cognizant of the way online swipe pushes women to judge guys based on metrics that may select against what they’re supposedly seeking. Expecting women to be analytical and self-reflective about their dating actions is futile, though.

Transsexualism, bodybuilding, anorexia: body dysmorphia’s many forms

Thinspo and Gender Goals: Musing on two internet subcultures is about attention and the failure to create effective identity: I read it as, when young people, specifically girls, say, “I am a man,” they really mean, “I want to look x way. And all my problems would be solved if I looked x way.” This desire will never be completed, and reaching the “goal” will never make the desirer actually feel whole, happy etc. The way the brain is malfunctioning in an anorexic state can give us some help understanding the transsexuality trend, which isn’t so different from grunge or witchcraft or other teen girl trends. What people (and especially teen girls) say is often not to be taken at face value; it’s part of some other ploy, usually related to status, insecurity, etc. Girls are more susceptible to social contagions.

With anorexia, the body dysmorphia is clear: showing how the origin of all this stuff (Tumblr) is the same, and the memes around it, the imagery, the feelings are all very similar. Somehow, we can’t see the obvious when we introduce the idea of gender, maybe because after a long period of discrimination against gays, we falsely analogize transsexuals to gays. “I hate my body, it’s the wrong one. I’ll never be happy until I can change it to be something else.” The language is so similar, the thoughts, all of it is really powerful to a small number of people. Like many things, the left might wake up 50 years from now and be like, “holy shit were we in a dream? Did we really think this shit was healthy?” No, it isn’t, and we’ll deny we ever thought it.

Transsexualism being like anorexia is interesting in part because it seems to get the essential idea that there’s no end game. Let’s say the teens who are “transsexual” achieve their body “perfection” or whatever. Then…what? What’s the point? It’s like bodybuilders (another topic discussed around here), you get the things, and then…you show it off, I guess? You search for adulation, or something else? And then, once you get that, then what? Whatever problems drive body dysmorphia are not solved by whatever body mods people think they’re feeling. With bodybuilders, some amount of lifting and being fit is good for you, but becoming obsessed and overly optimizing on “being fit” has negative repercussions. Most people want social and romantic connections: but transsexualism is unlikely to facilitate either.

EUPHORIA, it’s a conservative TV show, didn’t you know?

EUPHORIA is a conservative show, telling us parents should stay together and take care of their children, opioid drugs are bad, being an involved parent is good, parents who don’t watch out for their children are doing their children a disservice, dads are a positive influence. Talking out your feelings is good, repressing them is bad. Self-obsessed narcissism is everywhere, to the point no one bothers fighting it (bad). Too much TV and too little parenting creates problems, which is a funny message from a TV show. Women need to be protected from men, an idea nineteenth century Christians would have strongly endorsed.

Doing sex work is bad or at a minimum undesirable, better to work in the real economy. Parents should work hard at their jobs so their kids don’t have to do sex work or sell drugs. Sexting is bad, as is pr0n. Geting off your phone is good. The teens have lots and lots of feelings, but they are unable to form proper intimate relationships with each other, mirroring in this their parents’s inability to form intimate relationships with them. The drama revolves around taking or not taking drugs, and being able to form or not form successful relationships with another human being. That’s it. The most radical act possible for any character on this show isn’t MDMA or sex, it’s a committed relationship, and most of what they do instead of committed relationships is what Gen Z internet writers call “cope.” Radicalism today is the conservatism of yesterday. Drugs and sex are easy, the substitutes for substance. Don’t trust most of what’s written about this show, because the writing is mostly garbage. Critics denounced THE JOKER for its conservative subtext (just text?), few seem to have done the same with EUPHORIA.

The show is hugely high style, colors! camera work! look at us, we fancy. Style > substance, we believe in narrow field of view, lots of bokeh, it’s very moody. The actors and acting are good, the casting is good. But! OMG! The kids, they are doing the sex! And the drugs! Can you believe it??? Neither can I, except that in every generation there is worry about the youth and their erotic ways, not least in the way they offer erotic temptations to those somewhat older than them. How bad they are, for being tempting. Very, very bad, Very, very naughty. Wicked, naughty, evil. Now, the youth can record themselves doing the sex in HD, how scary, OMG. Were the old days better? EUPHORIA invites that kind of reading… in the old days, when mom and dad stayed together and the HD, self-filmed sex wasn’t feasible, let alone sharing the self-filmed sex with others. Pot + LSD > heroin + phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) meth. In mom & dad’s days, the obesity epidemic hadn’t happened yet, either.

Will public and socially acknowledged sex tapes become common and normalized?

An adult film performer has 300k followers on Twitter: it doesn’t matter which one, but I remarked to xbtusd, RPD, and another friend that she got those followers just for being attractive and naked: I said, “we live in an amazing world.” Xbtusd countered, “Attractive, naked, and recording yourself having sex.” He’s got a point, and yet I wonder if we’ll get to a world where recording yourself having sex and that recording being public will be socially acceptable to the extent that it doesn’t cause negative social and economic consequences; removing those social and economic consequences might drive out or down the premium those willing to violate social norms can achieve.

This isn’t as crazy as it might sound: in the 1950s, lots of people had sex before marriage, but it was a disaster for women to let it be known that they had sex before marriage, even though many women, maybe most, were doing it. It took until the 1970s, if not later, for sex before marriage to become common and expected. By today, it’s weird and bizarre for anyone not to have had sex before marriage.

Today, we’re in a situation where it’s extremely common to shoot nude photos and make sex tapes, but it’s relatively uncommon, and still reputationally damaging, for those to be publicly and socially available. We have celebrities (Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton) whose fame is linked to their sex tapes, and in some sense we all “know” that everybody does it. The vast majority of women let me shoot nude photos. I send them the photos, and I bet many later send those on to others. At what point do sex tapes lose their ability to shock and create negative consequences? It only takes enough women whose sex tapes become public shrugging and saying, “So what? It’s not a big deal. Everyone does it.” Maybe women don’t like their sexual value being foregrounded in this way. Onlyfans is arguably accelerating pre-existing trends. I’ve run into girls who are open about having an Onlyfans account: something I’d not have expected or imagined even five years ago.

Maybe watching other people have sex is losing some of its mystique / taboo elements: watch a show like Mad Men, and observe the etiquette of that time period… like, if you’re a married woman and you’re alone in a room with a man not your husband you better have a very good excuse for that happening. Now it’s like, “Yeah I’m married and yeah I’m going out and getting drunk with the girls tonight, we might fuck a bunch of random dudes, what of it?”

In Mad Men, Don freaks out because Betty tries on a bikini, and he slut shames her (“It looks DESPERATE…”), and Betty immediately changes. That’s representative of the culture of that day; now, thongs are common, and, as mentioned, some famous women got that way because they made sex tapes. And everyone’s fine with it. Very very soon you’re gonna have chicks that are the heads of major corporations, even presidents of countries, they’ll all have sex tapes, no one will care. Italian member of parliament (MP) Cicciolina made erotic films in the ‘80s, prior to being elected to Italy’s governing body. Maybe she’s a one-off, maybe she’s a harbinger. The last American president has more in common with pr0n culture than mainstream political culture. Maybe making sex tapes will be celebrated, an exploration of sexuality, and anyone who criticizes those practices will be ostracized… the exact opposite of what we have today (shaming women for doing pr0n). To use another historical example, recorded sex might be like tattoos; something that was shocking and outrageous decades ago becomes commonplace today (noting that many people don’t have tattoos).

I’ve had female friends whose nudes and/or sex videos have been leaked. And what’s happened has mostly been… nothing. Usually the women in question spend a bit of time trying to wipe the images or videos from the Internet, using DMCA requests, and that works. They’re unhappy for a few weeks, and then whatever fracas might have occurred dies down, and their lives return to normal. What’s most interesting is how minor the event tends to be. Most of their friends are supportive, and angry at the ex who’s done the leaking. Other women are sympathetic, understanding that it could happen to anyone. Guys routinely share nudes of chicks w/ our friends.

Trends tend to persist, similar to how Newton’s first law tells us that objects in motion stay in motion unless acted on by an external force. What external force is going to step in to curtail the growth of women’s sexual freedoms? Or the growth of smartphones, imaging, and connectivity? I wouldn’t want to be short women’s sexual freedom over the next decade. This isn’t my view, but it’s a possible view: if sex has become totally desexualized, and nobody can get hard anymore because of a desensitization to any sexual stimulus, it’s possible women might ask, “What are the costs of an unlimited growth in sexual freedom?” Cancer is unchecked cell growth but most cancer patients damaged their body long before the cancer showed up.

Soon, we’re going to defeat most STIs via vaccination. The social and cultural consequences of this still aren’t appreciated. We’re living in a changing world. Are you ready?

Why are polyamory and non-monogamy popular now? The Internet.

Gwen Kansen asks, “Why is polyamory so popular now?”, but I could reframe the question as, “Why have numerous once-minority pursuits, beliefs, and interests spread?”, and the answer is the same, “The Internet.” That’s a true but not completely helpful answer, and it’s more specific to say that anyone with niche interests, unusual beliefs, or non-mainstream pursuits had a lot of trouble and friction finding one another before the ubiquitous Internet, and so niche beliefs stayed very niche. We know that plenty of women had group-sex fantasies, even before the Internet, from books like My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday. What people didn’t have back then were ways of finding one another and spreading ideas about niche interests. Niche interests aren’t purely a sex thing: you can view modern versions of political correctness or “woke” politics as a growth in a niche field, and, while I don’t want to activate people’s political identities with this post, it’s hard to imagine the White House of January 2017 – 2021 without the Internet. The Internet facilitates feedback groups in which persons with niche interests find one another and reinforce their beliefs about their niche, and thus drive more extreme versions of that niche.

Humans really like f**king, a point I’m not going to belabor and, if you don’t believe it, why are you reading this? The ones who really really like to f**k a lot, often want novel experiences, but those novel experiences often come with costs, including search costs, danger, reputation costs, and others I’m not imagining right now. Online, anyone who wants to can write about their sex adventures in a way that’s effectively anonymous, barring the interest of the NSA or someone powerful and snoopy. Anyone who wants to can explore the group-sex scene in their city. Anyone who wants to can download Feeld (today), or, back in the day, use other sites to explore non-monogamy domains. Put those things together, and it’s possible for large numbers of people to coordinate in a mostly anonymous fashion. A woman’s family doesn’t have to know that she’s hoping to get drilled by four dicks at a party. A man’s friends don’t have to know some other guy unloaded in his girlfriend, while he was deep in another guy’s girlfriend. It’s possible to take baby steps in these directions. Once a couple or girl get enmeshed in the network, their friends often learn about it. Probably the most powerful impetus that encourages new people trying f**k parties is friends who are already going. You can f**k and still be friends, but many people go to f**k parties and don’t f**k friends.

Join the network and create the reality-based future

You should always listen to Balaji S: though he has little to directly say about the game, he has much to say about the nature of reality and much else that is game adjacent. Today, in Bitcoin, China, the “Woke” Mob, and the Future of the Internet, he speaks to the rise of networks and networked cities and states as a means of resisting the totalizing impulses of centralized, coercive states. This gets me thinking about the “woke” world that hates and feminizes men, despite despising, on a dating and mating level, the feminized men who result. If you buy into woke and being a p***y, you won’t get laid, and yet many guys seem to buy into this nonsense and indoctrination, and a larger number of women claim to want p***y guys while f**king typical hot, successful guys. What’s going on with the guys who buy the woke narrative? Could be that most guys don’t care about getting laid—or is it that getting laid in 2021 is really hard for most average guys because they don’t get it how it works and how to make it work for them, and for that reason either don’t try very hard or quit? Yours truly, however, still does try, and still feels some impulse to resist the ubiquitous media nonsense that celebrates failure and weakness instead of winning and strength. What is to be done?