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.

What does a serious society look like? What does a serious movement look like?

The Case for American Seriousness is a great work that explains what’s wrong with many currents in American society, including the abortion discourse right now. As of June 2022, abortion is the current thing, replacing Ukraine, which was the current thing a few months ago. Last year, the current thing might’ve been the Jan. 6 attempted coup event. Before that, the election. Before that, the “defund the police” and “black lives matter” protests/riots. Before that, it was “immigrants welcome here.” I don’t entirely remember what else happened, but in 2016 it was an election.

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.?

“Never settle” is an expression of narcissism

The best thing written about modern dating is by The Last Psychiatrist, and it’s so good he felt compelled to delete it, Don’t Settle For The Man You Want. It’s about narcissistic monster Lori Gottlieb, a woman who can’t see herself for who and what she is but is compelled to ladle advice out to everyone else. She thinks TV shows like Will & Grace and movies like Titanic are somehow real… “Nothing characterizes the dumbest generation of narcissists in the history of the world better than using throw away cinema as a template for life.” Lori can’t find a man for many reasons, one being that “She wants someone who will see her the way she wants to be seen and fulfill various other roles she has planned for him, leaving herself free to ‘grow.'” People are people, not roles, and not props in another person’s drama, however much social media tries to convince us otherwise (the best women I’ve met and dated in the last decade use social media minimally, if at all: not a coincidence). Lori is an expert in the negative, not in the positive,

A reasonable question might be, what kind of a man is this woman looking for? I defy you to answer this question. She’s two books and at least three essays into the topic, and still I have no idea. What I do know, however, is what she’s not looking for. That’s where her laser focus is pointed.

She is all “want” and no “give.” Real relationships mean give and take. Too much of either makes them impossible or dysfunctional. But, lots of people (especially women) have been trained to think like Lori: the man is an accessory to their life, not a person with whom she’ll build a new thing. Religion used to try to fight against narcissism, but it’s dead, and now it’s all about you. Advertising tells us so. And we have good psychological defense mechanisms that prevent us from realizing that we only want to take and never want to give. “Gottlieb figures that because she’s attractive and intelligent, the problem must be her standards are too high or men are threatened by her. Wrong. The problem is she is daring someone to like her.” Well that is one problem, and not the only one. But the key word “standards.” Listen to single women and you’ll hear endless talk of “standards.” Listen to married women and they’ll talk about how much they love their kids. Coincidence?

Listen to women’s dating podcasts (I don’t recommend it, but xbtusd listens to them, masochistically) and the idea of “standards” recurs over and over again. It’s right up there with “Living your truth” and letting emotions rule, and ruin, your life.

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.

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?

The beautiful privileges of the hot chick, and the disposability of the father

This short piece about hot chick Julia Fox is more revealing than it should be,

An older sister in one of those households worked as a dominatrix. “She would look at herself in the mirror, with the fish-nets and the PVC and the platforms,” Fox said. “And, in the back of my mind, I always knew it was an option.” In her last year of high school, she said, “I answered a Craigslist ad, when they still had the adult section, and I biked over after school and got the job.” A long-term romantic relationship with a wealthy older man, a client, followed. “I used to pray all the time that a guy would come in and take me away, and then it happened,” she said. “We were together for five years. He wanted me to marry him, and I loved him so much, but he wanted me to wear, like, Ralph Lauren Purple Label and Tory Burch. I felt like I was always playing a part.”

We get the normalization of sex work. But we also see a common bit of female fantasy, one that is nonetheless rarely represented in the media, that a man “would come in and take me away.” She’s young and hot, so she reaches out, and he does: such is the power of young hot female privilege. The writer doesn’t contemplate what happens to young guys in the same perilous circumstances… to most women, guys who they deem below them don’t exist, except as service workers, and as the people who keep their computers and phones working. Fox says, “In my personal life, I’m not having, like, crazy-wild sex.” She might be right, might be wrong, might have her internal compass set funny… she has a “five-month-old son, Valentino,” but we learn nothing at all about the father. To the chick writer and to Julia Fox, whoever inseminated her might as well not exist???

This is the middlebrow worldview, today. Sex work is good, fun, and liberating. Men are sources of cash and, should a woman need it, some semen. Being hot means a chick’ll make it in this world. The family is dead and unimportant. In current cultural conditions, is this wrong? Not, “should it be wrong?” but is it wrong? Julia says of sex, “It’s a necessary bodily function.” Yeah, cause for a hot chick, it’s available on demand, but, for the rest of us: the game. Love it or hate it, it is here, tantalizing you, to master the secrets of the p***y.

Your choice is to struggle, or die. I choose struggle. No one is going to come in and take me away (unless it’s to the gulag, for wrongthink).

If you are wondering whether Julia Fox is smart overall, listen to this podcast, and your questions will be answered. You will also discover real-time narrative formation for chicks… the podcast message is, “There’s never been a better time to be a player”… or a worse time to be a provider. Which will you be?

“The [male] feminist”

“The [male] feminist” is solid reading about a guy who needs a dad or uncle or male cousin to take him aside and tell him to stop being a p***y. Much of what we perceive as social or gender dysfunction is actually, at its heart, family dysfunction and disintegration, and, because of families are smaller and more fractured than they used to be, we don’t know how to become adults, which usually also means “how to become a man” or “how to become a woman.” “The [male] feminist” is most notable for the absence in it, because there’s no mention of this guy’s father or uncle. Where are they? Does his uncle not exist? why not?

There used to be a guy who kept a blog named Goldmund, for example, who, whatever his flaws, talked a lot about his older male relatives and how they influenced his development. Unfortunately his blog has been effectively abandoned… but he’s one of the few guys I’ve seen talk seriously about family and family influence. A lot of “how to be a man” and “how to be a woman” are best conveyed by aunts, uncles, older cousins, those relationships. Default_friend tweeted the other day that she learns a lot from her mom and grandma (can’t find the tweet at the moment), which may help explain why she thinks modern feminism is re/tarded. Camille Paglia writes about the same in her books and essays, about the vital role extended family play in development.

Who or what replaces family? Schools, bureaucracies, ideologies. Except none of those replacements work, it’s like trying to live off McDonald’s and fast food: even if you’re technically alive, you’re barely living. In “The [male] feminist,” the guy absorbs an ideology pitched by power-hungry bureaucrats. The story is exaggerated for effect, I understand that, but normal guys, as they get older, they understand how to discard bullshit that doesn’t work. Even the pathetic snake guys who embrace “I am a feminist” as a way to get laid in high school or college, almost always quit at some point. You get old enough to see an ideology doesn’t work, you quit it. The most interesting part of many stories isn’t what’s in them, but what’s missing.

Chicks aren’t attracted to vulnerability, and the story’s narrator goes around with his belly exposed to every chick he runs into. Chicks like guys they can be vulnerable with, but not guys who are vulnerable. Or the guy is vulnerable is a minor way, like, “I am afraid of heights.” Or maybe, “My ex was super hot but also hurt me badly.” Your hot ex (social proof) hurt you, and now I, a lady, can heal you with my magic pussy? That’s minor vulnerability. Major vulnerability is something like outright incompetence. Competence is attractive to women, which is why effective men work so hard to develop it.

Lots of red pill guys get that masculinity is earned, not given, and that’s why so many primitive tribes have intense male initiation rituals. Femininity is given, not earned, just by going through puberty. That power must be learned to be wielded well, to be sure, but it’s there by showing up… something the male feminist in the story misses.

I don’t remember how the exact conversation went, but Short Dancer admitted that she slept with an incompetent guy her age (who I knew slightly) right before I started f**king her. The guy got her by virtue of proximity and luck, but he lacked masculinity identity and had no one, from what I can tell, to teach him about it. Then I got with Short Dancer, who was diplomatic, but also basically said that he lacked adequate aggression and masculinity. I thought the guy was okay, and if I’d been able to see a way to help him I would have, but, due to some other circumstances, there was no real way to do so. Maybe losing Short Dancer to an older, more masculine guy taught him something important. He seemed like a guy who might identify as a male feminist, although I never heard him actually do so.