Anecdotally, as someone who has been on the other side of that debate, I very quickly got fed up with the constant goal post shifting. Not having any luck on the apps? You aren't really trying, have to approach in person. You did that, but none of the women you know are single? You aren't really trying, meet new people. You tried that, but the places you might go to do that are all male-dominated? You aren't really trying, get new hobbies (but of course pretend meeting women isn't why you are doing that). After a while I realized that no amount of effort would actually get anyone to admit that I was in fact trying.
This does remind me a bit of how people treat OCD- like there's no way you can still have OCD if you're in therapy or on meds, you must not be trying. The truth is so variable because it all depends on the person But many people *genuinely* are too scared to try.
This. Male dating advice is awful if you have perfectionist tendencies. Nobody wants to just say maybe in some cases the world isn’t fair or you’ve simply had bad luck. You’re always doing something wrong if you’re unhappily single. It’s always a skill issue.
Some people do feel that way, I don’t think that it’s always a skill issue, but I think if you’ve never tried (like the guy in my example) it’s really hard to assess what the issue is. Clearly he has enough going for him that he’s developed relationships with multiple women online!
Oh yeah I agree in that case, sometimes it is a skill issue or a lack of effort and risk taking. I don’t think you give unreasonable advice, but I see this perfectionism in male dating advice more generally fairly frequently.
Male dating advice often turns into basically “have you considered completely remaking your lifestyle and personality, and also obtaining 90% percentile social skills, and building a giant mixed gender social circle of extroverted partiers?” People don’t explicitly say that, but that is the implication if you take all the advice seriously.
Maybe this is something else I should write about, but I wonder how this conflicts with female dating advice because I feel like if you were in my generation, you were told to basically make yourself the perfect girlfriend and obsess over beauty from middle school onward, and then there was a shift where we were told, we shouldn’t care what men think even in situations where we’re obviously doing something that isn’t helping us.
I’d be interested. I have noticed that contrast too where women’s dating advice focuses so much on self-acceptance and having ever higher standards than on the nuts and bolts of being more attractive or approachable. I didn’t realize this was a shift form previous generations though.
"I didn’t realize this was a shift form previous generations though."
I've seen multiple times people advance (to me) wild claims that women have never been told to change themselves for a man and it's only now occurring to me that some people didn't grow up watching romcoms from the 90s-00s.
Yeah I feel like male dating advice, for a lack of better words, tend to be very self improvement pilled and tend to standardize a lot of things - I guess in a sense, male dating advice feels very much like workout advice.
But in reality, a lot of dating is just pure luck and finding a place where you have high chances to meet more compatible ones and assess compatibility, which is almost polar opposite of standardized or checklist able skills
If your lifestyle and interests aren't putting you in a position where you are likely to meet someone AND meeting someone is really important to you, then yep, you will have to make those changes.
As I mentioned earlier, I had a really hard time talking to women, that's what alcohol is for, I spent years going out drinking to clubs trying to hook up.
Now you know why vodka red bulls and old formula Four Lokos existed.
For actual advice, try to figure out another way to relax and get loose. Another thing the clubs used to have going for them is relative anonymity. You could go and try hitting on someone with pretty good odds that if the interaction didn't go well, you'd never see them again, which helped people take the plunge. I feel like cell phones have kind of ruined this.
The advice of "just get into the top 10% of the category you are operating in and success is assured!" Just like the saying, "Good work if you can get it," there is the principle, "reach the top 10% and you will probably be successful!" . . . "the median person is a disgusting loser" model.
If you're an extreme outlier wrt dating results despite having the rest of your life more or less in order, it feels unreasonable to assume this is just luck, rather than a skill issue.
Well, I think there's also a difficulty here in that we're all clearly talking about dating *discourse* which is more a political debate than an attempt at giving advice. People on either side will never allow that the people on the other side have any point bc polarization. Substack seems promising to me as a space which allows discussions outside of that dynamic.
Important, bc on another level - it's not simply that it is true that some things are not fair or outside of your control, but also requests that are technically fair or within your control are often super hard and discouraging, or force you to suppress aspects of yourself. It's totally "fair" and "in your control" (if incorrect) to say "men only like women with this size breast, so you just have to get a boob job," but we all know to reject that as silly advice because we all know about the secret caveat on "find a partner" which is "*who likes and affirms me" lol
I had the same thought and came here to mention that, Testname. I think the dating advice sphere needs to define “trying” in more specific ways. I have * my * definition of “trying”, but I once heavily offended someone by using the word flippantly, as it’s often used to move the goal post or suggest that the unsuccessful person has been sitting around doing nothing.
I wonder if the goal post shifting is a symptom of having a kind of black-and-white discourse that doesn't really help people. From my perspective:
- Dating can be *really really hard*. If someone says "I've tried really hard and I'm striking out", I hope we can all at least recognize that being in that situation genuinely sucks.
- But also, the only move any of us ever have on the chessboard is to change things that we're in control of. The only choices are to make those changes, or not. So the only advice that's ever really actionable has to be there. Even if it's not going to help that much and the situation sucks.
I think it is a general pathology of self-improvement that it often comes with the implicit fine print "and if this doesn't make things awesome for you, it's because you suck/you're holding it wrong/etc"...which...really isn't true. It's just a required fiction that those giving out advice need to maintain in order to have their claims be strong.
I was expecting to be annoyed (as I usually am with the use of the term), but found myself in furious agreement with most of the article. As I've been saying for years now, the term "incel" no longer means anything, and indeed equating lack of sexual/romantic success with misogyny just objectifies women. I'll also add that 99.9% of the discourse on incels isn't people identifying as such, but other people, usually progressives, using it as a slur. Incels are just a convenient boogeyman because our culture got stuck in high school, where it was cool to mock virgins.
A few years ago I saw someone on Twitter, I think Gabriel Rossman, point out that the default leftwing insult was "incel" and the default rightwing insult was "cuck". He pointed out that low sexual status men are the one category of people who have no protections, whom anyone can insult and it's okay.
Since he wrote this, the rightists have shifted to using racial slurs more, but you get the point.
Yup, masculine insecurities are eternal. It’s the exact equivalent of calling a woman online fat and ugly - it will hurt no matter how untrue it is, and it’s designed to.
I agreed with this piece until close to the end. I don't ask my Gen-Z college and graduate students about their dating habits but I end up learning stuff anyway. Someone mentions a boyfriend in a conversation about weekend plans, someone's girlfriend stops by the lab, etc. The numbers show less sex/dating than in previous generations but it's still happening enough that if you are 24 and have never dated anyone, that's still strange and (if you put in reasonable effort) may reflect you being unattractive.
I think incel self-identification arose in substantial part because of romantically unsuccessful men basically being told their experiences weren't happening. A lot of people, mostly but not always women, seem to think it is easy to find a girlfriend and that if you can't, it's because you aren't trying or don't practice basic hygiene or have a truly horrible personality or something. The unattractive wanted to shout to the world "we exist, our experiences happened." What else is a Reddit forum good for anyway? Point is, the unattractive still exist, even if not dating is becoming more of a default.
At any rate the word "incel" is useless for self-identification now. I like Ozy Brennan's suggestion that the category be split into "love shy" (can't find a partner) and "blackpilled" (thinks Chads are taking all the Staceys because the 19th Amendment or whatever).
This could be somewhat regional or class-oriented. The entiretey of Gen Z is not sexless, but they're far loneliner than millennials were at their age. I know marriage rates are lower among less educated and working class people, so that could be it? When I worked in tech, most of my Gen Z coworkers did have girlfriends and boyfriends.
I think you've hit on something here. In the bubble of the wealthy I do not see these trends in younger people I know. Maybe socializing frequently IRL has become another luxury good.
For married couples with young children having childcare at their disposal enables socializing with friends so those with that luxury are less likely to feel lonely.
I think the difference is almost entirely college. 4-year college is one of the last truly great places to date. Even if you don't marry someone you met in college, you very likely at least had a friend group in college and get in some dating experience, which helps you date after college as well.
I’m glad you brought up the socialization gap as well. I think there’s a huge knock-on effect that wealth has on confidence/belonging/social comfortability that no one talks about here!
There's probably a fairly strong socioeconomic class aspect. My Gen Z daughter is in college, and most of her peers have boyfriends or girlfriends. And, she's a weirdo who hangs out with other weirdos, so it's not limited to just Stacies and Chads. But, I think college is one of the few places left where's its still OK to approach someone for a date.
In fact, before she decided on college, my daughter was considering becoming a hairstylist - and all I could think was "oh no, if she doesn't go to college, how will she ever meet anyone? It'll be all girls and maybe a couple gay dudes at hairstyling school..."
In my generation (Gen X), a lot of my friends met their significant others at work; but that's a big nope nowadays what with #metoo.
We also just met people randomly by striking up a conversation. These days, however, most of those icebreakers are obsolete. You can't ask someone what time it is, or for directions, because no one does that anymore, you just look at your phone or use the phone GPS.
Yes, I think it's very clear that going to college could still be worth it just from a meat market perspective. Doubly so for guys given the current ratio's.
I don't know what the numbers are but, say, a 30% drop in sexual partners is very big but still not so big that it is normal to have never had a girlfriend at age 24.
On the quality of loneliness, it’s ambiguous because The Weeknd made a career out of singing about being a lonely sadboi but indulging a constant stream of sex & drugs. Ergo the 80% lonely stat doesn’t actually represent physical solitude
I’m always shocked at how ignorant most women are about men’s dating experiences. A lot of women seem to think as an average man you can fire up a dating app and have multiple dates lined up within a week, even if you’re looking for casual. They don’t realize that all but the most attractive men have to work really hard to get casual sex at all, and not super frequently even when they do get it, and that even men looking for something serious will have to have a lot of patience.
I also suspect that many of us, myself included, don't have a real good idea of what dating looks like for truly average women. I think I have a halfway decent idea of what high-demand and low-demand women's dating lives might look like, but average middle-of-the-pack ones? Not a clue.
On the other side, I also think men often envy women for being able to easily get casual sex, and fail to understand that women generally don’t *want* it.
Possibly unfair take: do women even think at all about men’s dating lives (besides CHH, god bless her big heart)? They know that the guys they’re mostly interested in mostly have other options. They know that some other dudes are predators. The rest of us there’s no reason to ever think about.
Appreciate the honesty! To be fair, if dating had always come easy to me, I would probably never have developed this disproportionate fascination with women’s dating lives.
My two cents, as a woman it is fairly easy to get a date. It's mind boggling difficult to get a man to commit to anything, even men that might not have many options. It's wild out there.
As a guy who was never afraid to commit, even as a teenager, all I can say is we’re out there (to be clear, I would probably have been a *terrible* partner at the time, but commitment wouldn’t have been the problem!)
My take is that very attractive dudes who want long-term relationships are either already in one, or get snapped up real quickly. Fortunately the rest of us who are flawed, but do want a serious relationship are not as rare as you might think.
Well, I've been married for the last 4 years, but I dated for a looooooong time, so.
I don't think I was only dating Chads and expecting commitment from them. In fact, when I was 37 I really broadened my criteria too ... basically nothing and went on dates with all sorts of men, different education levels, jobs, heights, attractiveness, activeness, dorkiness, etc. And I tried to make a deal with myself that I would go out with any reasonable dude at least twice, to try and know him a bit before saying no. So, I'm talking about commitment to second dates, not even like the label "boyfriend," or anything like that.
That’s just bizarre. Sorry that it was so hard to get anything out of those guys. Glad you finally got yourself a decent one who takes the relationship seriously.
Even dates. Just to be clear, I've been off the market for 5 years, but I dated forever before finding my husband and feel like I experienced a broad slice of every thing out there.
So, you go on a first date, and then... bad texting, no meeting plans, no next steps. So one might be tempted to think they don't want to date you any more, but then they will like randomly text you three weeks later and act confused as to why you wrote them off. It becomes abundantly clear very quickly that many men are weirdly invested in keeping things very casual in perpetuity.
And this can happen whether or not you've been intimate. Like it seems unrelated to sex, and more about laziness (or....? fear? ). I don't know. It was super confusing.
Weird. If this is “normal,” no wonder I was succeeding well above what I had been used to when I moved to CA and was dating again. Still happy to have been done with that since 2015!
That might be the case! I was just talking to my husband about this, and I asked him if he had any friends that acted like this, and he admitted that if that was the case, he would never know because men wouldn't be likely to talk about that among themselves.
We got into a further conversation about how my husband is just a dude who likes to do things and that probably helped him date and get girlfriends because he was always willing to go out and do things with people just for the experience. He had plans! He left the house!
I think this is definitely true, because in general we tend to assume our own experiences are harder than the other side. We see our own specific challenges and think "wow it would be nice to not have THAT problem" and don't realize there's a whole other set we haven't considered.
I want to say that’s more a geography problem. If you have good pics or show up to bar & “normal”, you can find someone average. But if you live in the middle of nowhere, you have less options
Yes, the unattractive still exist but there are plenty of unattractive people of both sexes. The key is to have a realistic view of your own value, and then set your sights appropriately. I've seen plenty of unattractive/obese people that still end up married.
Women have the advantage/disadvantage of expectations for using hair and makeup products that can up the attractiveness quotient. Men can certainly use makeup and hair products if they want, but that's not the norm. Also, male pattern baldness exists...
This is really interesting to me, as someone whose younger brother is a self-proclaimed "incel" who is in his 30's with no romantic experience but also has a combination of easily curable and incurable handicaps to his dating life. On one hand, he's tall, handsome and earning well into six figures as an optical engineer; on the other, he has pronounced autism and smells horrible in a medical way, and refuses to see a doctor to try and address that issue (we're unsure if it's a horrible rotting dead tooth or a hormone issue or what, but he's smelly enough that when he stays at my place I wash the sheets with vinegar when he leaves). He's also a raging misogynist who casually calls women "whores" and complains about "roasties" and loudly talks in public about how all single moms should be sterilized by the government before they spawn again. According to him, the sole reason he can't get a woman is because of the sexual revolution, because prior to that his paycheck would have been sufficient to lure in and keep a "good woman" because she wouldn't have other options.
I do feel like a lot of women either know or have encountered a man like my brother, and that becomes their idea of an incel: someone who finds it easier to blame women than to take simple steps towards becoming dateable. It's the utter resistance to any form of self-improvement and the externalization of that, making it everyone else's fault. There's an element of it that smacks of learned helplessness and hoping that by bitterly complaining enough, women will capitulate and lower their standards, that feels reminiscent of begging mommy to cut up their sandwiches for them because it's existentially unfair that the store still sells bread with the crust on. I'd say that in my social circles, THAT'S what the term "incel" refers to specifically, that infantile expectation that a man shouldn't have to put any effort into anything because women shouldn't have the option to fail to cater to men's whims. That's why people say Elon has "incel energy" even though he has baby mamas. It's the constant externalization of responsibility, the sense of entitlement to attention and praise, and the juvenile attitude towards self-improvement.
I don't think this is the platonic definition, but it does explain some of the definition-drift online.
Yeah, when my brother vents online about all the awful sluts who spurn him to debase themselves for a Chad he tends to leave out that he smells so bad that people won't go into enclosed spaces like cars with him! Which, to be fair, is something that probably wouldn't be easy to fix given how he's got relatively tidy hygiene practices, but really does change the entire context of the conversation.
How does he reject the useful feedback about how he smells? Like, does he deny that he smells bad in a way that causes a problem, or does he deny that he "should" have to change how he smells to make other people not mind being around him?
The latter. According to him, people need to just stop being “shallow” and get used to it, but to be honest I think that he probably is just afraid it’s a problem without an easy fix and is scared to attempt to find a solution in vain.
Your brother is clearly someone who is richly deserving of being alone, and women are collectively doing exactly what they should by making sure he never gets to first base, but part of me also thinks that even when you’re an asshole, being unwanted probably still hurts like hell and does a number on you. I hope one day he realizes that he doesn’t have to be like this.
I'm doing my best, but I think the ship may have sailed on his ability to socialize with women (he called me a "fucking whore" at Christmas dinner this year in front of the family, so this has been on my mind a lot.) I have no doubt that he's in emotional and spiritual pain and because I love him and because I don't want to see anyone in pain, I wish I could fix it for him. I have my doubts that it would be easy for him to find a girlfriend even with a sparkling, extroverted personality because of the pungent odor. I don't know, percentage-wise, how much easier he could make his dating situation or how much he could actually change his attractiveness since I don't know why he smells that bad.
But I do know that right now he's not taking ANY efforts to improve his situation, be they trying to set up dates, talking to his doctor, or reading up on how to talk to women. Instead he just sits on incel discords all day complaining about foids, which makes him unattractive and makes the idea of introducing my single, interested lady friends to him a no-go. He's set himself on hard mode and doesn't seem to take any ownership of that.
Jesus, I’m so sorry! He’s lucky that you’re even talking to him at all, if he treats you that way.
Also, I had never even heard the word “foid” until today, but it’s the kind of word that you can tell right away involves absolutely bottomless contempt.
I think the main two reasons for the incel/misogynist conflation are:
- The "incel" community on reddit had a specific ideology, it wasn't just a collection of men with romantic struggles
- Calling a misogynist a misogynist gives them power, like calling them mean. "Loser virgin living in parents' basement" stings a lot more, even though there's not really anything wrong with being that.
It's led to a strange phenomenon where discussing *anything* related to male social isolation makes people assume you're complaining that horrible men are being denied a god-given entitlement to sex. (of course, some horrible people do make this point)
But sex isn't a cure for isolation. The inceldom is a symptom of the social isolation, not the other way around.
Plus, after the Santa Barbara and other similar shootings, the IRL world realized we were having to put up with nutcases with this ideology who were actually going out and killing people over it.
The "all misogynists are incels" false equivalency is funny. I've seen someone on Reddit call Elon Musk, a man who has been married three times and fathered 14 children that we know about, an "incel". Whatever you think about his relationship with women, this is not celibacy.
So like he's a father in the loosest way possible. He doesn't love any of the moms. Isn't married to any of them now. The kids were conceived in a lab. It's possible he didn't even ejaculate for the recent ones and used frozen sperm from when he was younger. He doesn't raise the babies. That's done by nannies. It would be totally fine to call him an incel I think.
Obviously none of the stuff about being a bad father and having bad relationships with the mothers relates to celibacy in any way. Seriously, would you call a guy "celibate" because he leaves behind a string exes who hate him and children he ignores??
If they're all IVF babies, that does mean that we don't have _conclusive_ proof that he had sex. However, when a woman is willing to marry a man and be impregnated with his sperm, she is frequently willing to have sex with him as well. I also think that he had sex with his unmarried baby mamas, certainly at least two of them. A simple google search finds a video of him and Shivon Zilis attending a wedding less than 3 weeks ago at Mar-a-Lago.
The only way it is fine to call a man an incel when he is currently attending weddings with a woman who bore 4 of his children, is if "incel" is now a generic insult without any connection to its original meaning.
Look at his latest baby mama. He's a CEO and he's slumming it with an egirl, and by all accounts, they didn't even have sex to make the baby. Then he left her holding the baby. He seems to have been cold-DMing random women and asking them if they want to have his IVF baby. Not exactly the move someone with women flinging their panties at him would make.
If the Republican grifter were the only woman in his life, one sentence of that might have been relevant, but she's not even the one responsible for the latest baby.
You seem to be under the impression that if you convince me that Elon sucks and various related insults apply to him, I'll concede that he's celibate, despite the fact that he's currently attending weddings, inauguration parties, etc, with the mother of 4 of his children, a woman who has the wide-eyed stare of a true Elon fangirl..
I find it hard to imagine that he’d have trouble getting a woman to sleep with him if he’s able to get multiple women to agree to get pregnant with his sperm.
In a previous article where you mentioned that most women wish men would approach them more often, one commenter (I think Lila Krishna) said that too often, the reality of that is you end up having a hard time extricating yourself from a painfully awkward conversation with a dude with zero social skills. The famous "hello, HR?!?" viral comic also comes to mind. Like, sure, almost everyone enjoys being approached - by the right person.
I will say that when I was younger, I found approaches flattering, even if they came from people that I was not attracted to, but I drew the line when someone couldn’t take a hint or was being really inappropriate about it.
Yeah, and that's obviously inacceptable. It's a line that *should* be drawn.
When I was growing up, you would see lots of movies and TV shows that would show not taking no for an answer as being an asset. You're not giving up! You're being perseverant! Going for the goal! And in most areas of life, perseverance *is* a great quality! But when consent is required, if you're getting signs of lack of interest, you should absolutely point your perseverance at someone else.
My wife regularly criticizes this aspect of rom coms - the guy who never gives up. IRL, as you say, the guy arguably *should* give up. My wife’s point is that, IRL, the guy *would* give up - 100% of the time. Constant rejection is very off putting and painful for most people.
It's also fascinating how often elderly women will describe how they met their long-time partner in those terms - "I had no interest at first, but he kept trying and he eventually wore me down", and they're saying it with genuine affection, not in a "yeah, I finally gave in to that fucker and I never should have" kind of way. I suspect there may be an element of "permission to be horny" somewhere in there, though.
I think it's mostly permission to be horny combined with courtship over time. But the image of persistence has also changed. @casualsex has written about how there's a knack to casually propositioning someone for sex and I think a similar thing applies here - the guy who has a winsome attitude of "you'll love me eventually" but is clearly actually going to treat you the same regardless of your decision is very different than the guy who keeps asking in angrier tones of voice and starts stalking you.
Yeah, I think (as with discourse over metoo) people really overestimate the number of dudes who were annoyingly persistent who were influenced by romcoms lol. Being a lout doesn't really correlate with watching chickflicks.
Haha, I’m not a very persistent person under the best of circumstances, so that has saved my ass at least a little in the past, but I think there was more of an ambient “if at first you don’t succeed” vibe (sometimes executed in a seductive way and sometimes not) that is a lot less acceptable today.
In the vein of "there are no solutions only trade-offs", totally agree that telling people not to approach folk in public did maybe help to make creeps more identifiable, maybe ladies felt safer but it led to less coupling.
now maybe that trade off is worth it to you. I used to hate the amount of disgusting guys who'd yell out of their cars at me trying to proposition me. It was absolutely gross and demeaning. But guys also just talked to me about mutual interests (and I'd be completely unaware to their flirting) more too.
Yeah, I had a boyfriend in my 20s so I didn’t really want any approaches but most of the ones I did get I found flattering. If there had been a way to just get rid of the ones that were legitimately disgusting and predatory I would have. I guess my concern is that any guy like that is already so deviant that he probably wouldn’t listen to any changing social norms anyway! Like there was a guy who legitimately followed me down the street one time and I highly doubt he was listening to any content about respecting women lol
Exactly. I've been with my husband since I was 20 (16 years ago 😵) and even he sort of approached me for a date in a way that may get him cancelled now (white guy lusting over a black woman in black history month no less!) but was not really out of bounds then but the guy what yelled "hey, hey baby, HEY" out of the car wasn't reading Jezebel.
Yeah, I suspect that guys yelling shit from their cars are not doing that as a flirting strategy so much as an assertion of power - "I'm doing this because I can and there's nothing you can do stop me". It's street harassment, they're not trying to get a date. And my guess is they're pretty impervious to shaming and moral appeals.
Yeah, the entire goal is to either make your friends laugh or make women uncomfortable. I don’t think any of those men believe they’re actually going to find a girlfriend that way.
I don't think cold-approaching women actually helped anyone. It had like a pretty huge failure rate for all but a very small sliver of men, and convinced the rest that they were one cool pickup line from having a date. It used to be acceptable to slap men for using a bad pickup line but gen z men would probably file assault and battery charges.
It was more successful if you were kinda regular at some spot, or series of spots. And you both probably had nicknames for each other like "ski jacket" and "three-martini lunch". Your interest in each other was emissaried by friends, and your date zero was probably hanging out as a big group at one of your regular spots.
People aren't regulars anywhere anymore except work. There's not as much repeated contact that softens you up on friends or dates anymore.
Yes good point! I saw a post on Twitter where a guy was like "she's not hot, you just are around her a lot". Yeah dude, that's how this used to work! All of my friends from college that have married (I graduated in 2011) got with their future spouses this way. You can develop an attraction through a relationship but you can't develop a relationship from "I can't stand being around you and we have no mutual interests".
I find it surprising how much easier it is to make friends now that my kid's in school. I see the same moms and dads at school, at the same neighborhood events, at all the birthday parties. With some of the moms, I've made friends after about a year of seeing each other in these settings. Casual repeated contact is an important part of making new connections.
I don’t think it was a common thing even 20 years ago to hit people for saying something that wasn’t charming enough — like your original implication. I’ve literally never heard of it. I think even Will Smith slapping that man in the Oscars was a shocking deviation because it’s simply not normal. I also remember the furore when Zidane struck a fellow player during the World cup sometime in the 2000s. I don’t think it’s just a GenZ thing where this is considered a shocking reaction.
oh totally. Just saying I get where the desire to stop all men cold encountering you when you deal with this shit but it didn't necessarily stop these guys but stopped guys who *weren't* these guys
So all the maximalist hectoring was useless then. In fact it was genuinely a bad thing to convince 90% of decent men that men are trash. The 10% who are actual trash don’t care and catcall on the street and fuck around if they can anyway.
Is there such thing as being an exurb-cel? Aka “everything is so exhaustingly far away that basic socializing feels like an insurmountable task?”
I still make time for it but mannnnn— it’s like you cross a county line on your commute and there isn’t a soul below the age of 55
But what I’ve also found is it’s harder to develop something meaningful. And that one or two awkward interactions (a very normal part of getting to know somebody) will have either party skedaddling.
To me, "incel" meant someone who has strong feelings of alienation towards relationships and sex, and lets that become a cornerstone of their identity, usually expressed either in raging outward misogyny or ironic adoption of terminology that gradually becomes normal. The not fucking part is almost incidental.
As a man who hasn’t been out in “streets” and met my wife literally 2 months before Tinder went live, I have no idea what it’s like out there for single men.
A good friend of mine is handsome, incredibly “popular”, 6 ft, owns a comm/res real estate biz, and does extremely with well with women (currently living a poly-esque lifestyle lol).
He claims opportunities for straight men to have one night stands / date are much greater than the 00s and 10s, bc so few guys go out and hit on straight women, and now the ratio significantly favors straight men. I believe he’s totally wrong and biased bc the cards are stacked in his favor.
From what I’ve heard from my less fortunate bros, is that way fewer people are going out in general, and while there are way fewer men hitting on women IRL, women’s standards have risen significantly / people aren’t as open to interacting with “strangers” nowadays so the odds for straight men are significantly worse.
I agree with you that your tall handsome friend is out of touch. Very attractive men seem to often lack awareness of how much they benefit from their looks.
My observation is that as approaching becomes less normalized, it’s harder to do it well enough for woman to be interested. Women aren’t expecting or hoping to be approached as much, so you really have to sell yourself make it work. It’s more likely to come off as awkward because it’s not the norm. They’re also not going to give signals to approach or do things to make themselves more approachable.
I don’t know where he gets the idea that gender ratios favor men when going out. My experience is bars and clubs have more men than women almost universally, especially the kinds of weekend party venues that would facilitate hookups and approaches.
His point was Gen Z and younger millennial men are too awkward / scared to approach, making it much easier for guys with the “balls” to approach and start a convo.
In fairness, he’s got such a gregarious and likable personality it’s ridiculous. He’s literally close friend with a Netflix featured stand up comic he grew up with and has her falling over laughing when they hang lol. It’s sight to behold lol.
It's always been fun to be a good-looking, charming person in the dating market. Probably your friend thinks it's better because now not only are women excited to be hit on by an attractive guy, there's a bit of a novelty factor that didn't used to exist. But I seriously doubt that applies to anyone who's not top 10% attractive to people.
Definitely harder, and it's not just because I'm older. (I think it would be even harder if I was younger today.) People are just a lot more introverted and cliquier. It's much harder to break through and talk to a group of women than it was years ago. I also think standards are a lot higher. Seeing the amount of people we do in the casual, seemingly intimate ways that instagram and tiktok present is making it harder to settle down. I know it is for me. This is my experience in a big city, it was *slightly* easier when I lived for a few years in a mid-sized city.
Interesting that the mid-sized city was easier. I remember reading an article claiming dating options for college educated women in mid sized cities were awful compared to big cities, maybe that’s a factor.
Unfortunately, social anxiety also applies to the women being approached, not just the men doing the approaching.
Singles mixers and dating events have become popular in my city, every single one of them advertised with marketing copy about getting off the apps and meeting people in real life. I've gone to many events the past two years or so, and it's common to see women who are completely unprepared to actually talk to a man, even at a ticketed event where they've paid money for the express purpose of being in the same room as single guys.
Sometimes it's so bad that the majority of conversations happening at the event are same-sex. There's a series of events organized and run by a particular woman, Lexi, and for whatever reason those events are the worst examples I've seen - in spite of fitting more than a hundred people into a building, almost nobody pairs up even to chat. The women would stay in clusters with the (female) friends they brought with them, and give the cold shoulder to everyone; men would migrate from one side of the building to other in streams, trying to find a woman who would willingly make eye contact with them, and failing. It's easy to pick Lexi, the organizer, out of the crowd at her events: If you see a woman who is actually talking to men, that's her. I've spoken to other men, traded that tip, and had them say they'd noticed the same thing and identified Lexi the same way. (Obviously, I stopped buying tickets to her events, since there wasn't a point.)
Most events are not that bad. I'm sure the women in question would say they're acting this way for some mix of Safety ("I need my besties to look out for me!") and just being uninterested in the guys who showed up. Yet I can't help but notice that, in a room full of men desperate to try out their best jokes, stories, and fashion, almost none of the women decided to kill time by just talking to a guy, even in a controlled, safe environment.
That was certainly my experience on OKCupid back in the day. I could have dates lined up every day back then if I wanted to. A lot of the people I matched up with were really happy that I took them up on the dates because they'd sent so many messages without getting any traction. But I was also the kind of girl who could go to a bar and get offers to buy me a drink all night, so it just wasn't surprising that I was also in demand online.
Found my husband on tinder. We lived a few blocks apart, worked down the street from each other, and shopped at the same grocery store but we never would have met in a million years without the app or even considered each other seriously. Apps improved my life dramatically because while I was in male-dominated spaces, I felt a real lack of control over my love life. Just being on an app where everyone was single and looking and you'd know if there was mutual interest made the whole thing much easier.
The apps don’t work the way you imagine, especially Tinder. The reality is there are way more men looking for casual than women, so women looking for casual sex can have very high standards. To get casual sex off the apps as a man, you either have to dramatically lower your standards, or work very hard to craft a perfect profile and be very patient. It’s a very dispiriting experience.
The best book I ever read about how to optimize online dating was called "Data: A Love Story." The woman was having an impossible time on the apps, but she was a market researcher, so she decided to make a bunch of dummy male profiles of the kinds of guys she'd like to date and then piloted the profiles to see what kinds of women they matched up with to see how she could optimize her profile to be more like the attractive women that the men she liked were seeing on the apps. It was a fascinating read.
Hard agree on the Gen Z entire class warping that happens when you make everyone an indoor kid when most kids should be outdoor kids
I can’t imagine spending so much time on a computer, even though I had work from home during the pandemic and got the brain worms we all got- I was eager to get out of there not stay trapped
Best part of my life is being in nature and the street all day, novel interactions, seeing and talking to strangers and being neighborly in small ways
I know a girl who runs a discord e-bar where the watch e-sports and have the same level of nerdy stats and player engagement with whatever the video game is that regular people might have with the NBA.
She has all these friends who she has never physically met and that’s crazy to me like, wdym every single one of your friends has spent less time in your home with your kid than me- pretty much a random tinder guy
Who helps you move your furniture? Who do you eat breakfast with like
there are a lot of reasons these roads and social pathways have atrophied but for so many younger people never getting to the on ramp is deeply disconcerting
I used to play a LOT of World of Warcraft. But I would also get together with many of those guys at the local coffee shop, and actually met other out of towners in real life several times. We even did a week long Vegas trip together.
And I know some other people that met that way and got married,
As a esports guy, most of my main day one friends are all online. Video games and voice chat is enough to get deep meaning relationships rather than normie irl “how’s the weather “ types
Different friend, I want to spend time with and make a point to specifically sit down w them but all they are interested in is going onto discord and into Minecraft and sure that can be fun- it’s been years since I played the game when it was alpha
Sometimes gaming so much can be a retreat from life when you’re discouraged- this friend is pretty despondent bc miscarriages and infertility- lots of cases of IRL just withering rather than meeting expectations
what’s the right balance because so many people have no ability to fix the broken things irl so ig just make a nice little house in a game because real world houses start at an unattainable $1M and household median income is $105k but that’s 70 hours of work a week with no breaks for a working class person
wouldn’t the easier pathway be retreat from the physical world because the wealthy have squeezed the life out of real world physical space with scarcity and extraction
Anecdotally, as someone who has been on the other side of that debate, I very quickly got fed up with the constant goal post shifting. Not having any luck on the apps? You aren't really trying, have to approach in person. You did that, but none of the women you know are single? You aren't really trying, meet new people. You tried that, but the places you might go to do that are all male-dominated? You aren't really trying, get new hobbies (but of course pretend meeting women isn't why you are doing that). After a while I realized that no amount of effort would actually get anyone to admit that I was in fact trying.
This does remind me a bit of how people treat OCD- like there's no way you can still have OCD if you're in therapy or on meds, you must not be trying. The truth is so variable because it all depends on the person But many people *genuinely* are too scared to try.
This. Male dating advice is awful if you have perfectionist tendencies. Nobody wants to just say maybe in some cases the world isn’t fair or you’ve simply had bad luck. You’re always doing something wrong if you’re unhappily single. It’s always a skill issue.
Some people do feel that way, I don’t think that it’s always a skill issue, but I think if you’ve never tried (like the guy in my example) it’s really hard to assess what the issue is. Clearly he has enough going for him that he’s developed relationships with multiple women online!
Oh yeah I agree in that case, sometimes it is a skill issue or a lack of effort and risk taking. I don’t think you give unreasonable advice, but I see this perfectionism in male dating advice more generally fairly frequently.
Male dating advice often turns into basically “have you considered completely remaking your lifestyle and personality, and also obtaining 90% percentile social skills, and building a giant mixed gender social circle of extroverted partiers?” People don’t explicitly say that, but that is the implication if you take all the advice seriously.
Maybe this is something else I should write about, but I wonder how this conflicts with female dating advice because I feel like if you were in my generation, you were told to basically make yourself the perfect girlfriend and obsess over beauty from middle school onward, and then there was a shift where we were told, we shouldn’t care what men think even in situations where we’re obviously doing something that isn’t helping us.
I’d be interested. I have noticed that contrast too where women’s dating advice focuses so much on self-acceptance and having ever higher standards than on the nuts and bolts of being more attractive or approachable. I didn’t realize this was a shift form previous generations though.
"I didn’t realize this was a shift form previous generations though."
I've seen multiple times people advance (to me) wild claims that women have never been told to change themselves for a man and it's only now occurring to me that some people didn't grow up watching romcoms from the 90s-00s.
Yeah I feel like male dating advice, for a lack of better words, tend to be very self improvement pilled and tend to standardize a lot of things - I guess in a sense, male dating advice feels very much like workout advice.
But in reality, a lot of dating is just pure luck and finding a place where you have high chances to meet more compatible ones and assess compatibility, which is almost polar opposite of standardized or checklist able skills
If your lifestyle and interests aren't putting you in a position where you are likely to meet someone AND meeting someone is really important to you, then yep, you will have to make those changes.
As I mentioned earlier, I had a really hard time talking to women, that's what alcohol is for, I spent years going out drinking to clubs trying to hook up.
What does one do if alcohol just makes him tired?
Now you know why vodka red bulls and old formula Four Lokos existed.
For actual advice, try to figure out another way to relax and get loose. Another thing the clubs used to have going for them is relative anonymity. You could go and try hitting on someone with pretty good odds that if the interaction didn't go well, you'd never see them again, which helped people take the plunge. I feel like cell phones have kind of ruined this.
Add some cocaine?
Heard that from a friend of course...
Although I would be scared now with all this fentanyl crap. We didn't have to worry about that when I was raving in the late 90's
The advice of "just get into the top 10% of the category you are operating in and success is assured!" Just like the saying, "Good work if you can get it," there is the principle, "reach the top 10% and you will probably be successful!" . . . "the median person is a disgusting loser" model.
> Nobody wants to just say maybe in some cases the world isn’t fair or you’ve simply had bad luck
There's not a big constituency for hearing this, either.
If you're an extreme outlier wrt dating results despite having the rest of your life more or less in order, it feels unreasonable to assume this is just luck, rather than a skill issue.
Well, I think there's also a difficulty here in that we're all clearly talking about dating *discourse* which is more a political debate than an attempt at giving advice. People on either side will never allow that the people on the other side have any point bc polarization. Substack seems promising to me as a space which allows discussions outside of that dynamic.
Important, bc on another level - it's not simply that it is true that some things are not fair or outside of your control, but also requests that are technically fair or within your control are often super hard and discouraging, or force you to suppress aspects of yourself. It's totally "fair" and "in your control" (if incorrect) to say "men only like women with this size breast, so you just have to get a boob job," but we all know to reject that as silly advice because we all know about the secret caveat on "find a partner" which is "*who likes and affirms me" lol
I had the same thought and came here to mention that, Testname. I think the dating advice sphere needs to define “trying” in more specific ways. I have * my * definition of “trying”, but I once heavily offended someone by using the word flippantly, as it’s often used to move the goal post or suggest that the unsuccessful person has been sitting around doing nothing.
I wonder if the goal post shifting is a symptom of having a kind of black-and-white discourse that doesn't really help people. From my perspective:
- Dating can be *really really hard*. If someone says "I've tried really hard and I'm striking out", I hope we can all at least recognize that being in that situation genuinely sucks.
- But also, the only move any of us ever have on the chessboard is to change things that we're in control of. The only choices are to make those changes, or not. So the only advice that's ever really actionable has to be there. Even if it's not going to help that much and the situation sucks.
I think it is a general pathology of self-improvement that it often comes with the implicit fine print "and if this doesn't make things awesome for you, it's because you suck/you're holding it wrong/etc"...which...really isn't true. It's just a required fiction that those giving out advice need to maintain in order to have their claims be strong.
I was expecting to be annoyed (as I usually am with the use of the term), but found myself in furious agreement with most of the article. As I've been saying for years now, the term "incel" no longer means anything, and indeed equating lack of sexual/romantic success with misogyny just objectifies women. I'll also add that 99.9% of the discourse on incels isn't people identifying as such, but other people, usually progressives, using it as a slur. Incels are just a convenient boogeyman because our culture got stuck in high school, where it was cool to mock virgins.
A few years ago I saw someone on Twitter, I think Gabriel Rossman, point out that the default leftwing insult was "incel" and the default rightwing insult was "cuck". He pointed out that low sexual status men are the one category of people who have no protections, whom anyone can insult and it's okay.
Since he wrote this, the rightists have shifted to using racial slurs more, but you get the point.
Yup, masculine insecurities are eternal. It’s the exact equivalent of calling a woman online fat and ugly - it will hurt no matter how untrue it is, and it’s designed to.
This is often wielded by women
I agreed with this piece until close to the end. I don't ask my Gen-Z college and graduate students about their dating habits but I end up learning stuff anyway. Someone mentions a boyfriend in a conversation about weekend plans, someone's girlfriend stops by the lab, etc. The numbers show less sex/dating than in previous generations but it's still happening enough that if you are 24 and have never dated anyone, that's still strange and (if you put in reasonable effort) may reflect you being unattractive.
I think incel self-identification arose in substantial part because of romantically unsuccessful men basically being told their experiences weren't happening. A lot of people, mostly but not always women, seem to think it is easy to find a girlfriend and that if you can't, it's because you aren't trying or don't practice basic hygiene or have a truly horrible personality or something. The unattractive wanted to shout to the world "we exist, our experiences happened." What else is a Reddit forum good for anyway? Point is, the unattractive still exist, even if not dating is becoming more of a default.
At any rate the word "incel" is useless for self-identification now. I like Ozy Brennan's suggestion that the category be split into "love shy" (can't find a partner) and "blackpilled" (thinks Chads are taking all the Staceys because the 19th Amendment or whatever).
This could be somewhat regional or class-oriented. The entiretey of Gen Z is not sexless, but they're far loneliner than millennials were at their age. I know marriage rates are lower among less educated and working class people, so that could be it? When I worked in tech, most of my Gen Z coworkers did have girlfriends and boyfriends.
I think you've hit on something here. In the bubble of the wealthy I do not see these trends in younger people I know. Maybe socializing frequently IRL has become another luxury good.
For married couples with young children having childcare at their disposal enables socializing with friends so those with that luxury are less likely to feel lonely.
I think the difference is almost entirely college. 4-year college is one of the last truly great places to date. Even if you don't marry someone you met in college, you very likely at least had a friend group in college and get in some dating experience, which helps you date after college as well.
Great point.
When I used to wait tables it was quite common for us to all socialize together. much more so than I do now in my white collar job.
I’m glad you brought up the socialization gap as well. I think there’s a huge knock-on effect that wealth has on confidence/belonging/social comfortability that no one talks about here!
There's probably a fairly strong socioeconomic class aspect. My Gen Z daughter is in college, and most of her peers have boyfriends or girlfriends. And, she's a weirdo who hangs out with other weirdos, so it's not limited to just Stacies and Chads. But, I think college is one of the few places left where's its still OK to approach someone for a date.
In fact, before she decided on college, my daughter was considering becoming a hairstylist - and all I could think was "oh no, if she doesn't go to college, how will she ever meet anyone? It'll be all girls and maybe a couple gay dudes at hairstyling school..."
In my generation (Gen X), a lot of my friends met their significant others at work; but that's a big nope nowadays what with #metoo.
We also just met people randomly by striking up a conversation. These days, however, most of those icebreakers are obsolete. You can't ask someone what time it is, or for directions, because no one does that anymore, you just look at your phone or use the phone GPS.
Yes, I think it's very clear that going to college could still be worth it just from a meat market perspective. Doubly so for guys given the current ratio's.
I don't know what the numbers are but, say, a 30% drop in sexual partners is very big but still not so big that it is normal to have never had a girlfriend at age 24.
I feel like that’s definitely not the norm but it’s within the range of normal for today’s young people
I think we should also factor in the number of teenagers who were preyed on by older men and women. Now a lot more teens know it's wrong and gross.
On the quality of loneliness, it’s ambiguous because The Weeknd made a career out of singing about being a lonely sadboi but indulging a constant stream of sex & drugs. Ergo the 80% lonely stat doesn’t actually represent physical solitude
Haha, very accurate description of The Weeknd’s schtick there!
I’m always shocked at how ignorant most women are about men’s dating experiences. A lot of women seem to think as an average man you can fire up a dating app and have multiple dates lined up within a week, even if you’re looking for casual. They don’t realize that all but the most attractive men have to work really hard to get casual sex at all, and not super frequently even when they do get it, and that even men looking for something serious will have to have a lot of patience.
I also suspect that many of us, myself included, don't have a real good idea of what dating looks like for truly average women. I think I have a halfway decent idea of what high-demand and low-demand women's dating lives might look like, but average middle-of-the-pack ones? Not a clue.
On the other side, I also think men often envy women for being able to easily get casual sex, and fail to understand that women generally don’t *want* it.
Possibly unfair take: do women even think at all about men’s dating lives (besides CHH, god bless her big heart)? They know that the guys they’re mostly interested in mostly have other options. They know that some other dudes are predators. The rest of us there’s no reason to ever think about.
I used to think about it a lot! And was often perplexed.
Checking in to admit that no, I’ve never thought about men’s dating lives writ large.
Appreciate the honesty! To be fair, if dating had always come easy to me, I would probably never have developed this disproportionate fascination with women’s dating lives.
Not unfair at all. I doubt it’s ever occurred to many.
My two cents, as a woman it is fairly easy to get a date. It's mind boggling difficult to get a man to commit to anything, even men that might not have many options. It's wild out there.
As a guy who was never afraid to commit, even as a teenager, all I can say is we’re out there (to be clear, I would probably have been a *terrible* partner at the time, but commitment wouldn’t have been the problem!)
My take is that very attractive dudes who want long-term relationships are either already in one, or get snapped up real quickly. Fortunately the rest of us who are flawed, but do want a serious relationship are not as rare as you might think.
Well, I've been married for the last 4 years, but I dated for a looooooong time, so.
I don't think I was only dating Chads and expecting commitment from them. In fact, when I was 37 I really broadened my criteria too ... basically nothing and went on dates with all sorts of men, different education levels, jobs, heights, attractiveness, activeness, dorkiness, etc. And I tried to make a deal with myself that I would go out with any reasonable dude at least twice, to try and know him a bit before saying no. So, I'm talking about commitment to second dates, not even like the label "boyfriend," or anything like that.
I am not hideously ugly.
It was the most baffling behavior.
That’s just bizarre. Sorry that it was so hard to get anything out of those guys. Glad you finally got yourself a decent one who takes the relationship seriously.
Committing to anything including going out on a date? Or do you mean getting men to commit to something more serious?
Even dates. Just to be clear, I've been off the market for 5 years, but I dated forever before finding my husband and feel like I experienced a broad slice of every thing out there.
So, you go on a first date, and then... bad texting, no meeting plans, no next steps. So one might be tempted to think they don't want to date you any more, but then they will like randomly text you three weeks later and act confused as to why you wrote them off. It becomes abundantly clear very quickly that many men are weirdly invested in keeping things very casual in perpetuity.
And this can happen whether or not you've been intimate. Like it seems unrelated to sex, and more about laziness (or....? fear? ). I don't know. It was super confusing.
Weird. If this is “normal,” no wonder I was succeeding well above what I had been used to when I moved to CA and was dating again. Still happy to have been done with that since 2015!
Me too friend.
That might be the case! I was just talking to my husband about this, and I asked him if he had any friends that acted like this, and he admitted that if that was the case, he would never know because men wouldn't be likely to talk about that among themselves.
We got into a further conversation about how my husband is just a dude who likes to do things and that probably helped him date and get girlfriends because he was always willing to go out and do things with people just for the experience. He had plans! He left the house!
I think this is definitely true, because in general we tend to assume our own experiences are harder than the other side. We see our own specific challenges and think "wow it would be nice to not have THAT problem" and don't realize there's a whole other set we haven't considered.
I want to say that’s more a geography problem. If you have good pics or show up to bar & “normal”, you can find someone average. But if you live in the middle of nowhere, you have less options
Yes, the unattractive still exist but there are plenty of unattractive people of both sexes. The key is to have a realistic view of your own value, and then set your sights appropriately. I've seen plenty of unattractive/obese people that still end up married.
Women have the advantage/disadvantage of expectations for using hair and makeup products that can up the attractiveness quotient. Men can certainly use makeup and hair products if they want, but that's not the norm. Also, male pattern baldness exists...
This is really interesting to me, as someone whose younger brother is a self-proclaimed "incel" who is in his 30's with no romantic experience but also has a combination of easily curable and incurable handicaps to his dating life. On one hand, he's tall, handsome and earning well into six figures as an optical engineer; on the other, he has pronounced autism and smells horrible in a medical way, and refuses to see a doctor to try and address that issue (we're unsure if it's a horrible rotting dead tooth or a hormone issue or what, but he's smelly enough that when he stays at my place I wash the sheets with vinegar when he leaves). He's also a raging misogynist who casually calls women "whores" and complains about "roasties" and loudly talks in public about how all single moms should be sterilized by the government before they spawn again. According to him, the sole reason he can't get a woman is because of the sexual revolution, because prior to that his paycheck would have been sufficient to lure in and keep a "good woman" because she wouldn't have other options.
I do feel like a lot of women either know or have encountered a man like my brother, and that becomes their idea of an incel: someone who finds it easier to blame women than to take simple steps towards becoming dateable. It's the utter resistance to any form of self-improvement and the externalization of that, making it everyone else's fault. There's an element of it that smacks of learned helplessness and hoping that by bitterly complaining enough, women will capitulate and lower their standards, that feels reminiscent of begging mommy to cut up their sandwiches for them because it's existentially unfair that the store still sells bread with the crust on. I'd say that in my social circles, THAT'S what the term "incel" refers to specifically, that infantile expectation that a man shouldn't have to put any effort into anything because women shouldn't have the option to fail to cater to men's whims. That's why people say Elon has "incel energy" even though he has baby mamas. It's the constant externalization of responsibility, the sense of entitlement to attention and praise, and the juvenile attitude towards self-improvement.
I don't think this is the platonic definition, but it does explain some of the definition-drift online.
Yes, whenever I see “6 foot, 6 figures” I’m like….ok that is just not enough info. Lots of other stuff could be going on.
Yeah, when my brother vents online about all the awful sluts who spurn him to debase themselves for a Chad he tends to leave out that he smells so bad that people won't go into enclosed spaces like cars with him! Which, to be fair, is something that probably wouldn't be easy to fix given how he's got relatively tidy hygiene practices, but really does change the entire context of the conversation.
How does he reject the useful feedback about how he smells? Like, does he deny that he smells bad in a way that causes a problem, or does he deny that he "should" have to change how he smells to make other people not mind being around him?
The latter. According to him, people need to just stop being “shallow” and get used to it, but to be honest I think that he probably is just afraid it’s a problem without an easy fix and is scared to attempt to find a solution in vain.
Your brother is clearly someone who is richly deserving of being alone, and women are collectively doing exactly what they should by making sure he never gets to first base, but part of me also thinks that even when you’re an asshole, being unwanted probably still hurts like hell and does a number on you. I hope one day he realizes that he doesn’t have to be like this.
I'm doing my best, but I think the ship may have sailed on his ability to socialize with women (he called me a "fucking whore" at Christmas dinner this year in front of the family, so this has been on my mind a lot.) I have no doubt that he's in emotional and spiritual pain and because I love him and because I don't want to see anyone in pain, I wish I could fix it for him. I have my doubts that it would be easy for him to find a girlfriend even with a sparkling, extroverted personality because of the pungent odor. I don't know, percentage-wise, how much easier he could make his dating situation or how much he could actually change his attractiveness since I don't know why he smells that bad.
But I do know that right now he's not taking ANY efforts to improve his situation, be they trying to set up dates, talking to his doctor, or reading up on how to talk to women. Instead he just sits on incel discords all day complaining about foids, which makes him unattractive and makes the idea of introducing my single, interested lady friends to him a no-go. He's set himself on hard mode and doesn't seem to take any ownership of that.
Jesus, I’m so sorry! He’s lucky that you’re even talking to him at all, if he treats you that way.
Also, I had never even heard the word “foid” until today, but it’s the kind of word that you can tell right away involves absolutely bottomless contempt.
I think the main two reasons for the incel/misogynist conflation are:
- The "incel" community on reddit had a specific ideology, it wasn't just a collection of men with romantic struggles
- Calling a misogynist a misogynist gives them power, like calling them mean. "Loser virgin living in parents' basement" stings a lot more, even though there's not really anything wrong with being that.
It's led to a strange phenomenon where discussing *anything* related to male social isolation makes people assume you're complaining that horrible men are being denied a god-given entitlement to sex. (of course, some horrible people do make this point)
But sex isn't a cure for isolation. The inceldom is a symptom of the social isolation, not the other way around.
Agreed all around
Plus, after the Santa Barbara and other similar shootings, the IRL world realized we were having to put up with nutcases with this ideology who were actually going out and killing people over it.
The "all misogynists are incels" false equivalency is funny. I've seen someone on Reddit call Elon Musk, a man who has been married three times and fathered 14 children that we know about, an "incel". Whatever you think about his relationship with women, this is not celibacy.
He seems to have IVF'd the babies though. Even his first set of kids were IVF.
So like he's a father in the loosest way possible. He doesn't love any of the moms. Isn't married to any of them now. The kids were conceived in a lab. It's possible he didn't even ejaculate for the recent ones and used frozen sperm from when he was younger. He doesn't raise the babies. That's done by nannies. It would be totally fine to call him an incel I think.
Obviously none of the stuff about being a bad father and having bad relationships with the mothers relates to celibacy in any way. Seriously, would you call a guy "celibate" because he leaves behind a string exes who hate him and children he ignores??
If they're all IVF babies, that does mean that we don't have _conclusive_ proof that he had sex. However, when a woman is willing to marry a man and be impregnated with his sperm, she is frequently willing to have sex with him as well. I also think that he had sex with his unmarried baby mamas, certainly at least two of them. A simple google search finds a video of him and Shivon Zilis attending a wedding less than 3 weeks ago at Mar-a-Lago.
The only way it is fine to call a man an incel when he is currently attending weddings with a woman who bore 4 of his children, is if "incel" is now a generic insult without any connection to its original meaning.
Look at his latest baby mama. He's a CEO and he's slumming it with an egirl, and by all accounts, they didn't even have sex to make the baby. Then he left her holding the baby. He seems to have been cold-DMing random women and asking them if they want to have his IVF baby. Not exactly the move someone with women flinging their panties at him would make.
If the Republican grifter were the only woman in his life, one sentence of that might have been relevant, but she's not even the one responsible for the latest baby.
You seem to be under the impression that if you convince me that Elon sucks and various related insults apply to him, I'll concede that he's celibate, despite the fact that he's currently attending weddings, inauguration parties, etc, with the mother of 4 of his children, a woman who has the wide-eyed stare of a true Elon fangirl..
I seriously doubt that ol' Elon is at a loss for female attention.
After seeing what happened to his latest e-girl, I doubt it.
I find it hard to imagine that he’d have trouble getting a woman to sleep with him if he’s able to get multiple women to agree to get pregnant with his sperm.
In a previous article where you mentioned that most women wish men would approach them more often, one commenter (I think Lila Krishna) said that too often, the reality of that is you end up having a hard time extricating yourself from a painfully awkward conversation with a dude with zero social skills. The famous "hello, HR?!?" viral comic also comes to mind. Like, sure, almost everyone enjoys being approached - by the right person.
I will say that when I was younger, I found approaches flattering, even if they came from people that I was not attracted to, but I drew the line when someone couldn’t take a hint or was being really inappropriate about it.
Yeah, and that's obviously inacceptable. It's a line that *should* be drawn.
When I was growing up, you would see lots of movies and TV shows that would show not taking no for an answer as being an asset. You're not giving up! You're being perseverant! Going for the goal! And in most areas of life, perseverance *is* a great quality! But when consent is required, if you're getting signs of lack of interest, you should absolutely point your perseverance at someone else.
My wife regularly criticizes this aspect of rom coms - the guy who never gives up. IRL, as you say, the guy arguably *should* give up. My wife’s point is that, IRL, the guy *would* give up - 100% of the time. Constant rejection is very off putting and painful for most people.
It's also fascinating how often elderly women will describe how they met their long-time partner in those terms - "I had no interest at first, but he kept trying and he eventually wore me down", and they're saying it with genuine affection, not in a "yeah, I finally gave in to that fucker and I never should have" kind of way. I suspect there may be an element of "permission to be horny" somewhere in there, though.
I think it's mostly permission to be horny combined with courtship over time. But the image of persistence has also changed. @casualsex has written about how there's a knack to casually propositioning someone for sex and I think a similar thing applies here - the guy who has a winsome attitude of "you'll love me eventually" but is clearly actually going to treat you the same regardless of your decision is very different than the guy who keeps asking in angrier tones of voice and starts stalking you.
Link to that article please
Yeah... frankly, it gets worse with each rejection, not better.
Oh yeah, when all you’ve experienced is rejection, then each new failure compounds all the previous ones. It’s brutal.
Yeah, I think (as with discourse over metoo) people really overestimate the number of dudes who were annoyingly persistent who were influenced by romcoms lol. Being a lout doesn't really correlate with watching chickflicks.
Haha, I’m not a very persistent person under the best of circumstances, so that has saved my ass at least a little in the past, but I think there was more of an ambient “if at first you don’t succeed” vibe (sometimes executed in a seductive way and sometimes not) that is a lot less acceptable today.
In the vein of "there are no solutions only trade-offs", totally agree that telling people not to approach folk in public did maybe help to make creeps more identifiable, maybe ladies felt safer but it led to less coupling.
now maybe that trade off is worth it to you. I used to hate the amount of disgusting guys who'd yell out of their cars at me trying to proposition me. It was absolutely gross and demeaning. But guys also just talked to me about mutual interests (and I'd be completely unaware to their flirting) more too.
Yeah, I had a boyfriend in my 20s so I didn’t really want any approaches but most of the ones I did get I found flattering. If there had been a way to just get rid of the ones that were legitimately disgusting and predatory I would have. I guess my concern is that any guy like that is already so deviant that he probably wouldn’t listen to any changing social norms anyway! Like there was a guy who legitimately followed me down the street one time and I highly doubt he was listening to any content about respecting women lol
Exactly. I've been with my husband since I was 20 (16 years ago 😵) and even he sort of approached me for a date in a way that may get him cancelled now (white guy lusting over a black woman in black history month no less!) but was not really out of bounds then but the guy what yelled "hey, hey baby, HEY" out of the car wasn't reading Jezebel.
Yeah, I suspect that guys yelling shit from their cars are not doing that as a flirting strategy so much as an assertion of power - "I'm doing this because I can and there's nothing you can do stop me". It's street harassment, they're not trying to get a date. And my guess is they're pretty impervious to shaming and moral appeals.
Yeah, the entire goal is to either make your friends laugh or make women uncomfortable. I don’t think any of those men believe they’re actually going to find a girlfriend that way.
I once saw a garbage man do that while hanging off of a garbage truck. I don't think he was looking for a positive response.
I don't think cold-approaching women actually helped anyone. It had like a pretty huge failure rate for all but a very small sliver of men, and convinced the rest that they were one cool pickup line from having a date. It used to be acceptable to slap men for using a bad pickup line but gen z men would probably file assault and battery charges.
It was more successful if you were kinda regular at some spot, or series of spots. And you both probably had nicknames for each other like "ski jacket" and "three-martini lunch". Your interest in each other was emissaried by friends, and your date zero was probably hanging out as a big group at one of your regular spots.
People aren't regulars anywhere anymore except work. There's not as much repeated contact that softens you up on friends or dates anymore.
Yes good point! I saw a post on Twitter where a guy was like "she's not hot, you just are around her a lot". Yeah dude, that's how this used to work! All of my friends from college that have married (I graduated in 2011) got with their future spouses this way. You can develop an attraction through a relationship but you can't develop a relationship from "I can't stand being around you and we have no mutual interests".
I find it surprising how much easier it is to make friends now that my kid's in school. I see the same moms and dads at school, at the same neighborhood events, at all the birthday parties. With some of the moms, I've made friends after about a year of seeing each other in these settings. Casual repeated contact is an important part of making new connections.
Women were slapping men for bad pick up lines? Was this in a movie? Where was this happening?
I did it.
I don’t think it was a common thing even 20 years ago to hit people for saying something that wasn’t charming enough — like your original implication. I’ve literally never heard of it. I think even Will Smith slapping that man in the Oscars was a shocking deviation because it’s simply not normal. I also remember the furore when Zidane struck a fellow player during the World cup sometime in the 2000s. I don’t think it’s just a GenZ thing where this is considered a shocking reaction.
"How can she slap?"
Do those guys not exist anymore? Does no one get cat called anymore?
oh totally. Just saying I get where the desire to stop all men cold encountering you when you deal with this shit but it didn't necessarily stop these guys but stopped guys who *weren't* these guys
So all the maximalist hectoring was useless then. In fact it was genuinely a bad thing to convince 90% of decent men that men are trash. The 10% who are actual trash don’t care and catcall on the street and fuck around if they can anyway.
Yes, that is exactly what has happened. Nice men way over-read critiques that were never about them.
It reduced to a great, great extent for sure.
Is there such thing as being an exurb-cel? Aka “everything is so exhaustingly far away that basic socializing feels like an insurmountable task?”
I still make time for it but mannnnn— it’s like you cross a county line on your commute and there isn’t a soul below the age of 55
But what I’ve also found is it’s harder to develop something meaningful. And that one or two awkward interactions (a very normal part of getting to know somebody) will have either party skedaddling.
Just spitballing in my sleep deprived state
welcome to the yimby movement
To me, "incel" meant someone who has strong feelings of alienation towards relationships and sex, and lets that become a cornerstone of their identity, usually expressed either in raging outward misogyny or ironic adoption of terminology that gradually becomes normal. The not fucking part is almost incidental.
This is wild to me.
I should add, you're not the first person I've met that had this conception of the word, but is wild to me every time I encounter it.
Incel as someone who doesn't get laid vs. Incel as an identity.
Loved this!
As a man who hasn’t been out in “streets” and met my wife literally 2 months before Tinder went live, I have no idea what it’s like out there for single men.
A good friend of mine is handsome, incredibly “popular”, 6 ft, owns a comm/res real estate biz, and does extremely with well with women (currently living a poly-esque lifestyle lol).
He claims opportunities for straight men to have one night stands / date are much greater than the 00s and 10s, bc so few guys go out and hit on straight women, and now the ratio significantly favors straight men. I believe he’s totally wrong and biased bc the cards are stacked in his favor.
From what I’ve heard from my less fortunate bros, is that way fewer people are going out in general, and while there are way fewer men hitting on women IRL, women’s standards have risen significantly / people aren’t as open to interacting with “strangers” nowadays so the odds for straight men are significantly worse.
Does anyone have thoughts on this?
I agree with you that your tall handsome friend is out of touch. Very attractive men seem to often lack awareness of how much they benefit from their looks.
My observation is that as approaching becomes less normalized, it’s harder to do it well enough for woman to be interested. Women aren’t expecting or hoping to be approached as much, so you really have to sell yourself make it work. It’s more likely to come off as awkward because it’s not the norm. They’re also not going to give signals to approach or do things to make themselves more approachable.
I don’t know where he gets the idea that gender ratios favor men when going out. My experience is bars and clubs have more men than women almost universally, especially the kinds of weekend party venues that would facilitate hookups and approaches.
And of course, the lack of awareness is itself attractive!
“…lack awareness of how much they benefit from their looks…”
Too many dicks on the dance floor!
Oh man, I forgot that.
Nah let em live! Better there than Reddit or Twitter!
His point was Gen Z and younger millennial men are too awkward / scared to approach, making it much easier for guys with the “balls” to approach and start a convo.
In fairness, he’s got such a gregarious and likable personality it’s ridiculous. He’s literally close friend with a Netflix featured stand up comic he grew up with and has her falling over laughing when they hang lol. It’s sight to behold lol.
I think it's incredibly hard to pick women up at a bar now unless you are very attractive
It's always been fun to be a good-looking, charming person in the dating market. Probably your friend thinks it's better because now not only are women excited to be hit on by an attractive guy, there's a bit of a novelty factor that didn't used to exist. But I seriously doubt that applies to anyone who's not top 10% attractive to people.
Definitely harder, and it's not just because I'm older. (I think it would be even harder if I was younger today.) People are just a lot more introverted and cliquier. It's much harder to break through and talk to a group of women than it was years ago. I also think standards are a lot higher. Seeing the amount of people we do in the casual, seemingly intimate ways that instagram and tiktok present is making it harder to settle down. I know it is for me. This is my experience in a big city, it was *slightly* easier when I lived for a few years in a mid-sized city.
Interesting that the mid-sized city was easier. I remember reading an article claiming dating options for college educated women in mid sized cities were awful compared to big cities, maybe that’s a factor.
Unfortunately, social anxiety also applies to the women being approached, not just the men doing the approaching.
Singles mixers and dating events have become popular in my city, every single one of them advertised with marketing copy about getting off the apps and meeting people in real life. I've gone to many events the past two years or so, and it's common to see women who are completely unprepared to actually talk to a man, even at a ticketed event where they've paid money for the express purpose of being in the same room as single guys.
Sometimes it's so bad that the majority of conversations happening at the event are same-sex. There's a series of events organized and run by a particular woman, Lexi, and for whatever reason those events are the worst examples I've seen - in spite of fitting more than a hundred people into a building, almost nobody pairs up even to chat. The women would stay in clusters with the (female) friends they brought with them, and give the cold shoulder to everyone; men would migrate from one side of the building to other in streams, trying to find a woman who would willingly make eye contact with them, and failing. It's easy to pick Lexi, the organizer, out of the crowd at her events: If you see a woman who is actually talking to men, that's her. I've spoken to other men, traded that tip, and had them say they'd noticed the same thing and identified Lexi the same way. (Obviously, I stopped buying tickets to her events, since there wasn't a point.)
Most events are not that bad. I'm sure the women in question would say they're acting this way for some mix of Safety ("I need my besties to look out for me!") and just being uninterested in the guys who showed up. Yet I can't help but notice that, in a room full of men desperate to try out their best jokes, stories, and fashion, almost none of the women decided to kill time by just talking to a guy, even in a controlled, safe environment.
Oh jeez! Isn’t bringing your besties/mates completely at cross-purpose with the spirit of the event??
I went exclusive with the woman who became my wife in 2008 - so I've been off the market for many years. No regrets.
But I did always wonder what it would have been like to use those apps (Tinder) where self-selected horny people could find each other.
It has surprised me - but maybe it shouldn't - that sexual activity has declined just as technology should be making it easier to find someone.
My guess is that technology *has* made it dramatically easier - for a small minority that was not lacking for opportunities in the first place.
That was certainly my experience on OKCupid back in the day. I could have dates lined up every day back then if I wanted to. A lot of the people I matched up with were really happy that I took them up on the dates because they'd sent so many messages without getting any traction. But I was also the kind of girl who could go to a bar and get offers to buy me a drink all night, so it just wasn't surprising that I was also in demand online.
Found my husband on tinder. We lived a few blocks apart, worked down the street from each other, and shopped at the same grocery store but we never would have met in a million years without the app or even considered each other seriously. Apps improved my life dramatically because while I was in male-dominated spaces, I felt a real lack of control over my love life. Just being on an app where everyone was single and looking and you'd know if there was mutual interest made the whole thing much easier.
The apps don’t work the way you imagine, especially Tinder. The reality is there are way more men looking for casual than women, so women looking for casual sex can have very high standards. To get casual sex off the apps as a man, you either have to dramatically lower your standards, or work very hard to craft a perfect profile and be very patient. It’s a very dispiriting experience.
And none of the typical dating advice you get really helps with app based dating
The best book I ever read about how to optimize online dating was called "Data: A Love Story." The woman was having an impossible time on the apps, but she was a market researcher, so she decided to make a bunch of dummy male profiles of the kinds of guys she'd like to date and then piloted the profiles to see what kinds of women they matched up with to see how she could optimize her profile to be more like the attractive women that the men she liked were seeing on the apps. It was a fascinating read.
Hard agree on the Gen Z entire class warping that happens when you make everyone an indoor kid when most kids should be outdoor kids
I can’t imagine spending so much time on a computer, even though I had work from home during the pandemic and got the brain worms we all got- I was eager to get out of there not stay trapped
Best part of my life is being in nature and the street all day, novel interactions, seeing and talking to strangers and being neighborly in small ways
I know a girl who runs a discord e-bar where the watch e-sports and have the same level of nerdy stats and player engagement with whatever the video game is that regular people might have with the NBA.
She has all these friends who she has never physically met and that’s crazy to me like, wdym every single one of your friends has spent less time in your home with your kid than me- pretty much a random tinder guy
Who helps you move your furniture? Who do you eat breakfast with like
there are a lot of reasons these roads and social pathways have atrophied but for so many younger people never getting to the on ramp is deeply disconcerting
I used to play a LOT of World of Warcraft. But I would also get together with many of those guys at the local coffee shop, and actually met other out of towners in real life several times. We even did a week long Vegas trip together.
And I know some other people that met that way and got married,
As a esports guy, most of my main day one friends are all online. Video games and voice chat is enough to get deep meaning relationships rather than normie irl “how’s the weather “ types
I used to do a lot of WoW and Starcraft II. I agree you can develop good friends like that.
I still maintain though that actual RL friends are important too.
Different friend, I want to spend time with and make a point to specifically sit down w them but all they are interested in is going onto discord and into Minecraft and sure that can be fun- it’s been years since I played the game when it was alpha
Sometimes gaming so much can be a retreat from life when you’re discouraged- this friend is pretty despondent bc miscarriages and infertility- lots of cases of IRL just withering rather than meeting expectations
what’s the right balance because so many people have no ability to fix the broken things irl so ig just make a nice little house in a game because real world houses start at an unattainable $1M and household median income is $105k but that’s 70 hours of work a week with no breaks for a working class person
wouldn’t the easier pathway be retreat from the physical world because the wealthy have squeezed the life out of real world physical space with scarcity and extraction
I'm 22 and CHH serves as the red pill pick-up artist influencer bullying me into talking to women
I can bully you too if you want
"*I’m being informed “chopped unc” is now chopped and unc-coded."
Look, I'm sure your readership skews this direction anyways. We're all chopped uncs here.