There are a lot of people with very serious illnesses, like uncontrolled diabetes, for example, or heart disease, or breathing issues, where eating better and exercising will save their lives and they can’t do it consistently. They may want to, but it’s not just a matter of loving their lives or their spouses.
If it were just a matter of motivation, very few people would have addictions or be overweight. Very few people want to be overweight or alcoholic.
Again, these sorts of simplistic ideas of bootstrapping your way to success make people without these issues feel better about themselves, but they don’t seem to be getting at real solutions, just platitudes.
We’ll have to respectfully disagree then - I believe there’s a difference between what populations empirically do in the aggregate (ie low incidence of losing and keeping lots of weight off long term in the whole population) and what people individually are capable of actually doing when motivated enough.
The first speaks to the average difficulty, the second speaks to an individual’s motivation to overcome that level of difficulty. Weight is not an immutable attribute that can only move up.
It wasn’t an exhortation that incel’s should bootstrap their way to success, it was a response to Robot Arm decrying the lack of specific and directed steps that would improve one’s chances at dating / romance. They are those steps.
First is that different people have different metabolisms. You may be able to eat all you want, and as long as you take a 10 minute walk once a week, you’re good. Someone else may have to constantly keep themselves where they feel as though they are starving themselves, along with exercising several hours a day just to keep from gaining weight. People will judge the person without the weight problem as being motivated, and the person with as unmotivated, even though that is completely not the case.
Second, if you did pay 500k per year to people to lose and keep the weight off, a number would be able to do so, much higher than the number that could do so without. But that’s not because they are being motivated by the money, but because the money is making it easier for them to do so. Eating healthy is expensive. Having time for proper exercise is expensive. If someone takes your 500k, and hires a personal trainer, a personal dietary chef, and either exercise equipment or a membership to a gym that’s a bit better than LA fitness, is it really their motivations that are doing the work, or the resources that you have given them?
Does this mean that single men have it universally easy when it comes to dating? Of course not. I think we can acknowledge this while still being honest about what data tells us: using our best indicator of longterm relationships (marriage), proportionately more men have mates than women.
It seems like a lot of guys who struggle with dating prefer to fall back on evolutionary psychology-like “biotruths” than look at what is actually going on around them. It’s both sad and obnoxious because it all boils down to believing human behavior and preferences are static, instinctual traits even in the face of cultural, demographic, and environmental changes. I suspect the reason this kind of thinking is so appealing is because “biotruths” are ego-sparing; a guy can take rejection less personally if he sees his lack of success as a function of natural forces stacked against him. But perhaps, just perhaps, this thought process interferes with one’s ability to relate to the opposite sex like an empathetic human being.
Anyway, let me get off my soapboax. Here’s another cite worth reading: Single women choosing ‘freedom, independence’ over relationships with men. Looks like single women are coping with singlehood in a way their male counterparts are not. If a segment of the male population is truly hopelessly single, how can we get them to make peace with it like a lot of women do? Perhaps the focus needs to be shifted away from making these men more sexually desirable and directed towards repairing their outlook on life.
I think that’s the core issue. It’s not, I think, about dates. It’s about resilience. A lot of people simply don’t have much resilience. Yelling at them won’t make them gain it and papering over it with things they think will fix their lives will only make trouble down the road for many people.
Everyone is influenced by the media, often in ways we are not consciously aware of. We all know it is there, or at least we should. Like I said, it’s about teaching kids that the media is NOT an accurate portrayal of the world.
And honestly, I think the social pressure to change the media is justified. The way women have been treated by that industry - and continue to be treated is shameful, wrong and in many cases outright illegal. In the case of the latter, I’m all for holding everyone there - and I mean everyone high or low - accountable for their behavior. It isn’t just the Harvey Winesteins, but all the upper and mid-level management and even down to the people on-set who knew about it and in all too many cases, actually facilitated it.
We’ve allowed that entire industry to engage in an endless orgy of drugs, sexual assault and criminal accounting and in the mean time, we’ve elevated simple entertainers to being our royalty and allowed them to live free from the rules of the rest of society. The whole thing is rotten from top to bottom.
The problem with Incels is the unjustified anger and entitlement feelings.
Bottom line is that among young adults, there are proportionately more married women than men. Not too surprising, since women are more likely than men to get married early in life. But a 1.18:1 ratio is not exactly sausage fest territory of the likes of China. Since the majority of women and men are still single in their 20’s, it’s fair to say that your average single 20-something guy is still in good shape for finding a mate.
But by my reading, your statistics don’t seem to make a case for what you’re saying. Maybe I’m misreading them, or misreading you.
People don’t have to be married to be in relationships and have kids.
Marriage and mating are becoming further apart. About 40% of children in the US now are born to unmarried parents. That rate has been going up and up. It’d be interesting to see how many fathers there are today, compared to how many mothers, but I don’t know any data on that. Do you?
Marriage would be a much better indicator if it weren’t the case that 40% of children are born to unmarried couples. Marriage would also be a better indicator if the divorce rate weren’t 50%.
The pressure facing young people today could have something to do with this relative breakdown in the connection between marriage and mating, or even the relative breakdown in marriage in general. I don’t know this, of course. But the cited marriage statistics don’t make this question go away.
And that’s exactly why I entirely avoided “biotruth” explanations in my post, and quite to the contrary, pointed out how spinning stories could lead us wrong when there are so many competing stories that could explain the data.
You were the one asserting that women had to date “down” or “across”, rather than “up”. That’s spinning a story, too, whether you call it a “biotruth” or not. But your story is not necessarily true. And that is my point. It wasn’t true historically, as I pointed out, and it might still not be true today. If you have more direct evidence in its potential truth, I’ll certainly look at it. But it’s definitely possible for women in general to still “date up” in this society, as was the historical mean (if not the historical median), especially if “pairing up” is not working as it used to. From the high divorce rate, and the high rate of children born to unwed parents, it seems like “pairing up” is not functioning in our society the same way it did a hundred years ago. But I’m not attached myself to any explanation here.
Yes, that’s very true. They do seem to be doing better.
But why?
As soon as we ask why they’re doing better, we have to spin some kind of story to explain that. I agree with you, entirely, that it’s damn annoying when someone spins out a “biotruth” story as if it’s fact, when there are many different possible things going on. But here’s the thing: I also find it annoying when someone spins a socialization story with just as little evidence. I don’t want statistical rigor to be applied to only one kind of explanation, while another breed of explanation skates through without being challenged in the same way. I don’t think marriage is necessarily a good proxy for relationship success, especially at the margins where this discussion is happening (sort of a quantile regression instead of OLS), because the decline of children born within marriage seems to correlate with the problems we’re seeing, and might possibly be a key to unlocking at least part of this issue. I don’t know that, either, of course. But it has the same intuitive plausibility that other explanations have.
Perhaps the focus does need to be shifted exactly in the way you say. I’d be willing to believe that.
So, how do we favor that explanation over other possible explanations? What evidence is there that distinguishes one from the other?
What I’m seeing is a society that’s changing in a bajillion different ways, so much and so fast that it’s hard to isolate any particular effect. I work personally in systems of that nature (of the monetary variety) where teasing out causation is profoundly difficult because so much changes simultaneously. But the social systems of the kind we’re talking about here seem at least an order of magnitude more difficult, which makes me correspondingly less inclined to trust any particular explanation, whether it goes in one direction or the other. What I’d like to see is some evidence that can differentiate cleanly between competing stories. I don’t think I’ve seen it yet.
It is not impossible for urban youth to get out of gangs and get a good high-paying job afterwards. But it would be stupid to pretend that it is easy for inner city youth to rise above the circumstances that make gangs attractive all by themselves. They need long-term interventions, not step-by-step instruction manuals.
The same applies here. It is wrong-headed to think all we have to do is give these guys some coaching and everything will be alright.
QFT. Textual Innuendo does not appear to have seen the latest research on how hard it is for those with a tendency to put on weight to take it off. I’m the type who burns more calories fidgeting in my chair than some do in the gym, and can eat anything I want without gaining weight, but that doesn’t make me morally superior.
The only thing I’d add to what you said is that beyond hitting on anyone you find interesting (politely, of course) is to be open to finding a wider range of people interesting. If you only find supermodels interesting you’ll have to follow Textual Innuendo’s suggestions to the letter and throw in some plastic surgery too.
We have friends both of whom are way overweight. I worry about their health, but they have had a long and happy marriage.
Some are influenced a lot, some are influenced a little, and some are influenced not at all. We also get tons of conflicting messages. And popular culture is influenced by what sells. Julia Roberts had a hit movie and all of a sudden you saw a lot of actresses who look like Julia Roberts cast.
Not to mention that people can also be influenced by what they see in the real world. Go to a mall and you won’t see a lot of couples looking like Hollywood stars.
I think a lot of you all are making a fundamental error. You are presuming that incels want to get laid, or want to be in a relationship. This is wrong. They do not. What they value more than anything is their anger, their inchoate rage against a world they can’t stand. That is core to their identity, and no one wants to give up their core identity. If you could come up with some method to get a girlfriend that required as little effort as “Pick up a ten pound weight, carry it up the elevator to the 5th floor and take it to the room down the hall,” they wouldn’t do it. They don’t want a cure. They don’t want to become a normie, another fucking chad.
This is absolutely correct. (And I find it perversely fascinating that they’ve created this character “Chad” to exemplify an almost folkloric-character who they despise. It’s like John Barleycorn or Jack Frost, or maybe more like the Nazis’ idea of “the Jew.”)
These fucking guys can’t be taught to improve themselves or do anything that would actually increase their chances of getting the sex that they claim to want so much. They wallow in their celibacy, flaggelating themselves like masochistic monks.
And as I’ve said before, if they did have girlfriends somehow, they still wouldn’t be happy. They would just direct all their anger at the girlfriend, probably through sexual or verbal abuse. They could be sleeping with 4 supermodels and they would still be fucked up and unhappy. They could have Ferraris and they’d be unhappy. They could have all the money and ‘status’ to enjoy all the hedonistic pleasures of life that they crave, and they would be exactly like Jordan Belfort, the “wolf” (more like the weasel) of Wall Street, who sunk untold amounts of money that he stole from people in stock scams, into cocaine, Quaaludes, morphine, alcohol, and every single mind-numbing drug you could imagine, because having a supermodel wife, multiple hot girlfriends, and the coolest cars and yachts and shit that you could ever imagine, was not enough to make him feel the slightest amount of satisfaction with his life.
There’s nothing cool about the protagonist of The Wolf of Wall Street, he was and I’m sure still is a sociopathic, predatory, and self-loathing individual.
I think members of a lot of groups would claim that they wouldn’t want to be “normal” even if they could. But I don’t find it any more believable in this case than I do generally. Sour grapes are a coping mechanism. Not a good one, but one nonetheless. But hand a sour grapist some grapes and they won’t reject them. Give them a magic button to push, and only a handful wouldn’t push it.
This is totally false, man. All it takes is a clean diet and walking regularly. That’s it. Unless you are morbidly obese, like to the point of disabling your body and wrecking your organs, that is totally false.
Yeah, I’m sorry, but I don’t think you get this. These aren’t typical dudes who have a hard time talking to women, or can’t find a girlfriend for one reason or another. This goes way deeper and darker than sour grapes. It’s curable, with therapy, but it has much more to do with a hatred of the world than it does with needing to learn how to socialize and improve the impression you make.
Lest we veer off course, I’m going to play back my post to Velocity (who essentially said high status men are overconsuming women, leaving a shortage for other men).
I’m still trying to figure out why you’re talking about children. You can have sex without having children and you can date and be married without birthing or siring children.
But according to what I’ve seen, there are more mothers (85 million) in the U.S. than fathers (72 million). Is the difference significant? Certainly. Is it anywhere close to 2:1? Nope.
The problem with extrapolating parenthood to finding successful relationships can be illustrated using a common scenario: a divorced mother of two kids later finds love with a never-married guy–a reformed incel, if you will. Even though she’s had kids with another man, this doesn’t mean the former incel has no chance to be with her. He might just have to wait a while.
If a significant chunk of married couples dissolve, and then later have relationships with other people, this increases the odds than a never-married person will get a shot at things.
But that’s actually besides the point. Looking at marriage stats, we can see that there isn’t some gigantic disparity in marriage rates between men and women. Unless you have data showing single women as a group are not interested in finding monogamous relationships, then there’s no basis in saying high status men have left a shortage for lower status men. That’s the point I making to Velocity
The reason your post came across as biotruthy is precisely because it started out with storytelling how the deck was stacked against men during pre-antiquity. I think it would be infinitely more logical to ground things in the present, looking at information collected from the here and now. In cavemen days, who knows what the gender ratios were; if there were significantly fewer women that alone could’ve affected our family trees. We don’t have that variable in the mix today because the ratio is balanced.
I didn’t assert that. I asked how it would be possible for all women to “date up”. Just on the basis of numbers, some women would have to date “down”, “across”, or not at all all.
Do you not understand this point, or do you think I’m saying something else? Won’t respond to anything else until you respond to this.