Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Pattern-chaser]

Are you a parent?

Yes, I have two sons, both around 40 now. I have a grand-daughter too.

[HZY]

I think it's the social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok) that girls have access to, nowadays. Once boys realized what other boy-options girls can see, they quickly feel out competed even though what the girls can see are mostly fakes. It's all about confidence, or the lack of.

[Sea Turtle]

Interesting topic.

How do we wish things would be that is different than how it is?

Other contributors to this topic.

- Generational patterns.
- Diet.
- Tech advancements. Specifically in communications and available information and choices.
- Location or region dependent.
- The relationships between struggle and strength and attraction.

[styxphilip16]

Dating scenes can evolve in unexpected ways. But it's all about personal choices and vibes.

Things might be different now, but that doesn't mean it's good or bad, just different strokes for different folks, man! Your son's journey is unique, and that's cool! We all navigate life at our own pace.

As long as everyone's happy and respectful, there's no need to stress.

[A wee oddo]

Your critique was not what I expected which is a very good thing, your views seem rather good and I like your unique view, basically I have little criticism or things I think you believe in it might not be true so I'll just compliment

[Papus79]

I'd add something that may not get discussed much.

I had the good fortune of being a relatively 'free-range' kid, especially when we lived in the countryside and most of the places I was playing like the grass and farm fields beyond us was either extended back yard or was only a problem for me to be in if there was a combine out harvesting.

I've heard from a lot of people that you can't let kids be out unsupervised and getting acquainted to the world on their own terms - or if you do don't be surprised if Child Protective Services shows up. It's that plus, on the voluntary side, helicopter parenting and online access (see Jonathan Haidt's lectures on the cultural changes that made the 2010's 'uniquely stupid').

The other part - I don't think women realized what 'Me Too' would do as far as freaking men out. Yes, clearly there were men like Harvey Weinstein that deserved what they got, the trouble with any open-air activist movement and ESPECIALLY wherever 'believe all x' of any kind comes up you'll have psychopaths and other cluster B types run in there real fast to grab power, which means within a few years of a movement like that doing some good you'll then see fraudulent cases and, possibly what we saw in the case of Marilyn Manson (with Russell Brandt it's more ambiguous), both conspiracy to 'frame the Kulak' (what I think might be happening with Manson) as well as 'Well, we liked your politics before so we didn't care but - we don't like your politics now so it's time to take care of it'.

The other part, ie. either Darwinian or at least VERY long-term survival programming, for nearly all of human history women really had to think extremely carefully about which men could or would protect them and which wouldn't. For that amount of time the wealth of her husband was her entire horizon. Women now are 60% of college students and are making more money than men. The historical security need women have had to only date up-and-across wealth and social hierarchy is called 'hypergamy', and in that case what's happening now is both really brutal on successful women (very few men over and up - and those men who are over and up can literally have any woman they want and don't have the same hierarchy concerns) and the men who are less financially well off than many or even most women don't stand a chance - which is why men in their teens and twenties are doing awful - technically as a guy, until you're in your 30's or 40's or unless you somehow end up founding a really successful company in your 20's, most men at that age are socioeconomic losers - ie. undateable. Add to this attractive young women, or even moderately attractive young women, can get dating and relationship experience where young men (socioeconomic duds that they are - at least until mid-age) are inexperienced and experience itself seems like it's a Pareto / Matthew principle thing where the more you have of it the more you'll get and the less you have of it the less you'll get.

I'm also going to add something else here that I haven't heard anyone say - and this is another suggestion for what I think might be going on with instinctive firmware. It's bad enough that on the dating apps you have a significant minority of men who'll absolutely swipe right on any woman they see which means women's inboxes are absolutely pounded (and it poisons the well for any guy whose not doing that), I really think the framing of dating apps like Tinder is that these are 'male order husbands' or 'male order men' for even being on dating sites, historically marriages would be made through church or through friends, there was no 'dating' and if there was dating you were part of the dregs of society - thus even being on the dating market is a bad look.

There's also the process - ie. by the time you've dated 50 people your illusions for what can work or who'd be right for you are shot and it seems like a lot of dating experience would probably make you less marriageable, particularly when or if cynicism sets in.

For marriage there's also the divorce laws which are causing more men who are even doing really well financially to only have live-in partners and not marry, or if they're in common law marriage states they won't even do that - ie. their partner needs to stay at their own place, because they don't want the state to say 'You lived together for x many years, we consider you married, therefore she's entitled to half your stuff'.

While it might sound a little conspiracy minded I can listen to a lot of the people who I even respect on energy, sustainability, and environmental issues like Nate Hagans (Bend Not Break podcast), Nora Bateson, etc. and when they get together - they'll talk about population concerns often. The Club of Rome I believe wrote a treatise back in the 1970's titled The Limits To Growth, it wouldn't shock me if at least some of the cultural changes have been from think tanks trying to figure out how to both maximize economic success and decrease population at the same time. I mean yeah, there could be feminist concerns that addressing any of these issues would be a call to keep women barefoot and pregnant but I'm still not sure even that quite explains why it's taken so long for anyone to talk about this other than Youtube MGTOWs who were talking about this starting in the early 2010's (Barbarossa, ThinkingApe, Aaron Clarey, etc.).


We either have political needs to keep stepping on the head of a rake and get smacked with the handle (or put the wooden dowel in the spokes of the bicycle wheel while we're riding it) or it's a) at least partially an elite depopulation plan out of fear of planetary limits or b) if the planet is a superorganism in the James Lovelock Gaia Hypothesis it could be that feedback loops of that kind are producing this from a whole bunch of different directions.

Add to all this - decline of friendships, most notably right now among men but also women. The really bad stuff happening for women is girls in their pre-teens and teens needing to deal with social media and how sabotage, reputation destruction, etc. can be going on 24/7 which is a bit like them discovery WWI trench warfare (another thing Jonathan Haidt has talked about with respect to social media eviscerating the mental health of young girls).


It's not really a great time, at least socially and economically, for most people who are trying to come up.

[Sculptor1]

Your critique was not what I expected which is a very good thing, your views seem rather good and I like your unique view, basically I have little criticism or things I think you believe in it might not be true so I'll just compliment

To whom is this directed?

[Sculptor1]

I would hazard a guess that in my lifetime I have witnessed the fastest changing attitudes to sex that ever witnessed in human history.
Anthropologists talk about "hot" societies and "cold" societies. We are "hot".

Sexual mores throughout history have changed very little. As a student of History and Ancient history i can say the degree of constancy is great, only changing when new lands were opened up and chains of tradition broken in some way. In "traditional" societies 100 generations might go by with no remarkable change.

When I was born the expectation was that a pregnancy outside of wedlock would be horrific and lead to an immediate wedding (shotgun wedding to use an American phrase). The old Victorian values were still fresh in the mind. The result would be an unhappy couple expected to see the whole thing through to the end. Premarital sex was rare. Homosexuality and even specific practices such as oral sex were seen as perverted and or illegal. Abortion was illegal and contraception resitricted.
Through the 1960 that changed enormously , especially with the invention of "THE PILL" which was talked about and in the media daily for a decade.
Within 15 years, everything was legal, abortion a right, homosexuality decriminalised, and free love was every where with no expectation of marriage now widely condemned as a legal institution. An in the meantime there were still those clinging on the the old morals which continued to be adopted by an increasingly minority part of the population.
The direction of travel seems to be going backwards in many respects with hard earned right for minorities under threat, and trans people used as scapegoats to divert attention from the failings of globalisation.
I wonder if the situation will have turned 180 by the time I die?

[Sea Turtle]

I'd add something that may not get discussed much.

Your right, don't get discussed often. Often when someone brings the topics they get shutdown by politically correct police. Usually by using some form of emotional attack that has a goal to end the topic or deny any backward points.

You are describing how women are desirable for just being women, and men often must be able to demonstrate value outside of just being themself.

There is a twist in this that gets talked about even less. Not all men suffer the same fate in this. Some men are naturally attractive to women, but the list is small. We could discuss the attributes of those men, and we will find that they are not the ones demonstrating high value. I leave out a lot of discussion about all of that.

Women are competitive and do look for resource improvement. They can get resources from men(if the man has), or they can earn themself in the new world. Now what do the women need from the man if the man does not have more resources than she does? Its a trick question; hehe. This brings us back again to what do women want in a man. If she is not hunting resources(because she already has those) what does the man offer that she wants?

Remember that current laws and culture in the west tell that women can be assertive but men are not allowed to be assertive.

This leads us to a generation of men that try to peacock, the techniques include tats, going to the gym, steroids, demonstrating risk, fighting (professional,amateur and street), using credit to fake wealth that is larger than the women and other men. Pandas in leather all over the place trying to activate female biology. Or they just give up.

Women tell; can't find a good man. Lets define good......

Good used to mean resources.

Its not an attack on women, men have just as many glitches.

9 out of 10 times the girl want to go with the bad boy, not the good boy because of how she "feels". We usually do not teach this simple fact to our kids. Instead we expect it to be different just because we wish it so. We teach our young men to go along to get along; that is not attractive for women even though they insist that it is what they want.

In the sexual marketplace, women's power is beauty and behavior. Men's power is POWER (resources) and behavior. If women can get POWER without or in spite of men then only behavior is needed.

Leaves us with what is that behavior that is attractive? The sad part is that it is almost completely opposite of what we are teaching the young.

Everyone (men and women) end up sad because the driving needs never get fulfilled. We remove the physical/resource need for men, but not the emotional one.

[Pattern-chaser]

...

Mating rituals are common among most animals, and all of them make about as much sense as ours do! [I.e. none.]

[Papus79]

There is a twist in this that gets talked about even less. Not all men suffer the same fate in this. Some men are naturally attractive to women, but the list is small. We could discuss the attributes of those men, and we will find that they are not the ones demonstrating high value. I leave out a lot of discussion about all of that.

There's also a certain percentage of men and women who get married and just stay married - I think it's something like 33% of the population. I get the sense that people who have it in them to stay in a long term relationship such as a marriage either do so rather early (early to mid 20's) or they're struggling to find anyone whose like them and may not have much luck past that.

For the top 1% guys who are engaged in what Scott Galloway calls Porschia polygamy - they're in a strange spot and while there's plenty of human candy along their way it doesn't strike me as a balanced or healthy setup.

Remember that current laws and culture in the west tell that women can be assertive but men are not allowed to be assertive.

This leads us to a generation of men that try to peacock, the techniques include tats, going to the gym, steroids, demonstrating risk, fighting (professional,amateur and street), using credit to fake wealth that is larger than the women and other men. Pandas in leather all over the place trying to activate female biology. Or they just give up.

Peacocking is the same as it ever was perhaps, I think enough guys don't do it because they find it depressing. I'll get to that later though.

Leaves us with what is that behavior that is attractive? The sad part is that it is almost completely opposite of what we are teaching the young.

Alexander Grace took on a particular saying - there isn't much in the way of unattractive male behavior (within reason) but there are unattractive men and what behavior is deemed appropriate or allowable varies greatly on male attractiveness. I get why but I think we have to figure out societally how we buffer people from involuntary contact with that (such as work places where guys who are ugly, short, neurodivergent, etc. get treated awful for just trying to pay their bills).

Everyone (men and women) end up sad because the driving needs never get fulfilled. We remove the physical/resource need for men, but not the emotional one.

Men's sex drives are largely insatiable, I don't know how it is for women but there's clearly what stands out in terms of the escalated risks to health, even to survival, and the difference in involvement frames a huge over / under that ends up, at least in an atomized society, making men and women strategic adversaries on the sexuality and romance plane based on the inversion of priorities.


What I mentioned I'd bring up earlier - I watched a video where the author was describing Jungi Ito's first horror animae 'The Enigma of Amigara Fault'. In that there's a fault that breaks open a mountain and from that thrusts upward a face of rock that had been under the mountain since deep geological times. When the rock face came up there were all kinds of human-shaped holes in it. People were drawn to this, mesmerized, and it seemed like those who had holes that were exactly their shape called out to them personally and somehow those who had holes on the wall just for them would see it on TV and had the insatiable desire to go down to the wall and enter the hole that was their particular shape. No one who went into their hole ever came back out and nothing was scene for at least a few months until there was another earth quake that moved another slab up, this one had strange, monstrous, and serpentine openings in it's face. Some people were examining these openings and saw something deep in the hole coming toward them - effectively mangled flesh, teeth, and eyes.

The author of the vlog gave their analysis that this was Ito describing what happens when human beings are grabbed up by impersonal forces or prescribed roles. His first example was career - where you can't do with your life what would make you happy you have to do what pays the bills, to which you'll also find yourself in positions in those jobs where you're forced to either do the wrong thing or get fired, or you're forced to carve off some vital part of yourself for survival, and thus impersonal forces pull us in and mangle us. I think something similar happens for the dating world where those who spend too long in it get damaged by it. When you think about it it's kind of a cosmic horror in that we spent all kinds of time trying to elevate the status of being human, particularly the crap I was raised with that we're all naturally curious little Greek philosophers forever seeking truth and forever curious whereas that couldn't be further from the truth for most people (and for those it is true of they're often on the spectrum and they're treated as having never grown up for having those traits). In a way I think Human Centipede riffs on this fear as well that we're being mangled and devolved by the world we're forced to participate in.

That's sort of why I've stayed away from the dating world. I had a good ten or twelve years from my mid teens to my mid 20's where women would like the way I looked but they'd hate that I didn't react, speak, etc. to them exactly the way they wanted (I was my own person and trying to speak to them as a human rather than as an archetype). That amounted to a new girl at school or at work liking me at a distance and then hating me two weeks later, almost monthly, for years of my life (and yes - I was not dating at the time, wanted to but couldn't). After that when I did start a bit of online dating I found that almost always it was now the reverse that we'd get together on a date, we'd have nice conversation but I wouldn't be attracted, and that went on until I got tired of it. After getting to no a few people online then meeting them after having talked long-distance and not having that work I got to the point where I figured my odds of hurting a lot of people were much higher than me finding a partner - so I stopped in my early 30's, and my life got rocky enough after that in terms of melting iceberg employers where regardless of whether I was doing well they weren't - I wouldn't have had the financial stability to have a partner.

I get the sense that the world is dominated by impersonal forces and it's just as true in the human social realm and the forces are just as dumb. I think Junji Ito's analogy of a human extrusion mold that bends, breaks, and twists us into monsters is pretty accurate when I've seen the warped and twisted smiles and laughter at professional events and how much these people seem like they grew up to be almost human gargoyles and just how many people go dark and twisted after having years in the work world being an office place Hunger Games. I don't get the impression that we can have a world that's remotely approaching enjoyable (other than for the lucky and financially blessed) unless we found ways to resolve more of that, and dating as well will be a 'Stand in line and we'll tell you what we think your genes are worth' without much human decency to ameliorate it.

[Chris_winW]

It's interesting how things have shifted over time. With the complexities of modern dating and legal stuff, some people might choose different paths. It's all about doing what feels right and makes you happy

[Papus79]

It's interesting how things have shifted over time. With the complexities of modern dating and legal stuff, some people might choose different paths. It's all about doing what feels right and makes you happy

Something I was listening to yesterday, it was something like 3 hours and 15 minutes long but it was pure joy because it felt like a pure stream of honesty and sense-making, it was Konstantin Kisin from Triggernometry being interviewed on Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory.

What I've heard a lot of people driving home lately is that we're clearly, at least in the US but to some degree Europe and across the British commonwealths, heading into societal collapse. The way I heard them reifying it in the discussion is that once people are free not to have to die in war (not young Russians being thrown into Ukraine with a gun to their backs) and once real economic hardship stops for enough people you end up in a place where people are trying to negotiate away any and all limitations that could possibly be put on them. That's where people start pushing back against biological sex (playing a Mott and Bailey where they'll act like the whole thing is a social construct but if challenged retreat to 'sex and gender are different things BUT - I am a woman and I do have a female penis'). You have people who aren't good at math or other things castigating STEM as 'white' and imperial / colonial, and trying to navigate by 'what works' - while it doesn't mean you're far-right or fascist - you'll certainly get called that by these sorts. Laws aren't being enforced because people don't like having them enforced and that turns into open air drug markets in San Francisco and there was also a strange new law passed by Gavin Newsom in California where prostitution is still technically illegal in California but the police aren't allowed to interfere - meaning the body commerce strip of Figueroa Boulevard in Los Angeles just got a lot bigger and it's the worst of all worlds for the women because it's not like they're taking up 1099's, working with OSHA, and having the protection of the police if a guy tries to kill her - it's no protections and no filter for human trafficking.

I remember my dad always used to throw around an expression from Thomas Sowell - that these people are all 'first-stage thinkers' in that they like ideas that sound good on paper or sound compassionate when said out loud but they either can't see or simply don't care about the consequences of what would happen if those policies were actually implemented. It can be incredibly difficult to tell whose sincerely stupid vs. whose cynically virtue-signaling and social climbing, maybe the only tell for the later is they're constantly wrong and yet always 'winning' somehow.

Add to this - total market liberalism, which means the incentives for good behavior rather than trying to monetize everything about yourself and twisting yourself to pieces over what monetizes best is what we have as an unspoken cultural ethos.

This *may* be sloppy thinking on my part categorically but I look at this sort of meltdown in the context of Darwinian evolution. It's the gene game demolishing the society game, where the whole point is making the human societal game as unnavigable as possible (maximize corruption and nepotism) so that only the absolute best have anything resembling freedom and where hierarchies increasingly tend toward dominance rather than competence.

[Sea Turtle]

There is a twist in this that gets talked about even less. Not all men suffer the same fate in this. Some men are naturally attractive to women, but the list is small. We could discuss the attributes of those men, and we will find that they are not the ones demonstrating high value. I leave out a lot of discussion about all of that.

There's also a certain percentage of men and women who get married and just stay married - I think it's something like 33% of the population. I get the sense that people who have it in them to stay in a long term relationship such as a marriage either do so rather early (early to mid 20's) or they're struggling to find anyone whose like them and may not have much luck past that.

For the top 1% guys who are engaged in what Scott Galloway calls Porschia polygamy - they're in a strange spot and while there's plenty of human candy along their way it doesn't strike me as a balanced or healthy setup.

Remember that current laws and culture in the west tell that women can be assertive but men are not allowed to be assertive.

This leads us to a generation of men that try to peacock, the techniques include tats, going to the gym, steroids, demonstrating risk, fighting (professional,amateur and street), using credit to fake wealth that is larger than the women and other men. Pandas in leather all over the place trying to activate female biology. Or they just give up.

Peacocking is the same as it ever was perhaps, I think enough guys don't do it because they find it depressing. I'll get to that later though.

Leaves us with what is that behavior that is attractive? The sad part is that it is almost completely opposite of what we are teaching the young.

Alexander Grace took on a particular saying - there isn't much in the way of unattractive male behavior (within reason) but there are unattractive men and what behavior is deemed appropriate or allowable varies greatly on male attractiveness. I get why but I think we have to figure out societally how we buffer people from involuntary contact with that (such as work places where guys who are ugly, short, neurodivergent, etc. get treated awful for just trying to pay their bills).

Everyone (men and women) end up sad because the driving needs never get fulfilled. We remove the physical/resource need for men, but not the emotional one.

Men's sex drives are largely insatiable, I don't know how it is for women but there's clearly what stands out in terms of the escalated risks to health, even to survival, and the difference in involvement frames a huge over / under that ends up, at least in an atomized society, making men and women strategic adversaries on the sexuality and romance plane based on the inversion of priorities.


What I mentioned I'd bring up earlier - I watched a video where the author was describing Jungi Ito's first horror animae 'The Enigma of Amigara Fault'. In that there's a fault that breaks open a mountain and from that thrusts upward a face of rock that had been under the mountain since deep geological times. When the rock face came up there were all kinds of human-shaped holes in it. People were drawn to this, mesmerized, and it seemed like those who had holes that were exactly their shape called out to them personally and somehow those who had holes on the wall just for them would see it on TV and had the insatiable desire to go down to the wall and enter the hole that was their particular shape. No one who went into their hole ever came back out and nothing was scene for at least a few months until there was another earth quake that moved another slab up, this one had strange, monstrous, and serpentine openings in it's face. Some people were examining these openings and saw something deep in the hole coming toward them - effectively mangled flesh, teeth, and eyes.

The author of the vlog gave their analysis that this was Ito describing what happens when human beings are grabbed up by impersonal forces or prescribed roles. His first example was career - where you can't do with your life what would make you happy you have to do what pays the bills, to which you'll also find yourself in positions in those jobs where you're forced to either do the wrong thing or get fired, or you're forced to carve off some vital part of yourself for survival, and thus impersonal forces pull us in and mangle us. I think something similar happens for the dating world where those who spend too long in it get damaged by it. When you think about it it's kind of a cosmic horror in that we spent all kinds of time trying to elevate the status of being human, particularly the crap I was raised with that we're all naturally curious little Greek philosophers forever seeking truth and forever curious whereas that couldn't be further from the truth for most people (and for those it is true of they're often on the spectrum and they're treated as having never grown up for having those traits). In a way I think Human Centipede riffs on this fear as well that we're being mangled and devolved by the world we're forced to participate in.

That's sort of why I've stayed away from the dating world. I had a good ten or twelve years from my mid teens to my mid 20's where women would like the way I looked but they'd hate that I didn't react, speak, etc. to them exactly the way they wanted (I was my own person and trying to speak to them as a human rather than as an archetype). That amounted to a new girl at school or at work liking me at a distance and then hating me two weeks later, almost monthly, for years of my life (and yes - I was not dating at the time, wanted to but couldn't). After that when I did start a bit of online dating I found that almost always it was now the reverse that we'd get together on a date, we'd have nice conversation but I wouldn't be attracted, and that went on until I got tired of it. After getting to no a few people online then meeting them after having talked long-distance and not having that work I got to the point where I figured my odds of hurting a lot of people were much higher than me finding a partner - so I stopped in my early 30's, and my life got rocky enough after that in terms of melting iceberg employers where regardless of whether I was doing well they weren't - I wouldn't have had the financial stability to have a partner.

I get the sense that the world is dominated by impersonal forces and it's just as true in the human social realm and the forces are just as dumb. I think Junji Ito's analogy of a human extrusion mold that bends, breaks, and twists us into monsters is pretty accurate when I've seen the warped and twisted smiles and laughter at professional events and how much these people seem like they grew up to be almost human gargoyles and just how many people go dark and twisted after having years in the work world being an office place Hunger Games. I don't get the impression that we can have a world that's remotely approaching enjoyable (other than for the lucky and financially blessed) unless we found ways to resolve more of that, and dating as well will be a 'Stand in line and we'll tell you what we think your genes are worth' without much human decency to ameliorate it.

well said.

[Xenophon]

...as commitment to parenthood for a man means 100% responsibility but no rights.

And the same for a woman, too, I think? This thread already approaches the line between discussion and misogyny; I think it's probably a good thing to avoid straying too close to that line, to retain thoughtful discussion, and avoid a descent into discrimination, and the arguments that will inevitably come with it.

Whatever minor disadvantages a man might suffer in the circumstances being discussed here, they are surely far outweighed by what still remains of male domination (i.e. most of it). A balanced approach here will reap dividends, I feel.

For a start, we seem to be discussing parenthood and the hardships it can lead to, without remembering that those hardships are part of raising a family. Instead of devoting your resources to yourself, and maybe your partner, you suddenly have to give priority to your offspring, which can be a huge change in many people's lives, men and women both. Parenthood is hard, and it can require significant sacrifice. Are men (or women) seriously considering raising a family, thinking it'll be easy and simple? I really hope not...

It is caddish manners to interject talk of problem B into a discussion of problem A. Had you started a thread about female problems and the other guy brought up male gripes, would you be understanding and balanced? Your needle is stuck into its narrative groove (a.k.a., mental rut.)