I liked your description of certain unconventional schools of thought as “tough-minded” and “creative.” Tough-minded, creative thought processes will often involve concepts and metaphors that make people uncomfortable, including the people who think them up.
Sometimes, understanding the behavior of large groups of people involves concepts or metaphors that would be unhealthy to apply at the individual level. For instance, you can learn a lot about human behavior by thinking about game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This does not mean that you need to think about other people as “prisoners,” or think about your interactions with them as a “game” or as a “dilemma.”
I think you probably do have a lot of differences in values from people who are “red-pillers, manosphericals, conservatives, reactionaries, libertarians,” but I think this case is really just about inferential distance on the object-level. Although “sexual access” has potential problematic connotations, it actually accurately describes situations where some people’s dating challenges are so great that they are effectively excluded. I apologize for the length this post will be, but I want to drop down to the object-level for a while to give you sufficient evidence to chew on:
Demographics: sex ratio and operational sex ratio have a gigantic influence on society. Exhibit A: China has a surplus of men. Exhibit B: The shortage of black men due to imprisonment turns dating upside-down in the black community and causes black women to compete fiercely for black men. Exhibit C: In virtually all US cities (not just the West Coast), there are more single men than women below age 35 (scroll down for the age breakdown or use the sliders). Young men face a level of competition than young women do not.
If something like 120 men are competing for 100 women, in the system if monogamous, then 20 of those men are going to be excluded from marriage. Yes, in some sense, all 120 have an “opportunity,” but we know that under monogamy, 20 of them will be left out in the cold. And under a poly system, the results will be even worse, because humans are more polygynous than polyandrous. When low-status men are guaranteed to lose out in dating and marriage due to an unfavorable sex ratio, then that starts looking like a lack of “access.”
Let’s talk about polygyny a bit more. A recent article defended gay marriage from the charge of opening up the door to polygamy:
Here’s the problem with it: when a high-status man takes two wives (and one man taking many wives, or polygyny, is almost invariably the real-world pattern), a lower-status man gets no wife. If the high-status man takes three wives, two lower-status men get no wives. And so on.
This competitive, zero-sum dynamic sets off a competition among high-status men to hoard marriage opportunities, which leaves lower-status men out in the cold. Those men, denied access to life’s most stabilizing and civilizing institution, are unfairly disadvantaged and often turn to behaviors like crime and violence. The situation is not good for women, either, because it places them in competition with other wives and can reduce them all to satellites of the man.
I’m not just making this up. There’s an extensive literature on polygamy.
And there’s that word again: “access.” The notion of men being shut out of dating under polygyny mating appears in an entirely mainstream and liberal source. There are also concepts like “high-status” and “low-status” males, which feminists would often object to in other contexts.
Cultural forces: the quality of information about dating for introverted men is so poor that it is actively damaging and has the effect of excluding them from dating. There is also a decline in socialization and institutions around dating. For evidence, it is sufficient to look at the existence of the PUA community. Look at hookup culture on college campuses. In a healthy society, with healthy socialization and a monogamous mating system, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation because many of the same men in the manosphere or PUA community would be too busy hanging out with their girlfriends or wives to be complaining on the internet.
Legal and economic forces: In some Asian countries, women’s minimum expectations for husbands involves buying a house with multiple bedrooms, and only some men can economically afford that; the rest lack access to marriage because they lack the economic prerequisites. In many Western countries, if men get divorced, they can face such punishing child support and alimony burden that they must move to a small apartment (or even end up in debtor’s prison if they can’t pay). These men face steep challenges in attracting future girlfriends and wives due to their economic dispossession.
As I’ve shown at the object level, there are large cultural, demographic, economic, and legal forces that influence how challenging dating is and how people behave. These problems are much larger than asshole men blaming women for not putting out. Lack of “sexual access” is an entirely reasonable way to describe what happens to men under a skewed operational sex ratio or polygyny, though I would be totally fine to try other terms instead. I realize the term isn’t perfect, and that some people who use it might have objectionable beliefs, but if we give into crimestop and guilt-by-association, then we would know a lot less about the world.
On one side, I see people who are high-status, intellectual, and look really nice and empathic and compassionate. Of course my instincts like that. On the other side, I see people who look brave, tough, critical-minded and creative, plus they seem to be far more historically literate, so basically NRx and libertarians and similar folks give me that kind of “inventor” vibe, which incidentally is also something my instincts like.
So, basically, there are two groups of people with grievances. The ingroup is very good at impression management and public relations. The outgroup is bad at impression management, but your gut is telling you that they might be on to something. Yet you are suspicious of some of the outgroup’s arguments, because the ingroup says that the outgroup is just a bunch of “smart assholes,” and because the outgroup’s claims have problematic connotations in the outgroup’s moral framework.
I don’t think your reaction is unreasonable given your vantage point and level of inferential distance from the outgroup. But note that there is a strong incentive for the ingroup to set an incredibly high bar for the moral acceptability of the outgroup’s grievances, so it’s necessary to apply a healthy degree of skepticism to the ingroup’s moral arguments unless you have confirmed them independently.
In some cases, we will have to go to the object-level to discover which group is the “smart assholes” who are confabulating. Of course both groups will try to tar the others’ motives and reputations, but the seeming victor of that conflict will be the group with the best public relations skills, not necessarily the group with the more accurate views.
If your gut is telling you that there is potential truth in the outgroup’s arguments, then don’t let the ingroup’s moral framework shut down your investigation, especially when that investigation has implications for whether the ingroup’s moral framework is any good in the first place. Otherwise, you risk getting stuck in an closed loop of belief. I think the same argument applies to one’s own moral framework, also.
For instance, you can learn a lot about human behavior by thinking about game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This does not mean that you need to think about other people as “prisoners,” or think about your interactions with them as a “game” or as a “dilemma.”
The issue is that the Prisoner’s Dilemma doesn’t seem to predict human behavior in modern society well.Partially because it is the kind of tough situation that is uncommon now—this is a bit similar to the SSC’s thrive-vs-survive spectrum. All this tough-minded right-wing stuff is essentially survivalist, and every time I am back in Eastern Europe I too switch back to a survivalist mode which is familiar to me, but as usually I am sitting fat and happy in the comfortable West, I am simply not in a survivalist mode nor is anyone else I see. People focus on thriving—and that includes that they are not really in this kind of me-first selfish mood but more interested in satisfying social standards about being empathic and nice.
I totally accept the dating market is an uphill battle for most young men—I too was in these shoes, perhaps I would still be if not by sheer luck finding an awesome wife. This is not the issue at all. Rather it is simply what follows from it. This is a good, research-based summary of the opposing view here: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/07/07/the-myth-of-the-alpha-male/
I realize the term isn’t perfect, and that some people who use it might have objectionable beliefs, but if we give into crimestop and guilt-by-association, then we would know a lot less about the world.
This isn’t really that. I care very little about being PC except when it is about love. That is, if some kids gaming on Xbox call each other faggots the implied homophobia does not really bother some kind of inner social justice warrior in me, I don’t really feel this need to stick to a progressivism-approved list of okay words. But I have this notion that relationships and dating are not simply a brutal dog-eat-dog market competing for meat. There must be something we may call love there, something that goes beyond the merely personal and selfish level, a sense that one would if need be sacrifice for the other. And love is really incompatible with hate or harboring hidden ressentiment or anything even remotely similar, such as objectification. For all I care people may hate whoever they want to, maybe they have good reasons for doing so, but when people seem to hate the very same people they are trying to love I must point out the contradiction. Objectification may be a valid approach when you are a hiring bricklayers—if the project is late, just throw more warm bodies on the problem, that kind of objectification (workers as a fungible resource etc.) Objectification maybe a valid approach in the whorehouse and the strip club, even in the swingers club. But relationships must have a core of love which is really incompatible with objectification.
Maybe I am not only up against RP here—maybe “normal” young people think like life is a no-strings-attached swingers club, maybe they objectify too. I may be against general trends amongst the young...
And thus I am not policing words. I am pointing out that choices of words demonstrate mindsets and attitudes and “access” must flow from an objectifying one. Hence the goal is probably not a normal loving relationship.
This is purely pragmatic! Perhaps in the swingers club, love is not required, thus objecification is okay and thus terms like access demonstrate valid mindsets. But what I am saying here is guys who dream about real loving relationships yet think like this are sabotaging themselves and this is part of why it is such a hard uphill battle for them.
My point is a lot like if you flex both your biceps and triceps both will be weak because they work against each other. To flex the biceps really strong you must turn off the triceps. Men who want to find love must really learn how NOT to flex the ressentiment-muscle, the grievance-muscle against women, and this includes thinking of them fully as persons. Not just use a “more approved” word than access but really change the mindset so that such words don’t even come to mind.
This is clearly not about impression management. It is about deep contradictions in the outgroups goals and attitudes. My gut is saying that many of the grievances are correct, I have felt them too but yet the grievance state of mind is self-sabotage. Imagine the guy who was mugged by blacks and becomes racist. At least he has from that on a consistent goal—keep self and black people really apart from each other. Imagine the guy who constantly sucked at dating, when succeeded, got cheated on, maybe even got divorced on frivolous grounds. He has two contradictory goals or attitudes, the inner mental pushback against women which manifests as ressentiment or a grievance-mindset, and yet the desire to get sex.
I think your “mental muscle” analogy is interesting: you are suggesting that exercising mental grievance or ressentiment is unhealthy for relationships, and is part of why men red pill men have an “uphill battle.” You argue that love is incompatible with resentment. You also argue that certain terms “demonstrate” particular unhealthy and resentful mindsets, or lead to “objectification” which is tantamount to not viewing others as people.
I share your concern that some red pill men have toxic attitudes towards women which hamper their relationships. I disagree that language like “sexual access” is sufficient to demonstrate resentment of women, and I explained other reasoning behind that language in my previous comment where I discussed operational sex ratio, polygyny, and other impersonal forces.
My other argument is that views of relationships operate at different levels of explanation. There are least 3 levels: the macro level of society, the local level of your peers and dating pool, and the dyadic level of your interpersonal relationships. Why can’t someone believe that dating is a brutal, unfair, dog-eat-dog competition at the macro or local level, but once they succeed in getting into a relationship, they fall in love and belief in sacrifice, like you want? It’s also possible to have a grievance towards a group of people, like bankers, but still respect your personal banker as a human being.
A metaphor that is useful for understanding the mating market at the societal or local level can be emotionally toxic if you apply it at the dyadic level. If you believe that the current mating market results in some men lacking sexual access at the macro level, that’s a totally correct and neutral description of what happens under a skewed operational sex ratio and polygyny. If you tell your partner “honey, you’ve been denying me sexual access for the past week,” then you’re being an asshole.
In the past, men and women of the past held beliefs about gender roles and sex differences that would be considered scandalously sexist today. It seems implausible that our ancestors didn’t love each other. People are good at compartmentalizing and believing that their partner is special.
Your theory about concepts leading to resentment and resentment being a barrier to relationships could be true, but I think it’s much more likely that you have the causal relationship backwards: it’s mostly loneliness that causes resentment, not the other way around. For instance, in the case of a skewed operational sex ratio, some people are just going to end up single no matter how zen their attitudes are.
Even if there is a risk of alienation from understanding sex differences, and sexual economics, I still think it’s better to try to build an epistemically accurate view of relationships, and then later make peace with any resentment that is a by-product of this understanding.
It seems like the only alternative is to try to mentally avoid any economic, anthropological, or gender-political insight into dating that might cause you to feel resentment: blinkering your epistemic rationality for the instrumentally rational goal of harmonious relationships.
There’s also a genuinely open question of how big sex differences are: if sex differences are smaller than I think, then I’m probably harming my relationships by being too cynical, but if they are larger than I think, then I’m naive and risk finding out the hard way. I really doubt that relationships are the one place where Litany of Tarski doesn’t apply.
It sounds like your current relationship attitudes are bringing you success in your relationship and that terms like “objectification” are more helpful to you than “sexual access.” That’s totally fine, but other people have different challenges and are coming from a different place, so I recommend suspending judgment about what concepts their mindsets entail and why they are single. If you believe that toxic attitudes towards women are correlated with their concepts, then that’s plausible, though it’s a different argument.
To go a bit more meta, I would argue that a lot of the resistance towards men developing inconvenient conclusions about sex ratio, polygyny, sex differences, etc… is not because these ideas are necessarily harmful to male-female relationships, but because they are harmful to feminist narratives about male privilege. It is morally reprehensible how feminists use their own grievance-based concepts of “objectification” to reject any macro-level analysis of male-female dynamics that might be unflattering towards women. It’s just far too convenient how sociological, economic, and anthropological arguments that would be acceptable in any other circumstance are dismissed as denying women’s humanity or personhood. I think you should be just as skeptical towards feminist grievance concepts as you are towards red pill grievance concepts.
I liked your description of certain unconventional schools of thought as “tough-minded” and “creative.” Tough-minded, creative thought processes will often involve concepts and metaphors that make people uncomfortable, including the people who think them up.
Sometimes, understanding the behavior of large groups of people involves concepts or metaphors that would be unhealthy to apply at the individual level. For instance, you can learn a lot about human behavior by thinking about game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This does not mean that you need to think about other people as “prisoners,” or think about your interactions with them as a “game” or as a “dilemma.”
I think you probably do have a lot of differences in values from people who are “red-pillers, manosphericals, conservatives, reactionaries, libertarians,” but I think this case is really just about inferential distance on the object-level. Although “sexual access” has potential problematic connotations, it actually accurately describes situations where some people’s dating challenges are so great that they are effectively excluded. I apologize for the length this post will be, but I want to drop down to the object-level for a while to give you sufficient evidence to chew on:
Demographics: sex ratio and operational sex ratio have a gigantic influence on society. Exhibit A: China has a surplus of men. Exhibit B: The shortage of black men due to imprisonment turns dating upside-down in the black community and causes black women to compete fiercely for black men. Exhibit C: In virtually all US cities (not just the West Coast), there are more single men than women below age 35 (scroll down for the age breakdown or use the sliders). Young men face a level of competition than young women do not.
If something like 120 men are competing for 100 women, in the system if monogamous, then 20 of those men are going to be excluded from marriage. Yes, in some sense, all 120 have an “opportunity,” but we know that under monogamy, 20 of them will be left out in the cold. And under a poly system, the results will be even worse, because humans are more polygynous than polyandrous. When low-status men are guaranteed to lose out in dating and marriage due to an unfavorable sex ratio, then that starts looking like a lack of “access.”
Let’s talk about polygyny a bit more. A recent article defended gay marriage from the charge of opening up the door to polygamy:
And there’s that word again: “access.” The notion of men being shut out of dating under polygyny mating appears in an entirely mainstream and liberal source. There are also concepts like “high-status” and “low-status” males, which feminists would often object to in other contexts.
Cultural forces: the quality of information about dating for introverted men is so poor that it is actively damaging and has the effect of excluding them from dating. There is also a decline in socialization and institutions around dating. For evidence, it is sufficient to look at the existence of the PUA community. Look at hookup culture on college campuses. In a healthy society, with healthy socialization and a monogamous mating system, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation because many of the same men in the manosphere or PUA community would be too busy hanging out with their girlfriends or wives to be complaining on the internet.
Legal and economic forces: In some Asian countries, women’s minimum expectations for husbands involves buying a house with multiple bedrooms, and only some men can economically afford that; the rest lack access to marriage because they lack the economic prerequisites. In many Western countries, if men get divorced, they can face such punishing child support and alimony burden that they must move to a small apartment (or even end up in debtor’s prison if they can’t pay). These men face steep challenges in attracting future girlfriends and wives due to their economic dispossession.
As I’ve shown at the object level, there are large cultural, demographic, economic, and legal forces that influence how challenging dating is and how people behave. These problems are much larger than asshole men blaming women for not putting out. Lack of “sexual access” is an entirely reasonable way to describe what happens to men under a skewed operational sex ratio or polygyny, though I would be totally fine to try other terms instead. I realize the term isn’t perfect, and that some people who use it might have objectionable beliefs, but if we give into crimestop and guilt-by-association, then we would know a lot less about the world.
So, basically, there are two groups of people with grievances. The ingroup is very good at impression management and public relations. The outgroup is bad at impression management, but your gut is telling you that they might be on to something. Yet you are suspicious of some of the outgroup’s arguments, because the ingroup says that the outgroup is just a bunch of “smart assholes,” and because the outgroup’s claims have problematic connotations in the outgroup’s moral framework.
I don’t think your reaction is unreasonable given your vantage point and level of inferential distance from the outgroup. But note that there is a strong incentive for the ingroup to set an incredibly high bar for the moral acceptability of the outgroup’s grievances, so it’s necessary to apply a healthy degree of skepticism to the ingroup’s moral arguments unless you have confirmed them independently.
In some cases, we will have to go to the object-level to discover which group is the “smart assholes” who are confabulating. Of course both groups will try to tar the others’ motives and reputations, but the seeming victor of that conflict will be the group with the best public relations skills, not necessarily the group with the more accurate views.
If your gut is telling you that there is potential truth in the outgroup’s arguments, then don’t let the ingroup’s moral framework shut down your investigation, especially when that investigation has implications for whether the ingroup’s moral framework is any good in the first place. Otherwise, you risk getting stuck in an closed loop of belief. I think the same argument applies to one’s own moral framework, also.
The issue is that the Prisoner’s Dilemma doesn’t seem to predict human behavior in modern society well.Partially because it is the kind of tough situation that is uncommon now—this is a bit similar to the SSC’s thrive-vs-survive spectrum. All this tough-minded right-wing stuff is essentially survivalist, and every time I am back in Eastern Europe I too switch back to a survivalist mode which is familiar to me, but as usually I am sitting fat and happy in the comfortable West, I am simply not in a survivalist mode nor is anyone else I see. People focus on thriving—and that includes that they are not really in this kind of me-first selfish mood but more interested in satisfying social standards about being empathic and nice.
I totally accept the dating market is an uphill battle for most young men—I too was in these shoes, perhaps I would still be if not by sheer luck finding an awesome wife. This is not the issue at all. Rather it is simply what follows from it. This is a good, research-based summary of the opposing view here: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/07/07/the-myth-of-the-alpha-male/
This isn’t really that. I care very little about being PC except when it is about love. That is, if some kids gaming on Xbox call each other faggots the implied homophobia does not really bother some kind of inner social justice warrior in me, I don’t really feel this need to stick to a progressivism-approved list of okay words. But I have this notion that relationships and dating are not simply a brutal dog-eat-dog market competing for meat. There must be something we may call love there, something that goes beyond the merely personal and selfish level, a sense that one would if need be sacrifice for the other. And love is really incompatible with hate or harboring hidden ressentiment or anything even remotely similar, such as objectification. For all I care people may hate whoever they want to, maybe they have good reasons for doing so, but when people seem to hate the very same people they are trying to love I must point out the contradiction. Objectification may be a valid approach when you are a hiring bricklayers—if the project is late, just throw more warm bodies on the problem, that kind of objectification (workers as a fungible resource etc.) Objectification maybe a valid approach in the whorehouse and the strip club, even in the swingers club. But relationships must have a core of love which is really incompatible with objectification.
Maybe I am not only up against RP here—maybe “normal” young people think like life is a no-strings-attached swingers club, maybe they objectify too. I may be against general trends amongst the young...
And thus I am not policing words. I am pointing out that choices of words demonstrate mindsets and attitudes and “access” must flow from an objectifying one. Hence the goal is probably not a normal loving relationship.
This is purely pragmatic! Perhaps in the swingers club, love is not required, thus objecification is okay and thus terms like access demonstrate valid mindsets. But what I am saying here is guys who dream about real loving relationships yet think like this are sabotaging themselves and this is part of why it is such a hard uphill battle for them.
My point is a lot like if you flex both your biceps and triceps both will be weak because they work against each other. To flex the biceps really strong you must turn off the triceps. Men who want to find love must really learn how NOT to flex the ressentiment-muscle, the grievance-muscle against women, and this includes thinking of them fully as persons. Not just use a “more approved” word than access but really change the mindset so that such words don’t even come to mind.
This is clearly not about impression management. It is about deep contradictions in the outgroups goals and attitudes. My gut is saying that many of the grievances are correct, I have felt them too but yet the grievance state of mind is self-sabotage. Imagine the guy who was mugged by blacks and becomes racist. At least he has from that on a consistent goal—keep self and black people really apart from each other. Imagine the guy who constantly sucked at dating, when succeeded, got cheated on, maybe even got divorced on frivolous grounds. He has two contradictory goals or attitudes, the inner mental pushback against women which manifests as ressentiment or a grievance-mindset, and yet the desire to get sex.
I think your “mental muscle” analogy is interesting: you are suggesting that exercising mental grievance or ressentiment is unhealthy for relationships, and is part of why men red pill men have an “uphill battle.” You argue that love is incompatible with resentment. You also argue that certain terms “demonstrate” particular unhealthy and resentful mindsets, or lead to “objectification” which is tantamount to not viewing others as people.
I share your concern that some red pill men have toxic attitudes towards women which hamper their relationships. I disagree that language like “sexual access” is sufficient to demonstrate resentment of women, and I explained other reasoning behind that language in my previous comment where I discussed operational sex ratio, polygyny, and other impersonal forces.
My other argument is that views of relationships operate at different levels of explanation. There are least 3 levels: the macro level of society, the local level of your peers and dating pool, and the dyadic level of your interpersonal relationships. Why can’t someone believe that dating is a brutal, unfair, dog-eat-dog competition at the macro or local level, but once they succeed in getting into a relationship, they fall in love and belief in sacrifice, like you want? It’s also possible to have a grievance towards a group of people, like bankers, but still respect your personal banker as a human being.
A metaphor that is useful for understanding the mating market at the societal or local level can be emotionally toxic if you apply it at the dyadic level. If you believe that the current mating market results in some men lacking sexual access at the macro level, that’s a totally correct and neutral description of what happens under a skewed operational sex ratio and polygyny. If you tell your partner “honey, you’ve been denying me sexual access for the past week,” then you’re being an asshole.
In the past, men and women of the past held beliefs about gender roles and sex differences that would be considered scandalously sexist today. It seems implausible that our ancestors didn’t love each other. People are good at compartmentalizing and believing that their partner is special.
Your theory about concepts leading to resentment and resentment being a barrier to relationships could be true, but I think it’s much more likely that you have the causal relationship backwards: it’s mostly loneliness that causes resentment, not the other way around. For instance, in the case of a skewed operational sex ratio, some people are just going to end up single no matter how zen their attitudes are.
Even if there is a risk of alienation from understanding sex differences, and sexual economics, I still think it’s better to try to build an epistemically accurate view of relationships, and then later make peace with any resentment that is a by-product of this understanding.
It seems like the only alternative is to try to mentally avoid any economic, anthropological, or gender-political insight into dating that might cause you to feel resentment: blinkering your epistemic rationality for the instrumentally rational goal of harmonious relationships.
There’s also a genuinely open question of how big sex differences are: if sex differences are smaller than I think, then I’m probably harming my relationships by being too cynical, but if they are larger than I think, then I’m naive and risk finding out the hard way. I really doubt that relationships are the one place where Litany of Tarski doesn’t apply.
It sounds like your current relationship attitudes are bringing you success in your relationship and that terms like “objectification” are more helpful to you than “sexual access.” That’s totally fine, but other people have different challenges and are coming from a different place, so I recommend suspending judgment about what concepts their mindsets entail and why they are single. If you believe that toxic attitudes towards women are correlated with their concepts, then that’s plausible, though it’s a different argument.
To go a bit more meta, I would argue that a lot of the resistance towards men developing inconvenient conclusions about sex ratio, polygyny, sex differences, etc… is not because these ideas are necessarily harmful to male-female relationships, but because they are harmful to feminist narratives about male privilege. It is morally reprehensible how feminists use their own grievance-based concepts of “objectification” to reject any macro-level analysis of male-female dynamics that might be unflattering towards women. It’s just far too convenient how sociological, economic, and anthropological arguments that would be acceptable in any other circumstance are dismissed as denying women’s humanity or personhood. I think you should be just as skeptical towards feminist grievance concepts as you are towards red pill grievance concepts.