This illustrates the problem I have with how we leave boys’ sexual development to the haphazard and just hope that they can figure it out somehow. What about the boys who can’t or don’t have these experiences and learn these skills at an appropriate age?
Sex And The Valley: Tech Guys Seek Expert Love Advice From Therapists
“Dan” seems at first to perfectly embody that popular object of scorn these days in San Francisco: the privileged tech worker. He’s a developer-turned-manager at a thriving startup, the type of guy you would expect to see dodging protesters at a Google bus stop or evicting low-income tenants in order to build his dream condo. But beyond that veneer of untouchable privilege, there is a soft underbelly. He’s a 40-year-old virgin, and his troubles with women are bad enough that he’s sought out a sex therapist for help.
I think this is true and I don’t really understand the downvotes. Before the Sexual Revolution it was simple, not necessasarily satisfying but the rules were easy to grasp.
The early stages of the Sexual Revolution, say 1940-1970 were simple too. Pretty much everybody understood that the kind of guy who is good at sports and dancing and similar things will get the girls, and they would pretty much just go to the dances on the weekends, where Tommy Dorsey type of music was played in the 1940′s or the newer rock and roll in the 1960′s, and these dances still had traces of the old ballroom etiquette where girls would be sitting on one side and the boys on the other and they would approach a sitting girl and politely ask them for a dance. And things would develop on their own from there. Although the SR meant people stopped marrying as virgins (excluding the religious crazy at least) the goal was still to get married after having a few relationships and women were pretty open about basically testing men for marriage or LTR and attitudes were monogamous so there was this idea that you knew those five boys are far better than you but still as the five prettiest girls at the dance grabbed a firm hold on them the other girls had to realize that they lost that game and they have to settle for you.
And the whole thing was made even simpler and easier by people pretty much being carbon copies of each other. Everybody wore the same clothes and hairstyles and due to having similar sportly hobbies most boys would have similar musculature, fat people were rare because eating outside formal mealtimes was less common and so on. Remember in the movie Easy Riders how guys having somewhat long hair is a scandal in a small town, because they are so used to looking like each other. Today people look very individual, and this means no look is really scandalous but on the other this also increased competition in looks.
At any rate this started to break down in the eighties. I was born in 1978 so I have not seen the first phases of the breakdown, but in 1994 already what my parents taught broke down. There was no more pair dancing, just people forming circles on the dancefloor or dancing alone. But I guess it is was still recognizable what you do there, go to a girl, shake together then invite for a drink.
From about 2005 on things really started to make no sense. I saw guys just go in the dancefloor and plain simply grind their crotch on the backside of girls. Are they their GFs? No it turned out for the younger folks it became normal to do it with strangers. But the fun part is this, risk increased. This behavior could get an attractive guy a zero-effort bang and get an unattractive guy arrested for harassment. Also, as I mentioned above, there were no carbon-copy looks anymore so people competed highly in looks.
All in all, it seems the whole thing became more and more incomprehensible. It seems it is highly optimized now for the best. Guys who figure out how to look really good, or read social cues really easily can have it extremely easy now, while the rest who think there should be rules you can learn with your brain have it increasingly difficult.
Things got better for me when I left the world of dancefloors and got into internet dating, in an instinctively anti-Tinder way, as in, looking for women with no or grainy photos and really intelligent texts on their profiles It did not mean they are ugly, it mean they did not want to be judged after their looks. They make good partners. I think with Tinder internet dating is becoming something similar to the dancefloor, highly optimized for a few and not working for most. It is important to stick to less looks focused types of internet dating sites and I think filtering for no picture is still a good idea. Disclaimer: it helped that I did not live in an area with a lot of obesity, or else the lack of a picture may easily mean gravity-distorting mass.
Guys who figure out how to look really good, or read social cues really easily can have it extremely easy now, while the rest who think there should be rules you can learn with your brain have it increasingly difficult.
Why? Just because the rules are very different than what they used to be (i.e. there is far less jumping through hoops, and a lot more direct, often intuitive/implied negotiation) doesn’t mean that such rules don’t exist or can’t be learned conciously. Even “looking real good” is very much a craft that can be improved upon.
I think I have not expressed myself clearly. I need to go one meta deeper.
The limiting factor is courage or confidence. When rules are more direct, you must muster more courage to follow them because there is also a higher risk (of being accused of harassment or public embarrassment). Same with looks, there are less conspicious kinds of good looks, like the past, where you would put on a well tailored suit, and more conspicuous kinds of good looks, like a todays dance club where it is spiky hair and sleeveless shirts showing gym-made arms. Where it is more conspicuous kinds of good looks required, it is a test of courage or confidence, because if you don’t have so much, you will feel that you are noticed too much or stand out too much or look like a clown, basically get too “self-conscious” about it.
So the central issue is that today the rules test courage, confidence or testosterone harder, because you need more conspicous looks that attract too many gazes and you may feel like you are being ridiculous, or braver negotiation that could result in louder embarrassment.
My impression has been a well-tailored suit is more in right now than a sleeveless shirt. My friends and I were making fun of how many over-dressed guys there were at a show a few weeks ago; way too many dress pants and blazers for a concert.
Where it is more conspicuous kinds of good looks required, it is a test of courage or confidence, because if you don’t have so much, you will feel that you are noticed too much or stand out too much or look like a clown, basically get too “self-conscious” about it.
I guess that the being “self-conscious” has a bigger effect than the actual looks.
I think so too. I should also say I don’t like this term very much, it is unaccurate, so I like that you used quotes. Self-consciousness is supposed to mean a good thing, like knowing what you are doing and why. But a while ago in the English language this term gained a different, and more negative meaning, e.g. Daniel Radcliffe: “I used to be self conscious about my height, but then I thought, fuck that, I’m Harry Potter.” What would be a better term to express that feeling? It is something close to being inhibited and artificial because your attention is focused on yourself and not on the situation. Recommendations from other languages are welcome, we can Anglify them by translating them to Latin then using that root :)
This comment by user “CharlieSheen” from a similar thread seems relevant
I’m actually at the point when I think it is impossible to give men useful advice to improve their sex lives and relationships because of the social dynamics that arise in nearly all societies. Actually good advice aiming to optimize the life outcomes of the men who are given it has never been discussed in public spaces and considered reputable.
Same can naturally be said of advice for women. I think most modern dating advice both for men and women is anti-knowledge in that the more of it you follow the more miserable you will end up being. I would say follow your instincts but that doesn’t work either in our society since they are broken.
This illustrates the problem I have with how we leave boys’ sexual development to the haphazard and just hope that they can figure it out somehow. What about the boys who can’t or don’t have these experiences and learn these skills at an appropriate age?
You certainly complain about this a lot. But do you have any suggestions of how to fix this problem?
Not sure if you are suggesting this, but I really want to discourage any “don’t draw attention to a problem unless you have a solution” bullshit. These are two separate things, and they both have value. It is nice and good if you happen to have a solution to a problem that you’ve identified, but to keep silent about a problem just because you don’t have a solution is nuts insofar as you would like for the problem to be solved someday.
There are productive ways to filter writing (writer is doing crappy analysis, propagating misinformation on purpose or through incomptence/ignorance, etc), but doing so based on “did you propose a solution” is actively harmful. Remember the “don’t jump to solutions, scope out the problem first” bit.
Given that he has been “drawing attention” to this issue more or less constantly for months, I think it is reasonable to demand he stop repeating himself and start actually developing the idea further in some actually constructive way.
I think he keeps repeating it because he cannot and he would like others to try.
I doubt it, it’s the same pattern of behavior displayed when he complains about liberal transhumanists or the media bias against cryonics. It’s a “woe is me, the world is unjust” attitude, not constructive at all. It seems to me he just wants people to commiserate with him.
This illustrates the problem I have with how we leave boys’ sexual development to the haphazard and just hope that they can figure it out somehow.
That’s not the problem. If you leave boys’ sexual development to the haphazard, history shows most will figure it out. The problem is that society is actively giving boys bad advice.
I don’t think this is strictly a male problem. I would guess the average person does not have as much sex as they would prefer. A lot of this is due to child rearing. Without strict controls on relationships, a lot of women throughout history would have ended up as single parents, their partners unsupportive of their fling that went a way they didn’t expect.
I’m not sure if its possible to entirely avoid such problems unless we have better birth control systems or very different child raising practices; the latter is a whole new can of worms. By better birth control i’m referring to widespread usage, lack of side effects, and product satisfaction; not just availability and quality.
What about the boys who can’t or don’t have these experiences...
They fail to reproduce, presumably. Genetics and evolution are a harsh mistress. Is there some reason to think that males that do not find a mate should get some sort of assistance? Perhaps for them, 40 is the “appropriate age”.
I think I could make a fairly strong case that anyone who is not capable of talking to peers of both sexes and learning the right social cues to find a mate is probably someone also poorly equipped to take care of the results of finding that mate in the first place, namely a relationship and children. And—that’s fine, viva la difference—a nice thing about being an intelligent human being is that you are not necessarily constrained in your behavior by what might be best from the standpoint of genetics and survival of the species.
They fail to reproduce, presumably. Genetics and evolution are a harsh mistress. Is there some reason to think that males that do not find a mate should get some sort of assistance? Perhaps for them, 40 is the “appropriate age”.
The fact that we appear to selecting against traits like intelligence.
Given that most males in our current society (and, indeed, a significant fraction of females) seem to try to delay or indefinitely postpone reproduction—sometimes failing to do so - it doesn’t seem that failure to reproduce is a driver of behavioral modification.
This illustrates the problem I have with how we leave boys’ sexual development to the haphazard and just hope that they can figure it out somehow. What about the boys who can’t or don’t have these experiences and learn these skills at an appropriate age?
Sex And The Valley: Tech Guys Seek Expert Love Advice From Therapists
http://www.vocativ.com/culture/society/the-sex-therapists-of-silicon-valley/
I think this is true and I don’t really understand the downvotes. Before the Sexual Revolution it was simple, not necessasarily satisfying but the rules were easy to grasp.
The early stages of the Sexual Revolution, say 1940-1970 were simple too. Pretty much everybody understood that the kind of guy who is good at sports and dancing and similar things will get the girls, and they would pretty much just go to the dances on the weekends, where Tommy Dorsey type of music was played in the 1940′s or the newer rock and roll in the 1960′s, and these dances still had traces of the old ballroom etiquette where girls would be sitting on one side and the boys on the other and they would approach a sitting girl and politely ask them for a dance. And things would develop on their own from there. Although the SR meant people stopped marrying as virgins (excluding the religious crazy at least) the goal was still to get married after having a few relationships and women were pretty open about basically testing men for marriage or LTR and attitudes were monogamous so there was this idea that you knew those five boys are far better than you but still as the five prettiest girls at the dance grabbed a firm hold on them the other girls had to realize that they lost that game and they have to settle for you.
And the whole thing was made even simpler and easier by people pretty much being carbon copies of each other. Everybody wore the same clothes and hairstyles and due to having similar sportly hobbies most boys would have similar musculature, fat people were rare because eating outside formal mealtimes was less common and so on. Remember in the movie Easy Riders how guys having somewhat long hair is a scandal in a small town, because they are so used to looking like each other. Today people look very individual, and this means no look is really scandalous but on the other this also increased competition in looks.
At any rate this started to break down in the eighties. I was born in 1978 so I have not seen the first phases of the breakdown, but in 1994 already what my parents taught broke down. There was no more pair dancing, just people forming circles on the dancefloor or dancing alone. But I guess it is was still recognizable what you do there, go to a girl, shake together then invite for a drink.
From about 2005 on things really started to make no sense. I saw guys just go in the dancefloor and plain simply grind their crotch on the backside of girls. Are they their GFs? No it turned out for the younger folks it became normal to do it with strangers. But the fun part is this, risk increased. This behavior could get an attractive guy a zero-effort bang and get an unattractive guy arrested for harassment. Also, as I mentioned above, there were no carbon-copy looks anymore so people competed highly in looks.
All in all, it seems the whole thing became more and more incomprehensible. It seems it is highly optimized now for the best. Guys who figure out how to look really good, or read social cues really easily can have it extremely easy now, while the rest who think there should be rules you can learn with your brain have it increasingly difficult.
Things got better for me when I left the world of dancefloors and got into internet dating, in an instinctively anti-Tinder way, as in, looking for women with no or grainy photos and really intelligent texts on their profiles It did not mean they are ugly, it mean they did not want to be judged after their looks. They make good partners. I think with Tinder internet dating is becoming something similar to the dancefloor, highly optimized for a few and not working for most. It is important to stick to less looks focused types of internet dating sites and I think filtering for no picture is still a good idea. Disclaimer: it helped that I did not live in an area with a lot of obesity, or else the lack of a picture may easily mean gravity-distorting mass.
I downvoted to say “less like this.” advancedatheist has brought this topic up far too many times.
Why? Just because the rules are very different than what they used to be (i.e. there is far less jumping through hoops, and a lot more direct, often intuitive/implied negotiation) doesn’t mean that such rules don’t exist or can’t be learned conciously. Even “looking real good” is very much a craft that can be improved upon.
I think I have not expressed myself clearly. I need to go one meta deeper.
The limiting factor is courage or confidence. When rules are more direct, you must muster more courage to follow them because there is also a higher risk (of being accused of harassment or public embarrassment). Same with looks, there are less conspicious kinds of good looks, like the past, where you would put on a well tailored suit, and more conspicuous kinds of good looks, like a todays dance club where it is spiky hair and sleeveless shirts showing gym-made arms. Where it is more conspicuous kinds of good looks required, it is a test of courage or confidence, because if you don’t have so much, you will feel that you are noticed too much or stand out too much or look like a clown, basically get too “self-conscious” about it.
So the central issue is that today the rules test courage, confidence or testosterone harder, because you need more conspicous looks that attract too many gazes and you may feel like you are being ridiculous, or braver negotiation that could result in louder embarrassment.
My impression has been a well-tailored suit is more in right now than a sleeveless shirt. My friends and I were making fun of how many over-dressed guys there were at a show a few weeks ago; way too many dress pants and blazers for a concert.
I guess that the being “self-conscious” has a bigger effect than the actual looks.
I think so too. I should also say I don’t like this term very much, it is unaccurate, so I like that you used quotes. Self-consciousness is supposed to mean a good thing, like knowing what you are doing and why. But a while ago in the English language this term gained a different, and more negative meaning, e.g. Daniel Radcliffe: “I used to be self conscious about my height, but then I thought, fuck that, I’m Harry Potter.” What would be a better term to express that feeling? It is something close to being inhibited and artificial because your attention is focused on yourself and not on the situation. Recommendations from other languages are welcome, we can Anglify them by translating them to Latin then using that root :)
This comment by user “CharlieSheen” from a similar thread seems relevant
I find his point here quite insightful.
You certainly complain about this a lot. But do you have any suggestions of how to fix this problem?
Not sure if you are suggesting this, but I really want to discourage any “don’t draw attention to a problem unless you have a solution” bullshit. These are two separate things, and they both have value. It is nice and good if you happen to have a solution to a problem that you’ve identified, but to keep silent about a problem just because you don’t have a solution is nuts insofar as you would like for the problem to be solved someday.
There are productive ways to filter writing (writer is doing crappy analysis, propagating misinformation on purpose or through incomptence/ignorance, etc), but doing so based on “did you propose a solution” is actively harmful. Remember the “don’t jump to solutions, scope out the problem first” bit.
Given that he has been “drawing attention” to this issue more or less constantly for months, I think it is reasonable to demand he stop repeating himself and start actually developing the idea further in some actually constructive way.
I think he keeps repeating it because he cannot and he would like others to try. This is a perfectly reasonable request / idea.
I think at this point he should be offering some trade as apparently there is not really enough people interested in trying to solve it for free.
I doubt it, it’s the same pattern of behavior displayed when he complains about liberal transhumanists or the media bias against cryonics. It’s a “woe is me, the world is unjust” attitude, not constructive at all. It seems to me he just wants people to commiserate with him.
Commonly known as “whining”.
That’s not the problem. If you leave boys’ sexual development to the haphazard, history shows most will figure it out. The problem is that society is actively giving boys bad advice.
I don’t think this is strictly a male problem. I would guess the average person does not have as much sex as they would prefer. A lot of this is due to child rearing. Without strict controls on relationships, a lot of women throughout history would have ended up as single parents, their partners unsupportive of their fling that went a way they didn’t expect.
I’m not sure if its possible to entirely avoid such problems unless we have better birth control systems or very different child raising practices; the latter is a whole new can of worms. By better birth control i’m referring to widespread usage, lack of side effects, and product satisfaction; not just availability and quality.
They fail to reproduce, presumably. Genetics and evolution are a harsh mistress. Is there some reason to think that males that do not find a mate should get some sort of assistance? Perhaps for them, 40 is the “appropriate age”.
I think I could make a fairly strong case that anyone who is not capable of talking to peers of both sexes and learning the right social cues to find a mate is probably someone also poorly equipped to take care of the results of finding that mate in the first place, namely a relationship and children. And—that’s fine, viva la difference—a nice thing about being an intelligent human being is that you are not necessarily constrained in your behavior by what might be best from the standpoint of genetics and survival of the species.
The fact that we appear to selecting against traits like intelligence.
Given that most males in our current society (and, indeed, a significant fraction of females) seem to try to delay or indefinitely postpone reproduction—sometimes failing to do so - it doesn’t seem that failure to reproduce is a driver of behavioral modification.