Gender Tropes, Reluctant Truths

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As a thought, you could spend more time evaluating why people think you’re sort of a group that encourages abuse, rape, etc. instead of drafting your next think piece. Try to be introspective and not dig in your heels.

I've thought about it. Should I also spend some time evaluating why people think I'm a woman trolling as a man? People get labels online, shocker. Not the subject of this thread though. Thanks.

Yes, you should spend time wondering why people are perceiving you differently from what you believe yourself to be. As a woman sure, but MRAs have a body count. If someone mistook me for a member of a group of violent thugs (or violence endorsing thugs) I’d have bigger things to worry about than trying to stir controversy online.

Now remember, your instructions are not to dig in your heels.

You just can't help yourself, can you?

Create a different thread for that subject and stop derailing this one. I think it's a very interesting and clever framing of the subject. Thanks.

It’s very weird and probably a symptom of NPD to need to tell an Internet forum that you think you’re interesting and clever. We know you think you’re interesting, but there are already many threads on this.

I was talking about PP's framing of the question they appear to be interested in, not my own. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

You are confusing marriage and sex.

You're going to have to flesh this out a bit if you want to defend your point. Men, at a population.level, are driven by sex. They're not going to strive to be the best version of themselves that women desire if they have plenty of access to sex from women who are not yet thinking about marriage.

And I'm not blaming women for having sex before marriage. If in the past virginity was prized and a signal of desirability, today having plenty of experience and being great in bed from the get-go is desirable. I'm not advocating we go back to the days of stigmatizing premarital sex but years of meaningless sex has created a new set of material problems btwn the sexes that the OP is trying to articulate.

And women won’t feel compelled to settle for a man-child if they can get D without having to play mom.

But they do bc most of them want to be moms. As evidence, I would point to 80% of the threads on this sub-forum.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

You are confusing marriage and sex.

You're going to have to flesh this out a bit if you want to defend your point. Men, at a population.level, are driven by sex. They're not going to strive to be the best version of themselves that women desire if they have plenty of access to sex from women who are not yet thinking about marriage.

And I'm not blaming women for having sex before marriage. If in the past virginity was prized and a signal of desirability, today having plenty of experience and being great in bed from the get-go is desirable. I'm not advocating we go back to the days of stigmatizing premarital sex but years of meaningless sex has created a new set of material problems btwn the sexes that the OP is trying to articulate.

And women won’t feel compelled to settle for a man-child if they can get D without having to play mom.

But they do bc most of them want to be moms. As evidence, I would point to 80% of the threads on this sub-forum.

This forum is terrible evidence for anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Man here. Father of two (girls, 11 and 13). And I’m enlightened yadda yadda. My mom worked full time forever with an advanced degree. But still I’d say a reluctant truth is that a lot of men just don’t have the makeup to be doting parents and raise kids. Really nurture and raise them. They just don’t want to do it. They could hit just don’t like doing it. They can and like to do tasks. But bro g responsible for the emotional crap with kids? Screw it. I’m sick of it and it is massively unpleasant work to do it. My own skill set clearly lies in things like: wooing and bedding women or a woman, making her and them safe, doing hard labor, thinking deep thoughts and clearly, being decisive, and I’d have been a damn good warrior if I had had to do that. But nurturing whiny kids? I just hate it.

I'm a woman and I agree with you. Feminism encourages women to access their masculine energy in order to have successful careers, but as an ideology just assumed that men would want to access their feminine energy in the same kind of way. We can both do this for short periods of time, but most of us don't want to spend decades accessing abilities that we're capable of but not really interested in making lives out of. Iand yes, I'm speaking of men and women on average, here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Man here. Father of two (girls, 11 and 13). And I’m enlightened yadda yadda. My mom worked full time forever with an advanced degree. But still I’d say a reluctant truth is that a lot of men just don’t have the makeup to be doting parents and raise kids. Really nurture and raise them. They just don’t want to do it. They could hit just don’t like doing it. They can and like to do tasks. But bro g responsible for the emotional crap with kids? Screw it. I’m sick of it and it is massively unpleasant work to do it. My own skill set clearly lies in things like: wooing and bedding women or a woman, making her and them safe, doing hard labor, thinking deep thoughts and clearly, being decisive, and I’d have been a damn good warrior if I had had to do that. But nurturing whiny kids? I just hate it.

I'm a woman and I agree with you. Feminism encourages women to access their masculine energy in order to have successful careers, but as an ideology just assumed that men would want to access their feminine energy in the same kind of way. We can both do this for short periods of time, but most of us don't want to spend decades accessing abilities that we're capable of but not really interested in making lives out of. Iand yes, I'm speaking of men and women on average, here.

NP another woman, but I really don't know about that. Perhaps the percentage of women who prefer to nurture whiny kids as opposed to going to work everyday is a little higher than men who prefer the same set up, but I strongly doubt that women on average prefer to do this kind of thankless emotional work over working to earn their money independently.
Maybe this is just my bias but I feel that the average woman would agree with the bolded from pp (man).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

The working class folks are the ones who are doing it wrong; that’s why they’re working class after all.

You don't get it. They have so many intergenerational problems stacked against them. The gendered social norms and traditional family structures that elites can get away with criticizing (think about how many ppl are pro-polyamory on this board) have decimated working class families.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure?r=5pwik&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Hey man, you sound pretty….dare I say, “woke” about the working class.
Why aren’t those working families just bootstrapping their ways out of problems?

I’m first Gen college, my grandparents and great grandparents were divorced. Lots of inter generational trauma and terrible marriages. Yet You’d probably derisively sneer at me as an “elite” if you saw my lifestyle, our income, where we live, and our politics. Whining about “luxury beliefs” just seems to be a dismissive argument for society/individuals/institutions not being held accountable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

Can you share the pieces re: toxic masculinity and single motherhood?

I understand the phenomenon of "luxury beliefs" and I think it is rampant, but I think you (or Rob) are giving it way too much explanatory power with regard to the decimation of the working class, which I would attribute more to technological and economic forces. To be sure, there are some cultural forces at work as well, but they are myriad. Keying in on the memification of toxic masculinity is doing a lot of work. Moreover the typical indica of toxic masculinity tend to thrive or be more prevalent in lower class communities, and that phenomenon precedes the proliferation of what you are deeming the memification of toxic masculinity, which is relatively recent phenomenon.

Likewise, I'm not sure what is meant by "single motherhood". Perhaps destigmatizing single motherhood? Again, this has been a issue beleaguering lower classes for decades, so I have some trouble with the top down attribution.

I'll try to respond the best I can although my response may still be a bit disjointed--it's an internet forum conversation after all. But you seem genuinly interested and I am certainly fascinated by this topic. Re: the memification of toxic masculinity, as you point out it's relatively recent and I think really emerged out of the #metoo movement. While there are certainly men who display psychopathic (which is really what toxic tendencies are) traits, recent thinkers and my own experience with hook up culture lead me to believe that the vast majority of the experiences described by women during #metoo were not remotely non-consensual in the conventional sense, but were really ways for women to describe sexual experiences that they deeply regreted in a culture that doesn't give women space to say that without being slut-shamed from misgynists or accused of victim-blaming from feminists. In a world where there aren't supposed to be any meaningful differences between the sexes, women can't say that they don't like casual sex, even if most of us don't. So #metoo was a way of getting around that. This led to the memefiction of toxic masculinity which has further marginalized lower and working class men. So the connection with the lower classes is perhaps more indirect than I initially claimed but I think the connection with #metoo is relevant to the OP's first post.

Again, you're right that the roots of poor masculine identity formation among the lower classes is multi-faceted and wasn't caused by the meme per se, but the meme turned them (and men in general) into scapegoats for a variety of liberal socio-political causes that have been popular over the last 5-10 years b/c you can't have a victim without an oppressor--regardless if that opprressor isn't nearly as rampant as the meme would suggest.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-sexual-revolution-has-hurt-women-11660921139

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thor...campaign=post&utm_medium=emailg

Now whether you buy into the idea that the concept of luxury beliefs has as much power as I've argued that it does, I'll just point out that while Rob Henderson has popularized the term to describe contemporary realities, it recently came to his attention that Adam Smith discussed this exact proclivity of advanced economies in Wealth of Nations back in 1776:

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1631772059721187328

Smith's observation is almost exactly what Henderson is referring to when he describes that there are generally two ways of living "strict and austere" or "loose and liberal." Taking single motherhood as a contemporary an example: posters routinely claim on DCUM that it's preferable to be a single mom than to be married to a man-child, even if he is the father of her children. Chances are she has a variety of resources to make this tenable. Two-parent households are nice for the upper and upper-middle classes, but ultimately viewed as optional b/c the fall out can be minimized to weigh well against the drawbacks of staying married. But for the working class the collapse of traditional two-parent, married families has been a disaster. Again, there a certainly a number of gov't policy related reasons for this but if we were to go through them one by one, how many of them could directly or indirectly be informed by the elite (policy makers) evolving attitudes about the necessity of traditional familial and lifestyle structures and supports (e.g. conservatives would point to the introduction of wellfare here as replacing the protoypical male-breadwinner)?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

Can you share the pieces re: toxic masculinity and single motherhood?

I understand the phenomenon of "luxury beliefs" and I think it is rampant, but I think you (or Rob) are giving it way too much explanatory power with regard to the decimation of the working class, which I would attribute more to technological and economic forces. To be sure, there are some cultural forces at work as well, but they are myriad. Keying in on the memification of toxic masculinity is doing a lot of work. Moreover the typical indica of toxic masculinity tend to thrive or be more prevalent in lower class communities, and that phenomenon precedes the proliferation of what you are deeming the memification of toxic masculinity, which is relatively recent phenomenon.

Likewise, I'm not sure what is meant by "single motherhood". Perhaps destigmatizing single motherhood? Again, this has been a issue beleaguering lower classes for decades, so I have some trouble with the top down attribution.

I'll try to respond the best I can although my response may still be a bit disjointed--it's an internet forum conversation after all. But you seem genuinly interested and I am certainly fascinated by this topic. Re: the memification of toxic masculinity, as you point out it's relatively recent and I think really emerged out of the #metoo movement. While there are certainly men who display psychopathic (which is really what toxic tendencies are) traits, recent thinkers and my own experience with hook up culture lead me to believe that the vast majority of the experiences described by women during #metoo were not remotely non-consensual in the conventional sense, but were really ways for women to describe sexual experiences that they deeply regreted in a culture that doesn't give women space to say that without being slut-shamed from misgynists or accused of victim-blaming from feminists. In a world where there aren't supposed to be any meaningful differences between the sexes, women can't say that they don't like casual sex, even if most of us don't. So #metoo was a way of getting around that. This led to the memefiction of toxic masculinity which has further marginalized lower and working class men. So the connection with the lower classes is perhaps more indirect than I initially claimed but I think the connection with #metoo is relevant to the OP's first post.

Again, you're right that the roots of poor masculine identity formation among the lower classes is multi-faceted and wasn't caused by the meme per se, but the meme turned them (and men in general) into scapegoats for a variety of liberal socio-political causes that have been popular over the last 5-10 years b/c you can't have a victim without an oppressor--regardless if that opprressor isn't nearly as rampant as the meme would suggest.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-sexual-revolution-has-hurt-women-11660921139

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thor...campaign=post&utm_medium=emailg

Now whether you buy into the idea that the concept of luxury beliefs has as much power as I've argued that it does, I'll just point out that while Rob Henderson has popularized the term to describe contemporary realities, it recently came to his attention that Adam Smith discussed this exact proclivity of advanced economies in Wealth of Nations back in 1776:

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1631772059721187328

Smith's observation is almost exactly what Henderson is referring to when he describes that there are generally two ways of living "strict and austere" or "loose and liberal." Taking single motherhood as a contemporary an example: posters routinely claim on DCUM that it's preferable to be a single mom than to be married to a man-child, even if he is the father of her children. Chances are she has a variety of resources to make this tenable. Two-parent households are nice for the upper and upper-middle classes, but ultimately viewed as optional b/c the fall out can be minimized to weigh well against the drawbacks of staying married. But for the working class the collapse of traditional two-parent, married families has been a disaster. Again, there a certainly a number of gov't policy related reasons for this but if we were to go through them one by one, how many of them could directly or indirectly be informed by the elite (policy makers) evolving attitudes about the necessity of traditional familial and lifestyle structures and supports (e.g. conservatives would point to the introduction of wellfare here as replacing the protoypical male-breadwinner)?

Socially conservative lifestyles are not the answer to anyone’s problems.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

The working class folks are the ones who are doing it wrong; that’s why they’re working class after all.

You don't get it. They have so many intergenerational problems stacked against them. The gendered social norms and traditional family structures that elites can get away with criticizing (think about how many ppl are pro-polyamory on this board) have decimated working class families.

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thorstein-veblens-theory-of-the-leisure?r=5pwik&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

"It’s remarkable that the twin giants of American leadership in the 20th century — FDR and JFK — were crippled or close-to. The modern sub-strand of wokeism concerned with 'ableism' looks very different...neurotic, feminised, victimhood obsessed"

Yeah he’s an idiot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

You are confusing marriage and sex.

You're going to have to flesh this out a bit if you want to defend your point. Men, at a population.level, are driven by sex. They're not going to strive to be the best version of themselves that women desire if they have plenty of access to sex from women who are not yet thinking about marriage.

And I'm not blaming women for having sex before marriage. If in the past virginity was prized and a signal of desirability, today having plenty of experience and being great in bed from the get-go is desirable. I'm not advocating we go back to the days of stigmatizing premarital sex but years of meaningless sex has created a new set of material problems btwn the sexes that the OP is trying to articulate.

And women won’t feel compelled to settle for a man-child if they can get D without having to play mom.

But they do bc most of them want to be moms. As evidence, I would point to 80% of the threads on this sub-forum.

Maybe the ones with low self esteem. You don’t need a husband to be a mom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

You are confusing marriage and sex.

You're going to have to flesh this out a bit if you want to defend your point. Men, at a population.level, are driven by sex. They're not going to strive to be the best version of themselves that women desire if they have plenty of access to sex from women who are not yet thinking about marriage.

And I'm not blaming women for having sex before marriage. If in the past virginity was prized and a signal of desirability, today having plenty of experience and being great in bed from the get-go is desirable. I'm not advocating we go back to the days of stigmatizing premarital sex but years of meaningless sex has created a new set of material problems btwn the sexes that the OP is trying to articulate.

And women won’t feel compelled to settle for a man-child if they can get D without having to play mom.

But they do bc most of them want to be moms. As evidence, I would point to 80% of the threads on this sub-forum.

Maybe the ones with low self esteem. You don’t need a husband to be a mom.

But you need a husband to be a GOOD mom

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

You are confusing marriage and sex.

You're going to have to flesh this out a bit if you want to defend your point. Men, at a population.level, are driven by sex. They're not going to strive to be the best version of themselves that women desire if they have plenty of access to sex from women who are not yet thinking about marriage.

And I'm not blaming women for having sex before marriage. If in the past virginity was prized and a signal of desirability, today having plenty of experience and being great in bed from the get-go is desirable. I'm not advocating we go back to the days of stigmatizing premarital sex but years of meaningless sex has created a new set of material problems btwn the sexes that the OP is trying to articulate.

And women won’t feel compelled to settle for a man-child if they can get D without having to play mom.

But they do bc most of them want to be moms. As evidence, I would point to 80% of the threads on this sub-forum.

Maybe the ones with low self esteem. You don’t need a husband to be a mom.

But you need a husband to be a GOOD mom

NP. No you don’t. A bad husband is worse than not having one at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

You are confusing marriage and sex.

You're going to have to flesh this out a bit if you want to defend your point. Men, at a population.level, are driven by sex. They're not going to strive to be the best version of themselves that women desire if they have plenty of access to sex from women who are not yet thinking about marriage.

And I'm not blaming women for having sex before marriage. If in the past virginity was prized and a signal of desirability, today having plenty of experience and being great in bed from the get-go is desirable. I'm not advocating we go back to the days of stigmatizing premarital sex but years of meaningless sex has created a new set of material problems btwn the sexes that the OP is trying to articulate.

And women won’t feel compelled to settle for a man-child if they can get D without having to play mom.

But they do bc most of them want to be moms. As evidence, I would point to 80% of the threads on this sub-forum.

Maybe the ones with low self esteem. You don’t need a husband to be a mom.

But you need a husband to be a GOOD mom

Men aren’t necessary anymore.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

You are confusing marriage and sex.

You're going to have to flesh this out a bit if you want to defend your point. Men, at a population.level, are driven by sex. They're not going to strive to be the best version of themselves that women desire if they have plenty of access to sex from women who are not yet thinking about marriage.

And I'm not blaming women for having sex before marriage. If in the past virginity was prized and a signal of desirability, today having plenty of experience and being great in bed from the get-go is desirable. I'm not advocating we go back to the days of stigmatizing premarital sex but years of meaningless sex has created a new set of material problems btwn the sexes that the OP is trying to articulate.

And women won’t feel compelled to settle for a man-child if they can get D without having to play mom.

But they do bc most of them want to be moms. As evidence, I would point to 80% of the threads on this sub-forum.

Maybe the ones with low self esteem. You don’t need a husband to be a mom.

But you need a husband to be a GOOD mom

NP. No you don’t. A bad husband is worse than not having one at all.

Exactly. No need to settle.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Reluctant truth: women don’t want to “marry down,” including enlightened feminists. In fact, a woman will remain single or have children with donor sperm before they willingly marry down.

The opportunity cost and risk to a woman of having kids is extremely high (could end up a poor single mother) so we have to vet carefully.

Are you saying that women should not sleep with any men they wouldn't have children with? We can't really have it both ways without consequences.

Maybe that's the elephant in the room. Hook up culture is bad for both men and women- at all ages, but especially young adults. Not really sure how you get that cat back in the bag though. But well-educated elites can recover from the consequences far more easily than the working class.

OP, I'm the who recommended the Modern Wisdom podcasts. I also recommend subscribing to a Substack by a guy named Rob Henderson. Interesting background that I won't go into here but he popularized a term called "Luxury Beliefs," which are basically ideas, lifestyles and language that the elite develop to separate themselves from the masses. They're ideas that they espouse but don't actually follow or use $ to mitigate fall out from (like hook up culture, single motherhood) but that have trickled down to the working class and decimated their lives. The mainstreaming of toxic masculinity as meme in the nat'l zeitgeist has destroyed working class families in a way that most people who populate this board have no concept of.

Can you share the pieces re: toxic masculinity and single motherhood?

I understand the phenomenon of "luxury beliefs" and I think it is rampant, but I think you (or Rob) are giving it way too much explanatory power with regard to the decimation of the working class, which I would attribute more to technological and economic forces. To be sure, there are some cultural forces at work as well, but they are myriad. Keying in on the memification of toxic masculinity is doing a lot of work. Moreover the typical indica of toxic masculinity tend to thrive or be more prevalent in lower class communities, and that phenomenon precedes the proliferation of what you are deeming the memification of toxic masculinity, which is relatively recent phenomenon.

Likewise, I'm not sure what is meant by "single motherhood". Perhaps destigmatizing single motherhood? Again, this has been a issue beleaguering lower classes for decades, so I have some trouble with the top down attribution.

I'll try to respond the best I can although my response may still be a bit disjointed--it's an internet forum conversation after all. But you seem genuinly interested and I am certainly fascinated by this topic. Re: the memification of toxic masculinity, as you point out it's relatively recent and I think really emerged out of the #metoo movement. While there are certainly men who display psychopathic (which is really what toxic tendencies are) traits, recent thinkers and my own experience with hook up culture lead me to believe that the vast majority of the experiences described by women during #metoo were not remotely non-consensual in the conventional sense, but were really ways for women to describe sexual experiences that they deeply regreted in a culture that doesn't give women space to say that without being slut-shamed from misgynists or accused of victim-blaming from feminists. In a world where there aren't supposed to be any meaningful differences between the sexes, women can't say that they don't like casual sex, even if most of us don't. So #metoo was a way of getting around that. This led to the memefiction of toxic masculinity which has further marginalized lower and working class men. So the connection with the lower classes is perhaps more indirect than I initially claimed but I think the connection with #metoo is relevant to the OP's first post.

Again, you're right that the roots of poor masculine identity formation among the lower classes is multi-faceted and wasn't caused by the meme per se, but the meme turned them (and men in general) into scapegoats for a variety of liberal socio-political causes that have been popular over the last 5-10 years b/c you can't have a victim without an oppressor--regardless if that opprressor isn't nearly as rampant as the meme would suggest.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-sexual-revolution-has-hurt-women-11660921139

https://open.substack.com/pub/robkhenderson/p/thor...campaign=post&utm_medium=emailg

Now whether you buy into the idea that the concept of luxury beliefs has as much power as I've argued that it does, I'll just point out that while Rob Henderson has popularized the term to describe contemporary realities, it recently came to his attention that Adam Smith discussed this exact proclivity of advanced economies in Wealth of Nations back in 1776:

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1631772059721187328

Smith's observation is almost exactly what Henderson is referring to when he describes that there are generally two ways of living "strict and austere" or "loose and liberal." Taking single motherhood as a contemporary an example: posters routinely claim on DCUM that it's preferable to be a single mom than to be married to a man-child, even if he is the father of her children. Chances are she has a variety of resources to make this tenable. Two-parent households are nice for the upper and upper-middle classes, but ultimately viewed as optional b/c the fall out can be minimized to weigh well against the drawbacks of staying married. But for the working class the collapse of traditional two-parent, married families has been a disaster. Again, there a certainly a number of gov't policy related reasons for this but if we were to go through them one by one, how many of them could directly or indirectly be informed by the elite (policy makers) evolving attitudes about the necessity of traditional familial and lifestyle structures and supports (e.g. conservatives would point to the introduction of wellfare here as replacing the protoypical male-breadwinner)?

Socially conservative lifestyles are not the answer to anyone’s problems.[/quote

The left won the culture wars. We are all affected by the lifestyle whether we choose it for ourselves or not.]