The sobering conclusion of this truthful and well written piece came to me a few years ago, when I started watching 24 hours A & E. I've watched this British series, all seasons and episodes more than once now; every time I need a boost in remembering human kindness, patience, logic, non hysteria, selflessness and indeed....true commitment. Many of the now elderly patients admitted were well under 20 years old when they committed , through marriage, to their partner . As you will hear and see all of them say, of course there were obstacles, but they stayed true and placed pride and value on their commitment once made. You will see multiple decades of marriages celebrated by families of great-, grand- and children. And yes, clearly seeing the generations following , presented with more "options" not being as successful in finding the right partner. Too many options confuses us. It sounds great but it is indulgent and negative. Imagine the feeling you have when looking at a huge menu, not knowing what to pick and end up regretting what you finally settled on. Less is more! Thank you Rob, for this article. It is brilliant and truthful.
"She replied that she had three requirements for him: stop smoking, stop drinking, and stop gambling. My grandfather agreed, immediately dropping all three habits, and never returning to them. They were married for more than sixty years and raised four children.
Today, it is laughable to imagine such a scenario occurring in the U.S."
Part of what makes this laughable is, sadly, the loss of the ability young women have to make demands on men at all.
When casual sex is so easily available, and when the "marriageable" dating pool has more men than women, women lose the stance from which they have a natural power to negotiate things like fidelity and good habits from men.
This is probably one of the most insidious ways modern feminism has screwed women, because there is no choice here, you can't really opt out - you have to adjust.
For young women who are very desirable - more physically attractive than average - this is easier to navigate, as you retain some leverage. You also tend to attract the kind of men who have high standards for themselves and are willing to put a lot of work into "woooing" a woman. These tend to be the kind of men who are also willing to invest a lot into anything long term - career, finances, commitment, children. These kind of men build your confidence, which increases desirability and leverage, and you end up being one of the lucky ones with a husband.
But for young women in the "average" department this culture creates huge disadvantages. With fewer marriageable men, and an environment where getting all the benefits of sex and a relationship without commitment, improvement, or sacrifice is easy for most guys to find somewhere, average young women are forced to use other means by which to "compete" - and often casual sex or shacking up is the only one they have.
And then that creates its own feedback loop: a girl has to sleep with men to get their attention, which degrades her self worth, which makes her afraid to make demands on men to be better, which leads to crappy men being drawn to her, and the downward spiral goes on.
I think this is where a lot of the current "queer" identification - which is overwhelmingly in young women - comes from. It's average looking young women who are dropping out of the dating scene with men because they just have insufficient leverage. And since "queer" identities have a lot of social cache, this is the easiest way that is available to them to make some meaning and find a place in society.
I've known multiple young women who were conventionally feminine, always dated and slept with boys, and then, often after a weigh gain, excessive promiscuity, or other event that reduced their "desirability", suddenly declare themselves generically "queer" out of the blue. They never date girls, they never even express any real physical desire in girls, and they don't physically transition into anything. They just announce the "queer" status, revolve their identity around "queerness", and rail against "heteronormativity." They always enter a long phase of nearly complete celibacy.
(This does not explain genuinely bi woman and lesbians, who of course exist because that really is how they are wired.)
Perhaps this "queer" celibacy is just a way for less desirable young women to opt out of a dating scene that is essentially a duck-duck-goose game they know they are going to lose. Maybe its a way to have access to old fashioned chastity while still projecting modern social attitudes.
I also think this culture feeds into the hysteria about "rape" and "harassment". Young women *really do* feel pressured into having sex. I think a lot do sense that their hook ups are not fully voluntary or wanted, not because the man in question is forcing anything physically, but because the entire culture doesn't give an average looking girl any leverage to really say "no." The entire experience makes them feel violated and unsafe, which is psychologically intolerable state for any female mammal, for whom safety and security is such a primal need.
The only way they can make sense of it all is to re-code promiscuous sex as "rape" and project fault for the unpleasantness of the encounter on the man.
Re-coding a hook up as "rape" and making the fault of the man also provides a psychological out for a less desirable young women where, rather than be forced to acknowledge that her lack of leverage is due to something about her lack of desirability, she can feel that she is SO desirable that men seek her out by force.
It's weird and twisted, but I worked at at therapist at a university for years, and after a while you just see some patterns that you can't unsee.
It's just fascinating to me to see old fashioned sexual mores - chastity, vulnerability, claims of victimhood at the hands of men - getting re-engineered as "progressive" expressions of feminism.
I am married, six years in and two kids now. My wife and I met in college (introduced by her boyfriend!), became great friends over the years, then realized that we wanted to always be together. Eight years after we met we started dating.
Dating was always hard. I never learned how to talk to girls, the sex talk from my dad (who is a great man that I love dearly) was, “If you get a girl pregnant, I don’t care who she is, you’re marrying her.” I was interested in marriage, not sex (though I did have a couple of fun nights in college). My brother is 37 and single and often tells me that I am lucky I got married when I did. I think he’s right in that digital dating is bad, and it wouldn’t work for me. I am certain, though, that if for some reason my wife were gone and I needed to find a wife for me and v mother for my children, it wouldn’t be that difficult. I’m older, wiser, more confident, and clearer in what is important. It’s all in where and how you are looking.
There is a crisis with our boys, and a society of weak men won’t stand. Those of us that are blessed to be dads have the great responsibility to instill in our sons and daughters the right values so that they can make the world better.
Aaron that cuts both ways, and it seems you’re keen to scrap.
The opposite of W Bush and Trump would have been Gore or Kerry and H Clinton. You certainly seem to not have liked the policies those two championed, and easily I can say Gore or Kerry and H Clinton would probably have this country already in the ditch that Biden seems to enjoy.
The Constitution has been amended many times, rightly so to remedy the ills of our past societies and the flawed leaders that we’ll always have.
If by rabble you refer to the folks not living in CA, IL, and NY, I’ll take them every day over the dominant party lunatics that run those states, and believe that people like Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton should be President.
And I’m hardly a pompous ass. I’d bet your circle of friends and family wouldn’t consider you one either. Take care.
What a shame -- Democrats don't wish to date Republicans and vice versa. It is their loss and a big one. How narrow-minded! How boring! To choose to miss out on the thrill of discovering someone with different ideas and opinions, someone with whom to have a great debate, someone who will challenge your ideas and you theirs. I feel really sorry for people who are willing to limit themselves in this way.
I met my husband on Match 20 years ago and we've been happily married since. Back then, Match was very simple in their questions. Now it is overloaded with way too much information on a prospective person. For the record, I was a D and he was/in an R (I converted). Nowadays, women will reject a man sight unseen if they know is a Republican. So many people who would make great couples are totally losing out. Everything in general has gotten far too "nichey". We look for reasons to stay apart rather than be together.
Wow. What a really tone deaf piece. No mention of the sacrifices women make in their careers or lives to be mothers/wives AND have to deal with husbands that are weaponizing incompetence while being more interested in playing video games etc. No mention of men who frankly don't put in the actual emotional labour it takes to make a successful relationship. No mention of how sick women are of doing all of that labour and raising kids, and keeping house, and and and the list goes on. Why on earth should women even bother dating? Why shouldn't our standards be high? Why should we settle? To what purpose and to what end? To the benefit of the mediocre men who don't want to work on themselves? No thanks. I am very ok with being single forever.
In addition, the author strikes me as protesting a wee bit too much that "Men Are Happier Than Women" - he must be cherry picking data pretty carefully since there are now a number of studies citing how unhappy and lonely men are.
You're an individual, you can find an individual you like, even love. I did, yep, a man who doesn't play video games, weaponize incompetence, puts in emotional labor...but maybe go to therapy first to unload all the baggage you have towards men and relationships because it sounds like you're determined to be unhappy. Sorry I know harsh. And yes you do have to sacrifice in relationships. But it's worth it. True love does exist.
But I agree I think in general men are more unhappy than women in society as a whole.
Actually, I have very little baggage towards men or relationships. I just don't care enough to commit anymore. The thing that had me incensed is this pathetic take on why people stay single. It isn't "swipe" culture.... it is however women knowing they deserve more and better.
Im an Orthodox Jew (American). Despite highly inaccurate media portrayals of forced marriages and deeply unhappy wives, here are the facts: like in every culture, marital happiness here is personal and varies and has much more to do with interpersonal dynamics between the couple than religion. But here's what I will say. Around 90% of us get married and I think most are happy, but you'd have to ask. In the Hasidic world (not mine - no not every orthodox Jew is Hasidic) it's pretty common to get engaged after 2 weeks. Not ideal for people in my circle. We date for a couple of months with the help of a match maker who sets us up, and those on the date date chiefly for marriage. I dated my husband for about three months. Got engaged three months later. Got married three months after that. Never looked back. We're very happy together and very much in love - okay it's only been two years, but he's a gem. But I think our expectations and outlook are different coming in to the dating scene and that's why it works, it has for me and my siblings and friends. Most of us get married for life. The expectation is that unless it's something deeply destructive, you work on yourself and your marriage if it's not going well (most people probably feel this way in general, I'm assuming, not just Orthodox Jews). Divorce happens, it's becoming more common, but it's still lower than average - about 10 percent. People get married to be married - they do it young, have kids and the whole shebang. It's a communal expectation, it pushes people out of their comfort zone, to focus on being marriage minded from a younger age and it works.
p.s. the war between the sexes - it doesn't really exist here. I mean sure, there's inequities on both sides, but that's to be expected - we weren't created equal. And not to say we don't have our share of issues, but it's not catastrophic, people are still getting married and staying married.
This article is insanely out of touch with the reality that men face; the VR and porn that Rob is trying to scare women with (so that he can finally get a pity fuck) are not existentially threatening to women at all. They are indicative of men's misery and mental illness. Three of my old high school classmates have tried to commit suicide that I know of and they are all porn addicted males who think VR will save them from loneliness. Meanwhile the classmates who have gone on to get married and have kids are not techbros and they are not interested in the VR/anime crap at all, and they're not porn addicted.
This article is really, really dumb. Men are not happier than women considering how high their suicide rate is. This article is a desperate attempt to scare women into having sex with men and its using technology as a boogeyman, as well as hiding the misery and shocking loneliness males face in our society. Instead of trying to encourage other men to keep going and remind them that there is hope for the future, Rob chooses to lie about their struggles. And it's all because he's trying to scare women into sleeping with men.
As with all things, men show higher variability than women. The men who are dying deaths of despair are not happy, but other men are doing better than women, at least in the relative sense.
At this point “trying to scare women into sleeping with men” is indistinguishable with stating basic facts about the human condition.
"A relative sense" is one hell of a way to sweep despair and mass suicide under the rug. I thought women hated each other but men must absolutely loathe and despise each other that you're this desperate to whitewash porn addiction and the male suicide rate. Otoh it makes sense as intrasexual competition; you don't want anyone thinking about the dead ones so long as you can pretend everything is fine and get laid.
Mass suicide is an exaggeration, but it is indeed true that deaths of despair (a term coined to include suicide, drug overdose, drug-related liver disease, etc.) overwhelmingly affect men. And there are of course many deep societal factors stacked against men to produce this outcome, including many that Rob Henderson is hinting at here.
And boy are you miles off with what you're projecting on me.
Porn addiction is absolutely real. You can get addicted to anything that hijacks your dopamine receptors, which is how people get addicted to carbs and smartphones. Stop making excuses for porn. My ex-boyfriends were so ruined by porn that they all eventually confessed that they were unable to feel attraction towards me because they only wanted to jerk off to videos. It's horrible.
That's exactly why I think Rob Henderson is being really pathetic and underhanded. Instead of addressing these issues and coming up with solutions he's whining about how women need commit because otherwise we'll lose males.... to VR porn. He's advertising for pornography and trying to intimidate women into forming half hearted "relationships" with addicts. He might as well demand we sleep with coke users.
Rob is essentially right that women acting in their perceived short-term interests produces disastrous outcomes for everyone, and they would be well advised to do what men have always done and learn to resist our baser urges and-as he puts it-settle.
Your lack of insight is unfortunate, but not something I feel compelled to make any further effort to remedy. Try to have an open mind.
"Please please please please have sex with me! I'll become a porn addict and waste my life fapping to VR if you don't! It's all your fault that I'm depressed and lie on polls and surveys!"
Selfish, short sighted, and lying about the emotional problems that males face. This is pathetic.
This article talks about young people and their sexual confusion. Yawn. This writer trots out the usual tropes about women and degrees, men and casual sex, and the mismatch of priorities between the sexes, etc. I am so tired of this discussion t/b/h. When are we ever going to talk about young people and their lack of meaning, and social engagement in their every day lives as the root cause of their loneliness? Most of our current social problems and anomie can be solved by getting more sleep, eating clean, moving more, getting off line, and caring about one's fellow humans (and other sentient beings). Relationships of all kinds are suffering now-a-days. Spending the vast majority of our lives online has not helped, but these trends in society have been ongoing for well over a generation.
I thought of these matters while reading the recent David Brooks essay (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/), where he says, among other things, that "...we would never want to go back to the training methods that prevailed for so long, rooted in so many 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘴 and so much shaming, and riddled with so much racism and sexism."
Leave aside the racism, which I think is a red-herring here, as one won't easily find anyone claiming that our proper moral education requires that we distinguish people by race. He's saying that we won't review our current assumptions about human nature and morality even though, considered as a test of a hypothesis for what makes a good society and a good life, there's evidence that they're wrong.
That's fair. There are things we think are morally wrong and will avoid doing even if they might make most of us happier. I don't think a recognition of differences between the sexes, or that people have obligations to their communities and to both previous and succeeding generations, or that people have obligations to God, are in that category.
In defense of tech, it was a lifesaver for me during covid. I had just retired, and a few years before that had gotten divorced. It was just me and my cat. There were family members and friends I still got together with, but Toastmaster meetings, book groups, and even a few prospective dates via Zoom were a huge value to me. Take me back to before smartphones and Zoom and I would have been miserable.
The sobering conclusion of this truthful and well written piece came to me a few years ago, when I started watching 24 hours A & E. I've watched this British series, all seasons and episodes more than once now; every time I need a boost in remembering human kindness, patience, logic, non hysteria, selflessness and indeed....true commitment. Many of the now elderly patients admitted were well under 20 years old when they committed , through marriage, to their partner . As you will hear and see all of them say, of course there were obstacles, but they stayed true and placed pride and value on their commitment once made. You will see multiple decades of marriages celebrated by families of great-, grand- and children. And yes, clearly seeing the generations following , presented with more "options" not being as successful in finding the right partner. Too many options confuses us. It sounds great but it is indulgent and negative. Imagine the feeling you have when looking at a huge menu, not knowing what to pick and end up regretting what you finally settled on. Less is more! Thank you Rob, for this article. It is brilliant and truthful.
"She replied that she had three requirements for him: stop smoking, stop drinking, and stop gambling. My grandfather agreed, immediately dropping all three habits, and never returning to them. They were married for more than sixty years and raised four children.
Today, it is laughable to imagine such a scenario occurring in the U.S."
Part of what makes this laughable is, sadly, the loss of the ability young women have to make demands on men at all.
When casual sex is so easily available, and when the "marriageable" dating pool has more men than women, women lose the stance from which they have a natural power to negotiate things like fidelity and good habits from men.
This is probably one of the most insidious ways modern feminism has screwed women, because there is no choice here, you can't really opt out - you have to adjust.
For young women who are very desirable - more physically attractive than average - this is easier to navigate, as you retain some leverage. You also tend to attract the kind of men who have high standards for themselves and are willing to put a lot of work into "woooing" a woman. These tend to be the kind of men who are also willing to invest a lot into anything long term - career, finances, commitment, children. These kind of men build your confidence, which increases desirability and leverage, and you end up being one of the lucky ones with a husband.
But for young women in the "average" department this culture creates huge disadvantages. With fewer marriageable men, and an environment where getting all the benefits of sex and a relationship without commitment, improvement, or sacrifice is easy for most guys to find somewhere, average young women are forced to use other means by which to "compete" - and often casual sex or shacking up is the only one they have.
And then that creates its own feedback loop: a girl has to sleep with men to get their attention, which degrades her self worth, which makes her afraid to make demands on men to be better, which leads to crappy men being drawn to her, and the downward spiral goes on.
I think this is where a lot of the current "queer" identification - which is overwhelmingly in young women - comes from. It's average looking young women who are dropping out of the dating scene with men because they just have insufficient leverage. And since "queer" identities have a lot of social cache, this is the easiest way that is available to them to make some meaning and find a place in society.
I've known multiple young women who were conventionally feminine, always dated and slept with boys, and then, often after a weigh gain, excessive promiscuity, or other event that reduced their "desirability", suddenly declare themselves generically "queer" out of the blue. They never date girls, they never even express any real physical desire in girls, and they don't physically transition into anything. They just announce the "queer" status, revolve their identity around "queerness", and rail against "heteronormativity." They always enter a long phase of nearly complete celibacy.
(This does not explain genuinely bi woman and lesbians, who of course exist because that really is how they are wired.)
Perhaps this "queer" celibacy is just a way for less desirable young women to opt out of a dating scene that is essentially a duck-duck-goose game they know they are going to lose. Maybe its a way to have access to old fashioned chastity while still projecting modern social attitudes.
I also think this culture feeds into the hysteria about "rape" and "harassment". Young women *really do* feel pressured into having sex. I think a lot do sense that their hook ups are not fully voluntary or wanted, not because the man in question is forcing anything physically, but because the entire culture doesn't give an average looking girl any leverage to really say "no." The entire experience makes them feel violated and unsafe, which is psychologically intolerable state for any female mammal, for whom safety and security is such a primal need.
The only way they can make sense of it all is to re-code promiscuous sex as "rape" and project fault for the unpleasantness of the encounter on the man.
Re-coding a hook up as "rape" and making the fault of the man also provides a psychological out for a less desirable young women where, rather than be forced to acknowledge that her lack of leverage is due to something about her lack of desirability, she can feel that she is SO desirable that men seek her out by force.
It's weird and twisted, but I worked at at therapist at a university for years, and after a while you just see some patterns that you can't unsee.
It's just fascinating to me to see old fashioned sexual mores - chastity, vulnerability, claims of victimhood at the hands of men - getting re-engineered as "progressive" expressions of feminism.
Great read!
I am married, six years in and two kids now. My wife and I met in college (introduced by her boyfriend!), became great friends over the years, then realized that we wanted to always be together. Eight years after we met we started dating.
Dating was always hard. I never learned how to talk to girls, the sex talk from my dad (who is a great man that I love dearly) was, “If you get a girl pregnant, I don’t care who she is, you’re marrying her.” I was interested in marriage, not sex (though I did have a couple of fun nights in college). My brother is 37 and single and often tells me that I am lucky I got married when I did. I think he’s right in that digital dating is bad, and it wouldn’t work for me. I am certain, though, that if for some reason my wife were gone and I needed to find a wife for me and v mother for my children, it wouldn’t be that difficult. I’m older, wiser, more confident, and clearer in what is important. It’s all in where and how you are looking.
There is a crisis with our boys, and a society of weak men won’t stand. Those of us that are blessed to be dads have the great responsibility to instill in our sons and daughters the right values so that they can make the world better.
Aaron that cuts both ways, and it seems you’re keen to scrap.
The opposite of W Bush and Trump would have been Gore or Kerry and H Clinton. You certainly seem to not have liked the policies those two championed, and easily I can say Gore or Kerry and H Clinton would probably have this country already in the ditch that Biden seems to enjoy.
The Constitution has been amended many times, rightly so to remedy the ills of our past societies and the flawed leaders that we’ll always have.
If by rabble you refer to the folks not living in CA, IL, and NY, I’ll take them every day over the dominant party lunatics that run those states, and believe that people like Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton should be President.
And I’m hardly a pompous ass. I’d bet your circle of friends and family wouldn’t consider you one either. Take care.
What a shame -- Democrats don't wish to date Republicans and vice versa. It is their loss and a big one. How narrow-minded! How boring! To choose to miss out on the thrill of discovering someone with different ideas and opinions, someone with whom to have a great debate, someone who will challenge your ideas and you theirs. I feel really sorry for people who are willing to limit themselves in this way.
I met my husband on Match 20 years ago and we've been happily married since. Back then, Match was very simple in their questions. Now it is overloaded with way too much information on a prospective person. For the record, I was a D and he was/in an R (I converted). Nowadays, women will reject a man sight unseen if they know is a Republican. So many people who would make great couples are totally losing out. Everything in general has gotten far too "nichey". We look for reasons to stay apart rather than be together.
49, single male Oklahoma, lf female. Hey we have at least one thing in common....
Wow. What a really tone deaf piece. No mention of the sacrifices women make in their careers or lives to be mothers/wives AND have to deal with husbands that are weaponizing incompetence while being more interested in playing video games etc. No mention of men who frankly don't put in the actual emotional labour it takes to make a successful relationship. No mention of how sick women are of doing all of that labour and raising kids, and keeping house, and and and the list goes on. Why on earth should women even bother dating? Why shouldn't our standards be high? Why should we settle? To what purpose and to what end? To the benefit of the mediocre men who don't want to work on themselves? No thanks. I am very ok with being single forever.
In addition, the author strikes me as protesting a wee bit too much that "Men Are Happier Than Women" - he must be cherry picking data pretty carefully since there are now a number of studies citing how unhappy and lonely men are.
You're an individual, you can find an individual you like, even love. I did, yep, a man who doesn't play video games, weaponize incompetence, puts in emotional labor...but maybe go to therapy first to unload all the baggage you have towards men and relationships because it sounds like you're determined to be unhappy. Sorry I know harsh. And yes you do have to sacrifice in relationships. But it's worth it. True love does exist.
But I agree I think in general men are more unhappy than women in society as a whole.
Actually, I have very little baggage towards men or relationships. I just don't care enough to commit anymore. The thing that had me incensed is this pathetic take on why people stay single. It isn't "swipe" culture.... it is however women knowing they deserve more and better.
It's women who have made things more difficult for themselves.
Im an Orthodox Jew (American). Despite highly inaccurate media portrayals of forced marriages and deeply unhappy wives, here are the facts: like in every culture, marital happiness here is personal and varies and has much more to do with interpersonal dynamics between the couple than religion. But here's what I will say. Around 90% of us get married and I think most are happy, but you'd have to ask. In the Hasidic world (not mine - no not every orthodox Jew is Hasidic) it's pretty common to get engaged after 2 weeks. Not ideal for people in my circle. We date for a couple of months with the help of a match maker who sets us up, and those on the date date chiefly for marriage. I dated my husband for about three months. Got engaged three months later. Got married three months after that. Never looked back. We're very happy together and very much in love - okay it's only been two years, but he's a gem. But I think our expectations and outlook are different coming in to the dating scene and that's why it works, it has for me and my siblings and friends. Most of us get married for life. The expectation is that unless it's something deeply destructive, you work on yourself and your marriage if it's not going well (most people probably feel this way in general, I'm assuming, not just Orthodox Jews). Divorce happens, it's becoming more common, but it's still lower than average - about 10 percent. People get married to be married - they do it young, have kids and the whole shebang. It's a communal expectation, it pushes people out of their comfort zone, to focus on being marriage minded from a younger age and it works.
p.s. the war between the sexes - it doesn't really exist here. I mean sure, there's inequities on both sides, but that's to be expected - we weren't created equal. And not to say we don't have our share of issues, but it's not catastrophic, people are still getting married and staying married.
This article is insanely out of touch with the reality that men face; the VR and porn that Rob is trying to scare women with (so that he can finally get a pity fuck) are not existentially threatening to women at all. They are indicative of men's misery and mental illness. Three of my old high school classmates have tried to commit suicide that I know of and they are all porn addicted males who think VR will save them from loneliness. Meanwhile the classmates who have gone on to get married and have kids are not techbros and they are not interested in the VR/anime crap at all, and they're not porn addicted.
This article is really, really dumb. Men are not happier than women considering how high their suicide rate is. This article is a desperate attempt to scare women into having sex with men and its using technology as a boogeyman, as well as hiding the misery and shocking loneliness males face in our society. Instead of trying to encourage other men to keep going and remind them that there is hope for the future, Rob chooses to lie about their struggles. And it's all because he's trying to scare women into sleeping with men.
As with all things, men show higher variability than women. The men who are dying deaths of despair are not happy, but other men are doing better than women, at least in the relative sense.
At this point “trying to scare women into sleeping with men” is indistinguishable with stating basic facts about the human condition.
"A relative sense" is one hell of a way to sweep despair and mass suicide under the rug. I thought women hated each other but men must absolutely loathe and despise each other that you're this desperate to whitewash porn addiction and the male suicide rate. Otoh it makes sense as intrasexual competition; you don't want anyone thinking about the dead ones so long as you can pretend everything is fine and get laid.
Porn addiction is not real.
Mass suicide is an exaggeration, but it is indeed true that deaths of despair (a term coined to include suicide, drug overdose, drug-related liver disease, etc.) overwhelmingly affect men. And there are of course many deep societal factors stacked against men to produce this outcome, including many that Rob Henderson is hinting at here.
And boy are you miles off with what you're projecting on me.
https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/
Porn addiction is absolutely real. You can get addicted to anything that hijacks your dopamine receptors, which is how people get addicted to carbs and smartphones. Stop making excuses for porn. My ex-boyfriends were so ruined by porn that they all eventually confessed that they were unable to feel attraction towards me because they only wanted to jerk off to videos. It's horrible.
That's exactly why I think Rob Henderson is being really pathetic and underhanded. Instead of addressing these issues and coming up with solutions he's whining about how women need commit because otherwise we'll lose males.... to VR porn. He's advertising for pornography and trying to intimidate women into forming half hearted "relationships" with addicts. He might as well demand we sleep with coke users.
I have you figured down to the letter.
Rob is essentially right that women acting in their perceived short-term interests produces disastrous outcomes for everyone, and they would be well advised to do what men have always done and learn to resist our baser urges and-as he puts it-settle.
Your lack of insight is unfortunate, but not something I feel compelled to make any further effort to remedy. Try to have an open mind.
"Please please please please have sex with me! I'll become a porn addict and waste my life fapping to VR if you don't! It's all your fault that I'm depressed and lie on polls and surveys!"
Selfish, short sighted, and lying about the emotional problems that males face. This is pathetic.
This article talks about young people and their sexual confusion. Yawn. This writer trots out the usual tropes about women and degrees, men and casual sex, and the mismatch of priorities between the sexes, etc. I am so tired of this discussion t/b/h. When are we ever going to talk about young people and their lack of meaning, and social engagement in their every day lives as the root cause of their loneliness? Most of our current social problems and anomie can be solved by getting more sleep, eating clean, moving more, getting off line, and caring about one's fellow humans (and other sentient beings). Relationships of all kinds are suffering now-a-days. Spending the vast majority of our lives online has not helped, but these trends in society have been ongoing for well over a generation.
I thought of these matters while reading the recent David Brooks essay (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/), where he says, among other things, that "...we would never want to go back to the training methods that prevailed for so long, rooted in so many 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘴 and so much shaming, and riddled with so much racism and sexism."
Leave aside the racism, which I think is a red-herring here, as one won't easily find anyone claiming that our proper moral education requires that we distinguish people by race. He's saying that we won't review our current assumptions about human nature and morality even though, considered as a test of a hypothesis for what makes a good society and a good life, there's evidence that they're wrong.
That's fair. There are things we think are morally wrong and will avoid doing even if they might make most of us happier. I don't think a recognition of differences between the sexes, or that people have obligations to their communities and to both previous and succeeding generations, or that people have obligations to God, are in that category.
You
Every social and cultural problem in this country can be directly traced back to a progressive cause.
In defense of tech, it was a lifesaver for me during covid. I had just retired, and a few years before that had gotten divorced. It was just me and my cat. There were family members and friends I still got together with, but Toastmaster meetings, book groups, and even a few prospective dates via Zoom were a huge value to me. Take me back to before smartphones and Zoom and I would have been miserable.