50% of men aged 18 to 24 have never approached a woman in person in their life.
And like even higher percentage, 18 to 30 haven't approached a woman in the last year.
Is this downstream from me too?
I have a slightly weird take on this, which is that actually the thing you hear about as sort of the thing that Gen X people talk about, of going up to someone in a bar and this being a way of striking up relationships,
I think that was a very brief period of history, sort of post-sexual revolution, but pre-internet, where that was considered normal.
And I'm slightly too young to have ever actually experienced that.
The normal way actually that people start relationships in the vast majority of cultures is to be like it is like semi-arranged marriage right, like not the full.
You've never met this person before you know 13 year olds whatever, getting betrayed like, not like that, but the sort of you're introduced by family members, mutual friends, you're known in the community, you go to the same church, whatever it is, and then both of your families consent to the marriage and it works out okay.
But the expectation of marriage up until relatively recently was that you would have an economic relationship and a reproductive relationship.
But you weren't best friends and actually i don't think.
I don't think husbands and wives used to talk to each other as much as they do now.
I think people used to have much more homosocial kind of lives.
You'd hang out with other men, you'd hang out with other women, you wouldn't necessarily hang out a lot with the opposite sex, including your spouse um, so this idea that like the going up to a person in the bar is like the normal and natural way of starting relationships, i don't think is historically That's interesting.
So the male aversion felt, fear of approach anxiety, which every guy listening is aware of, apart from the psychopaths, right.
There is a girl that I find attractive that I either know or don't know or partly know or whatever.
Yeah. hi, how are you?
Nice to meet you, is kind of like a miniature war that you have to go to.
And the felt sense of palpable fear is just ripping you apart inside.
That isn't, or the modern aversion to that isn't some novel new problem.
It was a, in your opinion here, a bar that kind of never really needed to be gotten over in the first place in some regards, because you had seen each other at church for ages, or her father owned the farm next to your father's land.
And you guys had known like, yeah, yeah.
People have much more kind of static social lives.
So yeah, just approaching some stranger and ending up getting married to her is not.
I had this uh, I had this conversation with a guy called Mads Larson, who is a mating ideology researcher.
I'll send it to you.
It's phenomenal.
And he talks about this.
All of the different arrangements that people went through, and the romantic to the confluent, which is what we've moved through most recently, has left us with a really interesting vestige, which is previously it was they own the farm next door.
It was almost like a tactical marriage between the two of you.
And then it's, no, no, no, no.
You guys are supposed to be together forever.
There is supposed to be deeper meaning instantiated in this.
But then as soon as you have the sexual revolution, you have confluence.
So, for as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you, I think even Mia Khalifa, who obviously paragon of sexual virtue uh, said on a recent interview that um, people think that marriage is some sacred thing.
It's not, it's just a piece of paper and if this person isn't helping you grow, it's time to move on.
Um, so they just confluent like uh ideology there.
Helping you grow front and center?
You need to be helping me, i'm not sure.
Yeah, helping you prepare for your next porn scene.
I don't know, whatever she meant.
So you have this really interesting thing, which is that both the two most recent cultures have kind of got like conceptual inertia inside of our heads.
That we have this sense and we were kind of told and maybe some people think that it's true that you're supposed to find a person who fulfills you, who is your confidant, your best friend, your sexual paramour, the co-owner of your children and the household and all the rest of the things.
And yet modern culture is this more confluence thing which is they're supposed to benefit you and help you grow.
And these two things kind of bounce off against each other.
And then you know, if we look back ancestrally at what we're predisposed for, it's fucking neither of those two, right.
Like you can say what you want about the truthfulness or utility of both of those.
It wasn't that.
And it seems like serial monogamy is what we're built for, some combination of polygyny and serial monogamy.
And all of these, the existing base rate of what we are plus the two most recent cultures, are just like the Bermuda triangle of mating ideologies inside of our mind.
Yeah.
There's this book called The All or Nothing Marriage, which is about sort of yes, this modern conception marriage where exactly this you put so much expectation on your spouse that they will be, you know you will be perfectly sexually compatible, perfectly like conversationally compatible, you know everything, everything is perfect, and obviously for loads of people that isn't going to be true, and that's not going to be true for 60 years or whatever that you might be together.
And so you end up with this all or nothing thing that like, some people have absolutely fabulous marriages and some people just they can't possibly take the strain and so they collapse.
And the authors compare it to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Well, if you're in a situation of economic subsistence, you basically just see your spouse as like your economic partner with whom you have children, but your expectations are not that high.
And then you reach the point where you're so affluent contemporary culture, where you kind of regard marriage as fulfilling all of these esoteric psychological needs, which is just not reasonable.
So I honestly, again, Mary Harrington, endlessly quotable.
She has this saying that we should abolish big romance.
That the idea of having these incredible romantic expectations of your spouse is just pretty much setting yourself up to fail.
She's just a one woman meme machine, isn't she?
Yeah, she really is.
What was your thing?
It was you that reminded me of a story that I'd forgotten from my childhood, about ladies dropping handkerchiefs.
Oh, right, as a way of like demonstrating... Interest.
Yeah.
So I had this thing with me and David Buss came up with this solution around women cultivating receptiveness if they want to improve their dating prospects.
Now, in a post-MeToo world where we're worried about women's safety, especially sexually, this is something that is kind of difficult to say.
But again, if you want to work within the confines of how reality is, not how you want it to be, think that women cultivating receptiveness accounts for the male approach anxiety problem right that you know a slightly lingering a longer lingering eye than you think or like you know smiling at somebody as opposed to doing the uh why men love treat him mean keep him keen kind of approach men are going to be so bad at receiving those signals though don't you think Have you ever heard that the average man of 130 IQ has the emotional, social receptivity of a woman with 70 IQ?
So you're saying that we're actually socially retarded?
Yeah.
My husband calls me a witch because I'll be able to sense there's something off with this person.
You are particularly witchy today with the olive as well.
I think it's just women.
I think we are just- Witchy.
Witchy.
That's why you were burned at the stake.
Bring it back.
You can just sense that something I don't know, facial expressions whatever, something which most men are just oblivious to.
Blinkers on.
With some exceptions, clearly.
Well, let's take that as the again the thermodynamics of the situation that men are.
Uh, their eq is 50 of what a woman's is essentially.
Um, if that is the case, leaning in even further to not being receptive is going to make said blinkered man even less capable of understanding that.
Maybe you're interested.
Oh yeah yeah right, so i just think that Again, another confluence of the hydra's head of lots of stuff that's going on.
The multifactorial problem
Women are maybe being a little bit more masculine, working in more masculine environments, thinking they need to be more disagreeable to be more effective at work, concerned about their own safety, generally skeptical of men that come up to them strange men that come up to them in a bar, which has led to absolutely less receptivity from women.
And it's like look, if you are complaining, like where are all of the good men at, look around a little bit, if you can, when you're at your crossfit class or you're doing yoga or you're doing whatever.
And if someone, if some guy comes up to you and asks some awkward, clunky question but he's kind of cute, like don't just presume that he's asking the question like use the witch clairvoyance right, tap into the astral realm or whatever it is that you do yeah, and think, oh yeah, have you heard of the?
The male over perception in the female under perception bias Is this with sexual interest?
Correct.
Yeah.
So that's in David Buss' book that men overestimate the degree of interest that women have to them and women underestimate, which is largely why you have awkward passes by male co-workers and stuff.
Well, what do you mean?
Like her eyes and you saw the way that she looked at me every time we went to the copy machine or whatever.
And you know alcohol exaggerates that.
Does it really?
Yeah.
So men are more likely to falsely perceive sexual interest when they're drunk.
Fantastic.
Which again it just makes so much sense of all the you know.
Like were you?
Um, you know that there was.
Like me too, but for schools in the UK a few years ago it was called everyone's invited.
It was like a website that some girls set up to to describe like bad sexual experiences that they'd had with men.
In school?
Well, also not normally in school.
This was the thing.
So it ended up being a big headache for teachers and headteachers because parents were obviously really upset, understandably.
And they said, you know, you should be teaching consent workshops in schools.
You should be doing all these things.
And the teachers were like, this isn't happening in school.
Very rarely is this happening in school.
This is normally happening Friday night at some house party.
The parents aren't there.
Everyone's drunk.
And like, it's kind of the parent's responsibility to step in.
Yeah.
And it's like look, you've got horny.
Young men raised on porn plus alcohol.
Young women often giving confusing signals.
One of the things that teenage girls just don't understand bless them is if you say, dress in revealing clothes because you want to attract a particular man, the blast radius of that signal.
Do you know what I mean?
It's a dirty bomb.
Yeah.
I was getting a train recently in London and there was a schoolgirl who was probably 16 who was walking ahead of me and she was going up the stairs And she was wearing such a short skirt going to school that I could see absolutely everything.
And I almost jogged after her just to say like, you're lucky it was me who was walking behind you.
And I know that you're doing this because there is a kind of thrill of feeling sexy that young women experience for the first time.
And they have no idea how potent and dangerous that tool is.
So you know you do it because there's like a particular guy who gets the same train as you, who you want to catch his eye, or whatever.
Fine,
But like, I could have been a creepy bloke.
And this is why I think parents have to be banning their daughters from leaving the house looking like that, basically because they have no idea.
Like teenage girls are just, I mean, you know, teenagers are dumb.
The sort of me too.
Conversation around victim blaming and stuff is such a deep hole when you get into it to talk about.
Should things be this way?
No.
Are things this way?
Yes.
Do you want to play within the confines of the thermodynamics of this particular system?
Well, you probably should, right?
And to thread that needle, especially because I often think about this.
Douglas Murray once taught me that it doesn't really matter who makes the best logical argument in a debate.
If you manage to get two or three big laughs, you win.
Yes, it's true.
It's all vibes.
Yep.
It's just vibe.
You're a vibe architect, right?
And the problem with this discussion if you have somebody who is very anti this and is saying that's victim blaming, you're giving men a pass.
You're saying that women should be fearful of what they should wear.
And it's like that particular talking point is so empathetically robust in its signaling that it almost always wins yeah because the most obviously caring argument up front that sounds like the one that sounds right that sounds like the one that you will get the most support for on twitter it's so tough to it's like right yeah yeah no i don't disagree but look at the outcomes that we get from this One of the things that, um, progressives really have on their side rhetorically is that if you're, if you're a conservative who's saying, look, actually, you know, there was a line that one of my readers sent me from, uh, from all places.
It was a book about um uh, making wine, and the line was um, traditions are experiments that worked.
You can say that when you're talking about winemaking and it's not too politically explosive, but you can obviously apply that to social issues as well.
Wow, that's so perfect.
Traditions are experiments that worked.
Exactly.
But what you end up if you're trying to make that argument and if you're proposing anything remotely conservative is that you have to.
You end up having to defend other cultures or cultures of the past.
So you'll say look, actually you know there was a lot to be said for the sort of slightly arranged marriage.
There's a lot to be said for teenage girls being encouraged to dress more modestly, whatever.
And people say, oh, what?
So you're saying that you support domestic violence.
You're saying that you support, you know, cholera and imperialism and like everything that might've happened during the era that you're talking about, and you have to say no no no, I don't.
You just end up at the back foot.
Whereas if you're a progressive, you can say, I can see this vision.
In the future, we'll have this amazing society where everything's great.
And the fact that this has never happened and is never likely to happen means that you're never in the position of having to defend anything unfortunate.
You never have to talk about trade-offs.
I think that acknowledging the existence of trade-offs is a fundamentally conservative trait.
Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Yeah, it's really painful, but it's true, unfortunately.
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