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Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

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351–360 of 806 posts

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#351
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it is their response to the problem that is problematic.

What is the right response? For a long time the response of men in suffering has been to be quiet, turn anger inward and suffer from suicide, heart disease, drug addiction and other deadly forms of despair. I'd agree that inceldom is toxic (one of my son's friends fell under the spell of an incel Youtuber and dumped my son as a friend because my son is taller than him and could possibly "heightmog" him.) but the aver…

The tragic thing about incels and the broader online men's rights movements is that the pain is real, but they've rejected the most useful lens for understanding where it comes from and how to address it.

Third wave feminism prominently addresses the origins and dangers of certain aspects of masculinity, diagnoses how they harm men, and proposes well thought out mitigations and alternatives. Bell hooks for example wrote several entire books on exactly this subject, and she's not the only one.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#352

> One possible aid for sexual loneliness might come from online dating apps such as Tinder. In theory, online dating could provide an efficient way to find a partner. However, online dating divides people heavily into winners and losers – perhaps even more so than traditional dating. While women can get attention from thousands of men online in just a few hours, men are lucky if anyone is interested in them My wife d…

Tinder is straight up depressing for the median dude. My mind was blown just how much harder it was to get a date on tinder vs getting a date in real life. I can do the latter pretty easily but trying to get one on tinder would be like months of constant effort to then get ditched before the date even starts. It feels like 90% of women on there are chasing the top 10% of dudes and not settling for anything else.

Yes, but I don't see why everyone is acting like Tinder is the only choice. There are other apps that seem to work differently and better.

I used Tinder for close to a year and had an experience close to what you're describing. I only managed to go on two dates that both went nowhere. At the suggestion of someone on one of the dating subreddits, I switched to Hinge, saw the difference in the amount of attention I was getting, and never looked back. Eventually, I met my girlfriend on there.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#353
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think the post was sensitively written about a topic that can be touchy. It's pretty easy for someone to get on the apps and have sex with people they don't have much in common with, I don't think we need to consider that a humble-brag.

It's not sensitively written.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#354
post #162

> One possible aid for sexual loneliness might come from online dating apps such as Tinder. In theory, online dating could provide an efficient way to find a partner. However, online dating divides people heavily into winners and losers – perhaps even more so than traditional dating. While women can get attention from thousands of men online in just a few hours, men are lucky if anyone is interested in them My wife d…

I think it's very telling there's no real lesbian equivalent to the sex clubs for gay men, or Grindr for that matter. They do exist; relatively few women actually use them. Pornography by and for gay men, is as popular if not more so, with gay men as pornography is with straight men. The market for such material aimed at women, gay or straight, is rather marginal by comparison. Similarly, a very large % of gay men wh…

Glad someone pointed this out. The average man simply wants far more sex, more often, and with more variety, than the average woman.

This is the ultimate source of much of the struggles for men.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#356

Legalize prostitution and regulate safety and perhaps incels would build confidence and learn to socialize a bit from paid sexual interactions? I'm kind of ignorant to the subject of what is the cause of 'sexual loneliness' but I believe the world's oldest profession shouldn't be pushed into the shadows as that causes more problems than it prevents.

> Legalize prostitution and regulate safety and perhaps incels would build confidence and learn to socialize a bit from paid sexual interactions?

Prostitution is legal in my country. One can literally go to a clearnet website and get a menu full of humans to choose from. So called "incels" still exist.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#357

I'll chime in as somebody who's been considered top 10% of attractiveness in one country and bottom 50% in another - the difference in the amount of sexual opportunities on apps is absolutely staggering. Not that this should be a surprise to anyone. Where I am considered attractive, I've gotten 80+ matches in one day and random women messaging me at 11PM telling me they're lonely and to come hang out. I've had more f…

How does that work? Is it an ethnicity issue?

Shit I can drop like 3 (relative) points on the good ol' 10 scale just by traveling to different sections of my own city. And while I'm not bad by local standards I'm only like a 2 or a 3 in some cities I've visited. From "not bad" to "uggo" just by traveling to another city, without ethnicity being a factor.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#358

Legalize prostitution and regulate safety and perhaps incels would build confidence and learn to socialize a bit from paid sexual interactions? I'm kind of ignorant to the subject of what is the cause of 'sexual loneliness' but I believe the world's oldest profession shouldn't be pushed into the shadows as that causes more problems than it prevents.

Make things worse for women to appease lonely men? No thank you.

That the 'oldest profession' is essentially paid rape says a lot really.

Better to criminalise only those who seek to use prostitutes, and provide help and support for those who wish to exit the sex trade.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to downvote this. (I'm paying partictular attention to the "how I want to live my life" part) But there's a number of presumptions made that I think are worth calling out that should not be assumed: - That the ending of a relationship is necessarily a failure. - That two very young people are in a place to understand the implications of choosing a life partner. - That extended families are necessary to…

I am very well aware of those assumptions. I've lived in several countries. I've found that things function better, and people seem healthier, in more collectivist societies where there are real, permanent families and communities. To the point of the book, the way things actually were is that we evolved as tribal creatures. We didn't pick our communities, didn't have much choice of mate, and we did need to rely on o…

I would argue society-level collectivism is actually a big destroyer of these families.

The phenomenon of say the elderly being disconnected from the younger I theorize is in part due to the fact they extract their social security through violence of the state in taxation rather than through family bonds. The lack of mutual familial reliance destroys the unspoken quid-pro-quo arrangements that held families together. The end effect also is children are a pure cost driver as the support they provide as adults to seniors is equally distributed amongst society rather than mostly directed towards the benefit of the parent who invested in their upbringing. This brings a massive free-rider problem where everyone is incentivized for the other guy to have kids but not for you personally to have one.

I theorize this also has destroyed to some extent inner city poor families. Non-familial nation state social payments to single mothers can actually work against marriage in poor families, as the single mother may be financially penalized for getting married. The resulting lack of father figure inspires more poverty and crime and recycling of the issues.

When my partner and I were first expecting we honestly were not sure whether to get married or not, as a lot of possible government benefits vaporized when you took my partner from "single poor mom" to "married middle of the road family."

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#360
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair this is not entirely due to social dynamics but rather due to MatchGroup companies following identical monetization patterns. They’re just capitalizing on male desperation and artificially widening or narrowing the gap depending on how much you pay. If you observe the actual dating climate it’s nowhere near this bad and in larger cities like NYC it can even be closer to 1:1. Rather than a social problem th…

> in larger cities like NYC it can even be closer to 1:1 I don't know the stats but on places like Blind there's a lot of anecdotes about the dating scene favoring men in NYC and favoring women in SF, due to the gender balances.

Having seen data that most have not (believe me or don't, but if you want to take a chance on a random anon user I would say I can give a more data-informed take on this exact issue than 99.9% of people), it's really not as dramatic of an effect as lonely people would like to pretend, but even subtle as it is numerically, it does affect the feeling. An extra cup of water still feels like a world of difference if you're in a desert.
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