Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem? • Hacker News Board

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#361

Post by konart » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

Fortunatelly I have a wife now, but for me for the longest time the so called "sexual lineliness" was linked with the three facts:

1) I was raised into believing that sex implies serious relationship and vice versa. As in "if we are having sex that means we are in serious relatioinship".

As it turned out - this does not work like this for most (many?) people. Turns out yuo can just have a good time and some sex without worrying about 1001 things before you do so.

2) I simply do not like dating. Like at all. For me a perfect date is the one that I can attend during my lunch time or maybe after studies\work. Definatelly not on weekend. Definetely not longer that 2 hours (well 3-4 if we are really into each other and both have the same kind of thinking about how to spent free time). May be just bad luck but many girls I've met wanted those stupid 6 hours walks around the city talking about all things you can imagine. (don't you have things to do?)

3) I failed to realise I can suggest any type of activity during our date and not just try and adjust to her preferences. As a result a bunch of dates were just me doing shit I didn't like

UPD: fixed a few obvious typos.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#362

Post by quotz » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #318

cuuupid wrote: 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…

Can't speak for NYC but this is not true for the west coast tech hubs (SF, Seattle, Portland). In these places, even 300K per year tech wealth isn't enough to make one attractive to the opposite sex. I've talked about it on other threads but where and how you earn your money matters. 300K per year as a lawyer = sexy and powerful. Even "don draper" vibes. 300K as a SWE? The moment you mention this at a bar the girl kn…

Its because youre not a rare commodity and because society has shifted from family-building to endless dating. Big salaries work wonders for dating in relatively not that well off environments, if you had a salary like that and lived in Mobile Alabama, or like Slovakia I am sure you would be a hot cake there, but bay area or LA or NYC it doesnt really matter. What matters is whether you have the romancing vibes and whether youre an exciting partner. I highly suggest you go travel somewhere for like a few months and totally immerse yourself in the culture and try dating, it will be a paradigm shift for you. Places like Argentina or Brazil or Mexico, just make sure you research whether Americans are accepted and try dating there, it will blow your mind.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#363

Post by throwawaymaths » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #320

japanman425 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If some perceived desirable accomplishment is retold as an experience without obvious boasting and with wisdom drawn from it, I think that responding with insecurity is delegitimizing only to you, not them

The wisdom is not all that profound and it comes off as boastful. Whether or not it deligitimizes the reader is irrelevant. The poster knows it's a sensitive topic from the very outset and still goes ahead with the comment.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#364

Post by danenania » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #160

spaniard89277 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running online communities for years and this, as far as I can see, factual. I've read somewhere, maybe multiple times, that most men are emotionally and sexually deprived. That sounds correct given the data I have. I'm ok looking and I feel like I can make women like me. I still struggle sometimes. Many of my friends do much worse than me. I have friends that I find intellectually stimulating, average-look…

> The only advice I've told them is to get out of any online stuff and hit bars. They need your wife to bring her single friends to the bar. If they have a hard time reaching out to women hitting bars without friends won't help them much.

I've been married for 8 years so not sure anyone should care about my advice, but I wouldn't suggest going to bars or clubs at all. I know there are exceptions, but for the most part it's hard to think of an environment where a nerdy introverted person will be perceived as lower status.

When I learned to play poker, one of the key insights was that beyond the point of basic competence, literally the most important factor is table selection, and second most important is seat selection. It doesn't matter how good of a player you are if you're in a game with an even better player on your left. Similarly, you don't have to be very good to make a lot of money if you can find a terrible player and sit to their left.

I think this applies to dating and social skills more generally. While it's great to occasionally get out of your comfort zone, you're more likely to have success socially and romantically in settings where you feel in your element. The more comfortable you are and the more you're authentically enjoying yourself, the more attractive you'll appear to others. So unless you really like bars and clubs, don't go to them--or at least look for places with a vibe that suits you, not places where you feel like a loser. The best bet is to somehow find the overlap in the venn diagram of 'places/activities you authentically enjoy' and 'places where single women are present'.

They aren't always easy to find and it might take some work to arrange these types of settings if you don't have access to any that already exist, but at the same time, anyone can host a game night or book club or running group etc. and start promoting and networking to get people involved.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#365

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

giraffe_lady wrote: post #351

PaulHoule wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wr…

People are really negative towards outsiders with explanations. When I was in grad school, a friend and I tried to unify all the progressive organizations on campus. One thing we found was that black organizations reacted negatively to any hint of vanguardism or anything that sounded like some white people think they know better than black people.

It is one reason why I reject How to be an anti-racist because it is not for white people to take a leadership role in solving black people’s problems, in particular blacks “own the problem” and get to decide what is an acceptable solution or not.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#366

Post by avmich » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #316

AdamH12113 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've gathered by listening to women, there are fundamentally different problems. "Attention" is not valuable in itself. Getting spammed with dick pics is about as appealing as any other kind of spam. No one looks in their spam folder and thinks "Gosh, all of these advertisers think I have money to burn! What a great compliment!". It doesn't show any personal interest. It's not a sign that the other person i…

> The difference in experiences starts early in life. For boys, girls showing interest in them is often an exciting and empowering experience. Hence, if you're going to try and show interest in a woman, do it in a way that's clearly going to be interesting, exciting and empowering to her, even if she doesn't seem to reciprocate sexually. (Which in practice means you'll need to show genuine social interest and friends…

> do it in a way that's clearly going to be interesting, exciting and empowering to her

I wonder what examples would you have in mind?

It's easy to say "just be great".

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#367

Post by FearlessNebula » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

quantified wrote: post #348

FearlessNebula wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah everyone seems to be very focused on sex whereas to me the problem is not fostering intimate connections in the first place. We don’t have an epidemic of relationships that aren’t having sex, we’re having an epidemic of people who aren’t fostering those relationships and as a downstream byproduct they aren’t having sex. Pay a prostitute is a bandaid patch on the downstream problem, but it will never makeup for t…

There's more than one problem. Trust me, being in a loving marriage where your partner just wants sex with other people and not you, but is jealous of your sexual fidelity, is corrosive. Especially if you have a high sex and intimacy drive.

While that certainly sounds like an awful partner, to my knowledge it doesn’t happen to the same extent as we see lonely people

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#368

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

morbia wrote: post #327

retrac wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Similarly, a very large % of gay men who are partnered romantically, are in open relationships. And by large % I mean around half. At least with American gay women, open relationships are a very minor thing, similar to the rates with heterosexuals. I would love to know the actual number here, as someone in the gay male open relationship category. I remember discussing this with a friend of mine, who is also in an o…

[deleted]

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#369

Post by goodpoint » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #305

goodpoint wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> evolutionarily optimal strategy Gender roles (and sexism) are primarily cultural. If you look through history there has been matriarchal and patriarchal societies. Monogamous and polygamous and so on in many combinations. Humans sexuality is very unique compared to other animals and, respectfully, we should try not to play armchair Darwin. There are very good lectures from prof. Sapolsky on youtube on the topic. Hu…

Roles are very cultural, but who has the eggs isn't. One person can create 10-20 offspring over their life, another can create thousands (hypothetically).

...and that means close to nothing, as shown by history.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#370

Post by mathematicaster » Thu, Jan 26, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

red_trumpet wrote: post #286

Levitz wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's interesting to me. I have female friends in their 30s who go on tons of dates but reject pretty much all of them for any long-term relationship. The ones they seem to be in to tend to reject them after a couple of dates. This is simply the other side of the coin, "online dating divides people heavily into winners and losers" What is happening is that in the same way most women get more attention than most men,…

I don't understand how this is a stable situation. If women have to compete so much, wouldn't it be better for them to lower expectations?

Tricky. In an environment where it takes time to collect information about competitiveness, updating of expectations is slow (and costly, because it is hard to be rational about this), there is a lot of randomness, and one's own competitiveness might be typically decreasing ... the slope of the expectation update might be not steep enough.