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Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

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Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#401

Post by dkarl »

josefresco wrote: post #73
f-securus wrote: post #5

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.

> incels would build confidence and learn to socialize a bit While there's a perception that incels are ugly, socially awkward nerds, the one's I've interreacted with online (and off) tend to be angry, misogynistic douchebags. The nerdiest guys I know (IRL) all have significant others. The bitter guys I know (two) IRL are older, have let themselves go and have nothing "going for them". They are both very active onlin…

I think there's a vast gap between people who feel hopeless and worthless and occasionally vent a little bit online, and people who adopt the incel identity so thoroughly that they'll cop to it IRL. I think the latter are rare, and their perceived importance is inflated the vast numbers of the former.

My teens and twenties predated the term "incel," but I was horny, lonely, and unhappy about it, and I could identify with a lot of the online whining from men who felt the same way. I did some venting in the "woe is me" vein on Reddit. But in my real life, at least when I wasn't in a depressive episode, I was always trying to improve my situation by bettering myself and buffing my social skills. I was always thinking of ways to crack the problem. When I felt defeated and discouraged, I'd complain anonymously online, because I knew nobody in my real life wanted to hear it, and then I'd get back to work figuring out my life.

I have no evidence, but I would bet that the perception of the incel phenomenon is warped by a small number of angry people who managed to inflate their importance by expressing the frustration and humiliation of a much larger group of men who are like I was, who go online to express temporary (though possibly recurring) feelings of hopelessness. As an identity, being an incel doesn't have much to offer. It's about a desire for sex, but it doesn't offer any path to sex. I think the vast majority of horny, frustrated young men who have applied the label to themselves at one time or another probably spend much more time thinking about how to be more likable to women than they spend thinking about incel ideology. And if they get any reward at all from trying to improve themselves and their empathy towards women, that will be a better deal than they get from the incel camp.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#402

Post by lechacker »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #38
itsmemattchung wrote: post #4

> 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'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…

Being inexperienced in your 30s as a man is game over. Sorry to put it bluntly but for those guys there isn't a path that leads to a relationship or real intimacy of any kind.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#403

Post by GrigoriyMikh »

idontpost wrote: post #201
giantg2 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have friends that I find intellectually stimulating, average-looking, that have not been touched by a woman in years." I have a friends like this. One solution a couple of them have found is dating internationally. Not via "mail-order" services though. It was sort of a situation where they had a domestic friend who had friends or relatives abroad who were looking for a US marriage. So there was some trust there, a…

At minimum I think most people (the bottom ~90% dating-success-wise, both men and women) in our society would be better off with arranged marriages compared to our current cultural hellscape. The problem is no one thinks they're in the bottom 90% of anything.

Agree. Arranged marriages worked for generations. And to me it looks like a perfect mechanism to tame hormone-induced young people, who, en masse, hurt not only themselves but whole society.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#404

Post by kragen »

fxtentacle wrote: post #15

I love how the article compares the unequal distribution of sex partners with the unequal distribution of wealth, because in my opinion that might be part of the cause. I would predict that being able to afford a nice apartment in a good area close to date locations will easily 10x your sex chances. There have been other studies about young men struggling to find jobs that pay well enough for them to become financial…

A weird thing about this is that I think I've had more sex, and met more new partners, in periods when I was unemployed or underemployed. When I've been really poor I've been depressed, which cuts my chances of meeting a new partner to about zero. But when I've been extremely employed I think I haven't had the time or emotional bandwidth for intimate relationships. Or travel: travelers get an automatic +4 bonus to sexiness, but it's really hard to travel when you have a job.

Even when my apartment has looked like something out of Hoarders I think it's cost me, at most, one nascent sexual relationship, and I think that was actually because she didn't enjoy our sex, not because of the apartment. (I'll probably never know.) By the time a new lover has decided to come home with me, they generally already have a strong interest in making love with me. So I think worrying about whether your apartment is nice enough might be analogous to worrying about whether your penis is big enough: it's a factor, but it usually comes into play too late to make a big difference, and in only a small minority of cases is it so bad as to actually matter.

As for financial independence, here in Buenos Aires you can always go to a telo. If you do that twice a month you are spending, say, $10000 a month (US$26) which is not an insignificant expenditure but is tiny compared to renting your own apartment. Other Latin American countries call them "motels", and in Japan they're "rabu hoteru".

Nice shirt? You can get an all-cotton button-down dress shirt for like US$40 if women won't look twice at you because you're wearing a T-shirt. This is not a significant issue for Japanese hikikomori. Also, though, the vast majority of women aren't that picky, if you're attractive in other ways.

Bad economy? Japan and Switzerland have much better economies than Brazil, Nigeria, and Haiti, but the better economies aren't the ones where people are more easily finding sex partners.

I do agree that location is important, though. Burning Man is not the same as Cairo at all.

I'm male, for what it's worth; 46 years old; and so far all my partners have been women. I think I'm way out on the right tail of the distribution when it comes to a variety of traits, including ⓐ height, ⓑ tendency to initiate conversations with strangers, ⓒ willingness to touch and be touched by new people, and ⓓ interest in and enjoyment of sex. So my experience is probably not typical.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#405

Post by yamtaddle »

zb3 wrote: post #209
yamtaddle wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There too was Cephalus the father of Polemarchus, whom I had not seen for a long time, and I thought him very much aged. He was seated on a cushioned chair, and had a garland on his head, for he had been sacrificing in the court; and there were some other chairs in the room arranged in a semicircle, upon which we sat down by him. [....] [Socrates:] And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arr…

I don't see any argument in your comment, so could you break it down for me?

... am I supposed to be arguing?

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#406

Post by jrockway »

goodpoint wrote: post #254
gorilla0 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say something similar. Humans are much closer to “other” animals than what they think, and social instituions like marriage were created to prevent social mayhem.

> Humans are much closer to “other” animals than what they think Plain false. Humans are very unique compared to other animals as I wrote in another response. See prof. Sapolsky's lectures on the topic. He's an outstanding anthropologist.

I think I agree with this. Society's laws and contracts mirror our instincts and feelings. We create laws because they encode a deep-seated feeling that most of us have about things. Not everyone agrees on every law; most of us don't want to murder, and would be sad if we did, but there are still serial killers.

We don't change our instincts just because there are laws. Look at how many people are in prison for drug possession. The law is much weaker than brain chemicals being expressed. (Also, not every law is based on wide agreement of human emotion. Sometimes lawmakers simply do whatever. I'm mostly talking about the ones that have been around since the dawn of humanity.)

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#407

Post by PaulHoule »

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?

Yes. But it takes time. Most importantly, women lose their ability to have children earlier than men but in their early 20s many of them are busy with other things and think they have a lot of time.

They get less desirable as time goes by so when they decide to ‘get serious’ at 35 it is already getting late

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#408

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Of course they rejected it. Accepting feminism didn't result in them being accepted in return. Feminists can write a million books about toxic masculinity and it won't matter because those are the men that women actually have sex with.

The sexual liberation of women is a major theme of feminism. Does that imply even so called "incels" will get some of that? No. On the contrary, they're even more marginalized now.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#409

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #38
itsmemattchung wrote: post #4

> 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'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…

>> I've told them is to get out of any online stuff and hit bars

Unfortunately, women that frequent bars are very likely to be alcoholics.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#410

Post by seydor »

fxtentacle wrote: post #15

I love how the article compares the unequal distribution of sex partners with the unequal distribution of wealth, because in my opinion that might be part of the cause. I would predict that being able to afford a nice apartment in a good area close to date locations will easily 10x your sex chances. There have been other studies about young men struggling to find jobs that pay well enough for them to become financial…

> how the article compares the unequal distribution of sex partners with the unequal distribution of wealth

I think Houellebecq's quote from 1994 is what popularized the sexual marketplace

> “It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

I wish he wrote another future-looking book about the next decade

> a bad economy and bad job market makes it difficult for young men to become independent and that makes it extremely difficult for them to become sexually active

I m not sure about that because a lot of the frustrated guys are nerds with lucrative jobs (hence why they hang out in reddit). They make great uncles but are not considered boyfriend material.

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