Blog post on the epidemic of forced celibacy in males

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Women that have low self-esteem gravitate towards emotionally and physically abusive men. The other option, that she just thinks he's really hot, doesn't paint women in a much better light either.

really? why do you think there are so many women with 'low self-esteem' who get into abusive situations? where do you think the low self-esteem comes from?

Well I know one woman, my 41 year old cousin, who's dated the same type of men her whole life...the men in uniform, bulky type, and each time been emotionally or physically abused. I don't know for sure, but my guess is that it comes down to two things, 1.)She finds those kinds of guys physically attractive like a lot of women do, and mistakes lust for love. 2.)She suffers from depression anyway...so while she doesn't seek out or ask to get abused, she has it written all over her face that she's an easy target and these type of men are the kind that will take advantage of it.

here's another opinion:



i believe we need to rethink how men and women are treated, and start to value all people. i think abuse can be reduced through changing people's attitudes.

I'm bitter about not getting as many dates/girlfriends and as much sex as I'd like, but I would never abuse a woman. Venting on a message board and actually mistreating or using women are two different things. I'm sure I could have lost the V-Card by now if I had done the a$$hole thing and pretended to have feelings to get what I want.

if you are not interested in a relationship, and not interested in a friend with benefits, what exactly do you want?

I would like a relationship if the woman was no-nonsense, and was interested in me as much as I was interested in her, and we had similar lifestyles.

What I'd like now is a friends with benefits...not to be confused with f*** buddy. I want a casual relationship without the drama.

I do agree with some things the article says. I understand how this perspective is very difficult for most women to understand or sympathize with, simply because, the majority of NT and even AS women have a polar opposite position and life experience. This does not mean the article doesn't contain any truths. It is a sad commentary on the state of society and male-female relations.

I'm getting to this discussion late, so please forgive me if I'm repeating previous points.

This author is pretty much way off-base. He starts out decrying feminism, and ends up sounding like the Unabomber's Manifesto.

Some key points --

--The author is clearly very young and trying to show off (thus the over-the-top writing style and crude remarks). This is a bit ageist, but I really don't need someone in their early 20s, who really hasn't tasted that much of life (and seen how men and women's motivations change over time, especially in that "ticking biological clock" period) to tell me about the meaning of life or even life in general. Yes, I've been at that know-it-all age too -- it doesn't mean I was right at the time.

--Being that this is for presumably a PUA audience, he offers up PUA as an alternative idol/goal/lifestyle, but even indirectly admits that this is a false idol/goal due to the basic flaws with society. As a side note, don't ever make the PUA lifestyle your goal -- it's just too much of a descent into douchebaggery vs. what you can get by being a normal and honest human being.

--I will admit that there are problems with feminism and other rights movements in terms of a double-standard. I do think it is true that American' women, and possibly their Western European counterparts, have gotten to the point where they think they can eat their cake and have it too. Meaning, if you want total equality, you can't have chivalry, and what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. No more "ladies first," etc. At some point, you have to wonder what a wife/GF offers other than sex or companionship. I bring technical skills, my income, and brute force (for yardwork, protection, etc.) to the table -- what does she bring, if she can't cook (I can't and won't) or won't do child care? Do I have to do that skillset too, and if so, what is her contribution? Contrary to what we may think, nature does not leave us all equal -- a topic for another thread, I think.

--That being said, feminism is not the main cause of our societal problems -- there are so many more powerful forces and factors to blame. Popular culture promoting the thug lifestyle, leveraged for corporate profit, pretty much undid 40 years of progress since the Civil rights era, with minority groups now in some ways worse off than they were before desegregation (I cite the current 70% illegitimacy rate with African Americans as an example -- it was 20% during the pre-Civil Rights era). We have literally tens of thousands of gang members, essentially urban terrorists, living in our cities and creating economic damage wholesale. We have a drug war that is impoverishing our citizens while creating a civil war in our neighbor to the south, Mexico. We have the military industrial complex gobbling up our tax dollars while schools and social programs languish. There are a lot of other things I could list here, all of which eclipse feminism's effects on anything.

--I do think that men should have a legal and consensual outlet. As others have said here, everyone has the right to their own bodies, so compulsory intercourse or expectations of marriage are not just or realistic (getting married is not the optimal solution for celibacy). I would suggest that legal and regulated prostitution would make a very safe and affordable solution. Getting it back out of the black market would drive prices down.

--Guys don't just earn money to land a wife. Yes, it's one of the reasons, but not THE reason. Some of us like having nice stuff, achieving things with our career, having buying power, etc.

--Finally, this guy says that things are "broken" -- they're not. Even in a very competitive environment like L.A., I'm able to get a house (finally), make a decent living, get a good education, work at a job that pays well yet does not work me to the bone, and have a beautiful wife. Sodini had other options and chose not to pursue them -- plenty of women who were immigrants (and thus from a different value system) or in the third world would have appreciated him. Just because a few women at the gym weren't into him (and really, the gym is a bad place to pick up women anyways) doesn't mean that he was hopeless. He was just doing it wrong.

This whole blog post was a big slippery slope argument that turned into a big rant.

i agree with a great deal of what you said. but erm, i was the major breadwinner in my household for many years. i also do more than my share of the plumbing, i'm the household techie, i do all budgeting and bills payments, i've assembled most of our furniture, etc. i am also very, very strong in a physical way. how am i not equal to a man? lots of men are not skilled at these things, but are better at cooking or childcare.

i get that you are saying that each partner needs to fulfill a role, or that partner is less useful in a partnership. but your assumption that women should only complete certain tasks is reductionistic. give people a chance and they can do everything the other gender can do (obviously i am not speaking biological differences like having a birth canal or a penis).

In your case, of course the man should take up the slack -- you're doing the breadwinning, the physical work, the tech work -- so yep, it's on him to complement your skill set - cooking, child-rearing, etc. You are, of course, in the minority -- most women (outside of these boards) in a relationship are not the main breadwinner, the techie, etc.

And that's my main point -- I don't think that women or men should by default be assigned to certain skillsets, but at the end of the day, certain skillsets do need to be employed to have a household function and to get by with life normally, and men and women tend to gravitate for various reasons to various skill sets. Generally speaking, there is a tendency for me to like mechanical, techy things, and women tend to like other things. This isn't just from cultural learning or bias -- even independent studies with using the opposite gender's toys with very young children shows a tendency for boys and girls to gravitate to certain activities, much as women tend to have greater social development and acumen vs. men's tendency towards greater mechanical development. And yes, there are definitely exceptions to this.

So no offense intended, and that was only one (and probably my most controversial) point out of many above. I think what men do resent is someone who, because of the women's movement, assumes that she is off the hook on all of the skillsets, doesn't have to cook or clean, does less work than the man overall, yet is still free to take advantage of society's chivalry. And yes, there are women like this, I would argue a growing amount in the upper-middle class.

My sisters were like this growing up -- so coddled (and we were not rich), while I was forced to do all of the manual labor. They didn't cook or clean or do anything, were given everything, while I had to beg for everything. I've run into a lot more women like this. Many of them wake up when they hit their mid-20s and realize this is a dysfunctional world view that will not leave them with a good man or a family in most cases.

And that's why I really don't think feminism is a big deal in the overall view of things, nor do I find it a problem. I do think it did a lot of good to get equality for women in ways that matter, and I do support 90% of the further efforts, especially with those on the moderate end of the spectrum.

okay, that's fair. you speak a great deal of sense to me there. my husband did, indeed, fulfill some more of the traditionally female-gendered roles, like caring for our child and cooking, etc. currently, it is redistributed and i am doing the cooking. we are flexible, i guess. so i'd say all of your points ring true to me.

did you know that in canada a man can have 35 weeks of parental benefits to care for a newborn or newly adopted child? 15 weeks of maternity benefits are paid to the mother for physical recovery, and additionally, those 35 weeks parental benefits can be used or shared by either parent.

Interesting -- I wonder if the guys want to be home that long I'm about to have my first child in a few weeks, and I have the feeling I'll be eager to get back to work vs. staying at home with a crying baby and not getting any sleep, lol!

I think that the "I will never cook or clean or change a diaper" statements from women in early 20's are just a phase in many cases. Of course some women don't want to be mothers- which makes the whole childcare thing a moot point in that case. But some men don't want to be fathers either- and hopefully these people find each other. I rarely cooked while in college. Like so many women (and men) in that demographic, I ate crap, takeout or food that was assembled rather than actually cooked. I didn't start actually cooking until I graduated. Prior to that, I am sure that I declared many times that I would "never" cook. This turned out to be an unsustainable way to live just as deciding to "never" clean is. And never changing a diaper? I think even movie star moms have to do that too (nannies do get vacations). So those ideas just aren't sustainable for living with another person and they aren't healthy for living by yourself.

Your post is very reasonable, even given how low the bar was set for "reasonable" by the insane ranting in the blog and some posts here.

Congratulations! And no-- you would probably be climbing the walls well before the 35 week mark. My husband took one week and would have preferred two but would have been getting distinctly twitchy at 3.

Thanks both to you and hyperlexian for the positive feedback.

My thought is that a lot of what we see with our current peers is the aftermath of a lot of the social engineering and rights movements of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I don't know that any particular viewpoint is "right," but that the pendulum culturally and politically will always swing from one extreme to another, and our parents viewpoints affect how they raise us, right or wrong.

For instance, my mother was born in the mid 1940's, grew up during the 50s and 60s, and had very strong viewpoints about gender and her experiences with sexism to the point that in our household, the pendulum swung the other way, and my experience was a family that was sexist against boys. When I look back and think about the things my mother went ballistic about with me, I really have to scratch my head and wonder -- and this was a woman who grew up with an older brother! After all, as a teen, I was never arrested or in trouble at school (other than academically), not inordinately violent or into roughhousing, almost always home and not out late, and not into drugs or alcohol, yet I used to get a lot of flak and criticism for my behavior.

I'm realizing now she probably had a lot of resentment against male figures in her life, male authority that kept her from recognizing her potential in some ways, and went too far the other direction. I can see how someone growing up in similar circumstances might again swing to the other extreme (pro-male) when they were raising kids.

I'm just glad that despite having some of the same male frustration we see here in a more extreme form, I was able to separate what was a local issue (my family) vs. a global outlook (all women) and also parse out the cultural and time factors (U.S. women, women in my age group, women in my area, women at my socio-economic level) and still come out of it with a generally good feeling about everyone.

No one is perfect, and I think the guy who penned this rant had an axe to grind about a lot of things, most of it not really relevant to what he said was to blame.