50% of men aged 18 to 24 have never approached a woman in person in their life and uh like even higher percentage 18 to 30 haven't approached woman in the last year is this Downstream from me too I have a certainly Weir 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 out relationships I think that was a very brief period of History sort of post-sexual Revolution but pre-
internet where that was considered normal um 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 is like semi- arranged marriage right like not the fool you've never met this person before you know 13year 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 your both of your families like consent to the marriage
and it works out okay but that but the expectation isn't like the expectation of marriage up until relatively recently was that you would have an economic relationship a you know and a reproductive relationship but you weren't best friends mhm 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 they going up to a person in the bar is like the normal and natural way of starting relationships I don't think is historically accurate that's interesting so the male version 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 know blah blah blah 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 lasson who is a mating ideology researcher I'll send it to you it's phenomenal and he talks about this all of the different uh Arrangements that people went through and the uh romantic to the confluent which is what we've moved through most recently has left us with a really interesting vestage which is previously it was they own the the farm next door it was almost like a tactical marriage between the two of you and then no no no
no you're supposed to you guys are supposed to be together forever you know 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 the confluent like uh ideology there helping you grow front center you need to be helping them grow yeah I'm not sure yeah helping you prepare for your next porn scene I don't know whatever she meant um 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 who is your Confidant
your best friend your the sexual Paramore your the co-owner of your children and the household and all the rest of the things yeah 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 [ __ ] 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
Seems like serial monogamy as what we built for some combination of Po polygyny and serial monogamy uh and all of these the existing base rate of what we are plus the two most recent cultures are just like like the Bermuda Triangle of mating ideologies inside of our mind yeah there's this book called the um the All or Nothing marriage which is about sort of yes this modern conception of marriage where 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 per 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 um 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 this strain and so they collabs and the authors compare it to um maso's hierarchy of needs where like if you're in a position if you're you're in a situation of economic subsistance 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 right in contempary culture where you kind of regard marriage as yes as fulfilling all of these like esoteric psychological needs which is just not reasonable so I honestly this again Mary Harrington endless quotable she has this uh this this this saying that we should abolish big romance yeah that the idea of having these incredible like romantic expectations of your spouse is just pretty much setting yourself
up fail one woman meme machine isn't she she really is um what was your thing it was you that reminded me of a story that I'd forgotten from my childhood about uh ladies dropping handkerchiefs oh right as a way of like demonstrating interest yeah so I had this thing with me and David bus came up with this solution uh around women cultivating receptiveness if they want to improve their dating Prospect now in a post me too world where we're worried about uh 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 I think that women cultivating receptiveness accounts for the male approach anxiety problem right that you know a 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 uh the average
man of 130 IQ has the like emotional social receptivity of a woman with 70 IQ like the difference this is what my husband you're saying we're actually socially [ __ ] yeah my my husband and I my husband calls me a witch because I can like I'll be able to like sense there's something off you are particularly witchy today with the with the olive as well yeah I think it's just women I think we are just witchy witchy that's why you were burned at the Stak BR back you can just like sense that something I
don't know facial expressions whatever something which most men are just oblivious too with with some exceptions clearly okay so yeah 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 blinked 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 uh women are maybe being a little bit more 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 uh generally skeptical of 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 and think oh yeah have you heard of the the male overperception and the female under perception bias is this with sexual interest correct yeah yeah that's in David David bus's book that men uh overestimate the degree of interest that women have to them and
women underestimate which is largely why you have awkward passes by uh male co-workers and 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 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 some girls set up to to describe like bad sexual experiences that they'd had with um what they in school well not also not normally in school this was the thing so it ended up being a big um headache for teachers and head teachers because parents were obviously really upset understandably um and they said you know you should be teaching consent workshops in schools you should doing all these things and the teachers are like this isn't happening in school very rarely is
this happening in school this is normally happening happening Friday night at some house party the par parents aren't there everyone's drunk and like it's kind of the parents responsibility honestly to stop that step yeah and it's like look you've got horny young men raised on porn plus alcohol young women often giving confusing signals I mean one of the things that like teenage girls just don't understand bless them is like if you if you say dress in revealing clothes because you want to attract a particular man that the blast radius of that signal you yeah like
I was I was getting a train recently in London and there was a school girl who was probably like 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 like 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 you want to feel I like there is a kind of thrill of feeling sexy that young women experienced
for the first time and they have no idea how potent and dangerous that 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 Teena you know teenagers are dumb the the sort of me too
conversation around victim blaming and 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 I often think about this um 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 three big laughs you win yes it's true
and it's almost 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 absolutely you saying that 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 upfront 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 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 a from all places it was a book about um uh making wine and the line was um Traditions or experiments that worked you can say that when you're
talking about wine making and it's not too like politically explosive but you can obviously apply that to to to social experiments that work exactly but what you end up if you're trying to make argument and if you're and if you're you know 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 Cher and imperialism and like everything that might have happened during the era that you're talking about and you have to say no no I don't I mean you just end up at them back foot whereas if you're a progressive you can say I can see this Vision you know like in the future we'll have this amazing Society where everything's great and the fact that this is this has never happened and is never likely
to happen means that you never you're never in the position of having to defend anything unfortunate you never have to talk about tradeoffs I think that like acknowledging the existence of trade-offs is a fundamentally conservative trait yeah Thomas Soul there are no Solutions only trade-offs yeah it's really painful but it's true unfortunately in other news this episode is brought to you by cozy Earth we sleep onethird of Our Lives do not spend 33% of your life in anything other than unbeatably comfortable sheets getting a good night's sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer and the sheets
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