Also, literally who cares. This isn't politics. Zoomers and millenials are very left-wing and that hasn't changer significantly in recent years. This isn't happening at scales that are shifting the political landscape. Idk why there is an obsession with this shit.
The only two categories of male self-help discourse I've ever found genuinely useful are "listen to women" and "know your rights in the workplace" and the right won't even touch those.
Obviously I have problems in other areas but everyone throwing "self-help discourse" in the direction of those areas seems to be a grifter or an idiot.
So much of self-help is one-part Do The Obvious Thing (hygenie/appearance, manners, social outreach) and one-part Weird Superstitious Bullshit (mysticism, mantras, arcane dietary habits or abstentions).
The first part is marginally helpful, but still requires you to get out and practice socializing. The second is pure placebo, intended to juice your convince and set you up for further fleecing with "magic extras" that the Guru will try to sell you.
I agree Leftists would do well to adopt some of the Self-Help methodologies, simply because they're proven successful at building movements. At the same time, the last thing anyone on the Left needs is more Personality Cults and highly orthodox social cliques fueding over which set of Magic Beans will bring FALGSC.
but still requires you to get out and practice socializing.
and nobody ever explains how to do this without bothering people. The rightwingers don't care if you make nine women uncomfortable to find one who is receptive to their bullshit, and the mainstream-to-left feminism stops at "leave women alone" because they're understandably not focused on that side of things.
This is why America is flooded with cults, gurus and "rehabilitation centers" which are just fancy prisons.
I practically make the same comment every time this comes up so I'm gonna be lazy and copy paste it this time:
I have said repeatedly that there is much need in the left for a healthy version of machismo (as Che would have put it) to return. One that acts as a role model for men while also not carrying patriarchal or anti-lgbt attitudes. What we seem to lack however are examples to elevate as these machismo leftist role models, besides :gigachad: that is.
Such role models would then work on a healthy leftist masculinity, undercutting the right-influencer manosphere influencers with a healthy leftist equivalent.
What’s needed is a set of leftists who do “machismo” alongside a focus on what the alienated crowd of young men/boys care about to compete with and undercut the manosphere. Generally I think of this as a sort of leftist ladbible style of influencer group, where the main focus is a “dudes rock” sort of thing with leftism being incidentally injected wherever necessary and manosphere influencers being heavily denounced but not to a point of whiny internet drama because that wouldn’t be machismo and anyone with real machismo ought to be well above that kind of shit and it screams insecurity. The balance that’s required is pretty delicate.
Providing nothing to these young boys just allows the far right to groom a bunch of them into fascists.
What does healthy masculinity mean? If there’s a trait that is healthy and good, then everyone should strive for that trait. What does it have to do with masculinity? I don’t understand how there can be a healthy masculinity or femininity. Positive characteristics aren’t masculine or feminine. All good characteristics are gender-neutral.
Ultimately it's just about gendered content targeted at young boys that counters mysogyny rather than being laden with it.
Right now the far right are using people like Andrew Tate, a champion kickboxer that young boys quickly look up to as a "winner" for being big strong and being able to beat others. They're 10-16year old impressionable young boys, sometimes even younger.
In the past the left had titans like Muhammad Ali as left wing male role models .
What is masculinity without toxicity? I think people on Hexbear show us regularly with the various "dudes rock" posts. It's just man-focused content like ladbible stuff, but would be interspersed with educational content about respecting women instead of abusing women.
Vaush is already demonstrating that this is not what he intends to do. He is literally just going to become a typical misogynyst but wearing fake left aesthetics as he has always done, he just wants to get in on the grift. But this doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a REAL left wing effort in this arena.
He won two ISKA world kickboxing titles and was ranked second in the world in his weight class at peak.
I think you are probably talking about his MMA record? Which is not kickboxing.
What is masculinity without toxicity? I think people on Hexbear show us regularly with the various “dudes rock” posts. It’s just man-focused content like ladbible stuff, but would be interspersed with educational content about respecting women instead of abusing women.
i don't think there's anything uniquely masc besides aesthetics and roles... to any gender for that matter. I rejected what society prescribed for me and there was nothing left. I'd be an abolitionist if other people didn't experience gender euphoria.
I'm fine with that idea, but for these young boys that's not really an option until society changes. Failure to compete is just giving these boys to the fascists to educate in any way they see fit.
of course. i just don't see how we can simultaneously reinforce patriarchal norms and adequately support and protect queer kids, especially because gender stuff is so ephemeral.
I personally found a lot of utility in deconstructing gender and trying to decouple it from expectations and norms
when you do that what's left of gender? medical research seems like some (most?) people have a brain process that makes them feel something we came to call "gender" but it's internal and only accessible to others if we use expectations and norms to signal conformity or we directly state "i'm a man/woman/both/somwhere in the middle/somwhere outside/whatever the heck xenogenders are/none".
If we want to make good dudes the normative expression of masculinity that's... fine but like, everybody should try to be like Mr Rogers regardless of gender so I don't understand the point of the division.
Christ I didn't say Ali was positive masculinity I said he was a role model that the left used to have.
It is fucking impossible to have a fair conversation about this if you do not actually listen to what other people have to say, and instead keep mixing together different stuff. If you keep ignoring the qualifying parts where people say specifically that they don't want it to be like past instances of machismo then of course it sounds bad.
uh if you read takes from actual activists like the OG black panthers, the women have made it clear how shitty this “positive machismo” strategy is for women in practice
Yeah great but the COMPLETE ABSENCE of anything at all just makes this a playground for fascists to groom recruits. You can not convince me that no left wing attempt to provide positive male figures to children that are seeking them out is better than having SOMETHING even if it ends up being imperfect when the alternative is just letting fascists provide an education in pure and unadulterated mysogyny to these children.
Also men don’t actually want ever a real “positive masculine” role
This isn't about men, it's about impressionable young boys during hormonal years who are extremely easy for fascists to groom . You are not listening.
2 day old account.
they're a bit late but i'm glad the kerryposters have rung in the new year for us
Braindead. The actual problems are that first off, the right has trillions of dollars to pour into propaganda and controls all major media. The second is that people have been conditioned to think of socialism as evil 100 trillion ded no iphone, which means that leftists can't just say "the problem is capitalism" because the person's anti-communism immune system will kick into overdrive, and then you need to have a multi-hour conversation. Meanwhile, the right can just say "IT'S THE JEWS/THE FEMOIDS/THE IMMIGRANTS" so it's a lot easier for them to get the message out there.
An entire industry built around telling people that capitalism isn't the problem, it's the individual. :thinkin-lenin:
what if instead of books about working out and hating women, we made books about working out and not hating women?? anyone ever had this idea before?
Fr the suggestions I see for creating a "positive masculinity" always make me groan, because they always go on to describe behaviors and values that aren't specifically masculine. the only reason a man or boy would need to view them as masculine to pursue them is if he felt his masculinity was under threat. The right affirms this position and the left necessarily rejects it. Our self-help, such that it is, is concerned with how to become a better person, which is distinct from how to become a better man.
Advice on how to overcome toxic masculinity does indeed make one a better person, not a better man. It is still a gender specific problem, though. And when we want to adress it and do something about it, we can't do that without men.
Unfortunately the best advice i have to offer in that regard is "just stop wanting to be a dude, this shit crumbles immediately when you realize you've been a girl all along". That obviously doesn't help cis dudes, even though it was a complete game changer for me and how i relate to people, how i take care of my friendships, how i access and regulate my emotions, if and how i seek help when i'm in trouble, how other people treat me and also how i talk to women i want to date (or at least write smut with). And i can say with 100% certainty that being molded into an emotionally dead, constantly guarded shell of a human being constantly fighting for control is literally killing men. It's just very difficult to adress that when the same molding also makes men kill women before they kill themselves. This is the central contradiction of the left's ability to tackle men's issues: We recognize the privilege men have, and they do, cismasculinity is the default gender in our society and on top of nearly all hierarchies. But we struggle to address the fact that this privilege comes with a price for them because capitalism gives you nothing for free. Boys get broken until they can become the oppressors that capital needs to manage its institutions, let its political power grow out of the barrel of the gun and stratify society in ways that are conducive to the egotistical nightmare worldview of eternal oneupmanship that is the ideological backbone of the capitalist hustle. This is on purpose. And we cannot fight patriarchy, and by extension capitalism, if we do not heal men from this hellish mindset.
Well yeah, this probably wouldn't work as well for guys as it does for me. Like i said, i can't really help people who are men and need to maintain some kind of male gender role. I can just relate to how being expected to perform as a man fucks people up.
And we cannot fight patriarchy, and by extension capitalism, if we do not heal men from this hellish mindset.
I guess my corollary to this, being somebody that is deeply entrenched within exactly the kind of personal hell that you're describing, is that I don't really think that you're going to fix or solve the mindset issue without first solving the material issue.
The fact is, or at least my experience is that the reason men adopt the mindset that they do is because it's required of them to actually compete, to keep themselves "alive", and to meet their needs within society as it is presently constituted. Unless you can directly prove that they can still achieve all those things, that they can still sustain themselves & exist as a meaningful member of society right now without having to compete in the ways that they do, then you don't have any real basis by which to argue against it other than acknowledging the fact that it's a fuckin' miserable existence that hurts themselves & others. Which yes it is, but the alternative is material squalor & total social disenfranchisement, you in fact might as well just fucking kill yourself in that scenario because you're going to die early, wretched, alone & unremarked upon anyways.
And like no you can't reasonably expect most people to be willing to take that option; that is IMO the problem with, and to some extent the paucity of the critique of Toxic Masculinity. It refuses to acknowledge that there are real material reasons why it exists; and it's not just some kind of bizarre cognitohazard that propagates completely independent of the social or material reality of the moment.
Because some people (not me) actually like being male and want to continue doing so and still be seen as a good person. "Alpha Chad" mindset says toxicity is inherent to men and to be toxic. Some women (typically terfs) treat being male as if it makes you a rape demon. Under both these systems you can not be a decent human and a man simultaneously. Is it not wrong for someone to want both masculinity and humanity as part of themselves?
well here's how i do it: if someone hates me for being a man, i ignore them.
i'm not sayin it feels good when people are mean online, but there are solutions available.
Exactly. I've worked through this shit myself. Also good on you for being an emotionally mature and well adjusted human being. These are not things that teenage boys and young men who hear right wing propaganda are.
I doubt people who say the left is mistreating men could point to any specific thing. Or any evidence that men are leaving the left. It's just a general vibe made entirely by online echochambers.
Men aren't leaving the left over this, but men who are unhappy with their material conditions, who might otherwise get pipelined left, are getting pipelined right by this shit instead. It's not a loss, but a lost opportunity.
And you're right that the left isn't mistreating these guys, we're just giving them nothing. If a guy starts googling around about how to find a girlfriend, he gets either bland platitudes or a fast track to the alt right. There is no purpose-built "how to talk to women" equivalent on the left.
The problem is that social media algorithms will only boost the simplistic and hateful right wing content and won’t boost good l ft wing self help stuff.
It is mostly an internet thing. Are there feminists who hate men, and think them to be nothing but rapacious orcs and demons, incapable of human emotions? Yes. Is this what feminism is? No. Do both the aforementioned feminists and fascists portray them as the face of leftist ideology? Yes. Just talk to actual people who have actual political opinions and not brain worms.
When men post their defeated takes online there is always a contingent of ghouls there to delight in the suffering and toast with their "I drink male tears" coffee cups.
Divorced dads get a lot of abuse on this site too.
Yeah, that's a thing. Is it oppression? No. Does it fucking suck to know you are considered subhuman by people even if you will never meet them? Yes. Saying "men are oppressed because angry feminists on Twitter" or "get over it because you're not oppressed, it's men's fault anyway" misses the point. Shit can suck without being oppression, and a lot of left discourse misses that.
I don't think you understand the right. They don't hit you with that stuff until much later. They always offer community first. Food, a place to hang out, and friends are very hard to turn down for younger people. Just look at the hillel movement on college campuses. They're all about a big tent approach, and then they brainwash you later.
And that hasn't been my experience with the left at all. Every time I have ever tried to join a left community in meatspace it's a bunch of snarky, judgmental, dysfunctional assholes that do nothing but infight with a side of love triangles and polycules. I'm substantially older than most of the people here and there were two earlier periods in my life when I would have realized I was a communist but was driven away by so called leftists that expect you to meet them on their level, with their language, on day one. This is a pretty common experience for people my age.
The big thing that isn't talked about is learning social skills. I think a lot of people are way behind on that. But unfortunately, due to being context dependent, it's harder to teach someone social skills than it is to teach them how to learn a hobby or an exercise routine. Honestly, that's what I think people are talking about when they talk about how there isn't enough advice for men about this.
And the red pill types, while they hide it in so much misogyny, pseudo-evopsych, and a bunch of shit, does actually have some good advice on how to learn social skills hidden in them. Now, even when they give good advice, the reasons why they say it works is completely wrong. One example of this ks in the Mystery Method, when the reader is interested in a woman but she's talking with a group of friends, the reader is advised to talk to all of her friends to make her jealous. That is good advice, but hidden behind someone who thinks relationships are adversarial. The reason that works is not because it would make her jealous, but because she likely wants to talk to her friends, and she still can while talking to you, plus, if her friends approve of you, she's more likely to.
Social skills are learnable, maybe we need to do more advice on that. Plus, I mean, how can we ever expect to organize if nobody knows how to socialize or build community?
The big thing that isn’t talked about is learning social skills. I think a lot of people are way behind on that. But unfortunately, due to being context dependent, it’s harder to teach someone social skills than it is to teach them how to learn a hobby or an exercise routine. Honestly, that’s what I think people are talking about when they talk about how there isn’t enough advice for men about this.
Social skills are learnable, maybe we need to do more advice on that. Plus, I mean, how can we ever expect to organize if nobody knows how to socialize or build community?
:this: :this: :this:
what is the left saying that is “wrong”?
the left is not solving all their problems by magic, because that's the standard i guess
This isn't a significant issue but it's V*ush's target audience. His paycheck is based on reaching out to young men lol
somehow vaush believes in a worldview that posits him yelling into a microphone on twitch all day is actually the most important activism
So why doesn't he give dating advice to leftist teens? I've seen a lot more gnashing teeth over this alleged problem than people trying to solve it.
Because he is a liberal. He doesn't care about other people unless they can be used as an accessory. His entire platform is capturing budding leftists with liberalism disguised with leftist aesthetics.
You can't provide "self-help" to them by just validating their toxic masculinity.
:wojak-nooo: [Centuries of actual political theory]
:so-true: "WE CAN WIN OVER MORE PEOPLE TO THE LEFT IS WE TEACH THEM HOW TO GET LAID"
Getting people laid, or put less bluntly "providing opportunities for socialising", is a valid organising tool. It won't do miracles but a communist organisation will not be worse off it they get a reputation for throwing good parties.
A major strategy of every successful party. Hell, they're called "parties" for a reason.
also a space you can still be a "tough guy" type and have good politics too. my friends and myself back when i was doing the masc boymode thing and some people i know today from shows. you can have fun, treat people right, fuck up nazis and fascists and do real work on the ground (food not bombs, mutual aid stuff, orgs back in my day). and now the scene is so far beyond lefty open minded white boys and (some) girls it's racially, gender, and sexually diverse as fuck
DSA already has that covered
Might as well go to a Democrat meeting if DSA is the only option, it's basically the same thing but has a bigger dating pool 🤣 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
https://nitter.net/newyorker/status/1421362750530457601
Studies from the mid-1980s reported that 80 per cent of East German women always experienced orgasm during sex, compared to 63 per cent in West Germany.
:soviet-hmm:
:marx: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class strugglesnot getting pussy."Socialism should strive to be closer to the truth at all times, and that includes teaching young twerps how to socialize.
that sounds like bullshit but i wanna see the docs anyway lol
He's admitted to being an informant but he's also a weasel and an idiot so who knows what he means.
The way he said that seemed jokingly. Also who would he inform on, what does he do IRL other than make stupid comments in his basement and message minors on discord?
I think he's just dumb and ignorant. Maybe he has been artificially boosted without knowing it because he seems like a somewhat useful idiot who refuses to read.
we (the left) simply don’t have any mechanisms in place for deprogramming.
In my personal experience, the hard-core aesthetic of like "fuck the cops, fuck the carnists, fuck the breeders" was enough of a substitute for the edgelord shit I'd been on that I could swap it out, fulfil my need to be an edgy little shot while staying in alignment with my actual values.
Lots of young men's values are not as coherent as yours. 24/7 propaganda and indoctrination is a part of the American experience for many. The military is involved with Marvel Movies because it's an effective tool, Joe Rogan is the dumb man's smart guy for a reason, etc. These sort of things are tools of capital (and fascism) to pull young men to them. Disrupting this in any way possible is a good idea because it's young men who typically do the (initial) violence in times of trouble.
Not suggesting we abandon anyone (stupidpol bs), or that we can successfully convert the Hitler youth proud boy.
I take issue with the notion that lefties don't give dating advice. I've heard "get out and talk to people, be yourself etc" my entire life from liberals and leftists, and frankly there isn't much more advice you can give about dating beyond that and "take a shower, wear clothes that fit etc".
The reason it seems like all dating advice is right wing is because mysogynists gamify dating advice to an extreme degree. PUA shit, Alpha shit etc is all built off of an explicitly right wing understanding of relationships and of gender, and it also happens to be content that you can endlessly and effortlessly churn out.
Good advice is a lot more specific than something like "go talk to people," though. Where? How should I start a conversation? If I want to ask someone on a date, how do I do that, and when is a good time? That's stuff you'll get into on basically no left-wing site.
You avoid creep territory with stuff like "ask once," "be cool if she says no," and generally avoiding cringe pseudoscience concepts like "alpha" shit.
Yeah but an online influencer can’t give that good, specific advice. Because I’ve known people who do everything right on paper, but they have personal personality flaws that drive people away. An online stranger wouldn’t be able to see that.
Like getting better at anything, you'd have a process of talking through what exactly you said/did and figuring out how to improve. Doing this in person is better than doing this online, but you can get a lot out of online conversations if you don't bullshit yourself or others.
Ideas like this work well with ideas like self-criticism.
The problem is that the people giving the advice are well adjusted already. Thus they don't have to give specific advice, they can just say obvious things like "talk to people" which is impossibly vague and useless.
I hate the "be yourself" line. It's total bullshit. What if yourself is precisely the reason you're not sexually attractive? You need to change, not be yourself.
This is where the right and Jordan Peterson absolutely crush it. They have concrete advice which will result in measurable improvements. What does the left offer? Keep doing the one thing you KNOW doesn't work?
My issue with the "be yourself" line is that it is too general to be of any use. I'm not denying that being true to your values and not trying to be some fake cardboard cutout of a Real Man™ is solid advice but in order for it to be useful or has to help you do it. An insecure 16 year old who thinks girls are very interesting but also kind of scary can't use "be yourself" for anything.
If there's something the right wing grifters do right it is that they make these young men feel good about themselves. They do it in stupid and disgusting ways but you really can help people by making them feel confident. Leftist dating advice should tell people that they actually have what it takes and that they are deserving of love, no matter how short or tall, fat or skinny or introvert or extrovert they are and that rejection doesn't change that. Leftist dating advice should also hold up mutual respect as not only moral but also cool and sexy.
they actually have what it takes and that they are deserving of love
Men don't "deserve" anything from women. This is incel talk right here.
you can't read a common phrase like "feeling deserving of love" and jump to that reaction and expect to be taken seriously
It's worth noting that rejecting "be yourself" is not the same as telling someone to become a fake PUA asshole. If you want to be a doctor but are bad at chemistry and time management, you can change yourself into someone who is just as authentic and decent as you were before, but better at those particular skills.
Well if you're not yourself then you are a fake. But if yourself is what's keeping people away, what choice do you have? Be a fake who gets what he wants or be the real you and forever alone?
Misogynists have genuinely good advice about making a dating app profile. Here is an example. There's some shit in there (negging, "you need to wear a watch in every photo" lol), but the bulk of the advice is good. Know how the algorithm works, check out the competition, look as hot as you can, put hours into taking and selecting nice photos, don't open with "hey". [Obvs I don't endorse this post, the ideology is apparent in the explanations for why you should do certain things, also the Tinder algorithm has changed since 2018.]
Anyway I've never seen a lefty source so detailed about dating apps. Some thoughts:
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this is Reddit dressed-by-the-internet type advice. If you follow this guide you will have a good-looking very generic dating app profile. Misogynists think all women want to sleep with a single "alpha" ideal and their advice tries to get you closer to that. Non misogynists will tell you to make a good profile that shows off you who individually are as a person. The TRP post doesn't suggest including hobby/activity photos at all, just ones that make you look hot and friendly. Probably a one-size-fits-all guide will be more popular than something useful for only some people.
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if you have trouble relating with women, making a profile that gets swiped right on is probably the most you can do. So they are gonna get really good at that.
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I really like the word correctpilled, feels like the natural conclusion. I'm going to take the boomerpill and just add it willy-nilly to the ends of adjectives until it loses all meaning. Melodicpilled, dysfunctionalpilled, curlypilled maybe wrap it around and start calling being on pharmaceuticals pillpilled.
It also captures Vaush's whole deal so well. He's somehow younger than me but looks older and comes up with new and unique ways of sounding like a boomer trying to fit in with zoomers.
I still maintain the position that Vaush is just Rush Limbaugh's brain transferred to a younger body
I'm totally pillpilled right now, I'm on my tablet arc and basically I'm giving off lozengecore vibes
"Leftist" Dating Advice (in the West):
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Go to the gym and groom yourself better (solid advice)
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Be Yourself (no specifics)
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Don't be Creepy (no specifics)
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Touch Grass (no specifics)
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Put yourself out there and take a chance (no specifics)
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Realize it's not you but it's the system (noted, but again no specifics on what to actually do)
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Masculinity and femininity is "all a construct bro" (true, but once again no specifics on how to deal with this, maybe other than "go to therapy bro")
I'm with Awoo and 420blazeit69 and the others here that realize that there does need to be SOMETHING for these young men and it needs to be somewhat specific, actionable advice. Even if it's just advice on how to get laid (as opposed to finding companionship or a long term parter, etc), as long as it's not wrapped in reactionary BS, I think it's 100% ok.
Yeah honestly the PUA stuff is pretty solid advice as long as it's not using shaky evo-psych to justify it or any other red pill stuff. Like a straight cis young man should know how to navigate various social interactions in life, whether it's interacting with your grandmother or that girl you think is cute sitting next to you in the library.
If you wanna "shoot your shot" (so to speak) then there's gotta be some advice on how to do it. A lot of the lib twitter feminist space (usually also TERFy) will tell young men that "you should meet a nice girl" while at the same time telling them "don't approach a woman at a coffee shop or library cuz they don't wanna be bothered." So where does a guy go? To a noisy club or bar filled with superficial people? Honestly it's like they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. I'd venture to say that real women won't be too bothered being approached in a coffee shop or library (or any other non-bar/club area) as long as you don't approach in a "weird/creepy" way and the overall interaction is fun and adds to their day positively. Even if they're in a committed and healthy relationship, a nice interaction is just that, a nice interaction.
Even if they use evopsych reasoning, it's often right, but they're wrong about why it works. Like, one example I like to use is in the Mystery Method, the reader is told that, if they're attracted to a woman with a group of her friends, to talk to all of her friends as well. He says it's because it will make her jealous, because he views all relationships as adversarial, but it's actually good advice, because if her friends approve of you, she's likely to as well, and she wants to not be separated from her friends, so she'll enjoy talking to you AND her friends. Plus, you make more friends.
The coffee shop/library thing is questionable, and avoid flirting with your waitress or bartender unless you're someone they know or are in the same local service community and have some connection there. You can socialize at the same spots, but flirting on shift can be a bit aggressive and you're gonna get weird signals because their job is to be the smiling face so they can't tell you to fuck off and they also can't leave because they need to.
If you do want to do want to "make a move" in a situation like that, always open with smalltalk, give a compliment, and move on. If you hover, stare, or push then it becomes a problem.
If you're taking about patrons in these places that's different, they can leave and aren't bound by their employment contract to be nice. So you can lead with smalltalk, and just go from there.
Also smalltalk and compliments aren't code for discussing appearance, a compliment could just be "nailing it with the matching bag and shoes" as opposed to "your very beautiful" and smalltalk should be situational at first with stuff like "maybe one day we'll be out of this line" or "have you ever read Das Capital Volume 1 by Karl Marx?" you know, keep it light and inoffensive.
They just want to hurt men. Why would they deliberately give men good advice?
They just want to hurt men. Why would they deliberately give men good advice?
I don't claim to read their minds but I think a lot of them genuinely do want to help men in dating, but are operating from the wrong paradigm. For the ones that aren't, I mean even complete ghouls can give good advice, e.g. do some pushups.
i waste a lot of time debatebro-ing PUA/manosphere incels because i am masochistic. here is my list of social engineering shit.
- be aesthetic, but not too aesthetic (you hit diminishing returns quickly in terms of attraction)
- OLD and bar scene gender ratios are at best 50/50 and are highly zero-sum, optimization is almost entirely aesthetic, diminishing returns don't apply as much here
- invading female spaces is effective, but is usually a larger commitment
- there is a niche/type that you attract, figure out what it is and prioritize improving that demographic
- get a hobby that involves touching grass, getting good at something real builds more confidence than just looking good
- creepiness is dark attractiveness
- 'putting yourself out there' is code for getting rejected enough times that you can better interpret body language
- stop masturbating, you care less about rejection and engage in more risk taking behavior when you're horny
creepiness is dark attractiveness
Just curious, what do you mean by this?
invading female spaces is effective, but is usually a larger commitment
Also this? Like join a yoga studio or a knitting club?
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just a shitty way of saying that your actions are often perceived through the lens of how attractive you are, e.g the 'hello? hr?' lady meme
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yes
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That last one is 100% #nofap.
I think that like PUA stuff, once the toxic elements are removed, nofap isn't actually a bad idea. I mean young men are so addicted to hardcore porn these days that it's no wonder many of them getting erectile dysfunction when they finally do get with a real woman. Just like "touching grass" and "logging off" I don't think it's a bad thing to abstain from masturbating for a little bit. Especially if masturbation is mentally linked in your mind to porn. If it takes like a few weeks (or in hardcore cases) a few months to deprogram your porn brain, that's probably for the better. Also, you'll come to appreciate realistic beauty instead of the "mega hot chicks" in the porn videos.
the point is to get people out there. imo people are more prone to overthinking and less prone to action when they get to just relieve themselves with porn every day or two. obviously sexpesting is bad, but there needs to be some measure of proactive behavior, and masturbating less helps with that.
I miss when the PUA guys wore funny costumes. The Mystery dudes were gross but they didn't seem to harbor as much actively aggressive hate towards women as the Andrew Tate guys that would replace them.
Plus, you could always recognize them... because of the costumes.
Here's one: expand your dating pool to include heavy women, disabled women, and women of all races. A lot of times the biggest thing keeping young men from getting laid is focussing on women they "should" find attractive instead of the ones they do
Like when Arthur Dent was stranded on a pre-industrial planet and became the inventor of the sandwich because it was the only thing he knew that they didnt?
Generally this. Obviously it's harder to internalise than just reading the advice, but let go of the idea that your friends are going to judge you if your girlfriend is "ugly". I'll accept some standards of attraction are pretty internal, but a decent number of lonely guys tacitly reject partners on the basis that their "friends" will laugh at them. Masculine jockeying for clout in your social groups is making you miserable.
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"Subscribe to my channel. Contribute to my media career." If any of these people really wanted to help, they wouldn't be thinking of ways to further mire teens in online bullshit.
Also to OP, I do want to stress that people being nominally left-wing and being horrid little misogynists aren't mutually exclusive. I'm not saying that therefore this is a real issue (I don't know the numbers, or where I could even find accurate ones), but that the general tendency of young people to identify as "left" doesn't disqualify them from holding deeply sexist attitudes.
As a historical example, you can read some depressing stuff from female Black Panthers about how some of the men treated them.
being nominally left-wing and being horrid little misogynists aren’t mutually exclusive
Great point, unfortunately.
Doomers will latch onto this and say it's a sign of the world going to shit while ignoring that young men were listening to Rush Limbaugh in the 90's when things were at their peak for 1st world countries. You had many more in the 20th century doing the same thing.
The thing is that leftism in many developed countries is a little more inclusive. From my experience with leftists in Central America, sexism and transphobia is still a recurring issue and something liberals love to use against the left. At the same time, we're a lot more open with sex than sexually repressed countries like the US. I feel like that's another reason why they cling to people like Andrew Tate so hard.
I think you're right generally, but I have a 18-35 demographic friend who used to listen to rush. Now he's a ticket-buying Jordan Peterson head. Just an anecdote
I live in bumfuck nowhere, if my classmates weren't browsing /pol/ or stormfront, they would be listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Shit sucks.
Young adults in rural areas were and I remember because they wouldn't shut up about how he spoke "the truth." Glenn Beck was another one too.
No, it's not that the left gives brain-dead advice to Western men, it just gives them hard truths that are hard to swallow and challenge the concept of masculinity that has been given to them. Much of the time, it points out that third world women more embody the traits of masculinity that they so covet, which likely means the whole thing was a charade to begin with.
However, even if they internalize it, this will not help, because everyone else has internalized this contradictory set of masculinity as well. In fact, it is somewhat a prerequisite for being social to ignore these contradictions. There are many women who hate when strange men are creepy to them, but love when their boyfriends are creepy, jealous, and possessive. Online discourse is just as, if not more, toxic for women and their views of feminity and masculinity.
Men and women are both broken, but they are not broken equally, and while it is likely more important to reach out to the men, as they trend towards more public violence, these things have to be talked about together or they will never be addressed adequately at all.
we can't really do anything with these hard truths. It's structurally helpful to get guys who will listen be 20% better than background levels of misogyny but we don't have anything to offer somebody who is touch starved, vaguely suicidal due to loneliness and poverty, and never learned an alternative to the toxic normative gendered interactions.
and women need to be receptive to whatever that alternative is too, it doesn't help anyone if we enlighten men and then straight women assume a masc person isn't interested because he's polite and respectful.
