I mean, the problem is that Nick Offerman is too wholesome. Young guys are horny. They need role models who are also horny. But the message that is sent is “it is good to be a man, but only once you are 40 with a pot belly and a wife and kids and no sex drive.” Or “it is okay to be a man, but if you want to be horny, you have to be gay”. Or “it is okay to be a horny straight man, but only if you are so dumb and mockable as to be harmless.”

Show me the man, fictional or not, who is straight, sexual, and not constantly the butt of the joke. Show me an example of where a man wanting to have sex for the sake of having sex - not to get a girlfriend or live happily ever after - is framed as a legitimate goal which should be supported by the people around him, and which is not seen as a farce.

I always have to push back against this pathologization narrative. The very obvious alternatives are:

(1) that these guys you are talking about would have easily fallen into the trap of the right wing manosphere if it had been available, because being unable to find a parter when your hormones are urging you to and when everyone else around you seems able to find one is intensely painful. But you wouldn’t hear about it, since no one talks about it, because the least attractive thing you can do is talk about how you are frustrated by your lack of romantic success.

(2) the nerdy guys might just accept their lack of partners, but these days the demographic of unpartnered young men is significantly more diverse, and more likely to contain, let’s say… less discerning thinkers…

It’s kind of like saying “back in my day, no one really cared about getting kicked in the head by a horse. Yeah, it happened, and it sucked, but it just wasn’t a big deal. There wasn’t the social stigma that getting kicked in the head by a horse was bad, or that you shouldn’t get kicked in the head by a horse.”

Judged by whom?

Right, but if they keep talking while the other person is trying to talk, that’s rude.

I would think that if I wasn’t so certain that RFK Jr was actually a complete moron

Yeah, I mean, there is a solution. Liberalized zoning and Georgist tax policies. The problem is rarely that there is a lack of space to live - it is that that space is poorly utilized. And this is true because (1) it is illegal to build what people want where they want it in many places and (2) investors and homeowners speculate on land value without providing value to anyone else.

I have not once had a friend ask me these sorts of questions. You need to make different friends.

Gift and a curse. Gift when some random person has a hilarious, crazy story. Curse because now it is infected with average people who are extremely materialistic, closed minded, and enchained by limiting self beliefs. So it quickly becomes a cesspool of hate, depression, and crab bucketing.

Rachel, who is in her 30s and lives in London, met her partner on the popular dating app Hinge, and was struck by his generosity. He insisted on buying her gifts and giving her cash to spend. She thought her now ex-partner was a “normal, decent guy”.

Yeah…

Yeah, on paper I’m a mgtow. After about 2 seconds I was like “wait, these people are losers.” Turns out I’m a relationship anarchist.

I stand corrected

I mean, it’s literally true. If they marry a citizen, they are legally entitled to stay.

No, because women can get their sexual needs more or less without trouble. A male sex robot owned by a woman would make me feel the same way though, similar to the man’s-arm-shaped pillows. It is sad, because they can’t get a their emotional needs for intimacy fulfilled and are resorting to hollow physical proxies

No. But you are an extreme minority, and your existence won’t change overall cultural views of sex robots.

Then for people who are struggling & can’t afford to produce one “high value” child they make a logical choice to do it later when they have more resources. Since humans are complicated they can create other values they see are more valuable then children or decide to do something later until having children is no longer a possibility.

In your language, we would expect people in the first sentence to revert to K type parents. If they do not, they simply fall into the category described by your second sentence.

And in rich countries, who are the people still having many children? The poor, uneducated, rural, religious/conservative segments of the population, who believe in some way or another that raising a child struggling in poverty is preferable to not having children at all.

Sounds like a pretty big cope. Sex isn’t about cumming. It’s about emotional connection with another human being. Being unable to get fulfillment of this basic human need is sad and lonely. This is why fleshlights have a stigma that beating your bishop the old fashioned way doesn’t - every healthy teenaged boy spanks it on the reg. But actually purchasing a device speaks to a level of hopelessness at obtaining actual sex that is sad, which implies a failure to be attractive, which is itself unattractive.

If that were true, we would expect richer countries to have higher birth rates. Instead, we see roughly the opposite trend. The richer a country gets, typically, the lower the birth rate. You can’t tell me that a teacher and a data entry clerk in Virginia are less economically capable of raising children than subsistence farmers in Malawi, no matter how high the rent in Virginia is.

If you want to see high income places with high birth rates, then you end up in very traditional/religious cultures, like Mormons and the Arab petro-states, where women face extremely high cultural pressure (if not force/violence) to be child-bearers.

I’d really like to see the evidence for this statement, since it really seems like this trend is just an extension of the phenomenon we see in poorer countries: when you give women education, opportunities, and birth control, fewer of them will have children. It stands to reason that the more education, the more opportunities available, and the more freely accessible birth control is, the fewer women will have children.

Me, but I have no dogs and don’t play video games.