42 – Steelmanning the Other Side: Tinder, AI Girlfriends, Incels, Social Media, Porn, TikTok and Contemporary Dating (Yes, Really!)

Epistemic Status: Literally trying to build the steelman strongest case I can for the things above which a lot of people (me Very included) are very worried about. This is essay 42, and I think Steelmanning the other side can often be the solution to Life, The Universe, And Everything. Although I will steelman all these things together, I don’t disagree with all of them, I have always been a defender of Porn and TIkTok.

“The family is a fiction, but it is a useful fiction to keep useless men away from dangerous activities” – Someone 30+ years ago in a book

This will be more or less the sustaining basis of my argument.

Men don’t like hanging out with babies for extended periods too much. They get somewhat annoyed. Men like children more and more as they become closer to adolescence. Women always have and always will do primary care of younglings, cause, they like it more.

Back in prehistoric barbarism times size and strenghts were the chieftans of economic ability and protection capability. A service economy killed the first property, and firearms and a police force killed the second.

Men were once useful to protect women and children from strangers, and to bring home the bacon. Now the supermarket brings the bacon, and women can make enough money to raise kids, which again, they like more in the early years. So men have become useless.

The author of that book knew that millenia ago as soon as the second wave of feminism struck. Which, wow, Nietzsche level abstractive ability of predicting things.

So now Women can basically earn their own bacon, get good genes from a couple of guys, and use that money to raise some fine babies and kids.

Conservatives, falsely, believe that fathering matters. Here’s a bit of science for you: To test comparative anthropology stuff, you need to stabilize as much as you can, and vary the thing you’re trying to study. In the case of fatherness, the big confouding variable of course is genes. The question isn’t whether intact famillies do better than broken families with single mums. That’s a dumb question. The question is “how much of the fact that single mum kids suck is caused by the absence of dad in the environoment and male teachers, and how much is caused by the genes of that dad sucking?” and of course the response to that, like the response to literally every investigation into human psychology and behavioral genomics bar none ever is: it is WAY, WAY, WAY more genetic than we would like to admit. Take a guy who is a conscientious brilliant well adjusted low neuroticism, polite, orderly father of 7 in a protestant educated home, throw his genes around in ghetto single mums and watch some outstanding people rise from a terrible upbringing. His genes basically made them great, whereas the dad who leaves to get milk and never comes back is an asshat with bad genes.

So let us agree that in a service economy with power law wealth distribution and a police force, men are not necessary for the family. They contribute the genes and after that they are basically expensive pieces of furniture that tell the woman to make them a sandwich when she could instead be making power points from home for far more money for her and the kids. Plus, if she doesn’t have dad around at home, she can totally feel desired and loved like its the first time by going on dates with some local chads. And if she decides she needs a longer term companion, she can basically downgrade to a beta bux and he will happily provide for her and the kid.

So in short, men have become much less useful since the 1990s. We may not like it, but it’s facts. Whatever you think should be the case, the fact is that if you control for intelligence and select only like 110+ there are millions of single mums doing perfectly fine, alloparenting with friends, grandmas and nannies, and so on. Again, you have to control for genes, like everything else. Twins one of whom married to a dude and with 2 kids at home versus a twin single mum with also 2 kids at home. I mean, they will both do fine. The kids will likely do fine as well. Genes are far, far more important than we give them credit for, because we are afraid of eugenicists, and fair enough, eugenicists have been really annoying in the past.

So, families are no longer really necessary, or can be done on a partial basis, like a relationship between co-parenting parents that live in different apartments in the same neighbourhood etc…

That leaves us with, you guessed, a metric ton of men who are no longer in families. Now historically that’s how you build either an army or a civil war and unrest. We don’t need an army or a civil war, but the thing about the rise of useless men is that it coincided with The Great Dopamine Awakening and The Rise of Porn.

These two events not only countenanced what literally everyone expected (men will become super violent and society will descend into chaos) but OBLITERATED them. Porn, Only Fans, Playboy, surrogate relationships, one to many girlfriend subsistutes etc.. completely stopped men from doing riots and destroying everything. And videogames and TikTok and other stuff made the world far more interesting. So fucking damn interesting that it caused another event no one had predicted: A decline in alcohol consumption. Now I know alcohol is a little known substance that only a niche few berkeley hippies heard of but lucky for you I’m one of them and here’s the thing. HALF of all crime is alcohol related. That goes for boyfriends beating the shit out of their chicks, murders, car accidents, and all that jazz. So once we could get our fix from Phennibut, Caffeine, youtube and tiktok, and yes, even instagram, Crime went TO THE FLOOR. Crime is now half what it was. So let me say this again. Contrary to what everyone predicted every, although the number of marriages fell, the number of incels increased 4x+ topping 8% to like 30-50% now, the amount of crime at the very same time went down by 50%. Insane!

Now I have a confession to make .I am a TikTok user. And a Porn user. It all started when I was a …. I’m kidding you are a user too, and if not you’re addicted to some other social media, we all are.

Now here is a totally wild proposition: What if we stay on Tiktok instead of doing other things because Tiktok is BETTER? I know, shocker. I’ve lived on Tiktok for a long time. It is a positive place, full of energizing people who pull you up if you’re down, with great advice if you’re depressed, who will teach you things if you need to learn things, make you laugh when your friends didn’t invite you to a party, make you cry with emotional stories of kindness and generosity, seduce you with a level of sexyness that you almost never would get in real life even if you’re the boss of your neighbourhood mating market, and who will keep you away from boredom for literally 10 thousand hours. Tiktok will simply put give you what you want better than you knew what you wanted, forever, for free, by kind beautiful generous people, in a digestible, quick format that will elevate you and improve your life. Youtube does all those things though not as strongly because the algorithms are not as good, but it will also teach you how to think and allow you to be a bystander in the most interesting conversations in the world.

Instagram is bad, I can’t really steelman it, because guys hate instagram and are only in it because they want to get girls, which they fail at doing and get frustrated, and girls are in it to receive validation for photoshopped best pictures which are not really them and they get seriously depressed because there’s literally a million gilrs hotter than them, with an AI photoshopped face that is 15 years old, and thus absolutely unbeatable in the male preference market. But I can do Tinder. The human population is decidedly not homogenous. Girls who are hypersexual can go on Tinder and receive all the Chad sauce they need to be fulfilled. If they sleep with enough men (and they will cause I’m talking by definition about the most sociosexual women possible) then bam, a lot of guys get to unload some of their suffering from uselessness in their faces and breasts, which makes a for a great Tuesday night.

Now if the family is optional and has been for about 30 years or more, and not a survival necessity, men might have realized that they didn’t really like being servants to the upper class of women anymore. Like maybe, just maybe, there’s more to life than to live in a cubicle helping your boss get rich 15 hours a day to come home to a wife who only gets wet from seeing you occasionally and often demands some strange stuff from you.

Maybe, just maybe, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Smash Bros, Halo, Counter Srike etc… are actually more fun than women. I am not saying this ironically. I truly mean it. I think there’s a giant cohort of guys who pursue women because they think it is the right thing, whereas playing Magic, Fortnite, or watching the best 250 movies of all time on IMBD would actually make them much, much happier, with less stress and less demands.

I literally prefer playing Magic to Sex. I have literally passed on dates, several times, to play magic. A few times to scroll on TikTok. I am sure other men have variation on their preferences. So maybe the reason a lot of men are checking out, now that families don’t really need us anymore is because they literally found something better to do. Create a new Elvish language. Get jacked like Arnold. Climb everest, whatever. Women might always insist that “I’m not like other girls” but every guy my age who has been dating 18-25 year old girls for 16 years knows that that’s not really a totally accurate description of reality. Women are a lot alike, and there’s a ton, a metric ton, a fuckton of men who would like them if they were more easygoing, generous, and sexually available, but who genuinely feel like in their current form and shape, they are not the best ways to pass the time. I mean Dutch history is fascinating, chess is kinda cool, and live multiplayer action games are just better than reality. There are hundreds of millions of men who just don’t want women around except for cuddles, praise, and sex. And if you’re one of them, isn’t it great that men are useless now for non sperm purposes, and you’re not conscripted to serve a bitch for 3 decades before she flees with your money and kids? If you’re the kind of man that thinks like that, I’m sure lots of women will love that you self selected out of the market. MGTOW benefits women too.

This is only possible, of course, due to porn and other pararomantic parasocial relationships, which quelch the impossible for women to understand ferocity of the male sexual drive. Men are wild beasts, but now we can all share the experience of hooking up with a sex doll while inside a VR with a different hot 28 year old Ukraini@n r3fugee girl every night, who seduces on camera (in full size, 3d, with audio) then makes us feel validated, and then just let’s us spread our genes like Genghis Khan could never imagine on a creampie insiher. And much like a Starbucks coffe comes with a splash of environmental righteousness and save the planet virtue, ejaculating in that doll comes with a splash of giving Putin the middle finger and helping the war effort and saving democracy. (no joke, one of the VR websites has ukra1ne flags and US flags but no other flags, so you can help someone being damaged by the war)

Porn has always been good. Besides the diversity, it also helps people in long distance relatinoships to remain faithful, it helps disabled people get some semblance of mates, it helps ugly people not r@p3, and the benefits go on, and on, and on. The fact that like 2 people can create like literally 10 million orgasms with a well done video is just, I mean, historically unprecended. Mr Beast is making the world better. But he’s got nothing on Porn.

Humans are ridiculously adaptable. People in North Korea or in the poorest quintile of India are pretty happy. Mennonites study until age 13, then talk about the bible in low german until they die. Also pretty happy, and popping like 7 babies each. San Franciscans think not aborting is barbaric, not doing LSD is like going to the middle ages, Christianity is egypt level old, and cuddle parties are the new Vegas. Pretty happy on average as well, doing just fine. And no matter how much you try to attack them, they literally don’t give a shit about the shit and needles on the street, when they are walking 5 blocks betwen their weekly orgy and their startup meeting, which is just a pre-game for the hackaton, since, you know, it’s saturday.

Now women don’t want to have to deal with shitty men. And, to be honest, that seems kind of like a sensible position to have. I don’t wanna deal with shitty men either, specially not if they try anal every week. That shit hurts you know?

What I’m saying is that maybe having most men have these parasocial relationships might not be that bad.

I’m an expert at relationships (not Good relationships, don’t put the cart ahead of the horses) I’ve had 13 of them, 2 bad, 6 good, 5 excellent or so… And I’ve had parasocial relationships, first with a Yang-stan girl who I would leave playing in background, she’s asian (Hi Paget, I know we’re friends on facebook lol) so then I transitioned to another asian who talks about Dogecoin, Luci. I tried to get a thing going with ASMR Glow but I like ASMR males so much more that between The Laughing Heart and another guy I kinda had to break up with her, lol. I mean you get the idea. I was still dating real girls while all that happened, but it’s very obvious to me that the reason I watched so many videos of those two intelligent asian girls was to get some non-nagging, feminine, intelligent company while I cooked my steak or whatever I did sometimes. Some guys need it to be more girlfirend like so they go on Twich, pay the chick, do only fans, talk to indian men pretending to be her, and so on. And all the more power to them, for me literally having a voice in the background of an asian chick talking about something moderately interesting and occasionally looking at their long hair, was more than enough pararomantic relationship. But again people differ and some guys need much more engagement than that.

That engagement is coming. AI gfs are getting better and better. And let’s face it, most men think women can be a hassle with the whole shit testing and neuroticism and needing safety and “would you still love me if I was a worm” stuff. The AI versions will be super understanding empathic, encouraging, avaiable, sexy, and making you feel good. More and more men will voluntarily leave the market. That’s a good thing. First they won’t do raids. Second, much like the gays are awesome cause more women for us, they will leave even more women for us. At some point we will be drowning in pussy, real or virtual, and both will be happy, Chad and Zack (Zack is back!).

Is contemporary dating really all that bad? I mean I know everyone is complaining about it right now. But think about it. Fewer men are dating just because their balls are getting to heavy to carry, since there’s anime girls ready to get them off any second of the day. The few men who are going out there in the wild really do want a girl.

The girls sometimes only want validation and some free food. But men are kind of done with that, so they’re checking out.

Eventually since humans are incredibly adaptable, we should expect an equilibrium, where whatever are the conditions of dating, at that time, is exactly what the people who keep choosing to go to the dating market wanted from dating, at that time. If that balance will be Calígula level orgies between Chads and Sociosexual Stacies while everyone else stays at home or plays RPG, or if it will be christian couples who decided to pretend fathers are not useless because Jesus said so and want to play that game forever, I don’t know. But in either case, the people that want thing X will get thing X, and everyone else will leave that market.

We are living in a rare and unusual time where the tech came at us so fast that everyone is using it wrong. So everyone is sad and lonely and stuff. But soon the stigma on loneliness and Dolly, the doll, will go away, like the stigma on porn or being gay went away.

So men will freely choose to bang sillycon and play games on syllicon chips, removing carbon-heavy women out of the play altogether.

Women will get the best guys and the best genes, be some boss bitch if they want, and some pretend submissive christian wife if they want, and that that.

Right now we have men deceiving women and women being obligated by nature to filter men in ways that are not good for women or for men. But we will adapt. Hoes will be hoes, can’t make them a housewife after all. Some system like uber or postmates or amazon rating will emerge where we can track who is looking for longer or shorter relationships in a way that is hard to fake.

The main problem of contemporary dating (nothing can possibly correctly follow this sentence beginning) is fundamentally that we lost control of how to track people’s true intentions and capabilities. It is fundamentally a signalling problem. A millionaire extravert PhD in Altruism who speaks 5 languages and can travel with you for like, ever (any similarities with living persons is merely incidental), but who is only 5″10 and has a hispanic name might get filtered out before being even seen by any woman he would take actual interest in the streets, and hundreds of women who would be happy to hang with him will instead select via different signals that leave them heartbroken instead. Again for uber (aka strangers of the ethnicity you were most told to fear driving 16 year old girls in their cars drunk at night) we literally solve that problem. For amazon we solved it. For food, with yelp and postmates, we solved it. TikTok knows what you want way, way way more than you do. So we already know what you want without you telling us. Now make a robust signalling system so that long term maters will meet long term maters, and vice versa, a system of reputational tracking and relationship estimating that will actually find out if someone would be a good match for you or not, and bam. You win. You will be a trillionaire and you will kind of flat out solve the dating problem that rose a consequence of people meeting their significant other, or their insignificant sexual object, via discreet messaing and not through the veto of a community.

Soon we will be able to accurately signal who we are, the good the bad and the ugly, and at that time, dating will go back to being good. You may think people will not adopt that technology, and that`s not true. People will literally adopt anything women 15-26 adopt, because society follows them around. So as soon as those women conclude that`s the best way to both be happy mother of 4, and also on the other side of personality to be the target of a weekly bukkake, society will immediately, and without question, follow these young women to that new app.

So we are actually in the best of worlds. We created some stuff that is so fun and stimulating it is better than to be in a relationship for a large fraction of the population, and it makes people drop cigarretes and alcohol behind. We are finding ways for people to eventually be able to be sexual with exactly all the people they want to who want them back, and not one less, whereas people want 1 or 1000 of those, and we managed in the meanwhile to contain the violence and mess that would otherwise have emerged from men becoming useless without a rise in violence, r@p3 or civil unrest.

The number of orgasms in the world probably increased by a significant fraction and sexual pleasure might be at an all time high whilst unwanted sexual encounters are at an all time low, since women don`t need to be wives anymore, men don`t need to go out to a smoke filled club to catch a whale and can just lose 15 minutes before going back to homework to hangout with AI face of eva green in some super porn star video.

We are in an adjustement period, so there`s some discontent and lots of talk happening. But ultimately we will find a way to do what we need, and the optimistic news is we`ve done it with food and transport already.

And what will emerge on the other side of that is a future the likes of which our ancestors could never have dreamed of, with rivers of milk and honey, harps playing in orgiastic paradise, and the entire variety of human desire satisfied by a combination of real consenting loving people, when the numbers match, and virtual, perfectly optimized algorithmic AIs, when the numbers are skewed one way or another.

The future is glorious!