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It’s always amusing to me when some guy has a Big Theory about why he can’t get laid. It’s never his fault; it’s always some Big Trend, usually having something to do with feminism.
Today I want to look at a mess of a post in the Men’s Rights subreddit in which a guy basically tries to pin straight men’s lack of success with women in recent years on what he claims is the “rise in female bisexuality/lesbianism” and the concomitant “devaluation/disdain of men.”
“I’ve nothing against LGBT etc people in general, or want to restrict their rights,” TheNamelessComposer begins, unpromisingly, setting himself up for a big “but.”
But (as I’ve posted before) I do wonder how the rise in female bisexuality/lesbianism will affect the dating scene. Not encouraging hate for anyone, but I find it funny how most straight men celebrate lesbianism/lesbian porn etc, when it’d actually be better for them if more men were gay/bi. More options – you’d think.
Gosh, I wonder why straight men would be into lesbian porn. Such a puzzler.
But if we’re going to do this, let’s begin with the actual facts rather than this dude’s assfacts. Yes, there is a “rise in female bisexuality/lesbianism.” But only because there is also a rise in bisexuality and homosexuality in men. In fact, all categories within the LGBTQ spectrum have seen an enormous rise in recent years, so much so that now that a full 7.1 percent of adult Americans identify as LGBT or “something other than heterosexual,” according to a 2022 Gallup poll, double the percentage found in a survey a decade earlier. The increase is especially pronounced among younger adults, with an incredible 21% of Gen Z adults identifying as LGBTQ, with a large majority of that group identifying as bisexual. Indeed, most American LGBTQ folks are bi.
Anyway, back to this dude’s bullshit.
But if there’s no longer a financial incentive, and more women don’t care about having and raising kids with the child’s father, might more of these women choose female partners?
Well, they might, but men are also more likely to choose male partners.
I read in some populations of Japanese macaques the females often choose other females over males, they’re more lesbian than bisexual. I’ve noticed a lot of it seems like a continuation of the ‘political lesbianism’ of the 70s-90s.
Among the macaques? I don’t think so.
Like you ask most young women now and they’d say theyd prefer another attractive woman to a man, how much they don’t need men, how women are so beautiful, wonderful, men are mostly trash etc. Of course it’s not misogyny it’s ‘their truth.’
This is just fantasy. Though there has been a dramatic increase in female bisexuality in recent years, and to a lesser extent a rise in lesbianism, most women are still straight. So, no, “most young women” don’t prefer women to men. They might prefer women to you in particular, though. Hell, they might prefer macaques.
Also it seems there’s a shitload of studies talking about how fluid women’s sexuality are, category non specific etc, how they can be attracted to both while men only to women (or men if gay).
Well, by all accounts, women’s sexuality is more fluid. According to Gallup,
Women (6.0%) are much more likely than men (2.0%) to say they are bisexual. Men are more likely to identify as gay (2.5%) than as bisexual, while women are much more likely to identify as bisexual than as lesbian (1.9%).
Back to fantasyland:
It was only recently that they ‘admitted’ male bisexuality existed. Sure, some of these scientists might be well meaning, but many do seem to have an agenda to me.
Well, there was one infamous 2005 study that purported to prove that men who said they were bisexual were either wrong or lying, but the study has been thoroughly discredited, and even the researcher behind it now acknowledges that bi men are, indeed, real.
If you look at history and nature, men are just as bisexual as women, but while yes, progressives etc generally are for allowing men to be more open, these studies are reinforcing the idea that all women are bi while no or few men are.
No, most women aren’t bi, but they’re more likely to be bi than men.
Also, while most people say they want monogamy, polyamory is increasing in popularity, and heck is being promoted. Open marriages too.
I’m not sure how “women having sex with a greater number of men” is supposed to hurt straight men, exactly, but this guy does have interesting theories.
Many of these women are also bi/pansexual…all these will make it even harder for the average man.
Poor average man!
As I said in an older post, my prediction is greater gender segregation and more male as well as female homosexuality. In nature, if no females are available males will turn to other males for their sexual needs.
The idea that “no females are available” is simply delusional. In reality, more “males” are turning to other “males” these days because … they’re into other males.
If this becomes the norm, who knows where society will be.
Well, it’ll be gayer, that’s for sure. But, somehow, I’m not seeing that as a bad thing.
Is that a thing people are?
More on the class than the gender front:
Is anyone else noticing a significant uptick in recent years of advertising for various forms of gambling? PokerStars, Play OJO, your friendly neighborhood lottery, and so on and so forth?
It seemed to start maybe a year ago with a proliferation of “Play XYZ” themed gambling site ads, of which “Play OJO” seems to have eventually steamrolled its competition. More recently there’s been a big uptick in lottery ads, on TV and especially on mobile.
Could this be a proxy for the desperation of the poor (and the exploitation of them, like payday loans but with extra RNG fuckery), and therefore of the deteriorating economic situation (greedflation and such)?
On a maybe-related front: I’m running more and more into Youtube videos that go off on some weird tangent at some point, where the topic veers unexpectedly and ceases to be relevant to the rest of the content, before returning to track after from one to several full minutes. It’s not an ad, at least not in the normal sense: seeking within the odd section works like any other part of the video, it gets past uBlock, and the aberrant segment is presented by the same person against the same backdrop as everything else in the video, but it endorses some commercial product or service, often payday loan type crap or else VPNs, and it seems an awful lot like product placement, and particularly clumsy and poorly-executed product placement at that, particularly with how it utterly disrupts the narrative flow of the video as a whole.
It’s like, “There is a big problem with the prison-industrial complex, or climate change, or something <elaborate reasons with slides>, oh and also <recommends completely unrelated product and doesn’t get back to the topic for four full minutes>. Meanwhile, the greedy oil companies are <evil deed, evil deed, evil deed> and it’s time to boycott Sunoco or whoever.”
What exactly is this nonsense, and is there any way to filter it out other than to guess when it will end and skip ahead to there? It’s annoying. Also, a way to encourage video authors to either a) not do it or, if they really must, b) do it as subtly and artfully as TV these days tends to, would be nice. Meanwhile, add it to the already-very-long list of reasons to prefer text + images articles over talking head + slides videos conveying the identical information. (Along with bandwidth economy, some people have metered connections, text is control-effable, text is skimmable,…)
Addendum: if these are paid product placements, there is a giant ethical can of worms here whenever the videos are presented as being nonfictional news/analysis, to wit a lack of proper separation of editorial content from advertising. A secondary ethical issue is that this looks suspiciously like an intentional attempt to circumvent end-user ad blocking, which puts it firmly into the category of spam: communications that are expressly unwanted, but by golly they will be forced or tricked into looking at it anyway because our wishes supersede those of mere peons! With added irony and the obvious credibility issues when it’s a nominally left-leaning uploader who is caught resorting to such shady revenue-boosting tactics.
I suppose it could also be an end-run around Google claiming their percentage of the ad revenue. One wonders what Youtube’s terms of service have to say about that.
And who told it to stick that previous one on a page by itself? It would have been far better for it to be directly below the previous comment, as per norm. :/
@Surplus to Requirements:
No, I mostly get ads about businesses local to me, environmentalism stuff, electric cars, fashion, and cosmetics. When the US political season rolls around, I get ads for Democratic candidates. There was a time when YouTube was showing me a lot of Korean commercials for some reason (including one about a cosmetic surgery clinic in Seoul) but that’s not happened for some time.
I saw a video a few years ago (a bit before the pandemic, I think) which said that the majority of internet advertising uses services like Google’s AdSense to track people indirectly (they don’t know who you are, but do know sort of what you’re like, supposedly) and then uses AI to sort people into “buckets”. I think it said that Google AdSense, at the time, had 35 such groupings? These “buckets” are very abstract and defined by the AI itself, so aren’t strictly tied to things like presumed/extrapolated race, sex, class, political affiliation, etc… but those do have an influence. Which bucket you’re sorted into heavily influences what ads you see.
Now I can’t confirm that this is how it works because I only saw that one video and I always take things with a big grain of salt when I have only one source. But if so, it’s entirely possible that at least one of those services sorted you into a bucket which skews poor and desperate (and maybe also reckless and/or stupid people regardless of financial class), and may be getting a lot of predatory ads aimed at such people as a result. Meanwhile I personally seem to have been sorted into a bucket which skews towards middle class liberal white women, despite that it would be a real stretch to call me middle class.
I mean there is one website which I visit occasionally where I see online gambling ads and stuff for online games (mainly Hero Wars and Raid: Shadow Legends), but that’s not something I see anywhere else.
There are a few people who I watch online who sometimes do “promoted content” in the middle of their videos, but those people up front about the fact that these are basically ads; there are people who make online videos as their main source of income rather than a hobby, but it doesn’t pay well. Viewer donations through Patreon and similar services help, and paid promotions help even more. I would hardly be surprised if there were people who did it in a confusing and/or skeevy manner, though I haven’t seen any; then again, I don’t watch videos or discover people randomly, I only check out those who I have prior good reasons to believe that they are non-problematic and ethical.
I was going to launch into a big explanation of Google’s T&Cs when it comes to in-video endorsements; but then I remembered Tom Scott has already covered this much better than I could.
But TL;DW, you have to make it clear if you have any paid sponsorship, during the video itself.
As for ‘the algorithm’, it monitors literally millions of factors. The people at Google/Youtube are quite candid that even they aren’t sure exactly how it works now; it just seems to. But it even picks up on things like what’s in the thumbnail. Which is why a lot of YouTube videos seem to share that format of pictures of someone topical and big brash text.
ETA:
Here’s me being totally seamless setting up an advert.
What amazed me about this is it was a really noisy background; but we ran it through the AI and it just removed all that; although it makes me sound like I have a cold. Next time I’ll film when the pub isn’t as busy.
The algorithm picks up on certain words; but also tone of voice. So I always have to be quite jolly, even on controversial subjects, otherwise the algorithm thinks it’s not suitable for kids or people of calm disposition.
Man-child sues woman because she friend zoned him!
I would think the logical answer to being sued over it, is “How about neither?”
This is the second time in as many years that a dude in Singapore sued over being rejected. The Courts need to make clear they aren’t going to hear such cases.
@ dave
I think it’s the same guy. His earlier case was struck out; and apparently in this case the court is being asked to consider declaring him whatever the Singapore equivalent of a vexatious litigant is.
I just install an adblocker or two so I don’t have to see any of them. Also I keep the sound off 99% of the time.
@Alan: You are definitely from Oop North, by gum.
Surplus
In Australia there’s a creeping, but relentless, increase in advertising gambling. Like practically everything in social and economic mayhem in Oz, I blame the Murdocks. Might be unfair, but not very.