Let's throw a Straight Pride Parade to destigmatize heterosexuality
My proposal to make dating less horrible
In this piece I’ll give a practical example of how the Alt Right 2.0 might build salience in a slightly edgy but harmless way and potentially do some real good for people.
My idea is simple: I want to throw a Straight Pride Parade.
The goals of this would be twofold. First we would use the event to inspire a spirit of reconciliation and amity between men and women that seeks to reduce polarization and resentment in both directions. Second we’d use it as a dating venue to get Zoomers off the apps and inspire more healthy and equitable courtship norms.
But before I describe my idea in any further detail I need to provide some context.
There are two enormous problems with heterosexual dating culture right now.
The Incel Question
This is a metapolitical briar patch because it’s almost impossible to discuss this problem without lowering your own prestige / credibility. Simply acknowledging it as a thing makes you look like an incel, and will cause some segment of the population to tune you out.
Normally this would be a good thing, as society can’t afford for people to be too concerned with the problems of low status men. But the Incel Question has reached a point where it demands a serious response.
Young men are dropping out of society. They are rapidly falling behind their female peers in university graduation rates and median income. Any mental health professional will tell you there is an enormous crisis among young men right now.
And if you talk to these guys it is clear what’s causing this crisis: they aren’t motivated by anything. The juice of life is no longer worth the squeeze. They don’t want to work hard because it doesn’t seem worth it anymore, and a huge part of this is that it seems prohibitively difficult to find love.
If you want to maximize society’s productivity and prevent a collapse in the birthrate 5-10 years from now, you need to do at least something to address the Incel Question.
And your solution isn’t complete unless it addresses Tinder.
The proportion of men who can’t attract a partner has roughly doubled from 15% to 30% over the past decade. This is obviously a result of Tinder and similar swiping apps:
Everyone knows what’s happening here. On dating apps women evaluate men almost entirely based on looks. Women find a very small proportion of men physically attractive, so those men are getting a massively disproportionate amount of success, while men at the bottom of the distribution are getting almost none.
But incels misfire by getting blackpilled over this, because they fail to realize women don’t actually want to evaluate men based on looks. They don’t want to get pumped and dumped by West Elm Caleb. In real life looks are only about 30-40% of the equation, and the “vibe” you emanate is easily 50% of what gets you laid or rejected.
Sadly it’s impossible for any dating app to capture your “vibe” even 10% as strongly as a real life date (or even a phone call). Writing an elaborate profile makes you look tryhard, so your best bet is to convey status subtextually through profile pics with a lot of sprezzatura. Sadly most heterosexual men are abysmal at this and it still only helps you on the margins, so Tinder is pretty much purely a looks game
The problem is that Tinder copied the Grindr model (which works swimmingly for gay men) and imposed it on heterosexuals without our informed consent. Every attempt to innovate on Tinder, like Bumble and Hinge, has never fixed the fundamental problem inherent in suppressing a man’s vibe.
And this is why inceldom has become more and more of an issue. It used to be easy for George Costanza type men to date beautiful women by dint of sheer charisma. Seinfeld was not at all unrealistic in this regard. But it’s impossible for an exceptionally charismatic but short / chubby / balding man to be competitive on Tinder. Dating apps have cucked the Costanzas of the world.
This could be fixed very easily if you just magically got rid of dating apps and forced people to hook up in person again. You would easily drive the incel rate down to a more historically normal and eugenic 15%.
But this would never be acceptable among women, because of…
The Femcel Question
It’s a lot easier to discuss this one because it doesn’t inherently make you seem low status. But you still have to frame it as caused by circumstances unfair to women or people will think you are an incel, and that’s what I will do here.
Basically the issue is that women are pulling away from men and have become frightened and disgusted by male sexuality. I think this has several causes.
The first is that women have started going through puberty at vastly younger ages:
This has happened as teenagers have grown a lot more immature and childlike in each successive generation. We have loosened social expectations around traditional “milestones” of adulthood, and these days Zoomers think of 25 as the actual age of maturity. In practice the 14 year old of 1920 probably would be about as mature and agentic as a 21 year old today.
This means you have a bunch of twelve year old girls going through puberty and developing secondary sexual characteristics at far too young a mental age. When they go out into the world they understandably aren’t able to handle the results of this and it traumatizes them.
Some significant proportion of these girls end up identifying as trans and cutting their boobs off because they hate male attention so much, but even the ones who avoid this fate will often end up resentful of men and scared of male sexuality because of unpleasant girlhood experiences. Literally every woman I’ve dated seems to have been impacted by this on some level. I also think this explains why everyone is so fixated on pedophiles these days; it has genuinely become a much bigger problem.
Because of this phenomenon, I am starting to support the idea of using modern endocrinology to delay the onset of puberty at least 2-3 years in young girls so they are more mentally ready for it.
Obviously the “trads” are going to hate this proposal, but if you look at the above chart it seems that my ideal world is a lot more “trad” than yours. It isn’t in the least bit “traditional” for anyone to go through puberty when she still has the brain of a little girl—it’s probably one of the most dangerous developments of modern society.
Anyway, the other reason women are starting to hate male sexuality is obviously porn.
Porn use has become almost universal even in very young boys. These days a huge number of boys become addicted to porn before they even have a pubescent sex drive, which causes some of them to permanently view sex in a disembodied and nonphysical way largely rooted in a desire for limitless novelty and transgression.
As an adult this can make it prohibitively difficult to enjoy sex as a bonding mechanism with girlfriends because you inherently view it as a degrading act. It can also make it vastly easier to grow sexually bored with a single woman, because you’ve habituated yourself to orgasming only after experiencing tremendous sexual novelty.
Meanwhile, girls are confronted at an extremely young age with the idea that sex will involve hardcore and degrading acts, so the ones who aren’t high in openness with a low disgust reflex are going to start thinking of male sexuality as groace.
Then once these girls become sexually active they often find their boyfriend can’t get hard for a real life woman. Or he’ll grow bored of them and start to prefer masturbation over sex, or cheat on them due to a compulsive need for sexual novelty.
As a result of the above two factors, a huge proportion of young women implicitly think of male sexuality as gross or evil in a way they never would have a century ago. Thus women desire men less on aggregate, and they start to want to “opt out” of dating and take themselves off the market. In this way they become Femcels.
Crucially, this isn’t a matter of getting off Tinder. That would be a fantastic development in isolation. The issue is that they become less receptive to male courtship in person, and start to feel hostile to even completely benign and harmless expressions of male sexuality.
A schoolmarmish culture begins to emerge where men are punished for even talking about a woman being attractive, and norms begin to shift such that asking out a woman at work or even school is increasingly seen as “inappropriate.” Eventually this produces a dynamic where men don’t even bother asking women out in person anymore, and pretty much everyone exclusively dates on the apps.
…which of course only exacerbates the Incel Question.
I think you could basically solve the problems of heterosexual dating if you medically delayed female puberty by three years, banned internet porn, and banned dating apps. This would make men and women stop hating each other and all men who deserved a girlfriend would get one. But this would require an Orwellian nanny state and lots of people would probably riot in the street, so it will never happen.
At least in the short term we need to adapt to a sad and unfair world where lots of women are traumatized and resentful while lots of men have almost no way of making themselves attractive to women. We need to take some measures to reduce the harm of this landscape and start to create a more positive incentive structure.
And that’s where the Straight Pride Parade comes in.
The basic idea is every year you throw a parade in a bunch of major cities with a festival-like environment. You’d invite a bunch of feminist and redpill thinkers to give speeches about how they have deradicalized and come together under a unity platform dedicated to solving issues between the sexes in a mutually agreeable way. Maybe they could try to build some kind of culturally neutral stigma against porn and dating apps, but that wouldn’t be the main point. The point is creating good vibes.
The overall aesthetic would be agreeable to both trad types and Barstool Conservative / sorority girl types. It needs to be inoffensive to 70% of the country. You definitely want this to piss off LGTB advocacy groups to seem edgy/cool, but you also need to ensure moderate liberals think they’re overreacting and are just being humorless.
The main point of the parade would be providing a bespoke dating venue for single people (maybe with an upper age limit of 35 or 30). You want it to serve as a proof of concept to Zoomers who have never even tried to ask out a girl IRL before (and there are a ton of these guys). Basically you’d want to make it as easy and safe as possible for people to start flirting in meatspace with no apps involved.
To that end you need to get everyone marching together and provide them lots of alcohol. This would create an environment where young guys can easily approach girls and flirt with them in a non-threatening environment with lots of people around so the girlies don’t get scared.
Everyone can walk at a different pace (perhaps with women on the outside and guys on the inside) so if you get rejected it’s not a big deal and can just walk forward to the next group of girls.
Maybe there could be a mechanism where if a girl likes you she can pin you with a ribbon or something and you could go have a private date together. Alternatively she could pin you with her number to indicate she wants you to hit her up later. And if she doesn’t pin you at all you would get the hint and keep walking (it would be dumb for even thirsty / desperate guys to hang around in this environment).
In my opinion this is a much better and less stressful way to do “speed dating” than the cringefest format that actually exists.
In addition to a general march, you can also have different marches for different types of people. One for under 21, one for over 30, one for trads, one for degens, one for nerds, one for artsy types. This will probably make it easier for people to open up and take risks or start conversations.
Obviously you need to take measures to ward off bottom 15% guys who would kill the vibe, as well as anybody predatory. This would require a level of logistical planning beyond the scope of this essay. But I think it could be done.
If you pulled this off well, the result would be a bunch of short / bald / chubby guys who can’t score on Tinder realizing that they’re actually charismatic and attractive to women, and this would cut the incel rate in half. Meanwhile a bunch of women would realize they have nothing to fear from assertive male sexuality and they would eventually become a lot less neurotic and more receptive to in-person courtship.
Obviously this is a somewhat LARPy and fanciful idea, but I think it could be done. But you’d need a woman organizing it to pull it off optically, since a man doing it would be incel-coded. A conservative gay guy like Peter Thiel or a Milo-type figure would be even better and could generate a ton of hilarious press. And a conservative lesbian would obviously be the best.
If anyone powerful is on board with this idea please contact me and I’ll help you make it happen.
You're halfway there to describing Carnaval in Brazil (which also has these amazing 10,000ish people Open Bar parties hosted by local universities throughout the year). Unfortunately the US has far less socially well adjusted people, but taking something like Mardi Gras national might make a dent?
In the cattle industry, we can manipulate puberty to be later by timing births so that female calves are exposed to a shorter photoperiod after birth. Make girls go to bed when the sun goes down, and they will hit puberty later. No artificial light.