These days, it seems that men and women hate each other. When I speak to them in person, they conceal it, but in virtual spaces, where one is free of watchful eyes, where only strangers hear us, then we let down our guard, and say the base truths of our nature

I think some of you, many of you, still have not internalized the revelation of "hellbaked", and if there is one thing, only one, that I impress upon you with this account, it is that. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1025739449446019074

The vicissitudes of natural selection dictate that all the things we cherish have emerged from blood-soaked psychedelia of pain and misery, and only the most cruel, deceptive, and malcontent beings could possibly have emerged from it. And those people are us!

And not only this, my friends! Not only were we forged in unknowable aeons of disease and privation, but our evolution has played a trick upon us. We all think we're the good guys! https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1023550713811501057

When we meet face to face, there are dimensions of social pressure that are absent when we look through the glass of a phone. Social "science" is out on whether a painting of a pair of eyes will make you behave better, but the presence of other people will push you to conform

Groups of people want to have centroids; metapersons emerge out of groups, and those people have opinions which may not perfectly reflect any of its actual members. For this reason groups do things that appear quite puzzling from the outside

A single careless moment can undo a lifetime of genius. A ship of geniuses will be sunk by the lone fool. The metaperson of a group is slightly smarter than its dumbest member. Coordination costs bring even geniuses down. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1031893387819905025

In any case the world of anonymous and semi-anonymous social media has given us a great window into the human mind, a far more accurate picture than one gets from the highly manicured presentations of people found in books and movies and TV

Of course we know that our genes are locked in an arms race with all other genes; of course we know that males and females always compete, even within their lifelong pair bonds, even when they don't mean to, even when they love each other until death do us part

And we know of the many factors that cause the modern "sexual marketplace" to be so red in tooth and claw:

Dating apps give the illusion of infinite choice

instagram makes us feel like everyone else has a picture-perfect life

Anonymity of cities removes our accountability

But is there an exit from this hellscape? Everywhere around us we see problems that are caused by too much freedom: an overabundance of choices will make you unhappy, even the social scientists have figured that out!

Freedom should not exist in a vacuum. Privileges without obligations turn you into garbage. You long to be free from all masters, but freedom is meaningless without a specific goal.

Our limitations force us to adapt, and where we have no limit, we become shapeless blobs.

Whatever problems our liberalism causes us, it seems that somehow, our solution is always more liberalism. Even on the right we tend to labor under this kind of thinking.

Love is war, dating is amoral, and when you remove social constraints ("social constructions"?) from men and women, they compete ever more fiercely, and when they lose, they blame the other sex, every time.

For a woman who has been with many men, men become interchangeable, (oh you poor thing!) and she sees the sins of any man against her as merely the innate sinfulness of men. (God, men are the WORST!)

For a man who has been with many women, women become interchangeable, (what a cad, an abuser!) and he sees the sins of any woman against him the innate sinfulness of women. (so he becomes a bitter misogynist)

What women face in the sexual market is an endless cavalcade of libidinous men. A man, if he is virile, desires all attractive women, even though this world contains more than he could ever cope with. He makes his offer to as many as he can muster.

A woman in turn is paralyzed by the quantity of men on offer. She cannot sort through them all. Young men, especially, cannot relate to the pain of this. "Oh boo hoo, she is desired, how awful". Yes. Being an object of desire, when the desirers are infinite, is awful

Only very rich and talented men get to know this experience. One becomes distrustful of everyone. The only thing worse than this constant assault of desire, for a woman, is not to have it.

Can you even imagine the pain of envy and resentment a woman feels when all of her more beautiful sisters are the object of male desire, and she is not? Of course she then grows to hate male desire, of course she thinks men are trash, of course she lashes out from her pain

And what of men? Our plight is also painful, and most women seem unable or unwilling to empathize with it, just as we fail to see theirs. When all women treat you with suspicion, when they see your honest desire as somehow false or treacherous

When women reject you out of hand, it is because rejection becomes their DEFAULT posture as a matter of sanity. Nevertheless, it wears on a man. Women, as we have expounded ad nauseum, do not even see low quality men. But men, consider how you feel about fat girls

Men who loudly and publicly empathize with women's pain are at best pharisees. Often they decry other men in a transparent and pathetic intra-sexual competition gambit. Sometimes they are simply monsters.

A man who propositions a woman is engaged in something existential. In that moment he is judged, not merely by a single woman, but by all women, and by all of nature, as WORTHY or UNWORTHY to exist, and to continue existing.

And to face this existential anxiety, to summon the courage to do so, again and again, and to weather that rejection over and over, it is a profound cost for many men, and it takes its quarter out of his soul and out of his humanity.

Eventually you no longer care, you approach women with reckless abandon, you no longer feel the sting of rejection, and what then? Then you contribute doubly to the phenomenon that causes women to become callous.

Men's incentives create women's incentives create men's incentives in an endless feedback loop, and it approaches some horrible mass where every man or woman who dares to have opinions about the opposite sex gets shouted down by an angry mob of broken people.

And somehow, but this is a topic for another time, the people who defect from this cyclical arms race are even more insufferable than the people who are caught within it.

No amount of good intentions will fix this. There is no sermon, no book, no ideology, no well-wishing, no religious practice that can exorcise this evil. In times past, before our society got so big and so wired, intersexual hatred was dampened by the size of our networks

I think we are all stuck here with each other, and the only alternatives are worse. My hope for you, and it is a vain hope, is that you personally will learn to forgive both the objects of your desire and your sexual competitors

(that should not stop you from crushing them)

Saving this for later https://twitter.com/orwellngoode/status/1079793341380919297