Reddit reviews The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It

>At the National Policy Institute conference, the writer F. Roger Devlin gave a talk on why young Norwegian women in Groruddalen, outside Oslo, preferred dating Somali and Pakistani gang members to ethnic Norwegian boys-next-door. “The female instinct is to mate with socially dominant men,” he explained, “and it does not matter how such dominance is achieved.”

There is something surprising here though. The native Norwegians are wealthier than the Somali/Pakistani immigrants, and all else equal wealth is generally associated with social dominance. If you look at history, in basically every case the group that's wealthier is considered socially dominant over the less wealthy group, and women go for wealthy men. So what gives?

My theory: In this case, wealth is associated with high-speed Internet, which leads to porn overuse, which leads to social awkwardness. There have been anecdotes about this online for a long time, but research is finally starting to come out. This is why "women like bad boys" has just recently become such a meme: the average male in our generation is much worse with women than the average male of previous generations. That leads to r-selected mating behavior among women who are targeting the fraction of the male population that managed to survive the introduction of high-speed internet porn unscathed.

While it's loosely related, what's your opinion on Philip Zimbardo's The Demise of Guys?

It sounds like you've been through some tough times. The beauty of life is you always have an opportunity to forge your own path. As cliche as it may be, after every storm there is a rainbow. This is your opportunity. Here is my road map for you:

1. The first thing you must do is talk to a psychologist. It is possible you have depression or underlying mental illness. They can give you techniques to combat that. Even if you do not have a mental illness, the techniques they can teach you, with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, sound like they would be useful for you.
   
   
2. You need to make a schedule and, this is the hard part, follow it as well as you can. Find a diary or make an excel spreadsheet and fill your day with activities. Examples would be: 8am wake up, 9-10am go for a walk, 10-11am write resume, 11-12pm tidy house, 12-1pm lunch, 1-2pm reading, 2-3pm exercise, 3-4pm search for jobs, 4-5pm do online university course homework, 5-6pm free time, 6-7pm dinner, 7pm-9pm free time, 10pm go to sleep. Basically, fill it with tasks you think you can accomplish that are not so challenging that you are put off doing them. Even if you miss one or two scheduled activities, you will still be moving forward in the right direction.
   
   
3. There are some books you can read that may be of benefit/interest:
   
   

• Marty Seligman, Learned Optimism
  
  
• Philip Zimbardo, The Demise of Guys
  
  Good luck, let us know how you go.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Demise-Guys-Struggling-ebook/dp/B00850HTHO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337704658&sr=8-2

>with the rise of feminism and the normalization of female sexual agency, women are much more likely to seek out "alpha" males for casual sex — attractive, dominant men who don't necessarily have a provider vibe, but are good in the sack.

Sure, but there's also the widespread use of birth control, which influences women to prefer less masculine partners. So what gives?

I think a bigger issue is that the modern world is turning men in to wusses. See The Demise of Guys. A combination of porn and video games has rendered modern men anxious, distracted, and unable to pursue long term goals. Testosterone levels seem to be gradually dropping, possibly as a result of chemicals like BPA. (I suspect that anti-androgens like BPA are also responsible for the increase in assigned-male-at-birth people realizing that they're actually women. The rationalists are at the forefront of this wave because they're more introspective, nerds are lower testosterone in general, and the rationalist community isn't judgemental toward trans people.)

Most modern males read as "disgraced social outcast" to women because they have trouble maintaining eye contact and conversing naturally with them. Any man who doesn't have this problem is labeled an "alpha" by the PUA community. In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, you'd need some honest signalling of high genetic quality (symmetrical face, superior hunting abilities, height, high verbal intelligence that allows you to easily make people laugh, etc.) in order to enjoy unusual success with women. (Note that the characteristics I mentioned correspond only loosely with the PUA notion of "alpha" behavior, which is supposedly of utmost importance with women. Also note that "alpha" behavior doesn't seem like an unusually honest signal of genetic quality. Lots of male wild animals behave in a very feral, "alpha" way. If human women really were programmed since time immemorial to value "alpha" behavior over all else, we probably never would have self-domesticated and formed civilization in the first place.)