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Yakubian Ape's avatar

Location is a big and under-discussed factor in the "incel crisis". I remember seeing an article about a mountain town in Colorado trying to revitalize its economy by becoming a hub for WFH start-ups, offering all sorts of incentives from tax breaks to free co-working spaces, even flying out guys to come see the place and building all sorts of amenities to court them. Ultimately, almost no one took the offer to relocate there. When the mayor asked why they chose not to relocate to a place that most people would kill to live in, if given the opportunity, he said they all had the same answer - "Not enough young people, and especially not enough young women". No start-up staffed primarily by young men is going to relocate to a place where there's no women. You're right in pointing out that women's careers lead them to urban locales, but more than that, it's mostly a handful of ten or twelve metro areas scattered around the country (with notable emphasis on NYC, LA, Chicago, but also SF, Seattle, Atlanta, Austin). I once saw a very prescient tweet that I've never been able to find again that raised the great point that companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and their ilk were doing their best to collect educated women right out of university like Pokemon cards, enticing them to move to the above places with bullshit make-work jobs that paid very well but demanded very little (remember the trend of pretty young women on TikTok filming "A day in the life of [INSERT TECH ROLE HERE] worker where they did pilates in the office but never actually seemed to work?). Obviously the tectonic economic shifts from the pandemic have rendered that strategy null and void - mostly - but it did raise the question of why they were doing it. There were several theories but one interesting theory was that these companies were more or less "hoarding" young women, in a way, by offering them incentives to stay in gilded cages where they could be tightly controlled, monitored, and so doped up on company benefits and the "Sex in the City" lifestyle that they wouldn't care to marry or even date. What could the average guy, even a successful one, offer you that Amazon couldn't?

I don't really believe that there was a dedicated, malicious attempt to hoard young women like an Ottoman seraglio to depress demographics and anti-natalist reasons, but I do think that these companies understood that young men will naturally want to go where young women do, and if they have all these young women in their employ, in their city, there will be men that come. There's also a lot of other reasons that almost any girl with aspirations will move to one of these cities besides just work, but the end result is that respectable young men in middle America are left with very few prospects. Where I live, the dearth of educated or even just decent, unmarried women is the number one reason a lot of my friends say they aren't married. There's a joke in town that if you didn't marry while you were away at college or to your high-school girlfriend, your choices are a single mom or a meth addict. It's cruel, but it's also not entirely unfounded. Really, this all speaks to the need for decentralization in this country. I talk about it a lot but breaking the stranglehold that those ten or twelve metro areas have on the country's economy and populace and allowing good economic opportunities in more places will solve a lot of the issues were currently facing.

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Oli's avatar

Concerning women in combat: the post reminded me of when a naval ship of New Zealand ran aground (hit a reef) and sunk. The HMNZS Manawanui sunk due to "human error". Yet check out the headlines about it: all about how it's not the responsibility of the captain, and certainly does not call into question the suitability of women in command. As the NZ government said: "this is 2024" as I suppose only progessive governments on the "right side of history" really know women were not allowed these positions before because of the "misogamy of the heteronormative patriarchy". Thus the sinking is entirely the fault of the crew; the same crew that is entirely the responsibility of the captain.

Another example is the demotion of Captain Holly Graf. Graf was fired, I mean demoted, because she would just shouted insults at her crew and even assaulted some. Yeah, I'm sure none of these characteristics were known before her receiving her command.

Now I'm not saying that no man has run his ship into a reef, or assaulted his own crew. What I am pointing out, in particular with the NZ case, is the immediate defensiveness of the media/government to any question of the soundness of women being given command of sailors and ship.

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