I liked Gone Girl too, but the “Cool Girl” discussions ended up being another way for women to self-infantilize, to claim all the boons of feminism while accepting none of the accountability or responsibility that increased power and respect entails.

Welcome to life: if you want something to be a certain way, you have to make it, take it, or shake it till it gets that way. Eventually I think feminism will get good again as it embraces women actually being fully-responsible members of the political and social community, but right now feminism is mostly about attempting to pretend to be agency-free children when it benefits women and then complaining when they are actually treated like a child in other realms too.

And that’ll only go so far. Those contradictory leanings have probably reached about the end of their practical shelf lives, but all this will take another decade or so to play out, as these things always do.

Obviously not everyone in the younger generations has embraced extreme prudishness and non-sensuality. The people in the below videos have not abandoned all that makes life good, obviously, and they are all in their 20s. But it is the dominant strain now.

So I do wonder what was it that happened to cause this enormous change in so many to make it a generation-defining social alteration? Was it social media? The internet? Just natural churn and change, explained by nothing (I don’t believe this, but offering it as a hypothesis)? Reduction in social mobility? What?

Whatever the cause, it’s horrible to see; I feel like people are becoming puritan hikikomori because they cannot imagine anything else. Perhaps it’s all simply because they make better, more pliant consumers that way.

It’s sad but enlightening to hear all the female-to-male transition stories where they newly-minted man is shocked and saddened to realize that he will no long be appreciated just for existing.

Welcome to life as a man. We have worse clothes, die younger, and generally speaking no one gives a single shit if we live or die; we are disposable. It is lonely and very isolated. But at least we have pockets.

To clarify something, it’s completely wrong for incels and others weirdos to attack and harass any specific woman, no matter what she’s done. It’s pointless and counterproductive in addition to being morally misguided. It just doesn’t help.

But it’s a fine and even a good thing to do to observe that women’s mental health is in decline, that social media is causing grievous harm especially to women, that feminism has gone off the rails completely by its demand for power with no responsibility or accountability, and that a lot of things that women demand and do harm men. And that no one really seems to care one way or the other what men say or feel about anything, while believing that they are ravening sex beasts with no emotions at all.

Those things all should be discussed out in the open, and even more so the more people declaim so vociferously that they are not real problems.

My best friend is 30 years older. Here’s what she’s taught me about life.

There should be a whole lot more of this, even though socially busted-ass Gen Z finds it creepy.

So glad I am not dating now. Men are told we are not allowed to talk to or meet women at work, in clubs, in the gym, in the supermarket, on the street, on the bus or train, in the café or anywhere else in public or private. So that leaves only dating apps, which only work for about 10% of men.

So what are the rest supposed to do, exactly? Seems like hell world.

Why is Burger King’s marketing gimmick that you’re allowed to modify your orders when that’s a completely normal thing that pretty much all restaurants do?

Being able to get a custom order quickly was not always the case. A commenter says this, but back in the day it was impossible in most fast food restaurants to get a customized order unless you wanted to wait quite a long while. Burgers etc. were under heat lamps and you got what you got, even if it had been sitting there an hour.

If you did want something not available under the lamps it’d often be a 15-30 minute wait.

And that’s how it used to be in the 1980s.

It’s quite clear that the reaction to Haidt’s¹ claims about smartphones — even the “scientific” ones — are those of the addict’s defensive riposte to being told that their nasty habit is harmful to everything and everyone around them.

1. Obviously correct.

Why do non-Southerners always screw up Southern food so incredibly badly and make it taste like apocalyptically-atrocious garbage?

Southern food isn’t even hard to make! I cannot understand.