I think the largest reason that people get shut out for perceived sleights is because as you climb higher and higher, the competition you will face gets steeper and steeper, so you really need to have your shit properly in order if you want to survive there.

The worst part of the current dynamic is that it has people framing things as men vs women (or left vs right, or red vs blue...), which was absolutely not the case even 20 years ago. You can argue about what other people are doing til you're blue in the face, but the only real solution that exists for those who are fed up with porn is to seek actual relationships.

Let those who actually have the tools to understand the total dynamics of the issue, seek the solutions. Feel free to contact them with your concerns, but try to stay away from demanding specific resolutions, the way activist cultures tend to do.

You could try socializing with others like yourself. There are plenty of people in such difficult situations right now.

Just had a thought that might help: It seems to me that the Internet has been, for quite a long time, feeding people every excuse they could possibly want to blame everything else but themselves for their problems.

Perhaps most specifically, autism is being blamed on just about everything, other than simply that people are not going out and being social.

It may not be entirely in your head, but if you stay there rather than actually taking steps to improve your situation, you might lose every opportunity you had.

I hear what you're saying, because I was there too. But if you can actually pull yourself out of your echo chamber and look at the real world it becomes clear how that sort of thing becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

How about helping the good people of the world instead? Of who there are actually a lot more.

Women didn't have sexual and financial freedom until only a few decades ago

That's just blatantly untrue for much of the world.

Times now are FAR harder than you realize when it comes to getting a woman.

That may or may not be true in your individual life, but even if that is so you can still work to support those who actually do find a way, that society as a whole can keep moving.

How are their standards unreachable, when there are plenty of people throughout history who have actually done it?

You wouldn't even be here if every single one of your ancestors hadn't found a way to do so, often in MUCH harder times than where we now live.

How?

Nobody is forcing you to make the decision to give up.

Because the world only exists through the tremendous effort, and sacrifice, of good people. If you can live an entire life without ever once recognizing that fact, you really are dead inside.

It's always possible to desire to leave behind a better world.

What force is it that demands you MUST

1. lower your standards to the level of treating people as property, while at the same time

2. you absolutely MUST reproduce and pass that way of living on to innocent children?

all I'm focused on is her utility for breeding

You've lost the plot then dude. Your standards for yourself need to be higher before you actually start thinking about reproduction.

Have you taken a look around at many men's standards these days? Everyone's perceptions are fucked by the incessant barrage of utter nonsense that's been circulated online. If you got caught up in that as I had, step back and take some time to recover your own self before you start looking elsewhere.

The women you're looking at are on the flip side of the coin, as many of the men have responded to such by abandoning their own love lives to focus on alternative goals.

Both men and women will need to meet in order to fix this, but you can't just sit around waiting for everyone else to change.

I guess one problem that's come up with online debate is that too many of us assume that those we're talking with share a similar cultural background. For us, the "standard method" has been to groom yourself well, have polite interactions with the women you meet through your day, and when you encounter someone that you fancy, who shows signs of interest in you herself, you ask her for lunch/coffee or something similar. Then while you're there, you discuss your interests to see how closely aligned they are, and whether or not you can agree on a similar life plan. It may take longer to establish, and there's a lot of flirty interplay for those who put effort into such, but the point is to recognize that men and women do both want to live with each other, you just have to work things out so both of you are going into it with a mutual goal.

It doesn't even have to be a terribly long process if you find the right person. For both my parents and my sister, this process was actually quite quick, taking only a week or two over several meetings. We tend not to even have sex until after marriage either, because when you share that experience with only her/him you aren't always thinking of other lovers as comparisons. I've actually been celibate for over a decade now, while I work on correcting the bad habits that I picked up in my younger years, so that when I do finally find the one she'll be the only lover I have a strong memory of.

I think this is perhaps the largest area that westerners have been failing with in their role in our newly interconnected world. We've taken our own perspective for granted, despite the fact that the world we grew up in is barely existent anymore, and so we're not sharing this cultural wisdom with those who need it the most. Rather we've been getting caught up in trying to approach life from the lens of foreign cultures, and doing a poor job at that because it's all filtered through media.

Because too many of us haven't been stepping up to the plate and taking action on that issue ourselves.

Run around in circles in your heads however you like, but until that happens it's going to continue.

I also don't want a repeat of back when they were calling everything "satanic" and losing the younger people to the left like back in the 80s and 90s.

That's exactly how I fell off the wagon back when I was a child. Struggling to find a place in a society which had rejected me for entirely circumstantial reasons, but then also being shunned for not fitting in after that fact made it incredibly hard to find any way back in. I'll spare you the details, but the journey to finding a real place in society has been incredibly long and I'm still not quite there yet.

If there's anything I could change about society, it would be to see more charitable individuals getting directly involved in the lives of those kids that don't fit, and not by going through some organization or system. Just seeing more people helping those in their own communities would do wonders to help guide kids like I was back to a better place.

Just to point out how devastating it can be when professionals attempt impersonal interventions: I once attempted to kill myself because I was so distraught about my lack of social skills, and when I expressed to the psychologist who talked to me afterwards that I hated how I struggled to relate to kids my own age, he asked me bluntly if I was trying to tell him that I wanted to have sex with children. That was my introduction to the idea of paedophilia, as a vulnerable child who had just attempted to abandon God's gift. I've had a very hard time trusting anyone with authority after that incident (among several others).

No it says absolutely nothing about anyone but myself, and that I just don't find any appeal to it anymore. There's no labels involved, or philosophies about tricking yourself into liking real women. Porn is the unnatural element, not women.

Enjoyment is no indicator of what's a good idea or not.

If I'm perfectly straight, porn is a MASSIVE problem which has been ignored by far too many for far too long. Frankly, I've actually given it up entirely on my own, including masturbation itself, because I've become so sick of how hollow it all is. That energy is better spent improving oneself, to become a better partner for a future lover.

I'm certainly against straight up censorship (except in straight up illegal content), but the issue absolutely does need to be addressed, because it's been keeping people from seeking each other for far too long. It is not at all normal, or healthy, for society to have so many dedicated singles.

I think trying to establish overly generalized rules like this is really detracting from people's ability to interact with the world that they actually live in.

I've become allergic to the word "smart".

Order breaks down over time without direct investment by those involved. Eventually people get so overwhelmed that they just throw up their hands and try to create machines to force conformity, which fails spectacularly because you literally can't use the same solution for everyone without destroying most of them mentally and emotionally.

Push people far enough and they'll earnestly ask if that's worth the price.