I'm also the mother of a teen, a boy. He's homeschooled. It's a completely different world. The girls he knows are neat, clean, unfashionable, un-dieted and un-painted. The boys all look like Skid Row rejects, including him. He's growing his hair out, can't get braces yet to deal with a non-cosmetic problem, and he has a baby mustache that he doesn't want to start shaving.

He's also very popular with girls, the kind of popular where they hand him their number unasked. If you ask him, his secret is treating them "like human beings". He's also really interesting, the kind of interesting that makes even adults sit up and take notice. He's working toward lifeguarding. He's studying a second language. He's not only a gamer, but a designer of games or parts of games. If there's a free building or modeling tool out there, he's used it. What he's never used is Axe or hair gel, never mind tanning cream or guyliner.

Now, these are not hotties he's attracting. He doesn't know any hotties, which isn't deliberate on my part, just an artifact of his education, but when I showed him Hot Chicks with Douchebags, he busted out laughing, not only at the douchebags, but at the hot chicks. He thought they were just as gross as the douchebags. He doesn't like orange tans, flat stomachs, make-up and ironed hair, not to mention the stupid facial expressions and exaggerated modeling poses. Compared to the girls he knows, they looked like aliens.

Middle school and high school are ruthless hierarchies, and for girls, the only things that counts are looks and manipulation skills. Score high on a test or even be genuinely kind, and you drop to the bottom. For boys, it's athletic prowess and douchbaggery. I personally think that 99% of our problem in our twenties is that it takes more than a decade to recover from this crap, and even when we do, our sexual tastes can get stuck.

I was lucky. I scored too high on tests for my looks to matter one way or another. The men I dated as a young adult were the kind of dweebs who gave up on hotties at about age 12, which was the age at which I gave up on football stars.

Is that population dwindling? I don't know. What I see from my current, 40-something vantage point is that the ones I knew are still happily married. The homeschoolers, who are pretty much all dweebs, are very slow to date. They seem to be too busy figuring out who they are, and are under no pressure to get laid. Sexual precocity is frowned on in that community, by the kids themselves as well as by the adults.

A man who wants a Maxim-quality woman is going to have to turn himself into either a Fortune-500-quality man or a douchebag. Sorry, but there's no other way. Wailing about it as unfair or sexist isn't going to change it, because it's really neither. These women are putting in some serious expense and effort to look that way. Why should they do it for a man who wouldn't give them the time of day if they didn't go to the gym, didn't tan, didn't diet and did nothing in the morning but shower and dress?

My meditation on HCwDB turned out to be really good for me. Sometimes it's important to be clear on what you're expected to bring to the table and who you're expected to sit next to, especially if you don't want to eat at that table.

I'm also glad for my constant exposure to "free-range teenagers". They're wonderful.

"...and feminism has failed to provide men with a guidebook for navigating courtship."

Feminism has failed? Feminism has failed to do something else and more for MEN? Oh I knew it would be a woman's fault why a man acts like an clown ass. Yeah, Geraldine, the devil made him do it.

I'm not sure that young women today really understand what feminism is all about. It's not about stepping all over men - it never was. It's about following your own dreams and realizing your own potential is just as worthy as the next guy's potential. How that fits into this warped idea about "dating Darwinism" is beyond me. Sounds like some intellectual pothead was at it again one late night in the dorm.

The best determining factor for compatibility is values-based compatibility. Then there is the recognition that you might be able to have it all, just not all at the same time. People who share the same values, including marriage, career goals, economic futures, children, whatever, will find each other because they want to find each other. Young adults who have good family ties, regardless of socio-economic background, will generally be more successful in finding an equal than those who reject their family backgrounds (and maybe for good reason, too!).

I'm not so sure that anyone should be married before the age of 30. After all, the only frame of reference up to age 20 is that of being a child, usually in the confines and control of one's parent/guardian. Everyone should have atleast 10 years being an adult, gaining greater insight into themselves, figuring out what their goals are, and understanding the world and themselves in it a little bit better.

This is just more intellectual rubbish.

but that men and women do not have all the same problems either, that men are not, in general, any more to blame for the problems they do have than women are to blame for the problems they have, that women have real power and that society is not organized as a conspiracy to benefit men generally or the interests of men over women. As far as what to do about it I don't have any answers beyond what everyone agrees are basic human rights. I agree with feminists on almost all policy issues. People should control their own bodies, have sex with (or not) with who they like, support their kids, be free from violence (except under legally specified circumstances), be paid the same for the same work, etc. The fact is though, that due to technological changes that have rendered physical strength obsolete, due to the fact that women are much pickier about sex and more willing to live without it, and more capable and inclined towards asexual but emotionally meaningful social bonds than men are means that in a society organized according to these principles most women will be far more comfortable and far more in control than most men. Since this is the case I wish they would stop complaining so much about, and trying to use the law to prevent, every single instance where men don't do EXACTLY what they want, EXACTLY when they want it and EXACTLY the way they want it.