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The story
A thread titled “Beautiful single women are on the rise, and their lives look pretty great” popped up on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (Anything Live-Commentary) board. It started from the claim that good-looking single women get to live free of responsibility and hassle, then spiraled into a comparison of happiness levels and suicide rates between married and unmarried people. Against the idea that “single women get hit with anxiety once they pass 40,” posters pointed to data showing single men actually have higher suicide and lonely-death rates — sparking a fight over which sex really “loses it” in the end.
What people said
Living with someone and dealing with brats is a pain, though.
Still easier than working five days a week.
I just lack drive and a sense of responsibility — I'm thin, I've got hair, decent eyesight, an average face.
If I were a woman, I might not be popular, but I'd still be getting the perks.
Sounds like you're hoping they're anxious.
Though actually, it's single men whose happiness craters from anxiety at 40, apparently:
https://president.jp/articles/photo/92192?pn=2
Unpopular men have zero demand at any age either.
"Strong women" (lol) tell themselves that, but most other women actually look down on them.
That's why childless single women end up losing it.
But there are plenty of cases of married women with kids snapping and killing their own children, no?
Women stay pretty forever as long as they don't give birth.
I guess if they don't convince themselves these women end up unhappy somehow, it feels like their own muddy lives just got invalidated.
It's like asking whether Miyuki Nakajima or Yuriko Ishida (famous Japanese singer and actress) are unhappy.
If you've got the result of being beautiful and your self-esteem matches it, you can't lose — anything said against that is just weak people's jealousy 🥺
"Plenty" compared to what, exactly?
Childless women obviously can't kill kids they don't have, no matter how badly they might want to.
Married people have a far lower suicide rate overall — unmarried women kill themselves at nearly twice the rate of married women.
Single men kill themselves at more than 2.5 times the rate of those unmarried women.
There were even posts bragging about outright crimes, like tripping kids on purpose — weird that nobody ever got arrested over it.
Though it's almost always men who get arrested for sexualizing kids and committing indecency offenses.
I wanted to live a life with zero responsibility, at my own pace, and still get approved of the whole way through.
Yeah, honestly I would've liked to be born a beautiful woman too.
Or a handsome guy would've worked just as well.
But my parents run their own clinic and I'm a doctor myself, so I guess I've got it pretty good as it is.
In the end it's probably: women with a good family >>>>> single women >> women stuck in a crappy family.
So a man who can't get anyone pregnant ranks even lower than that?
That's only if you choose a demanding specialty.
I work in long-term/chronic care, so it's ridiculously easy.
Unlimited internet browsing, badminton or table tennis in the hospital's own gym.
Out by 5:30pm, weekends always off, and I pull in 18 million yen a year.
I don't think there's an easier job in the world.
Women in their late 30s who can't get married tend to see themselves as kind, beautiful people.
In their youth they really did get complimented and treated as pretty to some degree, and that track record is exactly what makes the delusion worse over time.
Of course, reality is more like a vicious monster.
Apparently women making only 3 million yen a year genuinely believe they can easily land a man on the same 3-million salary who's some older guy, even one they'd normally dismiss (the post adds an odd detail — pegging his age via the "Year of the Boar" zodiac sign).
That's why the marriage market is short on men for the first time in history.
Meanwhile, men who stay single and happy are rapidly increasing — quite the contrast.
I'd have pictured men as the ones who lose it.
It's men who get desperate trying to pass on their genes.
Women, if anything, are lucky to dodge the pain of childbirth.
Maybe they won't lose it if they've got a big circle of same-sex friends.
But normally they just get constantly one-upped by people who have families.
Every single bit of data on suicide rates and low happiness shows it's men who snap.
Lonely-death rates, hoarder-house rates, welfare-dependency rates ("namapo") among middle-aged-and-up men — men top every single category, and on top of that their lifespan is way below single women's.
This guy is definitely a single man lol.
Out in the countryside there's nothing to do if you're not raising kids.
At the level of ordinary people, there's no such thing as a beautiful woman in her 40s or 50s.
There might be some who used to be beautiful, but that's nothing more than past glory.
It's a flawed system, but more and more countries ended up with no choice but to adopt it anyway.
That said, globally it's still under 20% of countries.
Polygamy is still the mainstream system worldwide today.
Quite a few Japanese people don't even know that much.
There's not a single decent country that practices polygamy, though…
Polygamy believers totally ignore the human rights of "alpha men," don't they.
Why should a top-tier alpha guy have to pay living expenses for some fling-tier woman, or donate his genes to women he doesn't even care about?
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The suicide-rate and happiness comparisons flying around in the thread aren’t easy to pin down, since factors beyond marital status — age, income, whether someone has social ties — all come into play. In Japan, the share of people reaching their 50s without ever having married has been rising steadily over the long term, which is reshaping the social standing of being single in the first place. Plenty of figures circulated in the thread without clear sourcing, and the discussion even veered off at one point into a separate debate over the merits of polygamy, drifting away from the original question of whether good-looking single women really have it better. The conversation tends to frame this as a binary of which sex has it worse, but it’s easy to overlook how much individual differences — household finances, relationships with the people around them — actually matter.
※This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Beautiful single women are on the rise, and their lives look pretty great.”
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