Hacker Cinema
The 40 Year-Old Virgin
2005 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Judd Apatow
Andy Stitzer has a pleasant life with a nice apartment and a job stamping invoices at an electronics store. But at age 40, there's one thing Andy hasn't done, and it's really bothering his sex-obsessed male co-workers: Andy is still a virgin. Determined to help Andy get laid, the guys make it their mission to de-virginize him. But it all seems hopeless until Andy meets small business owner Trish, a single mom.
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9 comments on Hacker News
Wiki has a nice little series of pages with releases that placed 1st during at least one weekend in a year. The pages aren't well designed and have only a nav button at the very buttom (beyond even the references), but you can also just change the year in the URL manually. Anyhow, it's definitely not how you remember it.
2005 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2005_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States
2023 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_2023_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States
Although of course you are right. 2005 was not a great year for Hollywood, though it had some decent movies like Sin City, and comedy still hadn't been banned yet (Meet the Fockers, 40 Year-Old Virgin) - so that was cool. But contrasted against 2023 (and the contemporary era in general), it makes it look like the Golden Era of Hollywood.
Ok, from the sound of it, a big (the biggest?) source of your unhappiness is the lack of a romantic relationship. I don't have a quick or easy solution to offer, but I do have some personal experience to share and some perspective to offer. Apologies in advance for any graphic descriptions or colorful language that follow.
I was a virgin until 34. In fact, I had never kissed a girl until I met the one who would eventually become my wife, nor had I really ever been on a romantic date with anyone up to that point. She is the only romantic/sexual partner I've ever had (and if I'm very lucky and work hard at it, I hope that will still be true on my deathbed). So if you manage to go on one real date or kiss one person in the next 11 years, you will have beaten me! So that's something you can try to shoot for.
As you can probably imagine, from my late teens all the way to my early thirties, I experienced and accumulated a lot of anguish and unhappiness stemming from the lack of relationship success. But all of that quickly melted away once I got into a relationship. Well, I actually did have pretty severe performance anxiety with my girlfriend/future wife for about a month after our relationship turned physical. But she was amazingly patient with me, and now we have three kids together and (still) a vigorous sex life (people who have young children can tell you that's no small feat). Again, if you manage not to lose your erection the first 30 times you try to have sex with a girl, you will beat me there as well.
Ok, so all this isn't meant as a (very) humble brag about how I turned my pathetic life around and now have a sexy wife and a wonderful life of endless orgasms. I don't have any books or podcasts to offer. Not even a newsletter. The point is that, my life before wasn't actually bad. I was just what used to be called a "late bloomer". But apparently late bloomers are not ok anymore. Now the message in society is that if you aren't humping like mad by 17, then there's something wrong with you, and you're being left behind by all the guys who are drowning in pussy (or gals in dick, or any permutation/combination thereof). That's some grade A bullshit that permeates every facet of American life, from movies to television, to social media, to music, to news, and especially to all those scientific sounding bullshit studies about how many (self reported) partners everyone has bagged by 20/30/40/50 (when actually it's the 60+ folks living in retirement communities that are banging like rabbits and passing out STDs like Halloween candy). All of it is just utter crap of the highest order, but together they create this endless soul-sucking anxiety in our society that we're not getting as much sex as the next guy or gal and therefore represent some kind of a Darwinian dead end not worthy of continued existence. But the truth is, so many relationships are actually quite terrible, in that the people involved really don't care that much about each other and know that the relationships won't last. Yet they get into them out of FOMO or stay in them out of inertia. Yes, they're getting physical pleasure, but there's actually a pretty heavy psychic cost for being in numerous relationships that are disposable or ultimately go nowhere. Not to mention the opportunity costs of being constantly in mediocre to bad relationships and thus missing out on potentially great ones that come along.
So my point is, don't buy into the bullshit narrative on sex that we have all internalized since before puberty. If you don't have a romantic partner, it's not the end of the world. It's just not your time yet. Maybe you're a late bloomer like me. There's nothing wrong with that. There's a lot of good advice of all sorts in this thread, but the best ones are always about working on yourself for your own sake. Once you can find some sense of self satisfaction in really being who you are, then those other relationships will come. I know it sounds like some Kumbaya bullshit, but just because it's trite, doesn't mean it's not true. There's really nothing that kills a social/romantic relationship like a fixation on oneself, whether it be narcissism or self-pity/hatred. When you feel better about yourself, every social interaction will no longer be about your own perceived inadequacies. You'll have the mental bandwidth to really engage with others and to think about and care about who they are and what they have to say. That's how you make real friends and attract the kinds of people that you want to have deep, long-term romantic relationships with.
Good luck, young man. I think there's a good chance your life will turn out alright, if you will take the time to live it. Being in too much of a hurry usually leads to bad outcomes, no matter if it's running, driving, or living. And one last thing, the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin actually gave me a lot of encouragement when I was a 30-Year-Old virgin. It's pretty funny and well-acted, and while not terribly realistic, it lifted some of the burden of anxiety I was carrying. It made me think that I still had plenty of time.
If I remember the film correctly, his friends were a bunch of jackasses (in a comedic fashion), while the 40-year-old virgin was actually the nicest guy... Who best deserves the girl at the end. The female lead was also a virgin, and actually valued that in the main character.
I mean, I guess it still falls on the trope of "the hero gets the girl" at the end, if that's what your problem is? A lot of what his friends do get in the way of him actually having a successful romantic experience with the female lead.
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I dunno, reading those reviews kinda reminds me of one review I read for Frozen: where they were critical about "Love is an Open Door" and failing to understand the satire. Sometimes there are messages behind the message...
>Or if anime references don't work... 40 year old virgin movies or whatever.
Are you saying that movie doesn't stigmatize male virginity? From its wikipedia page:
>The film was criticized by Harry Forbes of Catholic News Service for promoting "the false premise that there's something intrinsically wrong with an unmarried man being sexually inexperienced,"[41] and by political columnist Cal Thomas for being an example of societal decline in regards to "self-control or what was once known as purity."[42]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_40-Year-Old_Virgin
Yes, but it's still remarkable how common in Japanese fiction the socially awkward, uncomfortable protagonist, meant to be relatable to the audience is.
The protagonist of The 40 Year old Virgin is unique for it, and the series is not meant for 40 year old virgins.
There is a surprisingly high amount of fiction from Japan that follows a formula similar to this:
- The protagonist is socially awkward and nervous, but otherwise has no actual opinions or character traits
- The protagonist starts the story rather lonely
- The protagonist fairly quickly finds friends, lovers, family, who are very devoted to him
- Bonus points for the protagonist being transported to a parallel universe to escape the dreads of social pressure of Japanese office worker life completely — this specific plot device is oddly common.
It feels as if one play a first person corridor shooter with a silent protagonist, but it's a book or television series: the protagonist is dragged along with the plot but somehow does not influence it and barely speaks or has opinions: the point is for the reader to mentally replace the protagonist with himself, and experience the story from his own perspective, so he can feel less lonely, just as such video games have a big element of making the player feel like an action hero, but the power phantasy sold here is simply “no longer being lonely”.
It's really an oddly big market for such a seemingly quite specific thing. Rent-a-Girlfriend consistently ranks within the top 25 of strip volume sales in Japan, and it's plot is really little more than “Lonely, socially awkward young adult is now less lonely.”.
"40 Year Old Virgin - Michael McDonald Scene" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRdLWbOAUEY
This movie was ahead of it's time. :)
"I couldn't see my girlfriend in a million years wearing ... and I'd never hear the end of it if she saw me wearing..."
And this is an insightful comment in that the tide seems to be turning anti-kinect, and once the "value is socially constructed by others, not internally" crowd decides as a group that the kinect is embarrassing, its toast in the marketplace unless it can downscale quickly and smoothly which most products can't do.
Occulus can survive while its in growth phase and fashion oriented people don't like it. That's OK, its a big world and there's space for all. But if the kinect org and support system and ecosystem is size "X" and "not being cool anymore" results in a mandatory nearly instant decrease in size by a factor of perhaps 3, that could kill the entire product by having trouble down scaling.
With narrow casting I'm not even sure what "cool people" watch anymore but all you need is some comedians making fun of people using Kinect or maybe some parody commercials during the superbowl or during reality TV or whatever, and that product is simply toast. Watch for that cultural phenomena, and then watch for product discontinued notices six months later.
All that product needs is a sequel of that "40 year old virgin" movie where sony pays for product placement for the main character to use a kinect, or maybe a stoner/teen comedy movie with a kinect in it, and its all over.
Glen it basically comes down to a genre by genre breakdown I think. If you're looking for a comedy which should inherently have high rewatchability, if any are rated as low then I can assume I should avoid them. For example, in college my buddies and I alternated watching 40 Year Old Virgin and Grandma's Boy for an entire semester. Neither would have the best quality ratings, but they were fun and sure had high rewatchability.
Now take the other end of the spectrum of film like Black Swan or even some slower paced films. I love 2001 A Space Odyssey but am not rushing to rewatch soon (though it has top quality) because it is way too slooow for me. Or take some dramas that while interesting on first glance don't really merit another watch.
Basically I think you should start with a top down approach by genre, and if something like comedy then the dominant factor is rewatchability but then for others it may be "quality" (which itself could be subdivided further into cinematographic elements for an auteur film, the musical score for a certain type, etc). But I feel like maybe you end up going down a rabbit's hole, so perhaps I'm asking more questions than I'm answering.
My advice, is a little different from the rest. All those things are good and all, but it doesn't hurt to lay the ground work for your future.
I recommend that you start coding your statup now. This is the best time for it. You have no expenses. You have very few commitments. And you are surrounded by a lot of other smart ambitious people that you can tap. Clubs, professors, classes, will make it easy for you to find out who the smart people are. So if you run into a problem, you can easily find someone to help you understand it.
And this way the times when your startup grows very slow, you'll have some other things to play with. Honestly if you don't have an idea now, start throwing some ideas in your head, pick one and start coding, if you change your mind along the way, change your product, you have plenty of time to get a winning combination. And remember, it doesn't need to be rocket science, Facebook is nothing more than a big database.
But this shouldn't be your only concern, you have to multi-task. Honestly the startup life is pretty shitty. You work all the time, you lose touch with most of your friends because you constantly skip going out, and unlike college where you are surrounded by women of your age, you end up being pretty much a monk, seeing two-three women your age during the week. So spend that time in college having fun.
a) start lifting weights. Trust me, it'll do wonders to your social life and for your self esteem. Honestly if you are afraid of going to the gym, buy a set of weights at a store and workout at home. I actually prefer that because you don't spend the extra time of driving to the gym, and can do it whenever you have free time.(i usually work out when I watch TV since I'm in front of it anyways)
b) Join some activity clubs. Honestly you sound like you have no idea what fun things you like. So look at all the clubs at your college and join a bunch and see what you actually like.
c) if you want excitement there is nothing better than buying a motorcycle. Start off with a Ninja 250(used). The reason is that its a starter bike(it'll run you like 2K used, 3K new, they hold their value really well). Granted its a little dangerous but thats part of the excitement. Then once you get the basics down, upgrade to a 600cc bike(the most expensive one will run you like 7 grand). And don't upgrade to a 1000cc bike because those are the killers.
d) get laid, Honestly college is probably the easiest time of your life for that .You are surrounded by women your age and as long as you are even remotely in shape you'll get a positive answer. If you wear glasses get contacts. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you'll be knee deep in women once you graduate. Like I said, w/o going out I see maybe 1-2 attractive women my age. And if you hate the party scene in college, you'll hate the bar/club scene when you graduate. You don't want to end up like that guy in the 40 year old virgin movie. And trust me, if you ride a bike, have a decent physique and no glasses, in college? You will have NO problem getting women's numbers. All you have to do is initiate the conversation.
e) take a road trip, just get into your car and head some place 2000 miles away.
f) obviously there are many other exciting things to do, but I don't know your money/location situation, so I dunno if you can afford to go sky diving, or if you live near an ocean so you can learn how to surf/ride a jet ski