I’m just gonna come out and say it. Things are looking pretty bad for my generation. I don’t want to be down on Gen Z, just because that’s a popular thing to do, but there’s a huge cultural gulf between my generation and the previous one, some of which is better, a lot of which isn’t, and which is which changes depending on who you ask. One of those things is dating. Another is online casinos. But let’s stick to dating.
The entire dating game has changed pretty significantly in the past twenty to thirty years for several important reasons- and not for the better.
The Sexual Revolution
Here’s a hot take: The Sexual Revolution was a terrible idea. I get it, though. On paper, it sounds amazing. Ask any guy on the street whether he likes the idea of more women having more sex, and I’m pretty sure I could guess the answer.
For women, the idea was sold as the equivalent of “breaking the chains” of social and cultural taboos. By throwing off the yoke of emotional baggage that comes with sex and relationships, this supposedly freed women and- well, makes them freer.
And maybe if we lived in a more utilitarian society and were less emotionally dependent on one another, that could work. And while I’m fantasizing about being an alien species, I’d like some wings and a couple of extra arms too.
Another reason The Sexual Revolution has exploded is because of the invention of cheap, effective birth control. This removes nearly any and all consequences from sex, with only the occasional fluke in millions, ahem, attempts. Provided, of course, that everyone involved is clean. On a completely unrelated note, California made it legal to knowingly give your sexual partner AIDS…
The third and final reason for those in favor of The Sexual Revolution is how easy access to abortion is. So even if the occasional fluke does happen, there’s a quick and easy solution! Provided that you don’t believe that the clump of cells growing inside is an actual baby. Or you don’t mind said cells vacuumed and pulled out piece by piece from the womb to be used for science.
Or if you procrastinated until the third trimester, here’s what could happen. As Virginia Governer Ralph Northam put it, “The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
Nothin’ like a little infanticide to shirk one’s responsibilities, am I right?
Because what all these things are. They are a way of removing responsibility and accountability from relationships- and good relationships are built on these things. By removing them, or attempting to, how the next generation views relations has been significantly altered, and we’re only now seeing the long-term consequences of it.
Humans are social animals. We have built-in biological functions that need to be satiated, both physically and emotionally, to have a complete life. To pretend otherwise is to deny our nature.
And nowhere has this become more obvious than on dating apps.
Dating Apps Suck. But Why?
I suspect that no one involved with making these applications, such as Tinder, Bumble, or OkCupid, ever intended to end up where we are right now. However, it’s fairly easy, with hindsight, to see how we did get here.
Again, on paper, dating apps seem amazing. They are an easy and convenient way of finding possible partners, without all the social rigamarole of trying to find people in the real world, only to end up getting rejected outright for whatever reason.
After all, everyone on the dating app is looking for a partner, so no more “sorry, I already have a boyfriend…” rejections. Each person can see the others’ interests, hobbies, and photos, and if they both like what they see, they match and begin a conversation. If that works out, they can try it out in the real world, and hopefully, a long and fulfilling relationship gets built.
Obviously, it doesn’t work like that in the slightest, or I wouldn’t be talking about it. The data from the dating applications themselves prove it.
If you’re a man and have ever used a dating app, you’ve probably gotten very few (if any) matches unless you arbitrarily swipe right on literally every profile. Are you ugly? Nope. It has nothing to do with how you look. As it turns out, women simply have higher standards than most men and prefer the men with characteristics of masculinity. And on a dating app, women have never had easier access to the top-tier guys (read: Guys with money, stability, good looks, and social status).
The evidence for this was provided by OkCupid themselves. Optimistic and naive members of staff helpfully published some articles showing the correlation between one’s success on dating apps and their overall attractiveness. The one I’m going to be referencing is called “Your Looks and Your Inbox”. It’s now deleted from OkCupid’s blog, but you can find it fairly easily through Reddit and the internet archive.
Surprise, surprise, being sexy / handsome gives you a huge advantage, which is further emphasized by the fact that people are super shallow online. OkCupid, at one point, allowed people’s profiles to be rated by both looks and personality separately.
The staff noticed that they had exactly the same correlation. They removed the personality measurement, and the correlation held. The conclusion? Everyone was just looking at the pictures. What’s even more interesting is that when OkCupid removed the pictures during the launch for a different service (that flopped), they found that their entire userbase tanked during the period.
Those who stayed though we’re far more likely to message one another… right up until they put the pictures back.
People are weird.
More relevant to the point I’m trying to make, however, is the data that the article (now deleted) reveals about the difference between how men and women perceive the other sex. When men rated women by looks out of five, the resulting graph is a nearly perfect bell curve, with the majority of women being rated average.
When women were asked to rate men, however, the results were extremely harsh, with nearly eighty percent of men being rated as below average! To compound that, other data based on how women send messages make it seem like, and I quote, “the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.”
They said it, not me.
In other words, women are aiming for the top of the pile. While it makes sense to a certain extent (because if you’re a woman looking to marry, why wouldn’t you want somebody with some weight and money to throw around?), it leaves the vast majority of decent looking guys competing for even the chance of a woman replying to them. The same data shows that women are nearly outnumbered by something like two to one on OkCupid.
Tinder is even worse, with a staggering seven to one ratio of men to women. The result is that women are bombarded with messages all day, every day, and most men are lucky to get even one.
The bottom line is that dating is easier than ever for women, but only something like the top percentage of men gets all the attention.
Sugar Daddies and the Degradation of the Sanctity of Relationships
The consequences of all these compounding factors is a generation where the sexes have never been more at odds. Modern politics, which has bled into the mainstream culture, regularly tells men how awful they are.
Combine that with shallow relationships (if they are lucky enough to have one), and men are getting more and more depressed than ever. As Jordan Peterson put, “Men are dropping out of society like mad.” Male suicides are up. Male success in academics has plummeted.
Women aren’t better off. Supposedly freed by the sexual revolution, more and more women have started treating relationships as transactions. Literal transactions, for cash. A woman doesn’t even have to actually put out if they don’t feel like it. Platforms like Twitch allow female streamers to get away with near-complete-nudity, and other blatantly sexual platforms like OnlyFans offer an insanely easy way for lonely men to throw their money away on women who will never, ever, see them as a partner (the internet slang for this is aptly called “simping”).
There was an article I read where female streamers / OnlyFans “models” earn nearly thirty thousand dollars a month. In other words, not only is far less taboo for women to create such content, there’s never been a greater financial incentive to do so.
However, for those women who are too classy to become actual prostitutes, there’s an alternative! On a site called “Unheard” (which I had never heard of before looking into this), in an article titled “Why Women want Sugar Daddies” (written by a woman), she reports that an insane number of women are taking up “sugaring”. As in, over two million women in the US alone. These women get hired out to join wealthy men on yachts and travel the world.
In ye olden days, you would probably assume that these women have no other choice, that they are desperate and need the cash. Nope. Quote, “Unlike traditional sex work, it’s popular among young women at elite institutions; destined for fine careers, they nonetheless see it as a time-efficient way to offload student debt and, as Molly, a 22-year sugar baby who read PPE at Oxford, told me, ‘get a taste of luxury'”.
The author, Zoe Strimpel, makes a pretty good point on the subject, “despite the familiarity of the trope and the clarity of the need, the rise of elite sugaring among young, extremely upwardly mobile women points to two profound and rather shocking shifts.
One: that dating, with all its messiness and the in-built possibility (if things go well) of an actual relationship — complete with compromise, give and take, and real intimacy — has imploded. And two: that feminism has morphed from a movement with ideals — which envisioned, for instance, a socialist world in which women might be free from sex work — into a hard-nosed, misandric, mercenary pragmatism.”
She goes on to report how these women differ from the feminists of the past. While the women who fought for suffrage were merely fighting for their rights, and the second wave of feminists fought “heternormative expectations”, the third wave simply despise men.
Sex for these women means nothing but a paycheck, and they consider it the easier part of their job. It’s so bad, these women can hardly experience even basic empathy for the men they sleep with, much less maintain a real relationship.
The men aren’t winning from this either. A lot of these men want someone who will listen to them, with the sex taking up five minutes of a three-hour session. One of these women said that she had a client who merely wanted to cuddle and cry on her shoulder.
These aren’t nobodies. These are men with money who are bawling their eyes out because they are miserable. They have everything- and yet, at the end of the day, they would trade all of it for someone who genuinely cares about them.
What to do?
Well, if I had the answers to everything, I sure wouldn’t be writing blogs for a living. It seems to me, however, that we must stop lying to ourselves. Truth matters. Relationships are an integral part of human nature, and so is sex. To treat those things casually is to deny millions of years of evolution.
Basically, we must follow the meme: Abandon society; return to monke.
