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Where do you see the Gender War going?
My Definition of the Gender War.
There are many fronts in the Culture War that can be more or less described as a 'Gender War'.
Front 1: Which pronouns to use? Does "gender even exist?
Front 2: Is Western society a "patriarchy"?
Front 3: Is Masculinity Toxic?
Front 4: "Incels".
This post is about Front 4. Growing male sexlessness. I am not going to make much of an empirical argument but more of a rhetorical one.
So what if men are having less sex?
A large enough contingency of young men not having sexual partners is almost always a precursor for political and social instability. All that excess energy needs to be directed somewhere (work to provide for the wife and kids), if it isn't it usually boils over towards the rest of society as men seek out more violent and high-risk avenues to gain social status let that be joining gangs or starting political revolutions.
Moreover, young men are the most productive demographic in society in just about every domain. If a large enough percentage of them don't see any reason/reward for working hard, they just won't.
It's getting worse.
A growing number of men not having sex is a canary in the coal mine. That whatever was holding the socioeconomic fabric together is deteriorating. Let that be worsening economic conditions (we got plenty of that), worsening economic inequality (plenty of that as well), or just worsening social institutions (Online dating is the plurality method of how heterosexual couples met., It's growing rapidly.).
The cultural wind is blowing
Not only that but the two sexes resenting each other is mainstream. As I was growing up in the early 2000s there were 'boys vs girls' conversations. But those conversations were light-hearted and there were no hard feelings.
Nowadays browsing through social media comment sections and talking to other young guys. The tensions are much higher. I see normies spouting black pill talking points all over Instagram and TikTok. And that seems to be the majority ideology. This is in stark contrast to the early 2000s and even the 2010s were the majority consensus amongst men could have been described as 'RedPill' or 'BluePill'.
If you want an example of the above, Read the comments of this video (Videos like this are an entire genre among zoomers). You can feel the tension in the comments. To me, it's obvious this girl is joking, even if the joke isn't all that funny or whatever. The comments don't suggest most people viewed it as such, the men are on edge. I'd wager they wouldn't have reacted like this a decade ago. Another interesting phenomenon is that unattractive girls produce content like this imitating the attractive ones who can actually get away with it and just end up sinking the sanity waterline further as young naive men peers who know her think "wait I can't even this this bitch?" and the women gas up their egos without being able to back it up.
I mean Andrew Tate is actually popular FFS! I have had so many of my normie friends and acquaintances ask me about what I think of Andrew Tate, and most of them say the same thing. "He's got a point, I agree with a large part of what he says". The man is a clown, he's a comedian in my eyes. The fact his rhetoric resonates with men despite all else is a testament to the times we are living in.
On the female side of the aisle, it seems like they are doubling down too. They will just make more TikTok videos like the one I linked above.
Where do I see all this going?
Increasing political and social tension. More fringe political parties are elected, and how that happens will be left as an exercise for the leader.
One can make the argument that countries like Japan and South Korea are already further along the line of atomization and sexlessness (their TFR is atrocious!).
I don't think East Asian countries with the rice farming optimized culture (and genetic predisposition against inhibition, extremely interesting but I can't find the link) are good proxies to model the rest of the world after.
India might be a candidate they have a Front 4 gender war as well, arranged marriage puts a damper but Hindu Nationalism is clearly on the rise.
It seems that we are in the perfect storm for worsening Gender relations. Economic struggles, increasing OLD (that comes with a massive amount of its own problems) app usage, increasing atomization, recommendation algorithms primarily suggesting media that lowers the sanity line (rage bait of the likes made by Ms Andrea Subotic), gender confusion, Males being vilified for???, Women specific AA, all of them compounding on each other...
(Apparently quoting The Gods of the Copybook Headings is gauche these days, but it's still so good)
More seriously, I find this a fascinating topic, but I also feel this might specifically be a Zoomer/late Millennial issue in the West. I'm in my late 30s and here are a few observations about me and my friendship groups over the 00s and early 10s -
Pretty much all my friends are now married with children, with not a single divorcee among the 20+ married couples I'm in regular contact with.
All my friendship groups from undergraduate to present were very mixed gender, and two of my all time best friends are women (I was actually "maid of honour" at one of their weddings!)
Throughout my 20s, there was a lot of sex had by all, although true one night stands (as opposed to short relationships/flings) were moderately rare.
Online dating in the form of sites like OKCupid was niche but fun, and lots of people met serious partners there (Tinder didn't exist).
Social networks were only weakly integrated with friendship groups (most people didn't notice what others were posting), and functioned more in the spirit of content sharing platforms than true extensions of social life.
This is of course highly selective, insofar as I'm about as outgoing, bourgeois, metropolitan, etc. but in general, it felt to me like the 00s and early 10s were a really good time for gender relations.
On the other hand, observationally, it really does seem like something has changed for younger men and women, really in the last 8-10 years. More and more young men are complaining about sexlessness, Tinder has intensified 'winner takes all' dynamics around sex and made one night stands more common, TikTok and Instagram have created new popular bimboid aesthetics for women (and some men), the culture war has polarised politics between men and women still further, etc., etc..
So I'm curious to hear from others here. For Mottizens in my broad age demographic, were gender relations as good as I remember when we were young and easy under the apple boughs? For Zoomer Mottizens, are things as bad as they look from the outside? And especially interesting, for Mottizens in their late 20s/early 30s, was there a notable transition period when you started to see gender relations getting worse?
Early 40s here. My friends don't have any divorces that I'm aware of but not many marriages either. There's a broad spread of wife'n'kids, stable long term'n'kids, "blended" families, DINK, field players, single with benefits (<-- I'm here)/dissatisfied daters, and the occasional jaded MGHisOW or resigned celibate.
Looking around I'd say, barring one or two outliers, we're mostly where we deserve to be. The responsible and personable people are mostly in stable LTRs and the irresponsible or unpersonable people are either biding time waiting for a better offer that they don't want to acknowledge probably isn't going to come along, or don't care enough to adapt just to fulfill external expectations, or both (<-).
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Speaking in the late thirties, here, and yes, single. Among my close friends group, only one of them is married - and he still had to swim against a heavy current to find someone. The other two that could be married aren't for other reasons - one just doesn't want to get married after watching bad experiences with divorce, another isn't for... reasons? Despite looking. (If I had to guess, it's due to his work schedule.) My brother, younger than me, isn't married and hasn't been looking for years. (When the topic got brought up, he implied heavily that the juice isn't worth the squeeze and they'd bring little to the table, so why bother?)
This is pretty universal from where I'm sitting. The only guy I work with(older than me) isn't married and never has been - my boss is divorced. I can't do a full poll of all of my co-workers, but I know of at least one other guy around my age that's looking and can't find anyone. And one woman who's painfully good looking IMO, who's also single and has no plans to get married.
People seemingly keep trying to fall into a just-world fallacy as to why this is happening, mostly centered around male responsibility and fault. Not just here, but elsewhere. 'Just take a shower, just be well-dressed, just be well-mannered'. I doubt that'll change any time soon.
https://flowingdata.com/2017/11/01/who-is-married-by-now/
This is from 2015, so it's likely slightly lower, but by 40, 81% of men were married.
So yeah, you're in a bubble. Hell, in 2015, you at 33, 70% already were married, so even at worse, let's say only 75% are married by now. Also, divorce has actually gone down since the peak a few decades ago, because the millions of couples who married in 1960 and hated each other by 1964, were able to get divorced.
Sure, there are issues with marriage, but the vast majority of adults in America, end up married by the time they hit 30, at least once.
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As a mid-30s guy, I pin this entirely on the Tinderfication of dating, starting in the early 2010s and increasing since. Dating, even if once not exactly easy, also wasn't arduous. OKC was even kind of fun; a thoughtful message would get attention, and people could and would read your profile.
Tinder shifted this to a pure meat market. Particularly, it materialized a hierarchy in conventional hotness, both by attributing a score to individuals based on the extent of how much others engage with them (not novel; OkC did something similar even early on, and people implicitly do this in real life as well) but, critically, in heavily favoring the presentation as possible mates the people at the top of the hierarchy through the primary channel of interaction (swipes). That is qualitatively different than the past and generates the winner-take-all dynamic you mention.
This is even more pernicious than it seems at first glance, though. There's kind of an evaporative cooling that occurs in dating. The people who are most suitable for long term partnerships gradually disappear from the dating market, because almost by definition they enter long term relationships. The most attractive men are no worse in that suitability, outside of attractiveness, than the least attractive men. I'd even guess they're on average better long term partners outside the superficial aspects. But the ones that are presented to women have been heavily picked over, to the point where the vast majority of those remaining on dating apps are lemons. And when a woman hops on Tinder, she's not typically swiping through hundreds of profiles to get to the less polluted pool. She's just seeing the top of the stack, which is men whose profiles generate a high level of engagement but who for some reason have not left the dating market. Some may be just generally bad; some may be unconsciously disinterested in a relationship; some may have personality traits that make them a bad prospect. The point is that women see highly sought after men who aren't good long term prospects.
This explanation has the advantage of describing both single straight men's experiences ("I never get any engagement") and women's ("the men I meet online are cheaters or liars or commitment-phobic"). Attractive people with long term relationship orientation still pair off with each other and wonder what all the fuss is about, though attractive women had to deal with a bunch of bad apples to get to that point.
Can it explain the decline in gender relations? IIRC something like 40% of new marriages today originate online, and a larger population has been on it. Probably the majority of daters have exposure to this dynamic. Moreover, the existence of it as an option has effects. Serendipitous meetings in real life are becoming more discouraged (e.g. meeting at work, once the first or second most common way of meeting, is now heavily frowned upon up to and including legal penalties). It possibly makes some people less open to meeting people in their social circles, as it invites a comparison to the more attractive people available online.
Why would it be an unconscious preference? If you're the hypothetical 'Chad Thundercock' and just want to get laid, Tinder's providing you with ample opportunities to get your dick wet and generally working as intended. Honestly, so long as Chad Thundercock is direct and clear with his intentions on just getting laid I don't think that's even a bad result for the stack.
The main issue/corruptive agent are people who are working on false pretenses. The hypothetical 'Lovebomber' who presents as down for a long-term relationship for 3-4 dates then bails, who undermines the sincerity of the actually longterm-orientated (and can, frankly, lead to some bizarre expectations where longterm-minded girls assume that their 'sprinting' effort and 110% agreeability is something that an actual longterm prospect is gonna emulate)
There are plenty of men who not only say but think they're looking for a long term relationship but are in practice disinclined to them. Maybe even highly picky guys fall into this category.
The experience for women is still crappy: date someone for a bit, get really excited for them, but a month later get cut off because he wanted to look for something new, even though the breakup was highly predictable given his previous behavior.
I agree that if someone is very clear about their intentions, there's no reasonable claim of anyone having been wronged. A single stack intermingles "hot casual stud" and "great long term partner" and confuses the derived signal, but simply segregating on intention would address part of that. The issue comes when people looking for long term things end up deceived: since a majority of women do mostly want something long term, more guys list themselves as primarily long term than would if most women primarily wanted casual sex. Self deception also plays a significant role here: it's often a combination of a guy deceiving himself about what he's looking for and a woman aggressively ignoring the telltale signs of deception, because of desire.
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I'm maybe a few years younger than you, and my personal experiences broadly align with yours. Zoomer girls do seem more standoffish to me even in everyday social context, but that might well just be due to the 10-year age gap.
That being said, if I rack my brain for concrete changes that are not confounded by my shifting relation to the group in question, it seems to me that among my younger acquaintances it's become much more common to observe girls dating out of their friend group. Where in my bracket the most common dynamic was to have ever-shifting couplings within a clique and perhaps at most including people at its periphery, among younger people I often observe (and sometimes hear the lamentations of the guys) scenarios where the girls snub the guys in their group and then randomly turn out to have a new boyfriend they picked up who-knows-where (in one case I knew a bit more about, it was a two-week internship at some random bank), who doesn't fit in and doesn't really make an effort to integrate with their home group.
As far as I could tell from the few cases where I got to hear the girl's side of the story too, this is not the case of heavensent spontaneous human connection either; in fact with several of those relationships I was taken aback by how little the girl seemed to know or understand about the personality of the guy she picked up, which would have been a bad sign even in an otherwise-"normal" relationship but was outright baffling in the context of her getting on track to ditch all her friends for this guy.
To the extent to which there is a new tendency, it seems very tempting to interpret it along the lines of "knowing less is better"; that is, at least at some crucial stage of relationship formation, the girls are incapable of feeling attraction towards guys in their circles as they actually are, and can only sustain it by projecting some counterfactual quality into the gaps of their ignorance towards a stranger.
If this is true, of course, the interesting question is why this is. Without having time to expand on the thought as much as I'd like to, I'm actually reasonably sympathetic to the idea that the "incel mindset" may contribute to the problem. The male resentment that is amply represented in this thread seems to be a natural counterpart to the "feminist mental health" cluster of views among women (like, the people who post opossum memes all day and launch slickly worded petitions to make the university administration spend more on therapists and set up an anxiety hotline), and I know I find the latter both viscerally and rationally undateable. (Why would you put up with someone whose every interaction with the world is coloured with resentment and who is always a few inferential step away from considering you to be an agent of what brought about that resentment?) At the same time, I find all the incel material to be fascinatingly infohazardous; I can't ever read much of it without finding myself nodding a long and feeling some of that righteous resentment well up in myself, and that's even though it is about as relatable to me as the laments of African orphans are to Silicon Valley EAists. A good half+ of college-educated zoomer women seems to have at least a latent infection with the "patriarchy gave me mental health issues" memeplex; what fraction of zoomer men have one with the "matriarchy wants me to pay for raising chad's bastard" one? If you are infected with it, wouldn't it be easier to hide from a stranger for a few weeks than it would be to hide it from the people you normally interact with?
I think it's more the perceived infinite universe of potential male partners provided by online dating makes it easier to essentially write off males in the friendgroup as triggering whatever 'ick' and/or compare real people against curated dating app images of strangers. I'm also curious how female sexuality has evolved with the modern slate of choices, since even going on Tiktok/IG generally provides a lot of examples of 'I was into X until he did Y that gave me incurable 'Ick'' and it's like... the vast majority of women to live have had vanishingly small pools of possible suitors which makes me skeptical that they were able to operate on such terms.
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Very similar here. I think the OKC/Match era was fundamentally different than today's Tinder environment. There were lower quality partners available, but I was able to date/fuck a couple older or niche women through it while doing the bulk of my dating "IRL".
Every indicator from both genders suggests that the new dating paradigms are more challenging and less fulfilling. Nobody does much about it in terms of shifting back to in-person approaches but boy howdy do they complain about how much it sucks.
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For the most part, yeah, although with the added caveat that our demographic isn't just age, but class and education. Like so many others in our general grouping, I had a mixed-gender friend group and never really had all that much trouble finding relationships, right up until I met my wife. Our friend group remains mixed-gender, but it's now a mixed-gender group of people that are either married or look like they're about to be. The whole Tinder scene just looks like an absolute hellscape to me from the perspective of a guy that missed that timeline by a few years. Sure, we had to experience the real-life version of being swiped-left, but at least it usually came with some sort of interpretable feedback that was more actionable than just swiping into the Tinder void.
That said, I came from a rural, lower-class environment originally, and it seems like a fair bit of my age cohort wound up with broken marriages or out-of-wedlock children. The people that escaped via academics and wound up with decent jobs all seem to have done decently well for themselves romantically and maintained quite a bit more stability. I suspect that this is probably pretty common in the new Zoomer demographics too - the scientists, engineers, attorneys, accountants, and so on will probably do basically fine romantically.
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This just seems wrong to me. Admittedly I'm older, married, and long out of the dating pool. I'd say most guys realize in early high-school they aren't going to be dating the head of the cheerleading squad, aka the hot influencer types. Things actually get better for them as they get older, as other things get valued comparatively more.
Opposite to your claim, I could believe Tinder is enabling more women to sleep with 'surface-level' hot guys (I really like /u/ThenElections post above about the prevalence of lemons on Tinder. I also think mass media has gotten somewhat worse, with crappy romance setting ever-more-unrealistic expectations. And I'm going to guess it's something of an interplay between the two with a large dollop of men being worse because they have the distraction of gaming and porn.
Women think they are entitled to a better match than they 'actually' are, but can get a one night-stand with a hot guy, because Tinder enables that, so they never revisit their expectations. That hot guy is a dick (which is why he's still dating and not in a committed relationship), so they double-down on 'guys suck'.
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Do they though?
Because from my experience when young women are asked to explain their "ideal" guy they describe something similar, but then when made aware of the fact that they are dreaming, the response is "you asked for ideal".
Whereas I rarely ever see guys even playing along with the premise. They usually respond with "big ol tiddies, or she just has to be alive", sometimes you will get "not fat and pretty". Irrespective of how attractive the guy is. They usually don't even entertain the thought.
The former implies to me at least that the guys are more aware of this specific reality.
Really? I think I would have always answered that hard requirements for a long-term relationship are being thin, fit, and fairly smart. The only one I ever got pushback on was people that are somehow personally affronted by a plain statement that I will never find an overweight woman attractive.
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There's also a lot of mockery in the memespace towards guys who would unironically answer that question with something like "Ana de Armas but a cup size higher and a gamer like me". At least, a lot in relation to women describing their ideal. As the line goes, "meanwhile they're just some guy".
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A lot of the complaints I see online are based on perceived double standards. Height vs weight is a cliche in the gender wars.
Incels are the ones that emphasize looks the most and imo it's backwards. They're upset at failing , so they construct an ego protection ideology that states that looks are all that matter (therefore it's not their fault - everyone else is shallow). They did not start out believing it was all-important.
Except the entire "body acceptance" movement and complaining about "unfair beauty standards". People upset by basic inequity in looks exist across the spectrum but the female half seems to be vastly more visible and prestigious.
This is basically the inverse to TRP's "women always want a high value male and many just refuse to lower their standards instead of dying alone" theory. Some of them also say that men are relatively simple about their needs (the implication being that women are almost immorally fussy about dating), just to make the parallel stronger.
I think both of these are dubious and, frankly, there seems to be an element of spite to them. Maybe I'm just an optimist, but I think most people don't hang all their hopes on dating an Instamodel or having Tom Hiddleston make them eggs in the morning before handing them a Centrum and let this actively ruin their actual prospects.
Sure, if you ask them that's what they'd want. If they're just consuming a fantasy (which is what Onlyfans and ads are) then that's what they'll buy but the calculus of real life speaks pretty loudly to most of us, very early.
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I turned 25 recently, So I'll speak a little bit for the Zillenials.
Obvious disclaimer being that my observations are influenced by who I am, and the fact that I was not an adult for the majority of the time period I am going to be talking about. But I will try to recall what I remember seeing and try to fill in the gaps retrospectively.
Things were much better 2000-2014ish. Things started deteriorating around 2018, the same time OLD became the plurality dating platform. But that is confounded by people just socializing less all around, I personally have a hard time "cracking" Gen-Z in that if I were to describe it succinctly, they are not as good at navigating uncomfortable social situations. If things get too uncomfortable they just fall back on their phones or conversationally they seem to put in much less effort and rely on meme speak and cultural references to do the hard talking or them. They have looser standards as well in the sense that ignoring text messages is a faux pas among my older friends but is the norm among the younger ones.
As for getting laid. It's bad. In short, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Obviously, it's not a binary shift but more of a shift of the distribution. In that getting a 4/10 girl now is the same difficulty as getting a 6/10 girl some years ago (all else constant). The reasons for this are multi-factorial and not all linked to the gender war, some of them are entirely unrelated, but at the end of the day, there are more headwinds to fight against as a dude.
Personally, I can reliably attract a girl up to 8/10. I don't bother with the 5/6's any more because they are EXPONENTIALLY more difficult to attract than previously, the 7s/8s are marginally more difficult but its a smaller delta than the less attractive ones. I think OLD is entirely to blame for this. This specific demographic of girls are the largest users of OLD, they are not attractive enough to have men swooning over them in their social circles, but can get men swooning over them and simping for them in socialmedia/OLD. The attractive ones don't need OLD, they can get attractive men in their social circles.
I am not sure exactly what form I expect it to take, but I think "terminally online" is going to trend toward becoming lower-status in the next decade. The Internet and social networks benefited heavily from the fact that users were initially highly educated -- if sometimes socially awkward -- and generally high-status, but Eternal September (I'm not old enough to recall the 1993 event, but I can remember when Facebook was invite-only) has been an ongoing trend in online communities. At some point soon (probably already) in the lifecycle, avid internet use will start having more negative connotations -- see "touch grass", but more generalized -- and some swinging the opposite direction can be expected.
I think that will be a healthy shift, but I'm not too optimistic about it. It doesn't seem impossible though, especially if high-status people start pushing it. Unfortunately, many of them love to be on-line -- fame seems tied to on-line presence for many these days.
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By "up to" I meant, that's the most I could do, my theoretical max. If all the stars align and whatnot. Also 8 = 95th percentile? What kind of mean and standard deviation are you using lol. I meant the 80th percentile.
I would say I am 70-75th percentile among men, Overall. So if the stars really align, I could get an 80th-percentile woman, by lucking out every step of the way. But my realistic zone is <60-65thth percentile. As I said that range of women has become so difficult that my time is better off pushing my luck with more attractive women, the expected value is the same anyways. I would get much more satisfaction from the company of an attractive woman than a mid one.
Of course, all of this is very anecdotal and circumstantial.
Also, I would say you would be surprised. As I have said elsewhere I am saying things that I hear said across the gamut of men, including some very attractive men. What they will tell YOU and tell each other behind closed doors might vary.
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Of course, this trend continuing apace means that all else hasn't been held constant and many of the would-be 6s are now 4s. To be crass about it, I know I'd rather stay home and jerk off than put in effort to attract a fat girl.
This could be a factor on why on paper moderately (6/10) women are so much more difficult than yesteryear. There are fewer of them.
I don't mean to be crass either, but if a woman is ever slightly overweight, she's out of sight for me. I only pursue thin women.
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