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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?
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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