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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?
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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